The worlds most expensive health care system has the sickest citizens among wealthy countries, and they are getting sicker every day.

Tens of millions of these chronically ill Americans will gather to feast on Thanksgiving Day. About 40 percent of the adults sitting around the table will be clinically obese, as will be 18 percent of the children, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

The proportion of Americans over the age of 20 with diabetes has risen from 10 percent in 2000 to almost 15 percent in 2016, the last year that the Centers for Disease Control has analyzed. More than 30 percent of Americans have hypertension.

As a result, the life expectancy for the average American at birth has dropped, the CDC reports. Heart disease, respiratory ailments, stroke and diabetes were among the top causes of death. Personal behavior plays a significant role.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Insurers pressuring hospitals and doctors to lower health care waste

Political candidates are debating how to fix the nations health care system, offering solutions ranging from socialized medicine to transparent pricing. But few have the guts to call out the American people themselves for being fat, dumb and dying.

Americans, on average, have dreadful eating and exercise habits. Most Americans consume too much sugar, salt and fat, and half overeat cheap, fast food high in calories and low in nutrition. And three out of four do not eat enough fruit and vegetables, according to the National Institutes of Health.

When those adults have children, they create a generational crisis. Poor eating habits hamper healthy development and create bad habits that last a lifetime. And no, most American children are not naturally husky. According to pediatric researchers, most obese children simply eat too much.

The more home-cooked meals a child eats, the healthier they tend to be. But U.S. children consume more calories from fast food than they do from school food and home-cooked meals are infrequent, according to a University of North Carolina study.

Americas obesity epidemic is one of the biggest challenges facing the U.S. economy. Rising childhood obesity will bring a tsunami of health problems when these kids reach adulthood and run up huge medical bills.

Economists would suggest that higher care costs should incentivize people to maintain their health. But rising obesity and preventable disease rates have coincided with skyrocketing health care costs for decades, and Americans keep ruining their health.

The U.S. spends roughly three times as much per person on health care as other wealthy countries. And despite our amazing hospitals and research institutions, Americans are underserved and less healthy, the latest Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development research reveals.

The U.S. has fewer people with health care coverage, fewer families with access to primary care doctors and fewer doctors per capita. And despite our fast food brands spanning the globe, Americans have shorter lives, more disease and more obesity.

Biologists understand human behavior better than economists. They know every creature seeks the maximum number of calories for the least amount of effort. Since calories in America are easily obtained with little physical effort, nature is out of balance.

Medicare for All is not going to override mammalian instincts. Forcing hospitals and doctors to publish their secret price lists will not encourage healthier lifestyles. Capping insurance company profits will not make lean protein and green vegetables cheaper than fried, sugar-coated carbohydrates.

Research shows that piling costs onto individuals does not change bad behavior, and in large-scale trials, neither does financial incentives for healthy behavior. Biologists know the only solution is to limit an animals access to calories. Here is where economists can help.

History frowns on government-induced famines, but we can use economic carrots and sticks to encourage healthier choices and complicate access to bad calories. It may be the only way to save the nation from a health-cost-induced bankruptcy.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Transparency necessary for health care pricing

Taxing sugary, harmful products to make them more expensive is unpopular but necessary. The revenues should be used to reduce the supply chain costs of delivering fresh food to everyone.

As a society, we must also vilify the supersize culture. Food producers promoted this marketing trick to sell more food and boost profit margins. But portion control is a critical healthy habit.

Finally, Americans need to learn that dieting does not work. Getting healthy means changing everything forever, both diet and exercise. Giving up potato chips for a month does nothing.

Americans are entitled to a range of food and behavior choices. Still, while no one should take that away, society also has a responsibility not to encourage behaviors because we are the ones who will pay the bill in the long run.

Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy.

twitter.com/cltomlinson

chris.tomlinson@chron.com

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Americans are fat, sedentary and dying of bad health choices - Houston Chronicle

Feline was the source

of love, companionship

My feline friend, Nicholas, died in mid-November 25 years ago. I clearly remember that day cool and gray, with a threat of rain. That afternoon, I found him in front of our house, with just a few minutes of breath remaining.

I lifted him carefully from the ground and felt the warmth ebb from his body and watched as his eyes turned cold and hollow. He died in my arms and I could do nothing to reverse the process.

When Nicholas joined our family, I greeted him with a casual indifference. I resolved that association would not evolve into fondness, that his presence would guarantee no more from me than the essentials of survival food and shelter.

Wrong. Nicholas possessed an insatiable curiosity and a superior intelligence. He combined an instinctive sense of play with a grand capacity for the absurd, all the while attempting to unlock the enigmatic patterns of human behavior. Predictably, inexorably mostly on his terms accommodation was transformed over five years into genuine affection. When he insisted on attention, who could resist? When he became distant and aloof, understanding was required. When he questioned and investigated, on occasion punctuated by the clatter of falling objects, reprimand without first repressing a smile was difficult.

I buried him in our backyard that cool, gray November afternoon. There is no marker, only memories: of a solid white fur ball with one brown eye and one blue eye, who would leap on and off one's lap without notification and whose whiskers would invariably invert in the relentless pursuit of feline knowledge.

Nicholas, I am convinced, grasped the essence of mutual fondness and understood his role as the source of abiding and everlasting joy.

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Letter to the Editor, Nov. 25, 2019: Feline was the source of love, companionship - Richmond.com

In 2004, when Tanesha Bannister was 29, a judge sentenced her to life in prison for selling crack, convincing the single mother of two she'd never be free again.

Two decades earlier, the country had responded to the crack cocaine epidemic with laws that hoped to stem both violence and social decay caused by low-cost crack cocaine. Over time, the 1986 law mandating a 100-to-1 crack versus powder cocaine sentencing ratio marooned millions of Americans, mostly black men, in Americas prison system.

But as her time in prison stretched on, Bannister, who is black, began to question the legitimacy of her punishment for a non-violent crime. She petitioned the administrations of President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump for a reprieve to no avail.

Then, in May, she became one of the more than 4,500 people released or who have seen their prison terms shortened since December 2018, when Trump signed into law one of the most significant changes to the federal criminal justice system in the 21st century.

"Basically after being let down for so many times ... it was just like life was breathed all over again," Bannister, now 45, said.

Nearly a year after the First Step Act's passage, NBC News spoke to over a dozen people, including former and current elected officials, liberal and conservative advocates, and formerly incarcerated individuals, among others, who championed the reforms. They all agreed that the law's effects are tangible, and many believe the bipartisan coalition that produced it appears durable.

