At the urging of Dr. Geschickter, the CIA provided $375,000 toward the construction of a new medical facility at Georgetown University Hospital. In return, Geschickter agreed to let the CIA use one-sixth of the new “Gorman Annex” as its “hospital safehouse” and to provide “human patients and volunteers for experimental use.”

Edited by Michael Evans | National Security Archive | December 23, 2024

Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.

Under code names that included MKULTRA, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE, the CIA conducted terrifying experiments using drugs, hypnosis, isolation, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on human subjects, often U.S. citizens, who frequently had no idea what was being done to them or that they were part of a CIA test.

Today’s announcement comes 50 years after a New York Times investigation by Seymour Hersh touched off probes that would bring MKULTRA abuses to light. The new collection also comes 70 years since U.S. pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Company first developed a process to streamline the manufacture of LSD in late 1954, becoming the CIA’s chief supplier of the newly discovered psychoactive chemical central to many of the Agency’s behavior control efforts.

Highlights of the new MKULTRA collection include:

• A DCI-approved plan in 1950 for the establishment of “interrogation teams” that would “utilize the polygraph, drugs, and hypnotism to attain the greatest results in interrogation techniques.” (Document 2)
• A 1951 memo that captures a meeting between CIA and foreign intelligence officials about mind control research and their shared interest in the concept of individual mind control. (Document 3)
• A 1952 entry from the daily calendar of George White, a federal narcotics agent who ran a safehouse where the CIA tested drugs like LSD and performed other experiments on unwitting Americans. (Document 5)
• A 1952 report on the “successful” use of ARTICHOKE interrogation methods that combined the use of “narcosis” and “hypnosis” to induce regression and later amnesia on “Russian agents suspected of being doubled.” (Document 6)
• A 1956 memo in which MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb signs off a project that would “evaluate the effects of large doses of LSD-25 in normal human volunteers” on federal prisoners in Atlanta. (Document 13)
• The 1963 report from the CIA’s inspector general, which led CIA leadership to reexamine the use of unwitting Americans in their covert drug testing program. (Document 16)
• The 1983 deposition of MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb in a civil case brought by Velma “Val” Orlikow, a victim of CIA-sponsored projects conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. (Document 20)

The challenges facing this documentation project were considerable, as CIA director Richard Helms and longtime MKULTRA chief Sidney Gottlieb destroyed most of the original project records in 1973. It is a story about secrecy—perhaps the most infamous cover-up in the Agency’s history. It is also a history marked by near-total impunity at the institutional and individual levels for countless abuses committed across decades—not during interrogations of enemy agents or in wartime situations, but during ordinary medical treatments, inside prison hospitals, addiction clinics, and juvenile detention facilities, and in many cases led by top figures in the field of the behavioral sciences. Despite the Agency’s efforts to erase this hidden history, the documents that survived this purge and that have been gathered together here present a compelling and unsettling narrative of the CIA’s decades-long effort to discover and test ways to erase and re-program the human mind.

The bulk of these records were drawn from records compiled by John Marks, the former State Department official who filed the first Freedom of Information Act requests on the subject and whose 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979) remains the single most important source on this episode. Marks later donated his FOIA documents and other research papers to the National Security Archive. Many of the redactions in the documents have been effectively removed with the passage of time, as official investigations, civil depositions, and detailed histories have shed significant light on some of these episodes. In many cases, copies of declassified records donated by Marks to the National Security Archive bear his handwritten annotations.

The legacy of MKULTRA goes far beyond the various “subprojects” described in these documents and that were largely shut down by the mid-1970s. As author Stephen Kinzer points out, the CIA’s behavior control research programs “contributed decisively to the development of techniques that Americans and their allies used at detention centers in Vietnam, Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and secret prisons around the world.” MKULTRA techniques were cited in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual that was the basis for prisoner interrogations in Vietnam and later in anti-communist dictatorships in Latin America.[1]

While many of the MKULTRA projects were conducted in hospitals, laboratories, or other institutional settings, others were carried out in clandestine CIA safehouses staffed not by doctors or clinicians but by hard-nosed federal narcotics agents like George Hunter White. Under the direction of Gottlieb, White adopted the persona of a bohemian artist named “Morgan Hall” to lure unsuspecting victims to his “pad” where he and his CIA collaborators secretly experimented on them and recorded their behavior. An OSS veteran who had worked on “truth drug” development for the Army in World War II, White surreptitiously dosed many of his victims with LSD, a drug that the CIA had in abundance thanks to Eli Lilly, which had developed the capacity to produce the drug in “tonnage quantities” and had agreed to become the Agency’s supplier. Gottlieb, his deputy Robert Lashbrook, and CIA psychologist John Gittinger are among the CIA officials who frequently visited White’s safehouses.

Of particular interest is the mysterious 1953 death of Frank Olson, an Army chemist and aerosols specialist for the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Army’s Chemical Corps, the CIA’s military partner in behavior control research. Officially ruled a suicide, Olson’s death from a 10-story fall in New York City came 10 days after Gottlieb and TSS staff spiked his cocktail with LSD during a CIA-SOD work retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. The drugging was later determined to have contributed to his death, but many, including members of his family, have questioned the conclusion that Olson—who was sharing a room with Lashbrook that night—threw himself out the window of the Statler Hotel.

