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Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Order Now! THE MAN NEXT DOOR
In those days, it was easy to join the revolution. You could sign up on any street corner where you could also find like-minded children with similar weird hair and clothes. I had been in the streets a lot that year, marching for this and shouting slogans against that. The future would sort itself out, as simple as breathing.
When I was fifteen years old, I saw Leonard Cohen sing The Stranger Song on Canadian television. Not long afterwards, I took the subway downtown and bought a book of his poetry. Magic was afoot.
"Regarding the Man Next Door - I'm still recovering! And I mean that in the best way possible…All my favourite texts knock the ground out from beneath my feet. Not only did it topple me, it might be the most engaging memoir I've read. You make subtle gestures towards the devil in the details with a very sharp labrys…pure artistry." -- Andrew Roberts
"That was one great read. More gentle on our hero and maybe less paranoid than stuff written in the past. The story really does hang together and connects with my own memories of Montreal. But what I really want to know is, where can I see a picture of the Chinese man flipping through the air?" -- Tom Hochmann
Well done. And timely. "Manufacturing the Dead Head" over at Gnostic Media and Dave McGowan's work and now your work are all meshing like a perfectly synchronized Rolex Submariner wrist watch. --- Agent Rooster Cogburn
"A wild ride." -- Carolyn Swayze literary agency
"A truly great read. The ending will shock you." -- Ellen Atkin, Raw Travelling blog
"Fascinating insight from that period from Ann Diamond, as usual. I look forward to reading her new book." --- Kitty Hundal
"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." --- Anonymous
AVAILABLE NOW (print or ebook versions) FROM DIAMONDBACK BOOKS
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Monday, March 31, 2014
UPDATE ON MY COLD WAR: Conversation with E. Jane Mundy
In my mid twenties I wrote a story about my childhood and a "dream" I had at age four of being in an underground laboratory where children were tied down to conveyer belts being molested with cattle prods. This short story was published in a couple of Canadian anthologies in the 1980s.
In 2002, I started to meet people on the internet and, read stories and accounts of people who described exactly the same scene as part of their childhood as kids in the program called MKULTRA. I wrote to one of these survivors, Carol Rutz, who wrote back saying it sounded like I was in this program.
I was fifty years old, and it took me a year to say well, maybe it's possible. This was after a year of reading thousands of pages of documents. I began to realize my own family had been closely connected to these institutions where experiments went on and also to some of the doctors. My father was a patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron and another psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Roper, who was a colleague and disciple of Cameron's "psychic driving" experiments which devastated so many lives. Unlike some patients Cameron de-patterned, my father was only in the Allan for six weeks, and was able to return to work for the next few months, although his memory was affected by the drugs and electroshock treatments and whatever else he received - his records are incomplete. He had turned sixty years old that year and the following year he took early retirement.
The same year my mother got ill with severe arthritis and she was constantly going for treatment to the same hospital. Both my parents became guinea pigs that year.
As I found out in 2004, my father had been in military intelligence with the Royal Canadian Air Force. In 1941 he was stationed in Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia. In 1943, he came to Montreal and was an Air Force intelligence officer during the war when Nazis were said to be operating in Quebec. After the war became a High School teacher. Former military were given preference in hiring after the war, and it appears there were many ex-military teachers in the English Protestant high schools. And being ex-military, he was also expected to volunteer in peacetime projects, like ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA. This also included us: as his children, and also as twins, we were in line to be placed in these secret experiments.
The Air Force was very involved in secret mind control research, and there was a lot of that going on in Montreal during the Cold War era. Dr. Ewen Cameron was in the American Air Force and so were a number of his colleagues who also happened to be 33rd degree Masons. So it was a secretive men's club and many of the psychiatrists who experimented on Canadians were British trained and came to McGill from Edinburgh and the United Kingdom where eugenics originated. They would get their eugenics training in the UK and many were hired by McGill University in Montreal. McGill has always been famous for attracting military contracts, and some needed human volunteers. One group of potential guinea pigs was children of the military, another was Native Aboriginal children, and another, a large group, was Quebec orphans.
