Lawful
I saw a cute little dog on a leash outside of a coffee shop one day, tied to a fence post and sitting all alone in an out-of-the-way place, waiting patiently for its owner to return. I thought I would go over and say Hello. I walked over and reached down to pet the little thing and it went nearly berzerk, barking and growling and showing its teeth. I jumped back. Someone popped out of the coffee shop right away and said, “Don’t get close to that dog! He was abused when he was puppy. He only trusts a couple of people.”
“Oh, I’m sorry”, I responded, and continued on my way.
A few years later, a couple of friends and I joined a volunteer group to help homeless kids. I learned to see the world the way kids who live on the street see it. And some of the things I learned surprised me. Our group went out on the streets once a week and brought various items that were donated by charity organizations. Some of the more popular items we distributed were toothpaste, toothbrushes, clean socks and bus passes. Whenever we had second-hand clothes to distribute, the darkest colors were always chosen first. Dark colors don’t show dirt as well and those kids rarely had an opportunity to wash their clothes, so they all preferred to wear dark colors.
It was interesting getting to know the kids, and hearing their stories. Some of them were really friendly and knew us by name. Some of them rarely came into public view. They remained in secret hiding places where only homeless people go, and they had friends who brought them stuff. So, when we knew that someone had a friend who felt safer remaining hidden, we would discretely allow that kid to take extra things with them for their friends. We didn’t know where all of the kids slept at night, and if they didn’t tell us, we didn’t ask. Some would find bridges to sleep under. Some slept in the park, near the creek or wherever they could sleep all night without getting harassed by the police.
In the homeless adult population, there are quite a few veterans with PTSD who are homeless mostly because their PTSD prevents them from being able to concentrate well enough to hold a job, and it seems to often accompany other issues that are not conducive to maintaining peaceful work environments. But there aren’t many veterans in the underage homeless population. Homeless kids are mostly runaways or kids who left home because they didn’t feel safe there anymore, and some whose parents threw them out. Some of the kids remained silent most of the time. We never asked any questions. We listened and distributed the things that the organization had for us to take out.
A couple of those kids had something all together different going on with them. Some of the kids had warned us which ones we should watch out for. On the nights when we were out on the streets, we would talk to the volunteers who worked with the homeless adults, and they said the same thing. Some of the people were the types that you always needed to be extra careful around. It was a well known thing in the homeless world, and we got to witness it for ourselves one day. None of us was quite sure what triggered it exactly, but one of the kids suddenly unleashed such a torrent of fury and rage at one of the other kids that everybody within a considerable distance stopped to see what was going on. It was a terrifying thing to see, and we realized at that moment that when the kids warn us to be careful around certain individuals, we should take their warnings seriously. It made a very strong impression on me, because I had witnessed the same thing only a few years earlier, exactly the same thing. And in a fraction of a second I recalled that vivid image, and I felt a very powerful sense of déjà vu as it flashed upon my memory. It was the image of that little dog outside the coffee shop that day.
There is a disease in American culture, and it has gone viral. The most serious symptoms are violence, mass murder, school shootings and the like. But the disease itself is systemic. What appear to be individual outbreaks are really symptoms of the same societal virus. It manifests itself in the form of many woven layers of psychological trauma and repressed emotions. By the time it finally expresses itself in the form of rage, the individual has long since forgotten the real sources of those emotions. The only thing they feel is the damage from it, and when the damage becomes too much to live with anymore and the person realizes they must make an early departure, they become angry, and that anger builds over time. And they retaliate against the whole society, the whole world. Because this is the society whose negligence allowed this to happen to them. This is the society that took their soul away from them. This is the society that is guilty of criminal apathy and stood by as its evil forces inflicted irreparable damage onto its victims. This is the society that tacitly condones bullying with one of its faces, while speaking out against it with the other. And a conviction develops within them, that society must pay for its crimes of contempt. And the anger builds and it is projected outward onto the passive conspirators. When the virus becomes deadly and the effects of the trauma become too much to live with, and the anger accumulates to levels that can no longer be contained, the disease becomes particularly virulent and potentially deadly for anyone near the person. We’ve seen this happen again and again and again, more often than not in the United States of America.