I think the biggest win is that this is now a safe issue after years and years and years of the two parties trying to use criminal justice as a way to tear each other down, said Jessica Jackson, co-founder of #cut50, a bipartisan criminal justice reform nonprofit.

However, some are skeptical the alliance can hold. Many of the next steps advocates have underscored as necessary to bring about true change, like reexamining lengthy sentences for violent offenses and restructuring policing practices, may be a tougher sell.

"As some people might say, it's easier to kind of agree on some of the low-hanging fruits, but the higher you reach, the more difficult consensus is going to be, said Tim Head, the executive director for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative nonprofit that supports the act as well as other criminal justice reform efforts.

More than 3,000 inmates have been released and another roughly 1,700 people convicted of crack cocaine offenses have seen their sentences reduced thanks to the First Step Act, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Some of that activity stems from a 2011 change made by the federal sentencing commission affecting people convicted of certain drug crimes and a provision of the First Step Act. That provision made the sentencing guidelines of the Obama-era Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 retroactive.

The majority of those released under both acts have been black men, the group which the "war on drugs" campaign of the '70s and '80s effectively targeted.

But the effects of the act's other major provision the relaxing of the notorious "three strikes" rule to mean a 25-year sentence, rather than life in prison, for three or more convictions are so far difficult to measure. A year in, little data has been collected around how many people had been sentenced under the new guidelines.

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The act also a required the development of a new risk assessment tool that aims to determine which inmates are most likely to re-offend if released and to identify ways to assist those who are released. It was completed in July. Meanwhile, roughly 16,000 federal prisoners have enrolled in drug treatment programs created by the act, according to the Justice Department.

The success or limitations of the tool and the new programs still remain to be seen, but advocates say the overall represent a major shift in thinking.

"It's part of wider system transformation from one that was based on gut instinct and anecdotes and headlines to decisions that are made based on evidence and research," said Adam Gelb, the founder of the Council on Criminal Justice, a bipartisan criminal justice nonprofit.

However, he added, the nuances of implementation matter.

"We're talking about human behavior and it's never going to be a perfect assessment of someone's readiness for release nor a perfect judgment about the length of time they deserve to spend behind bars for the purposes punishment," he said.

Head, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said the act's changes, which also include mandating BOP train its 31,000 employees on de-escalation techniques and mental health awareness, intended to shift "the culture of our federal system from pure punishment, to one of at least considering rehabilitation in a much more meaningful way."

The idea of rehabilitation and redemption, he said, is a core focus of conservative thought on the issue.

But, despite the sweeping reforms of the First Step Act, other experts say it's important not lose sight of the inmates who have been left out of the reforms and to start a conversion about about whether prison is the right punishment in a country that incarcerates more people than its peers.

"We have so much work to do to re-imagine our system of corrections, our system of justice, so we just need to be careful not to paint sort of a rosy picture of what's happening," Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an expert at the Brennan Center. "We still have more people behind bars under correctional supervision than any other country on the planet."

Advocates for the First Step Act, particularly left-leaning ones, describedits reformsashistoric but modest. True change will require looking to the heart of the system police interactions and what happens inside courtrooms, experts said. Right now, black Americans are more likely to be arrested for the same activities as white Americans, and more likely to be prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to longer jail terms.

It's understandable that people are frustrated with the pace of progress, said Gelb. At the same time, the criminal justice system is massive and fragmented. And it's going to continue to take some time to build the political will to tackle many of the more difficult issues.

Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and drug czar under President Barack Obama, suggested that reformers look to the states. First Step covers the nearly 180,000 federal inmate population, and does not touch the roughly 1.3 million people in state prisons.

"I think that the states have been moving in this direction now for quite a while, he said. But I think the First Step Act sends a good signal nationally, because not all states are on board, and not all states move as aggressively."

To make a more significant dent in the nations prison population, attention must shift toward the roots of mass incarceration, said Tony J. Payton Jr., a Democrat and former Pennsylvania state lawmaker who championed state-level criminal justice reforms.

Weve got to basically dismantle that entire system, said Payton, who is now affiliated with the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center, a national and bipartisan coalition of black criminal justice reformers.

Payton's list of targets, however, points to some of the remaining contentious matters in criminal justice reform that could threaten the bipartisanship needed to implement them, such as sentencing reform for both non-violent and violent offenders, eliminating mandatory minimums, reforming police departments and eliminating prosecutorial immunity.

Lester Young Jr., a South Carolina statewide organizer for JustLeadershipUSA, a national criminal justice reform nonprofit, who was formerly incarcerated for murder, cited his own experience to argue that reforms for violent offenders must be made a priority.

Head said that this might make some conservatives uneasy.

"On the conservative side of the spectrum, there obviously still are plenty of people that feel like the most severe crimes or severe offenses need to be dealt with severely," Head said. "People on the right saying, 'This goes too far' and people on the left saying, 'This doesn't go far enough.'"

Bannister, released from the minimum-security penitentiary in Bryan, Texas, where she spent 16 years, now works as a personal care assistant for two health care companies back home in South Carolina.

She's turned her efforts to activism after being released, hoping to lobby state lawmakers to improve reentry for ex-offenders with resources such as housing and job training.

"There's a lot of work to do, but I'm willing to stand in the trenches and fight the good fight and if I can make a difference in getting a law passed or writing legislation, those are my goals," she said. "They're not things I want to fulfill but I will fulfill."

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The First Step Act promised widespread reform. What has the criminal justice overhaul achieved so far? - NBC News

Minorities make up the majority of the latest group of U.S. college students to be named Rhodes Scholars, and the class includes the first transgender woman selected for the prestigious program.

The Rhodes Trust announced the 32 selections late Saturday after two days of discussions over 236 applicants from 90 different colleges and universities across the country.

Along with University of Tennessee graduate Hera Jay Brown, who is the first transgender woman in the program, this years class also includes two non-binary scholars.

As our rights and experiences as women are under threat, this moment has given me pause to reflect on what an honor it is to pave this path, Brown posted on Twitter after the announcement.

There are students from universities well known for their academics, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Duke University. The list also includes the first Rhodes Scholar from the University of Connecticut.

The 32 people chosen will start at least two years of all-expenses paid study next fall at Oxford University in England along with students from over 60 countries.

The studies undertaken by the scholars include research into the escape from danger reflex in zebrafish to better understand how the human brain deals with stress and how to make computer vision more humanlike.