At the center of it all was Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA’s Chemical Division and later director of the Technical Services Division (TSD). Gottlieb was “the CIA’s chief poison maker,” according to Kinzer, whose book, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), is the definitive work on the mercurial chemist. From his position deep inside the CIA’s secret corridors, Gottlieb led the Agency’s decades-long effort to find ways to use drugs, hypnosis, and other extreme methods to control human behavior and, it was hoped, turn them into usable tools for intelligence agencies and policymakers.

Stories about the CIA’s involvement in unsuccessful efforts to assassinate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Cuban leader Fidel Castro, among others, are among the most legendary, if not the most successful, examples of the Agency’s efforts to operationalize the tricks and tools assembled by Gottlieb’s unit. Less well known is his role in drug experiments and “special interrogation” programs that left hundreds of people psychologically damaged and others “permanently shattered,” according to Kinzer.[2]

Although MKULTRA was approved at the highest levels, it operated with virtually no oversight. As Marks notes, the initial MKULTRA budget authorization “exempted the program from the normal CIA financial controls” and “allowed TSS to start up research projects ‘without the signing of the usual contracts or other written agreements.’”[3] With little accountability, boundless resources, and the backing of CIA covert operations chief Richard Helms, Gottlieb and his staff at TSS developed a series of bizarre experiments that they believed would enhance covert intelligence operations while at the same time improving the Agency’s defenses against the use of similar techniques by enemy forces.

By the time Gottlieb arrived at CIA in 1952, Project BLUEBIRD, which explored “the possibility of control of an individual by application of Special Interrogation techniques,” was already well underway.[4] Led by Office of Security chief Morse Allen, the early BLUEBIRD experiments were performed by teams that included polygraph experts and psychologists and were conducted on detainees and suspected informants at secret U.S. interrogation facilities in Japan and Germany.

The elevation of Allen Dulles to deputy director of central intelligence in 1951 led to an expansion of BLUEBIRD programs under a new name, ARTICHOKE, and under the direction of Gottlieb at TSS. The new program was to include, among other projects, the development of “gas guns” and “poisons,” and experiments to test whether “monotonous sounds,” “concussion,” “electroshock,” and “induced sleep” could be used as a means to gain “hypnotic control of an individual.”[5]

It was under ARTICHOKE that the Agency first began to more systematically recruit the top researchers and court the most prestigious institutions to collaborate in its mind control research. One of the first to participate was the deputy director of Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. Robert Hyde, who in 1949 was the first American to “trip” on LSD after the hospital acquired samples of the drug from Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. In 1952, the CIA began to fund the hospital’s LSD research, under which Hyde used himself, his colleagues, student volunteers, and hospital patients as his subjects. Hyde would work on four MKULTRA subprojects over the next decade.

Shortly after Dulles became DCI in 1953, he authorized MKULTRA, expanding the Agency’s behavior control research and refocusing it on the development of “a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials” in “present and future clandestine operations.”[6] Many of the 149 MKULTRA subprojects were carried out through well-regarded universities like Cornell, Georgetown, Rutgers, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology of Emory University, directed four MKULTRA subprojects, all of which involved the use of drugs, including LSD, to induce psychotic states. The horrifying series of experiments left many of his subjects—including prisoners at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and juveniles housed at a detention facility in Bordentown, New Jersey—scarred for life.

Many other MKULTRA subprojects were established through grants from false foundations funded by the CIA. One of these, the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, run by Dr. Charles Geschickter, a professor of pathology at Georgetown University, steered millions of CIA dollars into research programs at Georgetown and other institutions. As part of the agreement, the CIA gained access to a medical safehouse at the newly constructed Gorman Annex of Georgetown University Hospital along with a ready supply of patients and students to use as subjects for MKULTRA experiments.

Another prominent MKULTRA “cutout” foundation, the Human Ecology Society, was run by Cornell Medical Center neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff, who wrote an early study of communist brainwashing techniques for Allen Dulles and later partnered with the CIA to develop a combination of drugs and sensory deprivation that could be used to erase the human mind. Among the most extreme MKULTRA projects funded through Wolff’s group were the infamous “depatterning” experiments conducted by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cameron’s methods combined induced sleep, electroshocks, and “psychic driving,” under which drugged subjects were psychologically tortured for weeks or months in an effort to reprogram their minds.

[…]

View the documents

Via https://alethonews.com/2024/12/25/national-security-archive-publishes-key-records-on-infamous-mkultra-program/

People’s Daily Online

HOHHOT, Dec. 22 (Xinhua) — In the sparse, sandy grasslands of Jarud Banner in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, machinery is filling wind-eroded pits and laying sand barriers while workers are busy supporting the comprehensive management of Horqin Sandy Land.

“Our independently developed sand-fixing machine processes raw materials like reeds and straw into grass mats for sand barrier installation,” said Yu Dongjiang from M-Grass Ecological Environment (Group) Co., Ltd.