The US is having a big national debate right now about gun control. Well, kind of. But the debate isn’t really about gun control. The two political parties are fighting over financial contributions, and they are using rhetoric that is designed to appeal to people’s emotions after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. But none of it is sincere. When the members of one party say, “we support the rights of gun owners”, they really mean, “we want to continue to receive donations from the gun lobby, and therefore we want to legislate to make their products easier to purchase”. And when the members of the other party say, “we support gun control so that kids can be safe from attack in their schools”, what they really mean is, “we want to cut off funding from our opponents so that we will have a stronger advantage in the next election”. Their words are all about gun control and constitutional rights, but their motivation is only about money and political gain. And that is why social problems like random homicide and school shootings will never be solved at the political level.
It isn’t really the availability of guns that compels people to use them in such ways. It is the availability of guns combined with the rage that develops in so many Americans over time. It is very obvious by now that tragedies like the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happen with much more frequency in the United States than in most other countries. What cultural forces affect so many of us in such horribly terrifying ways? Is it PTSD, some other form of mental illness perhaps? If so, then what is it about American culture that causes so much mental illness? What is the root cause of it? The effects of bullying, abuse and trauma are difficult to study, because it can’t be observed in a clinical setting. By the time it is discovered, the damage is too deeply rooted, or the individual is already dead. It wouldn’t be ethical or legal to conduct a study by inflicting PTSD onto a group of people, in a controlled and well-documented way, in order to observe the changes it caused in their behavior. If somebody could do that, we might really learn a lot about the potential long-term effects of certain types of abusive treatment. But you can’t just bully a group of kids for years just to prove or disprove a theory about how it might affect them.
Or can you?
I heard a story one time about a kid named Ted who scored 167 on an IQ test when he was in fifth grade in 1953. That is astronomically high intelligence. With an IQ that high, Ted would probably be in the top one or two out of a million people or so, but no one really knows for sure since there are so few people as brilliant as Ted that conducting surveys of those people is nearly impossible. Ted performed so well in school that it was recommended that he skip sixth grade. He continued to excel in school and it was later recommended that he also skip his junior year of high school. When Ted received word that he was accepted into Harvard University in 1958, he had not yet turned 16 years old. He started as a freshman a few months after his sixteenth birthday, majoring in mathematics.
But before I tell you the rest of the story of that brilliant kid Ted, I have to tell you the story of Dr. Henry A. Murray.
Dr. Murray earned his MD from Columbia University and got a PhD in biochemistry in 1928. He had met Carl Jung a few years earlier and was allegedly so profoundly influenced by the meeting that he chose psychology as his career instead of medicine. Immediately after graduating from his doctoral program, he became assistant director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He was an early pioneer in personality analysis and testing and developed the Thematic Apperception Test in 1935. In 1937, he was promoted to Director of Harvard Psychological Clinic.
During World War II, Dr. Murray went to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. His job was to develop a test for new recruits to see if they could stand up to the pressures of being a spy. Specifically, the OSS wanted him to develop tests that would determine which spies would not break down under the pressure of interrogations if they were captured by the enemy. The tests were designed to be extremely intimidating and uncomfortable, and the interrogations were harsh. According to Alston Chase, the anticipation of Dr. Murray’s tests alone was enough to make some candidates fall apart. After the war, Dr. Murray returned to his position as Director of Harvard Psychological Clinic, and resumed his studies of personality analysis.
Ted started his first year at Harvard in 1958, only a few months after turning 16. He was selected to be a resident in a small house that the university considered to be kind of an experimental incubator for the most highly intelligent freshmen, so that they could flourish academically and have a safe and quiet place outside of the common student housing. And like many of the other kids who lived in that house, Ted was majoring in mathematics.
During Ted’s sophomore year in 1959, he volunteered to participate in some ongoing psychological studies. The volunteers were paid and the opportunity was only open to sophomores. Each was given a code name for the duration of the study. Ted was given the code name Lawful. The participants were told that they would be given a month to write an essay about their personal philosophy of life, and also an autobiography. They were given all of Dr. Murray’s personality tests, and various other personality tests as well. A full analysis was made of each participant’s personality. They were told that they would come back to debate their ideas a month later.