The research also includes studies into human behavior, including the prevalence of sex work among refugees, the impact of nuclear testing on the American Southwest, how to use online cryptocurrency to improve conditions in the worlds largest Syrian refugee camp and defending the rights of migrants to the United States.

Winners of the scholarships include Daine A. Van de Wall, who is a brigade commander at the United States Military Academy, which is the highest-ranking cadet position at West Point.

Other scholars selected this year include students who were homeschooled before their university studies and some who are the first people in their families to go to college.

Arielle Hudson is a second-generation student at the University of Mississippi who remembered visiting campus with her mother, who holds two degrees from the school. She always thought she would go to college out of state until she received a full scholarship through a Mississippi teaching program.

When I received the scholarship, I started to think about how I would make a difference here, Hudson told the university in a statement.

Now her work will come full circle. Hudson plans to seek masters degrees in comparative social policy and comparative international education, then come back to Mississippis poor Delta region to teach for five years to fulfill her scholarship requirement.

Rhodes Scholarships were created in 1902 in the will of Cecil Rhodes, a British businessman and Oxford alum who was a prime minister of the Cape Colony in present-day South Africa.

The recipients are chosen not just for academic skill, but for their leadership and a willingness to do good for the world.

Previous Rhodes Scholars include U.S. President Bill Clinton, astronomer Edwin Hubble, singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson and author Naomi Wolf. Among 2020 Democrats running for president, Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg both studied at Oxford under the scholarship program.

More:
Diversity Marks Latest Class of US Rhodes Scholars - The New York Times

On the night of July 4, 1954, San Antonio, Texas, was shaken by the rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl. The man accused of these crimes was Jimmy Shaver, an airman at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base with no criminal record. Shaver claimed to have lost his memory of the incident.

The victim, 3-year-old Chere Jo Horton, had disappeared around midnight outside the Air Force Base, where her parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour, the group came upon a car parked next to a gravel pit; Cheres underwear was hanging from one of the cars doors. Shaver wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as dazed and in a trance-like state.

Whats going on here? he asked. He didnt seem drunk, but he couldnt say where he was, howd he gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Hortons body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and shed been raped.

Deputies arrested Shaver. At 29, he was recently remarried with two children and no history of violence. Hed been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but hed left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver had seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasnt drunk. One later testified that he probably was not normal he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances. He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didnt recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: He could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didnt remember anything, he reasoned, he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shavers memories still hadnt returned. The commander of the base hospital, Col. Robert S. Bray, ordered a psychiatric evaluation, to be performed by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of psychiatric services at the air base. It fell to West to decide if Shaverhad been legally sane at the time of the murder.

Shaver spent the next two weeks under Wests supervision. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, or truth serum, to see if he could clear his amnesia.

While Shaver was under, according to testimony, he recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. Shed brought out repressed memories of his cousin, Beth Rainboat, whod sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.

While Shaver was under hypnosis, he confessed to killing the young girl. At trial, he maintained his innocence.

At the trial, West made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court later ruled that hed had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his33rd birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

The trial, which hinged on Shavers testimony, might have ended differently had the jury knownabout Wests past. According to newly surfaced papers fromWests archives,the psychiatrist had some of the clearest, most nefarious ties of any scientist to the CIAs Project MKUltra. Wests files especially his correspondence with the CIAs longtime poisons expert, Sidney Gottlieb shed new light on one of the most infamous projects in the agencys history. Likely comprising more than149 subprojects and at least 185 researchers working at institutions across America and Canada, MKUltra was, as the New York Times put it, a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind. Its experiments violated international laws, not to mention the agencys charter, which forbids domestic activity.

At the trial, West maintained that Shaver had suffered a bout of temporary insanity on the night of Chere Jo Hortons killing, but he argued that Shaver was quite sane now. In the courtroom, Shaver didnt look that way. One newspaper account said he sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance, saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker.

Large portions of Wests truth serum interview with Shaver were read into the court record. The doctor had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy, hed said. The transcript of the interview, which survived among Wests papers, also showed West trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before? Or: After you took her clothes off, what did you do?

I never did take her clothes off, Shaver said.

The interview was divided into thirds, and the middle third hadnt been recorded. When the transcript picked up, it said: Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.

West asked, Now you remember it all, dont you, Jimmy?

Yes, sir, Shaver replied.

Though lawyers scrutinized Shavers medical history, little mention was made of the base hospital where Wests archived letters indicate he had conducted his MKUltra experiments. Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that hed dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. His condition was severe enough that the Air Force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor whod attempted to recruit him wasnot named in court records or transcripts.

On the stand, West said hed never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated in the experimental program. Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, according to the bases archivist, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with Sa through St had vanished.

Dr. Louis Jolyon West in San Francisco, Calif., in 1976.

Photo: Lawrence Schiller/Polaris Communications/Getty Images

Wests professional fascination with LSD was practically as old as the drug itself. For several decades, he was one of an elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerlands Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a new substance. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist whod discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a sacred drug that gestured toward the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.

In the 50s, even before hippies embraced the drug, Very few people took LSD without having somebody being a trip leader, Charles Fischer, a drug researcher, told me. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to that associated with hypnosis; West had studied the two in tandem. You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else, Fischer explained. Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being.

West seems to have used chemicals liberally in his medical practice, and histacticsleft an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it.

In my 50 years in the profession, that was the most dramatic moment ever when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl, Rose said in 2002 of Shaver and the truth serum interview. But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. Hypnotism, he said, was not part of the protocol for the interview.

Hed also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

We were involved from the first day, Rose recalled. Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder. He initiated it.

West claimed he was in the courtroom the day Shaver was sentenced to death. Around this time, he became vehemently opposed to capital punishment. Did he know his experiments mightve led to the execution of an innocent man and the death of a child? If his correspondence with CIA head of MKUltra Gottlieb predating the crime by just a year had been presented at trial, would the outcome have been the same?

Almost as soon as they had access to it, government scientists saw LSD as a potential Cold War miracle drug. Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command.

In 1949, the CIA, then in its infancy, launched Project Bluebird, a mind-control program that tested drugs on American citizens most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases who didnt even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.

Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that theyd sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed communists: The POWs must have been brainwashed. The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didnt appear in English before 1950. It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in postwar America: that a new class of chemicals could rewire and automate the human mind.

You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else, Fischer explained. Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being.

When the American POWs returned, the Army brought in a team of scientists to deprogram them. Among those scientists was West. Born in Brooklyn in 1924, he had enlisted in the Air Force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. His friends called him Jolly, for his middle name, impressive girth, and oversized personality. When he got out, he researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. He would later claim to have studied 83 prisoners of war, 56 of whom had been forced to make false confessions. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.

