"Human Resources" by Scott Noble

[Cain]

From our friend Thirtyseven

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FC6BGEOM

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/download/file.php?id=377 (torrent file)

Last night I watched Human Resources and I was impressed enough to pass it along. It's a documentary about Social Control, examining the history, the philosophy and ultimately the pathology of elite power. The movie is a full two hours...

Overall, Human Resources is rough around the edges but still overloaded with gems. Set aside some time to digest this -- and take notes.

Scott Noble does an admirable job of fitting ten hours of material into two. I also appreciated the space he gives to all the people he interviews...there's a metric ton of ideas here and he lets almost all of them unfold and breathe at their own pace. The footage itself is very low-fi and some of the interviews feel like they drag on for too long, or wander in circles. Impressively, those moments are few and far between. Noble can't cover everything, but the scope of this movie alone makes it the most ambitious entry in this strange genre so far, more complete than The Century of the Self and less hysterical than the Zeitgeist franchise.

The film really clicks in the final act, when the focus turns toward the CIA's MK experimentation. I was surprised and grateful to find an extended interview with Dr. Colin Ross, who takes pains to note that "CIA MK" is actually a misleading generalization, obscuring a larger network of projects involving the Army, Naval Intelligence and several other, more opaque agencies. There's a lot of rewindable moments here, tread slowly.

When the perfect documentary about Social Control finally arrives, I'm guessing it will be built on this precise blueprint. This film might be full of cosmetic flaws, but his argument is (mostly) methodical and devastating. A toast to Scott Noble.

[The Johnny]

MK Ultra project and all its brethen projects were/are an abomination worthy of investigating by anyone interested in social control, but surely hard to do so, for it is a lot of information and im not sure easy to find.

[The Johnny]

Just as an important fact i rememeber (and care to never ever forget) one of the directors of the APA was in MK Ultra or one of its offshoots.

ETA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron

this pig-dog was important in the creation of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUBARK_Counterintelligence_Interrogation

[Cain]

Dr Ewen Cameron, if I recall right?

There are actually court proceedings under way to get more MK-ULTRA and linked documents from the CIA, and the judge seems sympathetic.

Anyway, still haven't watched this, but I will tonight.

[The Johnny]

Oh, i havent seen this video you speak of either, just that Mk reminded me of things...

could wikileeks have something pertaining to this somehow?

[Cain]

Not that I know of

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/11/cia_brain_experiments_pursued.html

The CIA is notorious for its Cold War-era experiments with LSD and other chemicals on unwitting citizens and soldiers. Details have emerged in books and articles beginning more than 30 years ago.

But if military veterans have their way in a California law suit, the spy agency's quest to turn humans into robot-like assassins via electrodes planted in their brains will get far more exposure than the drugs the CIA tested on subjects ranging from soldiers to unwitting bar patrons and the clients of prostitutes.

It's not just science fiction — or the imaginings of the mentally ill.

In 1961, a top CIA scientist reported in an internal memo that "the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated...Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man," according to "The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate," a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks.

"[T]his cold-blooded project," Marks wrote, "was designed ... for the delivery of chemical and biological agents or for 'executive action-type operations,' according to a document. 'Executive action' was the CIA's euphemism for assassination."

The CIA pursued such experiments because it was convinced the Soviets were doing the same.

Victims have sought justice for years, in vain. Now, almost 40 years later, a federal magistrate has ordered the CIA to produce records and witnesses about the LSD and other experiments "allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975," according to news accounts.

U.S. Magistrate Judge John Larsen's Nov. 17 order exempted the agency from having to testify about electrode tests on humans, but Gordon P. Erspamer, lead attorney for the veterans, says "we are pursuing this as well."

...

Papers filed in the case describe "electrical devices implanted in brain tissue with electrodes in various regions, including the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, the frontal lobe (via the septum), the cortex and various other places," Erspamer said, drawing on [research papers] (http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/spytalkheathdocument.pdf) written by government scientists.

"We believe that one of our plaintiffs was given a septal implant at [Edgewood Arsenal] (www.edgewoodtestvets.org)," he said, based on an MRI he has "showing a 'foreign body' on the border between the septum and the frontal lobe."

"A lot of this work was done out of Tulane University using a local state hospital and funding from a cut-out (front) organization called the Commonwealth Fund," he continued, again drawing on the research papers.

"We tried to get docs from Tulane, but they told us that they were destroyed in the hurricane flooding."

The CIA claims that at least some of the documents should remain classified as "state secrets." But Magistrate Larson told the agency to come back with a better rationale, a "supplemental declaration explaining with heightened specificity" why the documents should be protected after all these years.

[Triple Zero]

I heard there was a documentary about the same events/projects that The Men Who Stare At Goats is based upon, does anyone remember its title? Or was it just a book? [I did find references to the book, but I'd like to watch the docu].

Any idea where I can find "Human Resources"? Torrent sites and Google Video didn't turn up anything.

Also, on the subject of CIA mind-control, if I'm to believe Derren Brown, as well as having read Influence by Cialdini, wouldn't relatively simple psychological/behavioural tricks be way WAY more effective than all this paranormal and LSD stuff?
Are there any documentaries or references to CIA research being done on that subject? I did get a whole bunch of psyops-related texts from your book collections (Cain), but--though I only browsed them a bit--they seem to discuss mostly mass-media and propaganda types of operations, not the extremely powerful NLP/PUA/"mentalism" methods that focus more on one-on-one interactions.

[Cain]

The title of the documentary is The Men Who Stare At Goats.  Try adding a "part one/two/three" to the end of it and you should find it, on Google Video if nothing else.

The only two places you can get Human Resources are from the links I gave in the OP.  So far, anyway.

Simple psychological tricks probably would be....everyone who has seen what the CIA has done admits that the MK-ULTRA experiments were complete and utter failures...Dr Cameron's "repatterning", for example, doesn't work, at least, not in the way he intended.  Yes, the memories of the test subject are repressed, but giving them crippling problems and phobias for the rest of their lives does not seem to be within the parameters of a "more healthy human being".

If you read Levenda's books, he suggests that the CIA obsession with mind control derived from emigrees of Project Paperclip (Nazi scientists, in other words), highly influenced by the Ahnenerbe S.S. and their quasi-mystical worldview.  Levenda is something of an unreliable source however (he wrote the Simon Necronomicon, for example) and probably shouldn't be entirely trusted.

This documentary focuses on how behaviouralism grew out of Taylorism, and the impact this has had on 20th century society, so it comes from a rather different place than Levenda.  Also, for the most part, CIA officers do not need psychological tricks to do their job....the acronym MICE (Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego) lets them figure out how to recruit an agent and run them, and the paramilitary side of things doesn't really involve much talking.  They have recruited magicians before, to train them in how to palm items...but for the most part, it's the agents who are doing the hard work, and they already have access to what the CIA want (or can get it), and all you have to do is blackmail them, pay them, satisfy their need for revenge or let them know how much this is doing to help bring down the regime.  You just got to find the agents in the first place.

[Triple Zero]

The only two places you can get Human Resources are from the links I gave in the OP.  So far, anyway.

D'oh! Would you believe I completely missed those links and just read the excerpt you quoted?

Thanks