But the study was not at all what the participants were told it was. Their personality tests were analyzed and their philosophies of life were scrutinized so that a volunteer from the law school could use the information in order to prepare to tear the unsuspecting students to pieces. On the day the students returned to debate their philosophies of life, they were led down a stairway into a dark room and seated in front of a bright light. Electrodes were hooked up to them to measure their heart rate and breathing. They could see shadowy figures of people behind two-way mirrors, and there was a movie camera pointed at them. And when the debate began, their opponents were brutally harsh and abusive, attacking their most cherished values and ideals.
The study was really designed to induce anger and rage. One source said it “aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress”. Alston Chase has suggested that the study might have been a continuation of Dr. Murray’s work for the OSS, because of how similar the experiments were, and the fact that Dr. Murray never gave any clear reason for conducting that series of studies at Harvard during those years. Such research would not be legal today. The following year, the participants were told to watch the movies of them breaking down under the harsh attacks, and they were asked to comment on their impressions of themselves.
It’s hard to say what effect a study like that had on those who participated. The study went on for 3 years, every week. Some people, including Alston Chase, have contacted some of the participants in that study. One of them said he felt like he was “being attacked”. Another remembered feeling “anger and embarrassment”. Decades later, they remember it as an unpleasant experience. And the one who went by the code name Lawful was two years younger than the rest. Ted was eligible to participate because he was a sophomore when the study began, but he was only as old as most high school seniors at the time.
Ted graduated from Harvard in 1962, at the age of 20, and went on to get his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan where he became interested in a branch of mathematics called complex analysis. His doctoral dissertation was titled “Boundary Functions” and it solved a problem so complex that even his professor, a leading expert in complex analysis, could not solve it. One of the members of Ted’s dissertation committee commented, “I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it.” After graduation, Ted published a total of six articles related to his dissertation in mathematics journals. In 1967, he became the youngest person ever hired as an assistant professor by the University of California, Berkeley mathematics department.
But while Ted was completing his doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, he began to have recurring nightmares. And the nightmares continued after he graduated from his doctoral program. After he started his job with the university in Berkeley California, the nightmares persisted. In 1969, Ted abruptly quit his job as assistant mathematics professor at UC Berkeley and moved back to his parents’ home in Illinois. In 1971, he built a small cabin in a remote location in Montana and moved into it. While living in Montana, he continued to have recurring nightmares. Alston Chase wrote in his article, “He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls”. Things only went down hill for Ted after that. If you haven’t figured it out by now, Ted did some pretty bad things in his life, I mean things that were like crime-of-the-century magnitude.
A 2002 joint report, issued by the United States Secret Service and the US Department of Education, determined that, “in a number of the incidents of targeted school violence studied, attackers described being bullied in terms that suggested that these experiences approached torment”. It sounds all too familiar. Yep. Way too familiar.
Citations:
Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber by Alston Chase
Harvard’s Experiment on the Unabomber from Psychology Today
Unabomber Decoded: Did Harvard Study Fuel Rage? from CBS Miami
Murray Center Seals Kaczynski Data from The Harvard Crimson
“Lawful”: Unabomber’s CIA-Sponsored MKUltra Experiments at HarvardIndustrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski
The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States from the United States Secret Service and US Department of Education
Stand Up For Kids
Stand Up For Kids
ELyssa D. Durant © 2007-2020
Monday, February 18, 2013
Aspie Kid | Perspectives from the Autism Spectrum || Lawful via @AspieKid
Twitter-Owned Posterous Is Not Accepting New Sign Ups To Blogging Platform Posterous Spaces | TechCrunch
Twitter-Owned Posterous Is Not Accepting New Sign Ups To Blogging Platform Posterous Spaces
Posterous, the blogging platform that Twitter bought in March 2012 for an undisclosed sum, appears to have stopped taking registrations for new users for Posterous Spaces. One tipster noted to TechCrunch that this has been the case for at least a week now, and it was also noted by a poster on Y Combinator’s Hacker News. Posterous was incubated and funded by YC in 2008.
There don’t appear to be any issues with Post.ly, Posterous’ URL shortening service that posts links, text and photos to Twitter.
We have reached out to Twitter to ask what is behind this and will update as we learn more. For now, there is still an option to sign up on the home page, although an attempt to do so brings up an error page.