The sand-fixing machine is simple in structure, easy to operate, and highly adaptable to various terrains. It improves raw material utilization efficiency, enabling the installation of nearly 30,000 meters of sand barriers daily, according to Yu, who is also the project manager for the comprehensive management of the northern central Horqin Sandy Land.

Previously, the manual weaving of grass mats required significant labor and time.

Yu’s project shows China’s wider push to advance ecological restoration. In the arid landscapes of northern China, cutting-edge technology is transforming the fight against desertification into a story of hope and renewal.

From satellite monitoring systems to innovative tree-planting tools, the integration of advanced equipment has elevated traditional reforestation efforts.

In Inner Mongolia’s Kubuqi Desert, for example, drones have been employed to plant seeds across vast stretches of barren land, significantly improving efficiency and survival rates. These seeds, combined with specially developed nutrient packs, ensure saplings thrive in challenging environments.

While in northwest China’s Gansu Province, solar energy projects are being combined with afforestation programs at the southern edge of the Tengger Desert, creating a synergy that not only restores ecosystems but also boosts local economic development.

Local villagers are also finding employment in these initiatives, blending green technology with grassroots participation.

“I never would have imagined that as a farmer, I could find work in the sand dunes,” said Qin Zhaoping, a resident of Hengliang Township in Gansu’s Gulang County. His job involves adjusting the sprinkler irrigation systems beneath photovoltaic panels and tending to the thriving sand plants.

For Qin, photovoltaic-based desert control is a meaningful effort that benefits future generations. “It generates electricity, combats desertification, and provides me with an income from working here,” he said.

According to official data, 53 percent of China’s treatable desertified land has been restored, leading to a net reduction of approximately 4.33 million hectares of degraded land.

One of the country’s landmark ecological projects is the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program. Since 1978, China has expanded its afforestation area by 32 million hectares under the program.

Meanwhile, China’s desertification control technologies and equipment are making their way onto the global stage, sharing ecological restoration expertise with other countries and regions.

To join the efforts of the Global South, China has launched desertification control centers with Arab states and Mongolia, created demonstration sites in Central Asia and Africa, and provided satellite technology and big data support for Africa’s Great Green Wall initiative.

In December, Yu’s company signed a memorandum of understanding with the municipal government of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia to enhance the country’s ecological environment and promote practical cooperation.

The collaboration includes conducting ecological restoration in desert areas surrounding the city, and jointly developing, maintaining, and cultivating plant resources.

“Through smart machinery, innovative research on grass species, big data analysis, and seed packages, the company has developed a scientific and efficient path for ecological restoration,” said Yu.

“The integrated use of these technologies not only improves the success rate of ecological restoration but also significantly reduces the cost of restoration,” Yu added.

China’s global cooperation in combating desertification also won praise from experts and officials during the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) held in December.

“We’re incredibly proud to be a partner with China. China has been a pioneer in showing how to create prosperous areas in areas that were once desertified and degraded. And we are proud to partner with you (China) to bring those lessons to other countries,” said Valerie Hickey, global director for the environment at the World Bank, at the conference.

[…]

Via http://en.people.cn/n3/2024/1223/c90000-20257040.html

SEASIDE HEIGHTS,  NJ –

Drone sightings in Ocean County and other part of the state are down this week. This comes after state and federal authorities, who previously dismissed the sightings as planes, planets, and stars, started looking into it.

According to Ocean County Sheriff Michael Mastronardy, whose agency operates an oceanfront drone command center, sightings are also down.

After reports of large car-sized drones flying over military bases, trailing Coast Guard vessels, and swarming the beachhead at up to 50 strong, they have suddenly stopped appearing.

For weeks, unexplained drones appeared in the skies over New Jersey, capturing the attention of residents and raising concerns among officials. These weren’t hobbyist drones buzzing innocuously through the air—witnesses reported seeing larger, more sophisticated devices operating in what appeared to be a coordinated manner. And now, just as suddenly as they appeared, the drones have vanished.

What hasn’t disappeared, however, are the questions about their origin and purpose. Neither state nor federal agencies have provided any concrete explanations, leaving residents to wonder: What exactly was going on?

The Drone Sightings

Reports of the mysterious drones came from various parts of New Jersey, often in less populated areas or near infrastructure such as power plants or highways. Witnesses described their size as larger than consumer drones and noted their unusual flight patterns, suggesting they weren’t being operated by hobbyists.

The sightings followed a pattern seen in other parts of the country in recent years, where swarms of drones were spotted moving in grids or formations, raising suspicions that they were part of military exercises or private sector testing. However, no entity—public or private—has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the New Jersey drones.

A Silent Government Response

Requests for information from agencies such as the FAA, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security have yielded little insight. The FAA, which oversees the airspace in which the drones were seen, offered general statements about drone regulations but declined to address the specific incidents.

State officials have expressed similar frustration, with some local law enforcement agencies stating they lack the resources to track and identify drones of this size and sophistication. This lack of transparency from higher levels of government has only deepened public unease.