Wests success with the POWs gained him entrance into the upper echelons of the intelligence community. Gottlieb,the poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIAs Technical Services Staff, along with Richard Helms, the CIAs chief of operations for the Directorate of Plans had convinced the agencys then-director, Allen Dulles, that mind control ops were the future. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further potential brainwashing by the Soviets. But the defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.

In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that communist spies could turn the American mind into a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius. Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKUltra in motion.

Little is known about the program. After Watergate, Helms (who by that time was CIA director) ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKUltra papers; in January 1973, the Technical Services staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens.

In the mid-1970s, after the Times revealed the existence of MKUltra on its front page, the government launched three separate investigations, all of which were hobbled by the CIAs destruction of its files:Vice President Nelson Rockefellers Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (1975); Senator Frank Churchs Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975-6); and Senators Edward Kennedy and Daniel Inouyes joint Senate Select Committee hearings on Project MKUltra, the CIAs Program of Research in Behavioral Modification (1977). When records were available, they were redacted; when witnesses were summoned to testify before Congress, they were forgetful.

We do know the projects broadest goal was to influence human behavior. Under its umbrella were at least 149 subprojects, many involving research on unwitting participants. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality earned him the nickname the Black Sorcerer, developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.

The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley farmed out to scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes, including those of their unknowing subjects.

Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to induced pain and psychosis. They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didnt do the trick, theyd try to master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.

MKUltra was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in 1961, he was not informed of its existence until 1963. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of it at any period during its 20-year history.

Sidney Gottlieb in 1977.

Photo: AP

West headed the psychiatry department at UCLA and the schools renowned neuroscience center until his retirement in 1988. One day, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis in Wests archives there, I found letters between West and his CIA handler, Sherman Grifford the cover name, according to John Markss The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, for Sidney Gottlieb. West, who had once written to a magazine editor that he had never worked for the CIA, had in fact worked closely with the agencys Black Sorcerer himself.

The letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKUltra started, when West was chief of the psychiatric service at the air base at Lackland.

Who would the guinea pigs be?West listed four groups: basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.

Addressing Gottlieb as S.G., West outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. He began with a plan to discover the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subjects recollection of the information he formerly knew. Another item proposed honing techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects or for inducing in them specific mental disorders. He hoped to create couriers who would carry a long and complex message embedded secretly in their minds, and to study the induction of trance-states by drugs. His list lined up perfectly with the goals of MKUltra.

Needless to say, West added, the experiments must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field. To this end, he asked Gottlieb for some sort of carte blanche.

Who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups: basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade. Only the volunteers would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasnt spelled out, unwitting. It would be easier to preserve his secrecy if he were inducing specific mental disorders in people who already exhibited them. Certain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments. Official investigations into MKUltra yielded little information about its subjects, but Wests letter suggests that the program cast a wide net.

Gottliebs reply came on letterhead from Chemrophyl Associates, a front company he used to correspond with MKUltra subcontractors. My Good Friend, he wrote, I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real. you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.

Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: We have gained quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.

West returned the camaraderie: It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me an asset, he replied. Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.

In 1954, around the same time as Chere Jo Hortons murder, West began to split his time between Lackland and the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, where he would lead the psychiatry department.

West had told his prospective employer that his Lackland duties were purely clinical and that hed been doing no research, classified or otherwise and he asked the board of directors at Oklahoma for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called a non-profit private research foundation. In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another of Gottliebs fictions, a shell organization enabling him.

In 1956, West reported back to the CIA that the experiments hed begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. In a 1956 paper titled The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility, he claimed to have achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace true memories with false ones in human beings without their knowledge. Without detailing specific incidents, he put it in laymans terms: It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur. Hed done it, he claimed, by administering new drugs effective in speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.

At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility that the CIA turned over to Senators Kennedy and Inouyein 1977. Wests name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But the CIAs version was also shorter, and watered down in comparison. Wests document was 14 pages. This one was five, including a cover page. Most glaringly, there was no mention of Wests triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual with a fictional event.

One passage, not in Wests original, claims the CIA never used LSD in studies at all: The effects of [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.

West, of course, had studied those effects for years. But when it came to elaborating on his findings about implanting memories and controlling thoughts, even in the paper found in Wests own files, he offered few details. He seems to have been in a rudimentary phase of his research. Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken placeso that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discussAn individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite.

Had the CIA doctored Wests original document to mislead the Senate committee? And if so, why would the agency have gone to so much trouble to hide experimental findings that werent ultimately all that revealing? Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading to mocking headlines like the The Gang That Couldnt Spray Straight. Perhaps the agency wanted the world to assume that MKUltra was a bust, and to forget the whole thing.

The official seal of the CIA in 1974.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The CIA seemsto have pared MKUltra back in the mid-60s, according to congressional testimony and surviving financial records, but Jolly Wests government-funded research continued apace. Late in the fall of 1966, West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies and LSD. Tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past, he cobbled together a new wardrobe and started skipping haircuts. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma, nominally to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his participation in a program there.

When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, West was the only scientist in the world whod predicted the emergence of potentially violent LSD cults such as Charles Mansons Family. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, West had contributed a chapter called Hallucinogens, warning students of a remarkable substance percolating through college campuses and into cities. LSD was known to leave users unusually susceptible and emotionally labile. It appealed to alienated kids who would crave shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation.

Another of his papers, 1965s Dangers of Hypnosis, foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by crackpots who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. He cited two cases: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a military offense induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. (Its not at all clear that the latter referred to Shavers killing of Chere Jo Horton.)

Hed also supervised a study in Oklahoma City,in which hed hired informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender a fundamental change in basic moral, religious or political matters. The title of the project was Mass Conversion, and ithad been funded by Gottlieb.

In the Haight, West arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on Frederick Street, where heset up what he described as a laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad. The pad opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. He installed six graduate students in the pad, telling them to dress like hippies and lure itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didnt mind grad students taking notes on their behavior.

According to records in Wests files, his crash pad was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. Dr. Gordon Deckert, Wests successor as chair at the University of Oklahoma, told me that he found papers in Westsdesk that revealed that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.

This wouldnt have been the agencys first disguised laboratory in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men. White later wrote to his CIA handler, I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun.