The inability to sign up could point to a couple of different things.
The first is that the blogging site may be making a move towards closing down, or changing its service.
At the time of the acquisition, the two said Posterous would remain “up and running without disruption” and that any changes would be flagged with “ample notice.” In December, Posterous began to let users back up and export their data — a feature that Posterous and Twitter had initially said would be appearing in the “coming weeks” after the service got acquired.
Some speculated that this could be a first sign that the service might finally close down this year. In that vein, closing Posterous to new sign-ups would make sense.
The second possibility is a little more pedestrian: the site may simply be experiencing a technical glitch. Posterous has had more than one of these over the last several months, including a service outage due to a lost database, a DDOS attack, and image uploading issues. Flagging these has been the main function of Posterous’ Twitter feed for the last several months.
One sign that this may not be a technical glitch, though, is that Posterous is usually quick to respond to and fix problems — eg, this problem with photo uploads from about 16 hours ago — whereas the error for new-sign-ups has been ongoing for at least a week, and there have been no public responses made to people asking about it.
Twitter in December noted that it had passed 200 million monthly active users, and 400 million tweets per day on Twitter itself. As it continues to hone that business with more revenue-generating services like ads, one primary focus will be to keep users engaged on its main platform. With Posterous’ founder and CEO Sachin Agarwal now product manager at Twitter, it’s hard to see where Posterous Spaces, as it looks today, fits longer term.
Synesthesia | Emma's Hope Book
Synesthesia
I cannot stop thinking about some of the things people have written regarding pain or doing things that others perceive as painful, but that they perceive as relief or calm or being more present. One person described it as feeling “organized.” And then there are the people who described various types of synesthesia coupled with pain. So I wanted to circle back to synesthesia specifically as this is something I know little about and I’m assuming many others may be unfamiliar with it as well.
*For those of you who are synesthetes, please jump in and comment or email me (emmashopeblog@gmail.com) privately. Anything you tell me will be treated as confidential unless you give me permission to quote you, I will paraphrase and not use your name.
There are a number of interesting websites (these are just a few I found particularly interesting, but there are dozens more): Neuroscience for Kids – Synesthesia, American Synesthesia Association, Brain Pickings, ScienceBlogs and Synesthete.org explains: ”Synesthesia is a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color).” Synesthesia is thought to be inherited affecting 2-4% of the population, though there is no evidence to suggest a higher prevalence of synesthesia in Autistics and it seems women are more likely to experience it than men. *It must be noted, everything I’ve written in this paragraph was gathered on the internet and almost all of the various articles are written by non-Autistic people. I have added links to the original sources throughout.
Someone described how they can smell colors and another wrote about being able to smell people’s emotions. They described being able to smell someone they saw from a distance or on television. Another person wrote that when they meet someone they see color. Someone else wrote about how a particular self-induced pain causes them to see the most beautiful flashes of colors, exquisite and unique and unlike anything they’ve ever experienced. And still others talk about how numbers or letters have personalities, this is called, ordinal-linguistic personification. One person described it as a numeric “soap opera” and said, “2 and 4 are in love, but 3 hangs around and is like an annoying little brother, always wanting to be included, but nobody wants him around.”
I found a great post by Jessica Bagnall entitled, Synesthesia-Why My Numbers Have Personalities, she writes, “Five is a businessman that has a half-relationship with Eight, though he is unable to commit. He is flaky and often impossible to get hold of, though he tries to be more stable. He is the older brother of Seven.“
And then I read this Autism and Synethesia (the mis-spelling is on the site): ”On a whim, I asked my son Tom, age 11, if he sees colors when he plays notes on the piano. Tom, who is diagnosed with high functioning autism, plays both piano and clarinet. Oh, yes, he said, he does! Here are the note/color correlations he gave me, right off the top of his head:
- C=red
- D=orange
- E=yellow
- F=green
- G=blue
- A=”pink”
- B=violet
I drew a series of dots in the colors he gave me, and asked him to play them on the piano. He played Frere Jacques flawlessly.
I looked up synesthesia, and found that there’s a close link between synesthesia relative to music – and perfect pitch (which Tommy has).”