They also seem to have had special programs for what were called "gifted" kids – whose parents were happy to be told their child has tested high on the IQ test, or was musically or artistically talented. There were privileges attached to being "gifted" and also to being a child of the military rather than to be, say, a child from a native reserve or an orphan. Children in Canada were disappearing into experiments designed by the military to produce a new generation of mind-controlled people who would help create a New World Order. If this sounds hard to believe,that's because the British eugenicists created a system designed to hide the evidence of what they were up to after the war in Canada. That's what I found, when I began trying to look into and write about what happened to my family in the Kafka-esque landscape of the Cold War in North America.
By 2004 I had a whole book written, which I called My Cold War, and I started looking for someone to publish it. I thought, it's a powerful story, and I had told it pretty well, and with all the information that was coming out on the internet, really vast quantities of documents and testimony and proof, much of it obtained under the American Freedom of Information Act, and at conferences where victims and therapists and people doing research into the history of mind control were coming together and sharing really fascinating new information – I was convinced my story was part of this big puzzle and would find an audience. All I had to do was send it out to publishers.
What came back was beyond rejection -- it was Absolute Denial. And it was also automatic. Publishers would be interested, and then they would refuse to read it. Or they wouldn't respond at all. It was as if I had handed them a hot potato, or something they were scared of. Almost as if there was a policy somewhere that said "Don't talk about this" – so they would not even tell me if they had read it or not. My former publisher took me off his mailing list so I would not attend any launches or events. It was as if, by writing this book, I had crossed a line and done something that was secretly forbidden.
Everywhere I went, I seemed to bump into people whose personal experience confirmed my own story. Everyone had a family member, someone close to them who had been harmed or destroyed by Dr. Cameron. Everyone knew a family who had lost a promising child to LSD, and many knew of experiments at McGill involving students, some of whom had suffered life-long mental health issues as a result. It seemed the streets of Montreal were absolutely filled with people who were victims of this program. And yet it was taboo to talk about it, or investigate it. The wife of a Arts Council director remembered several writers who had approached her husband with proposals for books on Nazi doctors operating in Quebec, only to be turned down.
For a while I was obsessed with the "Nazi" side of the story – how Nazi doctors had come to North America through Operation Paperclip. Now I believe the main mover in setting up this secret eugenics program in Canada was British intelligence. For example, the National Film Board had been turning out pro-British war propaganda in the 1940s. In the early 1950s it floundered for a while, and there was a power struggle between the military people left over from wartime and a new group that favoured young directors to document social change in Canada. Some of this "social change" was actually social engineering.
The NFB set up new programs like "Challenge for Change" and produced many social documentaries during those years and quite a few experimental films like The Ernie Game and Goin' Down the Road and Flowers on a One-Way Street and Angel and Christopher's Movie Matinee that were about alienated youth and the new drug culture. Arthur Lipsett made documentary and animated films. When I looked at these films a while back I could see he had to have been aware of the MKULTRA program, which was at its height when he was producing his best films. Lipsett, who was schizophrenic, was employed by the NFB and became almost a cult figure in his own lifetime. He brilliantly used collage and in-camera editing to layer all kinds of information into his films. Back in the 1960s and 70s the NFB seems to have been very interested in experimenting with LSD, and another award-winning animator, Ryan Larkin, was known to take large quantities of it in producing ground-breaking animation films like Walking.
In Montreal when I was young there always were many mental patients walking the streets who were indistinguishable from artists. There was a small English poetry scene in downtown Montreal that sprang up in the 1950s when Dr. Cameron was electro-shocking and drugging literally thousands of people at the Allan Memorial. Dr. Cameron supported the arts, I suspect because as a psychiatrist he found it gave him access to people's souls. He and his colleagues would approach young artists and offer them a chance to be in his LSD experiments at McGill. He encouraged patients to write poetry. Some, like Leonard Cohen, went on to have careers as poets and writers.
Several poets in the Anglo poetry scene that started to blossom in the 1970s, had been in the Allan Memorial as children -- for example, Artie Gold. Coincidentally, Artie Gold and Ryan Larkin both died on Valentine's Day, 2007. Poetry seems to come naturally to some schizophrenics, and having ex-patients write poetry and read it in public could be way of keeping track of how the experimental subjects were faring, especially when Cameron's program was shut down after 1963. We're talking 10,000 electroshock sessions per year on patients at McGill hospitals alone. Just massive amounts of experimental drugs and procedures being tested on unsuspecting people, including children, who ended up in Cameron's "care."