At the Haight-Ashbury pad, though, Wests motives were vague. No oneseemed to havea firm grasp of the projects purpose not even those involved in it. The grad students hired tostaffWests crash pad lab were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all of these students admitted that something didnt add up. They werent sure what they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasnt there.

One of the diaries in Wests files belonged to a Stanford psychology grad student who lived at the pad that summer. The experience was aimless to the point of worthlessness, she wrote. When crashers showed up, no one made much of a point of finding out about [them]. More often, hippies failed to show up at all, since many of them apparently looked on the pad with suspicion. What the hell is Jolly doing, it is like a zoo, the student fumed. Is he studying us or them?

When West made one of his rare appearances, he was dressed like a silly hippie; sometimes he brought friends to the house. Their general attitude,she wrote, was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. They spent a good deal of the time stoned. She added, I feel like no one is being honest and straight and the whole thing is a gigantic put on. What is he trying to prove? He is interested in drugs, that is clear. What else?

In December 1974, MKUltra finally came to light in a terrific flash of headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the Times: Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces. The three government investigations that followed the Rockefeller Commission, Church Committee, and the Kennedy-Inouye Select Committee hearings looked into illegal domestic activities of various federal intelligence agencies, including wiretapping, mail opening, and unwitting drug testing of U.S. citizens.

TheChurch Committeesfinal report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKUltra by the CIAs inspector general. Precautions must be taken, the document warned, to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions. A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: A final phase of the testing of MKUltra products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.

The Church Committee found that MKUltra had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient whod been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a military-contracted scientist whod been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for treatment. (Continued investigation by Olsons son, Eric dramatized by Errol Morris in the series Wormwood strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide,throwing him out of the windowbecause they fearedhe would blow the whistle on MKUltra and the militarys use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)

The Statler Hotel in New York, N.Y. where Frank Olson fell to his death.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The news of Olsons death shocked a nation already reeling from Watergate, and now less inclined than ever to trust its institutions. The government tried to quell the controversy by passing new regulations on human experimentation. Gottliebs destruction of the MKUltra files was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, quietly dropped. Gottlieb had testified before the Senate in 1977 only under the condition that he received criminal immunity.

The Senate demanded the formation of a federal program to locate the victims of MKUltra experiments, and to pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators. That program never coalesced. Surviving records named 80 institutions, including 44 universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among them Louis Jolyon West. The Times identifiedWest as one of less than a dozen suspected scientists whod secretly participated in MKUltra under academic cover.

Yet not one researcher was ever federally investigated, nor were any victims ever notified. Despite the outrage of congressional leaders and more than three years of headlines about the brutalities of the program, no one not the Black Sorcerer Sidney Gottlieb, nor senior CIA official Richard Helms, nor Jolly West suffered any legal consequences.

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Inside the Archive of an LSD Researcher With Ties to the CIA's MKUltra Mind Control Project - The Intercept

You finish that last sip of morning coffee and stare at the empty paper cup in your hand. Should it go into the recycling bin, compost, or be landfilled or incinerated?

You are not alone. Most Americans are confused about recycling, and thecrisisdriven by Chinasdecision to stop accepting most foreign scrap materialis worsening the problem. At this point its hard to be sure that items put in the recycling bin are recycled.

Research shows that more often than not, Americans give up trying to sort their recyclables. Or they engage inwishful recycling, tossing nonrecyclables into the bin. Even so, most waste never gets that far. People feel intimidated by the task.

Antowain Person, foreman of the Indian River County Landfill, takes photos of a contaminated recycling bin while conducting a field audit on Wednesday, July 17, 2019, in Indian River County. Person, along with a small group of county and Waste Management employees and members of Keep Indian River Beautiful, inspected the bins of repeat offenders at households that use the blue bins for household garbage. Residents could receive a warning for the infraction or pay a fine.(Photo: PATRICK DOVE/TCPALM)

The average American generates about4.5 poundsof waste each day. Only1.5 poundsof it is recycled or composted. This means that over an average lifetime of 78.7 years, one American would send 67,000 pounds of waste to landfills. Thats more than twice the weight ofa cruise ship anchor.

Although many communities and advocates have adopted regulations and action plans centered on moving toward a circular economy, major barriers still make it hard for individuals to reduce, reuse and recycle. Existing policies have been developed based on insights from engineering and economics, and give little consideration of how human behavior at the individual level fits into the system.

My colleagues andIuse behavior science to foster goals ranging fromenergy conservationtocommunity solidarity. In a recentpaper, economistMarieke Huysentruyt, Ph.D. candidateEmma Barnoskyand I uncovered promising solutions to the recycling crisis driven by personal benefits and social connections.

Why is getting Americans to recycle more so challenging? First, many of them dont understand waste problems and recycling strategies. Few are aware of the environmental problems waste causes, and most have a hard time connecting individual actions to those problems.

Most people dont know where their waste goes, whether it includes recyclables or what can be made from them. They may know what day to put out curbside trash and recycling, but are unsure which materials the companies accept. In a 2019surveyof 2,000 Americans, 53% erroneously believed greasy pizza boxes could be recycled, and 68% thought the same for used plastic utensils.

More: Fun and easy ways to get in the recycling habit

More: 'Recycling grannies' get new uses from plastic bags

More: County to continue strong recycling policing

Another 39% of respondents cited inconvenience and poor access to recycling facilities as major barriers. California pays a 5- to 10-cent redemption fee for each beverage container, but the facilities often are inconvenient to reach. For example, the closest to my home in Los Angeles is eight miles away, which can involve driving for an hour or more. Thats not worth it for the few cans my family produces.

Ethel Ford, left, and Nannette Wall hang their bags made of plastic grocery bags on a display in the gift shop of the Fishing Museum on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2019 at the Sebastian Inlet State Park. Dubbed the "Recycling Grannies" by park staff, Ford and Wall were given space in the gift shop to sell their creations with all the proceeds going back to the park.(Photo: PATRICK DOVE/TCPALM)

Most U.S. consumers are opposed to pollution, of course, but research shows that theyseldom view themselves as significant contributors. As taxpayers, they hold local governments responsible for recycling. Many are not sure what happens next, or whether their actions make a difference.

What can be done to address these barriers? Better messaging, such as emphasizing how waste can be transformed into new objects,can make a difference.

But as I argue in my 2018 book,The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market With the Planet, information alone cant drive sustainable behavior. People must feel motivated, and the best motivations bundle environmental benefits with personal benefits, such as economic rewards, increased status or social connections.

In a 2014 survey, 41% of respondents said that money or rewards were themost effective way to get them to recycle. Take-back systems, such as deposits on cans and bottles, have proven effective in some contexts. Such systems need to be more convenient, however.

