An effectively infinite budget free from public scrutiny is a helluva drug.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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That's what they want you to think. In reality the psychic goat explosion test worked, but there's a catch. It only works on goats.
Get a small monkey or child to ride a goat towards the designated target. Problem solved
Ya goat shrapnel is no joke
The British army has yet to develop a helmet that can stop shrapnel from a mind-exploded goat.
Very inappropriate joke. My good friend was injured by a goat-equipped IED. Lost his whole funny bone. Think before you crack a joke next time
I don't think the KGB felt like the CIA were always ahead of them.
Aldrich Ames is an interesting character to read about for example.
Context?
The CIA is often attributed great cunning and intelligence, both in popular culture and by their enemies.
In reality, they were busy during the Cold War dosing up on LSD and trying to cultivate psychic powers, including tests to try to kill goats with mind-powers
Counterpoint; you're more likely to only hear about the things that didn't work.
...the things that do work are important, so kept quiet.
You joke but this is actually what like 99% of classified documents actually involve, not conspiracy shit, just methodologies that worked that the relevant agency doesn't want people finding out about and developing countermeasures to.
This is why Edward Snowden is on an extended stay in a Russian airport right now, not for exposing a conspiracy and making the US government look bad, but for basically handing the playbook over to the public leading to adversarial countermeasures against the techniques and exploits they use.
If you ever see those "how to not be identified at a protest" posts, that's more or less what the letter agencies are trying to avoid people being able to make more of.
No joke, just what I assumed is the case.
And, consequently, the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats
Is that all they were doing?
Sometimes they tried to kill Castro with exploding cigars.
Honestly I say the KGBs fails were funnier with regards to trying to coerce foreign governments
They made a sex tape of the leader of Indonesia and when they tried to blackmail him with it he demanded copies to show to his buddies
Well, there was also the MKUltra thing.
I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the first attempted assassination of MLK was made by a schizophrenic black woman ranting about the things the CIA hates while they had a secret program for brainwashing disenfranchised schizophrenics into assassins and spies.
They were both. They were the organization that both spiked their own punch bowl with LSD and that overthrew several democratically elected leaders for American interests.
Oh, I'm not saying they're not shitty. I'm only saying they aren't nearly as competent as people think.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that they were competent in many ways. It’s just that they’re an insane sort of competent. They’re both fully capable of difficult and bad things and utterly incapable of self control
There was an excellent movie called The Men Who Stare at Goats that'll get you up to speed, just remember it's a 100% factual documentary.
Now that I think about it, if NCD had to make a movie, it would end up exactly like The Men Who Stare at Goats.
The movie is a loose adaption of Jon Ronsons book and documentrary series which is a 100% factual documentary.
The CIA didn't just spin their wheels, they knew something.
They knew if they didn't use up the budget they'd lose it for the next year
If they were a business or a public school maybe. But it's an intelligence agency in a nation that gives its military so much money that said military is begging for cuts, but no one's listening because "Well I own stock in a weapons company and I'm in congress, lol."
DoD: "We have a recruitment problem, not an equipment problem. Allocate money properly please?"
Congress: "Where's the profit in that? You can't get kickbacks from the enlisted!"
One of my "favorite" stories of that is CVN-76. Russ Feingold was in Congress in the 90s saying "guys, the Navy doesn't even want this thing, and even in a two theater war, we can get along fine with 5 or 6 supercarriers instead of 12."
It goes ahead anyway. Do you know what they named that monument to fiscal conservatism? The USS Ronald Reagan.
At least they got the shitting itself in public part right.
This is more about a specific office or department within than the agency as a whole.
There was a time when human psychic powers were a legitimate line of scientific inquiry. The ultimate conclusion was "nah, never mind", but the CIA probably got a whiff of the more mainstream research and wanted to know how to weaponize it.
From what we know of Mk Ultra, their "experiments" barely deserve the term. No controls, no good statistical models, and not even a clearly described hypothesis. It's unlikely they figured out anything of value, and probably caused unnecessary human suffering along the way.
You do realize that more recently evidence for Psi is actually proving valid, it's merely being resisted - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-of-the-darkness/202302/why-some-scientists-resist-the-evidence-for-psi
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/debunking-myths-the-mind/201804/the-biology-telepathy
tl;dr Psi is real, it's just being held to an unfair standard.
Utter garbage article from a pop sci rag. It does the same thing a lot of garbage science does: spends all its time attacking "mainstream science", none of it defending their own positions, and hoping the reader doesn't notice.
And here's the thing: the article focuses its attack on physicalism, but there's nothing necessarily contradictory about physicalism and human psi ability. Some kind of biological radio could very well exist. We simply lack any evidence that it does.
It's not that we lack evidence, it's that the evidence is actively being ignored because "Oh well, even though these 90 labs recreated this when they tested it, 1 didn't"
There's a very real stigma against it, and the article I listed actually gave examples of proven Psi, but you ignored that to focus on the "attack"m because you couldn't argue against the evidence provided.
Here's another article from the same site showing evidence for telepathy - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/debunking-myths-the-mind/201804/the-biology-telepathy
It's definitely not a woo site, as there are plenty of articles speaking out against that kind of nonsense - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201301/troubled-souls-spirituality-mental-health-hazard
And here's proof that the site is credible - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/psychology-today/
The thing is, Psionics is real, that much we know, however that still doesn't mean Madame Cleo can really talk to dead people or that Uri Geller can really bend spends, I'm not defending them, and I certainly have no love for New Age Bullshit (Ladies, if he's into Spirit Science don't start a relationship with him, lest you want to be gaslit into thinking your illnesses can be cured by baby oil)
A few scammers overstating or outright lying does not an entire study of science disprove. Kind of how we don't immediately shun all of green energy because of a few nutjobs claiming they totally have a car that gets over 9000 miles per drop of water.
If the data legitimately suggests that Psionic Phenomenon is real, then that means that despite a rocky start (to say the least), there are non-physical aspects of our reality and we know nothing about them other than that they exist.
In reality the Soviets deliberately spread rumours that they were doing psychic shit (which they did to some very limited extent) and that lead to a panicky CIA going "Aw, shit. They must be unto something. Let's dump billions into paranormal research."