The federal government’s silence may stem from national security concerns, as disclosing certain operations could compromise their effectiveness. However, this explanation offers little comfort to those who feel the public has a right to know whether potentially invasive or hazardous activity was taking place in their communities.

While some leaders such as U.S. Senator Cory Booker, U.S. Congressmen Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew raised the red flag on these drones, Governor Phil Murphy and the Administration of President Joe Biden have dismissed any concerns to public safety and national security.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy went as far as telling New Jersey to “calm down” over the drone hysteria.

Like other sightings around the world, they just stopped. Perhaps it was a surveillance operation, and the foreign agent or dark business entity already had all the data they needed.

Why Did the Drones Disappear?

One of the most puzzling aspects of this mystery is the sudden disappearance of the drones. If the drones were part of a sanctioned operation, it’s possible the activity was limited to a brief trial period. Alternatively, increased public attention may have led whoever was behind the operation to relocate or pause the activity.

A more concerning possibility is that the drones were operating without authorization. If this were the case, their disappearance could signal an attempt to avoid further detection as officials ramped up their inquiries.

What Comes Next?

For now, New Jerseyans are left without answers. Are the skies truly clear, or will the drones return? If they were part of a government program, will officials eventually provide details, or is this destined to remain an unresolved mystery?

More broadly, these sightings raise critical questions about the monitoring and regulation of drones, especially as their use becomes increasingly sophisticated. Whether they were conducting surveillance, mapping, or tests, understanding who is operating drones in our skies—and for what purpose—should be a priority for regulators.

Until clearer answers emerge, this mystery serves as a stark reminder of the challenges posed by emerging technologies in an era of limited transparency. The disappearance of the drones may have ended the sightings, but for many, the concerns they raised are far from resolved.

[…]

Via https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2024/12/25/and-just-like-that-the-drones-stopped-flying-over-new-jersey/

US President-elect President Donald Trump. ©  Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

RT

US President-elect Donald Trump has sent a message to Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, asking him to start thinking about a ceasefire and to abandon claims to territories that are currently under control of Russia, El Pais reported on Sunday.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to end the Ukraine conflict within a day of taking office, but has yet to elaborate on how he plans to achieve this. His vows have raised concerns in Kiev that it may be facing not only a decline in aid but also an audit of the billions of dollars it has received from the White House under President Joe Biden.

“You look at some of these cities and there is not a single building in good condition left. So, when you say “restore the country,” restore what? This is a 110-year reconstruction,” the Spanish newspaper cited Trump as saying in a “message” to Zelensky from his Florida golf club this week.

Earlier this month, Trump called on both Ukraine and Russia to reach an immediate ceasefire. He posted the call on his social media platform Truth Social after meeting in Paris with Zelensky and President Emmanuel Macron.

The Wall Street Journal reported in early December, citing officials, that Trump had said Western Europe should deploy its troops to Ukraine to monitor a potential ceasefire. He reportedly added that the EU should play the main role in defending and supporting Kiev, while Washington could support the effort without sending troops.

Speaking at his end-of-year press conference on Thursday, Russian president Vladimir Putin reiterated that Moscow remains open to negotiating with Kiev without any preconditions, except those that had already been agreed upon in Istanbul in 2022, which envisaged a neutral, non-aligned status for Ukraine, as well as certain restrictions on deploying foreign weaponry. He also noted that such talks would have to respect the realities on the ground that have developed since that time.

[…]

Via https://www.rt.com/news/609772-trump-zelensky-territorial-claims/

By Jorge Valverde, United Nations University

China recently banned the export of the minerals gallium and germanium to the US amid growing tensions between the two countries on trade.

The minerals are of critical economic value because they are used in computer chips, in military technology such as night vision goggles, and in the renewable energy industry, where they are important for manufacturing electric vehicles and solar cells. All of these areas are very sensitive sectors for the US and EU.

China has overwhelming market power over supply, because it is the source of 98% of primary gallium and 91% of primary germanium. Primary refers to “raw” sources such as mineral ore. In several sectors where the minerals are used, there are no substitutes for them.

Gallium and germanium are present in very low concentration as byproducts of major minerals – they’re known as trace minerals. Germanium’s primary source is the residue from zinc refineries and coal fly ash (a powdered residue produced when coal is burnt in power plants).

Gallium is mainly produced as a byproduct of bauxite ore (which is the main source for aluminium) as well as the processing stage to extract aluminium from bauxite.

The Chinese ban on exports of these minerals to the US closely followed Washington’s third crackdown in three years on China’s semiconductor (computer chip) industry. The US wants to curb exports of advanced chips to China that could be used in applications that threaten America’s security.

For example, advanced chips could be used in electronic warfare applications that make use of artificial intelligence (AI), or in advanced weapons systems such as hypersonic missiles. China said its ban on gallium and germanium was because of the minerals’ “dual military and civilian uses”.

According to a report in Reuters in 2023, the US Department of Defense holds a strategic stockpile of germanium, but no reserves of gallium. In October 2024, the US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that a total ban on the export of gallium and germanium could result in a US$3.4 billion loss to US GDP.