More: Stuart becomes first on Treasure Coast to ban straws

Returning bottles directly to stores is one possibility, but novel strategies are being deployed across the country. Pay-as-you-throw policies charge customers based on how much solid waste they discard, thus incentivizing waste reduction, reuse and more sustainable purchasing behavior.Recyclebank, a New York company, rewards people for recycling with discounts and deals from local and national businesses.

Social status also motivates people. The zero-waste lifestyle has become a sensation on social media, driving the rise of Instagram influencers such asBea Johnson,Lauren SingerandKathryn Kellogg, who are competing to leave behind the smallest quantity of waste. Visibility of conservation behavior matters, and could be a powerful component in pay-as-you-throw schemes.

Its also nice to have support. Mutual help organizations, or community-led groups, trigger behavioral change through social connections and face-to-face interactions. They have the potential to transfer empowering information and sustain long-term commitment.

One famous example isAlcoholics Anonymous, which relies on member expertise instead of instructions from health care specialists. Similarly,Weight Watchersfocuses on open communication, group celebration of weight loss progress and supportive relationships among members.

Magali (Maggie) Delmas(Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO FROM THE CONVERSATION)

French startupYoyo, founded in 2017, is applying this strategy to recycling. Yoyo connects participants with coaches, who can be individuals or businesses, to help them sort recyclables into orange bags. Coaches train and encourage sorters, who earn points and rewards such as movie tickets for collecting and storing full Yoyo bags.

The process also confers status, giving sorterspositive social visibilityfor work that is ordinarily considered thankless. And because rewards tend to be local, Yoyos infrastructure has the potential to improve members community connections, strengthening the perceived and actual social power of the group.

This system offers a convenient, social, incentive-based approach. In two years the community has grown to 450 coaches and 14,500 sorters and collected almost 4.3 million plastic bottles.

Such novel behavior-based programs alone cannot solve back-end aspects of the global waste crisis, such as recycling capacity and fluctuating scrap material prices. But our research has shown that by leveraging technology and human behavior, behavioral science can encourage people to recycle much more effectively than simplistic campaigns or slogans.

Magali (Maggie) Delmas is professor of the Management Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles.

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To boost recycling, reward consumers with discounts, deals and social connections | Opinion - TCPalm

EDWARDSVILLE As Thanksgiving nears, two faculty members of the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Department of Historical Studies and Native American Studies, provided an opportunity to discuss some of the historical facts surrounding the holiday.

Robert Paulett, PhD, associate professor; and Rowena McClinton, professor, served as facilitators of the topic, Understanding Thanksgiving and its Connection to Native American History, on Friday, Nov. 15 in the Morris University Center, Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion (CSDI).

We want to provide a brief introduction to the history of Thanksgiving and the origins of the Pilgrim story we all learned, which became defined over the next century into the holiday we know today, said Paulett.

The discussion was based on the excerpts from the publication known as Morts Relation, published in 1622 by George Mourton and written by Edward Winslow and William Bradford. The writing was made accessible in a modern, online edition by Caleb Johnson of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.

In its original form, this was a pretty typical document of exploration a description of exploration, settlement, violence, diplomacy and outright theft in some places, said Paulett. But at the end, there is a brief paragraph describing an English harvest feast that played host to their new Wampanoag trading partners. When this 1622 document was rediscovered in the 1840s, Americans seized on this brief paragraph, ignored the rest, and began to celebrate this myth and turned it into the national idea of Thanksgiving.

America in the 1800-1900s was trying to define itself as this generous, benevolent, Christian empire on the world stage. Look at our generosity, peacefulness, benevolence. That becomes the 20th century Thanksgiving weve all grown up with.

We all have a lot more to learn about Thanksgiving and about Native American experiences in our history, said Paul Rose, PhD, professor of psychology, and associate dean of the School of Education, Health and Human Behavior. Most of us have missed out on a lot of the facts of American history.

After the discussion, senior psychology major Angel Williams said she was glad to have learned a little more on the subject. The subject matter wasnt new, she added. But it was more in depth than what I learned in high school. In high school, we just learned about the good things. Hearing it now, does give me bad vibes, but its still a holiday that most people will celebrate.

The discussion refreshed some of the subject matter for me. I had studied some Native American history before coming to this discussion, said Kelly Moroney, New Students Transition coordinator. It didnt change my view of the holiday. I have mixed feelings. I like the idea of a peaceful union, but it is not an accurate representation of the history between Native American people and colonizers. I do like how the holiday is hallmarked as a time for family, because family is important to me.

More:
Our Education: SIUE faculty members examine the origins of Thanksgiving - Alton Telegraph

Israel is rolling up its sleeves for a third round of elections. If those of 2015 will be remembered for the Arabs are streaming to the polls, and those of April 2019 for the social media bots, the September 2019 do-over will go down in history as the camera elections. It is true that matters that seem to be of world-shattering importance during the week before Election Day deflate very quickly after the votes are counted. Nevertheless, we ought to inquire what it was about the storm over cameras in the polling stations that fit so well with todays reality.

There are cameras in every supermarket and every hospital so whats the problem? mused Benjamin Netanyahu, in opening the Government meeting a week before Election Day. Even though Netanyahu, who likes to sees himself as the leader of the start-up nation, does not always understand the issues of privacy and data security, this time he got his facts right.

Over the last decade we have networked ourselves to death. We have inundated our schools, supermarkets, hospitals, parks, and roads, with cameras of every type. We did so because we could, since taking photos and sending them from the camera to a central processor and storage unit, has become so very cheap and simple.

On top of that, we came to feel that here technology is interfacing with one of the fundamental principles of western wisdom, according to which seeing is believing, knowing and understanding. We say that one picture is worth a thousand words; we talk about perspectives, and try to foresee the future. This spawned the cameras symbolic status as the unblinking eye of an objective deity that can document the absolute truth, pass it on, and use it to prove that something did indeed take place, and, in this way, confirm and validate the reality. As we have increasingly turned into a post-truth society, swallowed up by alternative facts and disinformation, our desire for cameras has escalated.