In Montreal we had this downtown population of marginal individuals who came together in a cultural scene in the 1980s. These traumatized children needed somewhere to go so many found their way into artistic careers where it was okay to be a little strange. And it's interesting that the NFB has made documentaries about a few of them, such as Phil Tetrault and Ryan Larkin and Arthur Lipsett, who in my opinion show all the signs of having been in MKULTRA as kids.
This whole process has been quite strange because on one hand the city I grew up in is absolutely littered with relics of that terrible period when Montrealers were being used as guinea pigs for the CIA. And then on the other hand, there is what appears to have been a massive effort to destroy evidence and lie about all this, so you have a population of victims who have amnesia for what happened to them. It's a real tragedy.
I could give lots of examples of how that worked. McGill hired a law firm to help them hide records of LSD experiments on children. Reportedly many of these files were not destroyed, just hidden in the catacombs under McGill. I met a former male nurse who, along with other orderlies and staff, worked for months in 1978 tossing patient records into the dumpsters behind the Royal Victoria Hospital, after the world found out about McGill's role in secret mind control research on unwitting people. I have a friend who worked with Dr. Jonathan Meakins II (there have been three Dr. Jonathan Meakins in medicine at McGill – they are a sort of dynasty) who was in charge of managing all those records, sanitizing them so that people who were harmed by all these experiments could not take legal action.
When I was trying to get my late father's records from the Royal Victoria Hospital, I was given an amazing runaround and told I had no right to those records, and it was only by a kind of miraculous accident that I found a Chinese replacement secretary who was very helpful and actually located my father's file – which had been mostly emptied, but there was one page in it that identified him as a Cameron patient.
Both English newspapers, the Gazette and Montreal Star, were major supporters of Dr. Cameron's CIA research and going through their files on the Allan Memorial is very enlightening. The Star no longer exists, but its owners made financial donations to these eugenics programs at McGill. The Gazette also shares a law firm with McGill which is convenient when the goal is to conceal decades of criminal research.
So researching this terrible past, finding proof, has not been easy. Once you start finding proof, and collecting stories from survivors, you find people with the power to help, such as publishers, are afraid to talk to you. Some seem to have been put in their positions as gatekeepers, and an astonishing number of Canadian editors and publishers are from military backgrounds. Living in Montreal all my life, I never realized this until I wrote My Cold War. Montreal has a very controlled writing and publishing scene.
A few years ago, the Montreal law firm of Stein and Stein in Montreal managed to win a large settlement for Cameron patients. This legal victory made front-page news in the UK but in Montreal, where there were so many victims who could qualify for compensation, the Gazette didn't bother to print the story at all. After I complained, they finally ran it, ten days late, but they made sure to bury it in the middle of the paper over a single column so no one would see it.
That's how these very shocking crimes go on being hidden. I found myself marginalized when I started investigating and talking about that whole era of recent Montreal history, because the important people who collaborated operate under a cloak of respectability. The doctors and scientists who were doing these things to children are still considered heroes of medicine and are in the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
As soon as I started researching my past I not only began running into people who had been part of this program, but I also met a group of intuitives who offered to help me locate some "missing children." At first I was not even aware that I needed to go looking for these missing children. The way this happened was, well, a bit strange. It almost made me believe in angels, because without really looking I just I began running into clairvoyants who told me about souls of children who had been trapped between worlds when they died. Another way to say this is, there were children who were in the spiritual world and unable to move on because they had an important message for the living. These psychics and healers I was meeting demonstrated an ability to communicate with these lost children who are no longer alive, but can make their presence felt.
There was a medical intuitive running a centre for alternative healing at Queen Elizabeth Hospital who had communicated with these children who and they were telling her they needed help. For some reason, though, she was reluctant to get involved in their "case." A short time later, in November of 2003 I met a trance medium called Harley Monte who told me I would write a book about these missing children. He introduced me to a group of about ten of his students who all had powerful intuitive abilities. On the surface these were regular people with jobs, families, etc., and they volunteered to help me by channelling information from the time period when Dr. Cameron was running his top secret "children's program" which was at its peak in 1960. They started out at our first meeting by traveling back to a children's party at the Allan that my twin brother and I attended in 1956, at age five. They also gathered information from a hidden laboratory where orphans were kept in a military experiment, similar to the kind of experiment we hear about today, to develop super-soldiers. We collected disturbing details of child experiments involving sensory isolation, extreme temperatures, combat situation, photographic memory, ESP, sexual abuse, animal abuse – that were happening at McGill in about 1960.