I have to wonder whether my daughter experiences some version of synesthesia and if most who are profoundly moved by music do as well. Which then lead me to think about art, poetry, writing, painting, sculpture and dance. Are all of us born with some degree of synesthesia, which we then lose as we mature? Just as all of us are capable of learning many languages as young children, but as we grow older acquisition of other languages becomes increasingly difficult, is this true with synesthesia as well? As with so much surrounding neurology, I find the more I learn, the more questions I have!
To all of you who have shared your stories – thank you. Many of you have shared incredibly personal things and I’d like to acknowledge that and tell you how grateful I am. So thank you, really, thank you for being willing to describe such personal things. I am profoundly grateful to all who’ve reached out to me. I hope I’m doing your experiences justice in these posts.
Em at dusk running through the sprinklers on the ranch – Summer 2011
JustMigrate Launches To Move Posterous Blogs To Tumblr Just As Posterous Announces Imminent End | TechCrunch
JustMigrate Launches To Move Posterous Blogs To Tumblr Just As Posterous Announces Imminent End
Just in time for Posterous’ closure on April 30th, a service has launched to bring Posterous blogs over to rival service, Tumblr.
JustMigrate was announced the same day that Posterous unceremoniously called it quits via its blog. The service requires you to punch in your posterous URL, authorize it with Tumblr, and you’re all set. For those with multiple Tumblr blogs, granting JustMigrate access via your primary Tumblr will bring you to a page where you can select which blog you want to port over to.
Moving 100 posts is free, and it’s $10 for 250 and $25 for 500 posts. Tumblr’s API allows 250 posts, or 75 photo posts to be uploaded daily, so JustMigrate will queue posts over days if you have a large Posterous blog.
The service was created by 3Crumbs, a five-man team out of India that has produced a mobile shopping app. Its co-founder, Siddarth Menon, said the idea to create Posterous porting tool was conceived in December, during a hackathon. The startup is bootstrapped, and he hopes the service will bring in some revenue to help support 3Crumbs’ shopping app.
Since the service was announced less than a day ago, about 150 blogs are now waiting in line to get ported. Menon said former New York Times design director and Mixel co-creator, Khoi Vinh, has had his Posterous that has been ported.
JustMigrate’s team should brace itself for a lot more migrations to happen. Back in 2011, Posterous said it had 12.3 million blogs on the site, most of them by individual users.
JustMigrate’s entrance couldn’t be timelier. Last march, when Posterous announced its team was getting acquired by Twitter, founder Sachin Agarwal said his team would provide “ample notice” if the service was going to get closed, and also promised tools to export content to other services such as Tumblr and WordPress “in the coming weeks”.
Sadly, the Posterous team remained silent on those tools, and nine months later in December offered a way for users to download their entire archives as a huge zip file, instead. The lack of tools was especially disappointing, given that the service had initially acquired its users by providing a robust tool to port your existing blog over from services such as Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and even custom self-hosted blogs.
Posterous’ last blog post pointed to WordPress and Squarespace’s existing porting tools, before it bid its adieu.
Posterous Will Shut Down On April 30th, Co-Founder Garry Tan Launches Posthaven To Save Your Sites | TechCrunch
Posterous Will Shut Down On April 30th, Co-Founder Garry Tan Launches Posthaven To Save Your Sites
It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad story.
Have no fear, Posterous co-founder Garry Tan is coming to the rescue with a new site called Posthaven, which he promises will never shut down. Here’s what Tan had to say about the launch when we spoke to him:
I’m teaming up with another cofounder of Posterous, Brett Gibson, and we are taking a pledge to keeping the URLs online forever. It’s $5 a month and will have all of the ease of use and power of Posterous. It’s just the two of us and we’re coding it in our bedrooms right now.
Tan tells us that Posthaven will never accept funding and will be available to its users “forever.”
Here’s what the Posterous/Twitter team had to say about the shutdown, along with instructions on how to get your data:
Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.
On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.
Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.
As Twitter delves into how to make discovery easier for its users, some of the findings learned by Posterous will most definitely come into play. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s an easy way to move your information, with one of Posterous’ co-founders providing the service “from the heart.”
Posthaven is currently taking reservations for its service, so grab your name.
UPDATE: It looks like Posthaven is having difficulties managing all of the attention:
[Photo credit: Flickr]