The problem is that while all this was going on, we never stopped to ask whether we were turning our paradigm of citizenship from one based on values and obligations, to one that rests on fear of the all-knowing and punitive eye. Is there really a correlation between cameras and the prevention of violence, crime and fraud? (There is no unequivocal proof that such a connection exists; sometimes the violence migrates out of camera range, and forgers find new techniques.) Do we pay a price in our emotional wellbeing when we live in an aquarium and feel that we are always being watched? Of course we do. Children have a need to play cat-and-mouse games with adults. And adults, for their part, have to have some space where they can do whatever they want without violating the norms of human behavior and without the need to placate someone else. Have we replaced conversation, explanations, and listening, with an obsessive expectation of solid proof, as if every municipal inspector or school principal has to be a one-person detective agency?

We never paused to ask these questions or conduct a public debate about them, and never considered that it may be of vital importance to enshrine the conclusions in legislation. Then, quite unexpectedly, over the last two years the technological advances in video content processing based on artificial intelligence have substantially altered what can be produced from the output of surveillance cameras. It is no longer just about the ability to identify a specific n person in a specific place at a specific time, but rather the capacity to formulate a psychological and behavioral profile for people, based on their actions captured on camera. This includes their sexual orientation, whether they pose an immediate criminal threat, and more. Suddenly, today, we are witnessing signs of panic about the depth of vision and understandings that video processing enables, and about the intrusive exposure that the cameras bring with them and all our fears have surfaced with even greater intensity.

It is no accident that we are beginning to hear voices calling for a ban on the use of these cameras. The American Civil Liberties Union published a harsh and uncompromising report on the subject; San Francisco has banned the use of outdoor facial recognition technology; in Britain, the privacy watchdog has launched an investigation into the use of that technology in the Kings Cross precinct; and the European Data Protection Board has adopted new guidelines on the processing of personal data through video devices. So anyone who asserts today, as Netanyahu did before the last elections, that the use of surveillance cameras should be permitted in polling stations simply because they are everywhere, does not fully understand the capabilities and implications of video analytics.

But things are even more serious than that. The most important question we have failed to ask about the cameras is whether they really are essential for ascertaining the truth, or, at least, for fully understanding what is going on around us. By its very nature, the cameras output is enclosed in a frame and documents only part of any significant event. It can be edited and manipulated, as is done on television. The emerging technology of facial recognition based on video cameras still has a significant margin of error, not to mention the potential evil of deep-fake videos. Nor are we currently able to understand the processing of recorded information, the algorithms employed to do so, and the social biases of deep-learning machines that are supposed to decide who is a suspect, who should be arrested, or who should be sent to jail.

In short, our desire to have cameras provide us with the meaning and validity of what takes place is understandable and natural. But the belief that without a camera, we cannot be convinced of the truth, and that, when it comes to our surroundings, pictures are the gold standard of proof is, quite simply, childish. This belief can also provide a bonus to liars, who will hunt out the cracks in video documentations capacity to convey the truth. An embarrassing video was published about them? Its a fake, theyll insist and well be even more confused than we used to be.

So instead of asserting that today everything must be captured on film and that surveillance cameras are the only way to deal with fraud at the polls, we need to think about what it is appropriate and permitted to film, what it is appropriate and permitted to process from the video data, and the extent to which the processing of such data needs to be clear and transparent. And also needless to say where we as human beings are located on this grid.

Dr. Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler is a Senior Fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler is head of the Israel Democracy Institutes Media Reform project.

More:
We need to talk about cameras right now - The Times of Israel

Aubrey Moog-Ayers was outside of an apothecary shop a few years ago, working as an orientation interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, when two men pulled her aside.

The men, who said they were partners, asked her questions that stayed with her years later: What did she know about queer people in 18th-century America? Did anyone ever cross dress?

Moog-Ayers, who identifies as queer, told them about her own research about gathering places for gay men in 18th-century England, known as molly houses, and about a Virginia colonist who dressed as a man and as a woman.

But stories about what today would be considered the LGBTQ community never have been a formal part of the programming at Colonial Williamsburg. For the past four years, Moog-Ayers has been encouraging the living-history museum to fill this void.

Im queer, and I wanted to see if that was something that existed, if I could see myself in the past, said Moog-Ayers, now an apprentice weaver at Colonial Williamsburg.

This year, Moog-Ayers and other front-line staff members signed a petition calling for a push to study queer history at the popular tourist attraction, with the aim of telling a more complete story about those who lived in early America.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation agreed and recently launched a committee to research the history of gender and sexually nonconforming people. The group plans to create a source book for interpreters and guides to use while interacting with the half a million people who visit the historical site every year.

Human beings who operate outside of sexual and gender expectations have always existed within and contributed to our history, Beth Kelly, vice president of the Education, Research and Historical Interpretation Division at the foundation, wrote in an internal memo about the plans in April. Sharing this history is vital if we are committed to telling a holistic narrative of our past.

The foundations efforts are part of a growing effort across the country to include LGBTQ history in educational settings. At least five states, including Maryland earlier this year, have taken steps to require public schools to teach lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history. About five years ago, the National Park Service also launched a project exploring and preserving the legacy of LGBTQ people.

I think gradually were seeing this woven into the fabric of American education, said Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and author of A Queer History of the United States for Young People. An important part of that effort, he said, will be incorporating these stories in museums, exhibits, libraries and historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg.

Still, Bronski said he was surprised to see such an initiative in a place as prominent as Colonial Williamsburg, particularly on a topic that still is considered controversial among many Americans.

Other historical sites have faced backlash recently for grappling with topics some visitors see as polarizing. At Monticello, Mount Vernon and other plantations, they have complained about staff efforts to speak more honestly about slavery.

The changes come amid declining attendance at Colonial Williamsburg, which is attracting less than half of the visitors it did in the 1980s, according to an annual report from 2017. In 2018, ticketed attendance was 550,171.

Bronski anticipated possible pushback not just from some conservative visitors, but also from certain historians who oppose labeling people from centuries ago through the lens of the modern-day LGBTQ community.

Colonial Williamsburg historian Kelly Arehart acknowledged the challenges that come with researching sexuality and gender identity during the period, using language that didnt exist at the time.

There are all these gaps, she said. Its like chasing shadows.

Researchers plan to comb through available court documents, particularly from trials for those prosecuted under sodomy laws. Other clues can be found in letters or in poetry and art.

One local example mentioned by the Colonial Williamsburg researchers is the story of an indentured servant named Thomas Hall, who was born female and raised in England as a girl named Thomasine Hall. As an adult, Hall joined the army and began presenting as a man, with short hair and mens clothing. In colonial Virginia, Hall continued to live as both a man and a woman.

After speculation by Halls neighbors and a forced physical examination, a Virginia court was unable to determine Halls sex. The court found Hall is a man and a woman, and as a punishment, it ordered Hall to wear both mens and womens clothing.