The minerals’ uses extend far beyond national security applications. Gallium is used in solid-state lighting devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Germanium is used in optical fibres and as a catalyst to speed up the reactions used in manufacturing polyester and PLA (a bioplastic). The minerals are vital for making the electronic devices we depend on every day, such as smartphones, displays and laptops.

So what can the US do to circumvent the effects of the ban, given China’s near monopoly on the primary production of these critical minerals?

One route is for the US to re-start and expand domestic mining of these minerals. Indeed, the Pentagon has already indicated that this is being explored.

[…]

Via https://activistpost.com/2024/12/china-has-banned-us-exports-of-key-minerals-for-computer-chips-leaving-washington-with-limited-options.html

By Matthew Ehret

Chapter excerpt from Ehret’s new book Revenge of the Mystery Cults

The parallel growth of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel as children of mysterious establishment families enmeshed in the elite corridors of Apartheid South Africa and earlier fascist movements before and during World War 2 is noteworthy, but not evidence that either man is a part of a broader conspiracy.

However, the parallels don’t end with their family roots or connections to the Apartheid South African elite.

As both men ascended to the higher echelons of Silicon Valley culture in the 1990s, their lives continued to cross pollinate and advance the same transhumanist programs between 1998 through to the present day.

While Elon co-founded Zip2 as his first technology startup in 1995 (essentially selling digital phone books to various companies), Thiel’s entry into tech start ups also began around that time with his launching of a software company named Confinity in 1998.

Before that, Thiel had begun to make a name for himself as an innovative Straussian in Stanford University, where he founded the libertarian Stanford Review in 1987, serving as its editor-in-chief until his 1992 graduation.[1]

The Stanford Review received patronage from non-other than former Trotskyite and early Straussian Irving Kristol who led in the formation of the neoconservative movement during the Cold War and that movement’s acquisition of political power in the USA in 2000. The era of the ‘New Crusaders’ that launched forever wars abroad after 9/11 and a vast surveillance dragnet within the USA were all Straussians.[2]

This fact will become extra important later in this chapter.

After working as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse in 1993 and then a securities lawyer for the CIA-affiliated law firm Sullivan and Cromwell,[3] Thiel co-founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996 followed soon thereafter by his first digital payments company named Confinitity in 1998 where his life would begin to merge with that of Elon.

Although Elon Musk has made much noise proclaiming his having cut ties with his abusive father Errol Musk upon leaving South Africa for Canada at the age of 17, according to his own words, his father provided $20,000 of the original investment that got his startup company Zip2 online in 1997.^[4]

This is but one of many data points indicating that a thick veneer of false narrative has been carefully built up around the persona of Musk as a self-made libertarian genius who worked his way to becoming the richest man on earth from the status of a poor student living on crackers.

While Elon has stated that it was hard work, and personal resilience mixed with fortunate scholarships that paid his way through school, it is known that Elon actually co-owned an entire frat house in Pennsylvania where he was studying for his Bachelor of Arts.

While co-owning this frat house, Elon created a scandal by transforming it into a nightclub, and despite having done so illegally, appears to have never suffered any legal issues by campus or municipal authorities.[5]

Despite the fact that Zip2 was little more than a digital yellow pages, Compaq decided that it was a worthwhile investment and poured $341 million to purchase the start up in 1999 which netted Elon $22 million.

With this money, Elon was able to co-found X.com with Greg Koury as a boutique company that would specialize in online payments outside of conventional banking channels.

Within months of founding X.com, the company merged with another digital payments company called ‘Confinity’ that had been founded by Peter Thiel a year earlier. This new company quickly received a rebranded image under the new name of ‘Paypal’.

In 2002, Paypal was purchased by Ebay for $1.5 billion, scoring a $175 million for Elon, and $55 million for Thiel.

At this point, both Elon and Thiel were given patronage and direct support by leading directors of the CIA’s official venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.[6]

With his new-found wealth, Peter Thiel established a new private surveillance agency named Palantir in 2004 which drew its name from the all-seeing indestructible crystal balls used in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which granted its users the power to literally see and hear everything in the world.

[…]

In-Q-Tel became the first official financial backer of Thiel’s Palantir in 2004 providing the original $2 million funding to launch the new tech surveillance firm. [8]

The CIA’s interest in Palantir at this period was not so much due to American security as it was due to the failure of an earlier project dubbed ‘Total Information Awareness’.

The Rise and Re-branding of Total Information Awareness

In the wake of September 11, 2001, the newly emergent neoconservative social engineers introduced a ‘solution’ to the problem of international terrorism in the form of the first iteration of a vast surveillance dragnet dubbed ‘Total Information Awareness’ (TIA) featuring a logo with a pyramid and the eye of Horus.

The program proposed to manage a total surveillance state and even began innovating predictive policing algorithms. This new science of control would attempt to monitor and measure every citizen’s actions, electronic communications and even proposed to predict where future crimes would occur using probability theory.

The founders of the project called it the “Manhattan Project for counter-terrorism”.