Had I not already been reading and doing research for over a year, reading thousands of pages of testimony on secret mind control projects all over North America and including in Montreal, I would not have believed or understood most of what started coming through these amazing people who were accurately giving me details, including names, dates, places that jived exactly with survivor accounts, and despite the fact they had never even heard of this program. They were blank slates. For example, one of the channellers began describing a "Doctor Lehmann". She repeated his name, while picking up information about about him. Heinz Lehmann was the "father of Largactil" which he used to treat schizophrenia at the Douglas Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal and also at the Allan Memorial during those years. She described him as cold and heartless, treating children like inanimate objects.
At one session we contacted Sidney Gottlieb, who was the head of Chemical Services for the CIA MKULTRA project based in Washington D.C. We found him on one of the "lowers levels of the white light" where he is was being re-educated. This level is a little like Purgatory but there is compassion there even for perpetrators. He or one of his guides told us he had other incarnations where he had worked for powerful rulers, and his job had been to poison their enemies. So in his recent lifetime, Sid Gottlieb, – which was not his real name – his real name was Josef Schneider and during the war he had worked as a chemist for the Nazis, and after the war he came to America under Operation Paperclip and was given a new, Jewish identity and speech therapy to alter his accent – had worked for the CIA and was the chemistry genius behind their plan to poison foreign leaders like Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.
As I said, the psychics were unaware of all this background, but they were able to connect with entities or souls on the astral plane. Gottlieb about being he had been blamed for the MKULTRA program, but when in fact there were many people who did much worse things and escaped prosecution in the 1970s when it began to be exposed. He claimed to have been blackmailed. These secret projects, like the intelligence organizations that run them, appear to operate by threats and blackmail.
I met these psychics at a time when I was encountering so much denial when I tried to talk about my research in the "real world." It seemed miraculous that they put themselves at my disposal in the way they did. They said "We will help you because this story is so important, people need to know what happened to these children."
In the course of the two or three years that I regularly met with "Harley's Angels" we also spoke with several children who had lived in basement of the Allan Memorial. They told us their names, and Harley even read some of their files. I believe all of them died in those experiments and are buried in unmarked graves behind the hospital which is on Mount Royal in downtown Montreal. One of them, Isabel Flora Williams, was 16 years old in 1960. We found her strapped in a chair with electrodes attached to her head. She was kept in that chair in the basement literally for years, often in a state of semi-starvation. There is real evidence she actually existed: she appears in a drawing by MKULTRA survivor and author Carol Rutz, who remembers being taken to the Allan as a child in 1960. Later I went down to the City of Montreal Archives and found her a record for an Isabel Flora Williams, born in 1944 and had died in September 1963, which fits exactly with the dates she gave us in our channelling session in 2004 which I taped. So she died around the time Dr. Cameron's behavioural lab was being shut down. I am guessing she was terminated along with other children who managed to survive. I think in fact much of the project, including some of the psychiatrists, later moved from Montreal to southern Ontario.
There were Nazi doctors involved in this program, but most of the researchers were English and Scottish. A number of these men were trained at Maudsley Hospital and the University of Edinburgh, and many (like Eric Wittkauer, who came to work at the Allan in 1951, about a week before I was born) were involved with the Tavistock Institute. Tavistock had and still has an enormous influence in the English speaking world and was the birthplace of MKULTRA mind control and really needs to be studied and understood because it has been enormously influential. McGill was always friendly to eugenics and Sir William Osler – a medical library there is named after him – was a eugenicist. It's part of the history of English Montreal but very few people are interested in exposing it – that would be like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and opening Pandora's Box, in a single stroke.
It's all about power, powerful men and their scientific and medical careers, the military and McGill University. McGill recently put up a statue to honour George Merck from Merck-Frost who was put in charge of Canada's enormous and very secretive chemical and biological weapons program, during and after the Second World War. That program needed lots of guinea pigs and Canada had few laws to protect its population from medical experimentation. They tried to get soldiers to volunteer to test lethal chemicals like botulism toxin. They set up laboratories on military bases in places like Kingston, Ontario and also in remote areas of western Canada, and they had ways of acquiring subjects. It was around this time that orphans were targeted for medical experiments, and many of these children disappeared during the MKULTRA years from 1953-1964.