Thomasine was not allowed to choose gender for themselves, said Kara French, an associate history professor at Salisbury University who is working as an outside consultant for Colonial Williamsburgs researchers. This idea that someone might be changing their gender or shifting their gender was not to be tolerated.

Historians also point to Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian officer who was enlisted to train the Continental Army. At the time, rumors spread that he was fired from the Prussian military for being gay. He nevertheless rose to the rank of major general, commanding an American division at the battle of Yorktown, according to LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History, published in 2016 by the National Park Service and the National Park Foundation.

His sexuality does seem to have been an open secret, French said. His expertise and his status allowed him certain privileges that the ordinary might not have had.

Other examples cited by historians are not quite as clear-cut. For example, Alexander Hamilton wrote letters to Lt. Col. John Laurens that would seem intimate and almost romantic by todays standards.

Cold in my professions, warm in [my] friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it m[n] be in my power, by action rather than words, [to] convince you that I love you, Hamilton wrote in April 1779. I shall only tell you that till you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you.

It was not uncommon for men in the 18th and 19th centuries to experience romantic friendships, French said. Men and women lived very segregated lives at the time, she said, and many primary attachments were going to be with people of the same sex.

They were brothers in arms, they were part of this close-knit group, French said. Were not always sure about how deep these romantic friendships went.

French also mentioned Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man and joined the Patriot forces during the American Revolution. She was the only woman to earn a full military pension for participation in the Revolutionary War. She later co-wrote a memoir that boasted of flirtations from other women mistaking her for a man, French said.

It will never be possible to determine whether people like Sampson and Hamilton would identify with modern-day ideas of what it means to be queer. But thats not necessarily the point of such research, Bronski said.

Its not about finding gay people in history, Bronski said, so much as its actually expanding our notions of human relationships and the complexity of human behavior.

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Uncovering Colonial Williamsburg's LGBTQ history - Lynchburg News and Advance

Performa, the New York performance biennial thats now in its 16th year, has developed a reputation for forcing artists into unfamiliar territory. Indeed, for many artists, Performa commissions are their first opportunities to arrange events, which presents unique challenges.

The learning curve can be steep, and artists often have to learn on the fly.For many artists, the unpredictability is precisely the appeal: the chance to take a big risk can be a transformative opportunity.

As Performa comes to a close this weekend, we spoke with three artists doing live events for the first time to see what they learned from their experiences.

Paul Pfeiffer, University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live (2019). Photo: Paula Court.

When Paul Pfeiffer planned to bring the University of Georgias marching band to New York for his Performa outing, he envisioned them playing in an empty stadium. The original idea was to recontextualize how the band is perceived (they usually perform at football games)by placing them in an arena with no athletes in sight.

Pfeiffereven had one of the citys major stadiums lined up for the performance. But late in the process, the NBA swooped in and outbid the artist for the venue.

The irony that the NBA quashed his performancewhich emphasizes the corporate spectacle of professional sportswas not lost onPfeiffer. But it still left him with a problem to solve: where would the 50-member band play now? Eventually, he locked down the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem, which opened up new possibilities, Pfeiffer explains.

The band is nothing if not a machine; they are constantly on script, the artist says. To turn them into performers in a different context was a total unknown. And to an extent beyond what I anticipated, they performed their roles as hype generators in an amazing way. The audience had access to them, not just as a group, but individually. There were interactions happening that I did not expect. Individual personalities of the band members came out.

Paul Pfeiffer, University of Georgia Redcoat Band Live (2019). Photo: Paula Court.

The change also spurred Pfeiffer to expand the piece: while some members of the band played in New York, those who didnt make the trip performedsimultaneously at the vacant University of Georgia stadium. Their performance was then live-streamed at the Apollo.

The whole thing was an improvised negotiation happening in real-time, Pfeiffer says.

Theres a grey area between the notion that performance is something that happens on a stage, and a wider idea of performance as all human behavior, he adds. Thats absolutely fascinating to me. Thats what makes performance so exciting and pertinent right now. As an artist, thats where the action is.

Installation view of Tara Subkoffs DEEPFAKE, 2019. Courtesy of the Hole.

It was a very personal piece, says Tara Subkoff of her Performa commission, Deepfake.

An exploration of chaos theory and the way in which our lives are shaped by the choices we make moment-to-moment, the work was simultaneously staged at four different locations, which forced viewers to pick just one perspective on the sprawling event. Dancers moved to a capella renditions of a Nina Simone song at two separate churches uptown, while in Brooklyn, another group performed a water ballet.

And at the Hole, the gallery where Subkoff currently has a solo show, she staged a three-ring circus with jugglers, a mime, a magician, and a contortionist. As they pranced about,the artist chased her daughter around in a circle while her cousin, a tap dancer, performed nearby.

Subkoff didnt plan on being in the piece herself. (The one time she starred in her own work was, according to her, the worst piece shes ever done. It was worse than the time I sang karaoke in Tokyo and cleared the room, she says.) But her three-year-old daughter insisted on being part of the work, and so Subkoff decided to participate too.

It was a comedic version of what its like to be a female in our society, trying to be all these things to all these people at the same time, Subkoff says of the performance. As a single mom, I feel like Im always running in circles and juggling.

va Mag, Stand Up, still (2015). Courtesy of the artist.

Theres a Swedish expression (kpa grisen i scken, which translates roughly tobuy a pig in a sack) thats used to describe a situation in which you agree to do something without really knowing what it is.

va Mag, a Swedish sculptor and performance artist, says Performa was her pig in a sack.

It was a challenge for me to understand what this is, who the artists are, and how I fit in, Mag says. Im doing a project I havent done before in a new environment. I had to figure out how to get the help I needed. I had no idea what the outcome was going to be.

As a performer, Mag explains, you have to learn not to be totally nervous and freeze, but actually trust yourself and go on.

Mags work,Dead Matter Moves, is a durational performance that took place across six nights at the historic Judson Memorial Church. It features 10 performers erecting lifesize figures of clay and stuffing them into patchwork skins made of found textiles.

Mag says that talking with Performa curator Kathy Noble played a big part in shaping the piece, as did working with a production teamsomething shes never done before.

They helped with small details like scheduling throughout the day, and setting up the space for me to totally develop myself and investigate my techniques, says the artist.They pushed me to do more and to grow. That is really Americanyou can dream big!

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I Had No Idea What the Outcome Was Going to Be: What Three Non-Performance Artists Learned by Doing Their First Performa Commissions - artnet News