Although the Orwellian branding resulted in significant public backlash, the program was not shut down but merely rebranded to ‘Terrorism Information Awareness’ in 2004. This new Manhattan Project also continued and pioneered the science of biometric identification, facial recognition, and other technologies useful only under the conditions of dictatorship. Among the rebranding was included the creation of a civilian agency named Palantir.

The architect of TIA was the same Admiral John Poindexter who had overseen the Iran-Contra scandal with General Oliver North in the 1980s, and who (with North) had already promoted an off-the-books intelligence apparatus directed by the CIA which could be sold to the population as a ‘civilian’ contractor as far back as 1986.

The surveillance/database infrastructure then developed during the 1980s to satisfy this need was named ‘MAINCORE’ and the purpose was to keep track of all information of ‘potential disruptive individuals’ to be arrested “in time of panic” or “national crisis”. Later on, MAINCORE spawned such surveillance programs as GENOA, Genysis and PRISM.

Despite being sentenced to five years in prison for his role overseeing Iran Contra, Poindexter’s career did not suffer terribly, as his sentence was commuted to several months, and the neocon spent the next two decades working as a defense contractor, DARPA analyst and architect of TIA.

Thiels’ biographer Max Chafkin explains^[9] that just before Palantir was created, John Poindexter and then-CIA director George Tenet were introduced to both Thiel and fellow Palantir creator Alex Karp by none other than leading neoconservative strategist and leading Straussian, Richard Perle. Among Palantir’s military intelligence clients are found the CIA, FBI, NSA, CDC, Marine Corps, Air Force, Special Operations Command, and Westpoint[10]. But that’s not all.

The London Guardian wrote that “Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data efficient fighting of war. It runs Wall Street too”.[11]

[…]

It is here that Thiel celebrates the need for the cut-throat world of espionage and power projection of a world empire enforced by the military and political influence of the USA when he writes:

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

The Echelon Project referred to by Thiel is the largest global surveillance program managed by the Five Eyes and created in the 1960s as a military intelligence surveillance program. Echelon would have been the principal agency interfacing with and directing the operations of Palantir at the time of Thiel’s writing.

[…]

Elon Musk, X and Tesla 2.0

[…]

Like Thiel’s Palantir, SpaceX and its Starlink subsidiary would soon become a dominant contractor to the US military industrial complex under a civilian veneer.

Also, like Thiel, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel was also on hand for the launching of SpaceX as Michael Griffin, the President of In-Q-Tel accompanied Musk to Russia in order to negotiate a purchase of several ICBM rockets in 2002. Despite the fact that the Russians refused Musk’s offers, it is acknowledged that this trip was the origin for SpaceX itself.

[…]

Between 2005-2009, Griffin was a favorite among the Straussians managing post-9/11 USA and was appointed to become the Administrator of NASA where he directly oversaw the agency’s embrace of the ‘New Space Movement’. This new ‘movement’ posited that all space research and engineering should only be managed by private billionaires who were to replace agencies such as NASA which had formerly been tied to the sovereign nation state.

Among the most important of these ‘New Space Movement’ pioneers that received the first wave of NASA contracts were Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Griffin’s former employer Orbital Sciences. Soon Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin private space company (founded in 2000) would also receive lucrative government contracts under Griffin’s lead.

The growth of Elon Musk’s contracts with both NASA as well as with the Pentagon and CIA managing the largest array of space-based surveillance and increasingly an infrastructure for space-based weaponry under the veil of ‘civilian ownership’ parallels Thiel’s operations in many ways.

Not only has Elon’s operations served as a cover for a myriad of military intelligence companies controlling ‘cutting edge’ patents that are permitted into the public domain, but Elon’s involvement with Thiel since the late 1990s and his involvement with the Jeffrey Epstein-funded Behaviorist Economics takeover of the USA plays a major role in reviving his grandfather’s ambitions for a Global Technate managed by elite social engineers.

Silicon Valley Billionaires Merge with Behaviorists

[…]

Rather than suppose that societal control had to be of a simply top-down OR bottom-up nature, these ‘Third Way’ behaviorists rationalized that the APPEARANCE of personal choice could be protected satisfying libertarian proclivities for personal freedom on the one side, while the ACTUAL top-down controls for an elite network of social engineers could be held firmly intact outside of the influence of the animalistic masses.

In other words, the ‘Third Way’ was merely a modified re-hashing of Strauss’ interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which posited that societal equilibrium could only be maintained if the vast majority of the population were kept locked within a cave believing that their perception of shadows cast by a managerial elite was the only reality that existed.

The leading behaviorist economists gathered around the Edge Foundation, and which served as Technocratic managers of the ‘Good Plutocrats’ such as Bezos, Musk and Thiel were explicitly attempting to revive the theories of John Locke and Behaviorist Psychiatrist B.F. Skinner in 21^st century garb.

Recapitulating the X as the Behaviorist Secret Sauce

John Locke’s ‘X’, and Strauss’s Noble Lie studied by Thiel were directly shaped by the view that human beings must never be permitted to participate in serious discussions of the realm of higher ideas shaping reality.

Instead, humans could be allowed to have opinions shaped by perceptions (forever ungrounded in actual ‘knowledge’ of course) and the freedom to pursue lusts based on those perceptions.

These opinions and lusts would create the basis of a system of ‘scientific controls’ or a ‘hedonistic calculus’ outlined by Jeremy Bentham (following Locke) for an elite class which Locke believed himself to be a member.

And only this elite governing class would be permitted to control the influences shaping the lusts and perceptions of the masses which formed their convictions.

As Thiel also outlined in his Straussian Moment essay of 2007; All systems dominated by an elite class of human gods from ancient times through the rise of the British Empire required two simultaneous sets of doctrines and governing myths in order to function. One set for the masses would serve as an exoteric structure of beliefs, values, moralities and traditions which would define the boundaries of the masses and another darker esoteric set of beliefs, moralities values and traditions for those assigned to control society.

[…]

Via https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-peter-thiel-two-sides

Source: ilovethaki.gr

Jeremy Kuzmarov

Heralded as a hero in Western media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has allowed foreign private interests to steal his country’s best land

In early November, Barbara Bonte, a Belgian member of the European Union (EU) parliament, raised concern about the sell-off of Ukrainian land on a massive scale to U.S. private equity firms along with some Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses.

Bonte wrote to the EU parliament that, “according to several disquieting reports, mainly U.S. but also Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses are purchasing Ukrainian farmland on a massive scale. Cargill, ADM, BlackRock, Oaktree Capital Management and Bunge Limited, for instance, have reportedly gained control over much of Ukraine’s farmland.”

Bonte then posed two questions to the EU parliament as follows:

“1. What is the Commission’s assessment of the impact of this sell-off of European farmland to multinationals serving only U.S. interests on EU strategic food-supply dependence? How does the Commission intend to address that impact?”

“2. This strongly suggests that the United States is seeking to recoup its military support for Ukraine, and ensure a geopolitical presence there in a post-war scenario through control over Ukrainian farmland and the profits it generates. How does the Commission intend to prevent the United States from cherry-picking in Ukraine and Europe from being left to deal with just the handicaps?”

Bonte’s questions are significant ones that point to a hidden, underlying motive to the war in Ukraine and U.S. and European support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The bonanza offered to foreign investors resembles past wars where young people were sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits.

War and Theft

A detailed analysis of the land grab in Ukraine by Western corporations was provided in a 2023 report by the Oakland Institute^[1] entitled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land.”

Written by Frédéric Mousseau, a food security consultant, and Eve Devillers, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, the report starts by emphasizing Ukraine’s function as a “breadbasket of Europe” with its 33 million acres of arable land and “large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world.”

In 2021, Zelensky initiated a land reform program as part of the structural adjustment program begun under the auspices of Western financial institutions that enabled U.S.-based corporations to take over Ukraine’s land.^[2]

The structural adjustment program had been opposed by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown in the 2014 U.S.-backed Maidan coup.

After Zelensky’s “land reform” was initiated, about five million hectares—the size of two Crimeas—were outright “stolen” by private interests.

The thieves included Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street investment firm well represented in the Biden administration, which in April 2022 bought NN Investment Partners Holding N.V., a Netherlands-based company that is a major shareholder in Ukraine’s biggest landowner, Kernel Holding S.A, and in Astarta, another large landowner in Ukraine.^[3]

Vanguard Group Inc., which gave $45,473 to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and $98,551 to Joe Biden in 2020, was another Wall Street firm that bought up Ukrainian land cheaply.^[4]

Some large U.S. pension funds, foundations and university endowments are invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital—a U.S.-based private equity fund headquartered at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, which is the fifth largest landholder in Ukraine with its possession of 290,749 hectares.^[5]

NCH Capital currently faces accusations of unlawful land acquisition, tax evasion, and illicit financial activity. In 2015, its founder and CEO, George Rohr, was part of the high-level meetings involving Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and U.S. Commerce secretary Penny Pritzker that led Ukraine to agree to the structural adjustment program of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a condition for two $1 billion loan guarantees from the Obama administration.^[6]

Investors in NCH Capital include Dow Chemical, notorious manufacturer of napalm and Agent Orange, as well as other war profiteers like Honeywell and Lockheed Martin, along with Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Wellesley College endowments.

Open Secrets.com reports that NCH Capital has given the most money to Democratic Party candidates who have been fervent champions of U.S. intervention in Ukraine and billion-dollar military and financial aid packages there.

In 2024, NCH Capital gave $5,000 to Jimmy Panetta, a Democratic representative from California’s 19^th congressional district encompassing Santa Cruz, Monterey and San José, who is a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and the son of former CIA Director Leon Panetta (who delivered a keynote address at this year’s Democratic Party Convention in Chicago).^[7]

Not surprisingly, Jimmy Panetta has been a champion of “robust aid to Ukraine in Congress,” as a profile in The San Luis Obispo Tribune put it, helping to pass a national security package that included $61 billion in security aid for Ukraine and support for the sale of seized Russian assets.^[8]

In August 2024, Panetta traveled to Ukraine to meet with Zelensky. He subsequently issued a statement praising him and claiming that it was “heartening to see and hear firsthand how American support, especially our work in Congress to pass legislation for supplemental funding, is properly being used on the battlefield.”

NCH and other firms investing in Ukrainian agriculture are indebted to Western financial institutions, in particular the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC)—the private sector arm of the World Bank.

The Oakland Institute report compares the generous financing of multinational corporations and local oligarchs with the inability of Ukrainian small farmers to access loans and their being displaced from their land and plunged into poverty. Some have migrated to the U.S. to seek farm work in the U.S. Midwest, sending remittances back home.^[9]

Mousseau and Devillers wrote that “the Partial Credit Guarantee Fund established by the World Bank to support small farmers is only US$5.4 million, a negligible amount compared to the billions channeled to large agribusinesses.”

Mousseau and Devillers further emphasized that the billions in Western aid provided to Ukraine have been “conditioned to a drastic structural adjustment program, which includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets, and the privatization of key sectors of the economy.”^[10]

A central condition [of Western aid] was “the creation of a land market, put into law in 2020 under President Zelensky, despite opposition from a majority of Ukrainians fearing that it will exacerbate corruption in the agricultural sector and reinforce its control by powerful interests”—which indeed it has.^[11]

Mousseau and Devillers suggest that international financial institutions, by supporting large agribusinesses, are “in effect subsidizing [with the concentration of land] an industrial model of agriculture based on the intensive use of synthetic inputs, fossil fuels, and large-scale monocropping—long shown to be environmentally and socially destructive.

By contrast, small-scale farmers in Ukraine being driven off their land, “demonstrate resilience and a great potential for leading the expansion of a different production model based on agro-ecology, environmental sustainability, and the production of healthy food.”

At the end, “War and Theft” makes clear there are post-reconstruction plans for further land privatization that will benefit the same corporate investors who are already making a huge profit in Ukraine.

This is happening as an overwhelming number of Ukrainians want to suspend the land privatization laws enforced by the Zelensky government, whose image in the West is a phony one.

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/12/19/u-s-corporate-land-grab-in-ukraine-underlies-war-with-russia/

Paul Rosenberg

Whether or not they can express it clearly, or even face it directly, more or less all adults noticed that medicine was used as a weapon during the Covid fiasco.

Today I’m going to address this, because we’ve been losing science and we’ve been losing medicine; that is flatly unacceptable.

#1: Science is not consensus. Tens, hundreds or even millions of people, all draped in lab coats and saying the same thing, does NOT make it so. In fact, it matters not at all. It’s nothing but theater, and it’s anti-science.

All science is, really, is a process of testing ideas; it is not an organization, it is not based upon authority (it’s inherently anti-authority), and it is very certainly not allied with power. All that matters in science are verifiable results.

#2: Medicine stands apart from, and above, politics. Medicine is the application of science to the furtherance of human health. Politics is the use of persuasion and power to rule masses of humans. These are fully separate disciplines. To place politics over medicine is to subjugate and degrade medicine: it’s a path backwards into darkness.

I’ll leave details on this point to working medical practitioners, who can provide them with greater specificity than I can… provided they’re not too frightened to do so.

#3: Peer review no longer means much. Again I won’t go into great detail, but peer review has been captured by academic hierarchies and very often separated from science proper. It has become a tool of institutional power, wielded by academics who have sold out science for the favors of power and politics.

At one time peer review referred to the honest replication of experiments. That time is largely past.

#4: Medicine and science have nothing to do with social pressure. Once medicine and science are mixed with social pressure, they are no longer science or medicine. At that point they are instruments of manipulation and thuggery, nothing more.

#5: If you don’t read multiple scientific papers, especially from rebels and cast-outs, you simply don’t know. You can pretend you know, of course, and that agents of monopoly will support you in your charade, but you won’t actually know.

If you want to really know, you’ll have to find the scientific papers that address your question… and you’ll need papers that are rejected by experts and authorities. If you don’t, all you’ll have are pre-censored conclusions, the underlying facts of which may or may not be reliable.

At this point, if you don’t include “conspiracy theory” research, you may be stuck with Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. That’s tragic, but it’s also largely true.

The Problem Is Not Mental Weakness

The problem underlying all of this is not a lack of intellectual strength, but a lack of emotional strength. It’s not that people are stupid, it’s that they haven’t the strength to defy authority:

• Having been trained in submission to authority, to then speak against an authority is terrifying. And so people find ways to ignore truth (which has no backing but itself) and to sanctify authority, which is backed by everything from shame to guns.
• The fear of appearing stupid – of being publicly exposed as stupid – can be overwhelming. And with “important” people tearing up anyone not in lockstep with them, defiance seems too expensive.
• Power being wrong calls too much into question. If the high and mighty can be publicly wrong, and can lie about it both repeatedly and adamantly, what else can be called into question? And if everything can be questioned, one must face the world alone.
• Disobeying power or breaking with a group can lead to severe applications of social pain, as, again, it did during the Covid disaster.

None of these things have any connection to truth, only to power, intimidation and social penalties. And all of those are anti-science, no matter how much they may masquerade as science.

[…]

Via https://freemansperspective.com/the-weaponization-of-medicine/#more-11301