I looked at who attended the Quebec Conference in 1943 and 1944 as the war was ending. Maurice DuPlessis was re-elected as Premier of Quebec and was invited to the conference which was in part about "unconventional weapons" which would be needed against Russia in the post-war period. Churchill, Roosevelt and MacKenzie King were at that conference, already laying out a strategy for the Cold War. Nuclear weapons were about to be used on Japan, but they also were developing chemical and biological weapons – just a little downriver from Quebec City was Grosse Ile, where they were testing anthrax weapons. And Duplessis was in a position to offer the Allies two things; iron ore in the north, and thousands of war orphans, both of which would be very valuable to the continuing war effort.
When you have hindsight into these secret programs – and much of that hindsight comes from victims' accounts of being in them which are very hard to dismiss – you can literally roll back the tape and watch the plan unfold from its beginnings during and after the Second World War. There is so much research that needs to be done, and I have only scratched the surface, but since very few people seem to know about these programs, there was often a lot of it left lying out where you can find it.
I don't have real archives that I can pass onto others. I began my writing career in poetry and fiction, and I tend to work intuitively. I am a story teller, not an academic, although my B.A. is in History.
If I was a professional researcher I would devote my life to finding and photocopying the records, but in the meantime, I will just keep telling my story. There should be a hundred of researchers with skills. I know intuitively if you go and look, you will find plenty, even though so many of the records and documents have been hidden. Chances are they are still lying in the catacombs under McGill.
It has been a decade since I wrote My Cold War. In those days I lost quite a few friends to my obsession with this period of our lives. Their line of argument was, if this really happened, how come it's not on TV or in the newspapers? It was truly a strange and exciting time in my life, as I was looking into files and finding all sorts of names shocking thingsin these files. It was obvious there was a network of powerful people who had known about the experiments on children all along. I had even worked for some of these people, who included the owners and publishers of the Montreal Gazette. But it went beyond these few people, who seemed to be well informed about these secrets,that influential group to include others in what we think of as the independent or alternative publishing scene, who just "followed orders." So one editor said flat out, "This book can never be published in Canada." Another small press editor I sent the manuscript to told a friend of mine:
"If Ann publishes this book they will swoop down and lock her up." He actually seemed afraid to speak to me about it. So in the end I decided to self-publish My Cold War. In 2005 I brought out the first edition and then I continued revising it. In 2007, I attempted to enter it in a competition, and the reaction from my writers' association was bizarre. They set up an "ethics committee" to read my book to see if it was eligible. At the same time they hired someone to watch me and inform on me.
It was really hilarious. A strange man in a hat watched me working in the public library and followed me outside and introduced himself. As soon as he took off his hat, I recognized him as someone I knew. That threw him off a bit. He bombarded me with phone calls for a week until I agreed to meet him, and over coffee he started interrogating me and seemed to be memorizing my answers. He was about 60 with tardive dyskinesia from the anti-psychotics he had been taking since his breakdown in 1984. I felt almost sorry for him - he seemed to be some kind of informer but not a very good one so I started asking him about his life. He was a child of the military with all the characteristics of having been traumatized and groomed for a career in intelligence. For a while he had been a diplomat but in the mid-80s he suffered a psychotic breakdown and had never been able to rebuild his career after that. He mentioned he knew many important people at McGill who happened to be "pedophiles" -- that's how he described these friends of his. He also told me about his childhood growing up among the Canadian elite, and his abusive military dad who sent him to Eton in England. As a child he often played the Molson mansion in a small village near Riviere du Loup -- just down the road from the Allan family mansion.
Without intending to, he confirmed many things I already knew about children in the MKULTRA, and implicated the same people I had been reading about. He seemed to have no clue as to why I was so interested.
I have to say, this process of finding out about my own childhood has had many surreal moments.
In 2008 McGill University set up a committee to study its own Cold War history, headed by a woman who works for McGill and writes books for pharmaceutical companies. So McGill is investigating its own secret history -- that's also surreal. The simple, shocking fact is in the 1950's Montreal was a "medical mecca" because Quebec and Canada permitted secret human experimentation enabling unscrupulous people to build fantastic careers on child abuse and murder.
These secrets absolutely must reach the public. Our world is in a lot of danger because of these secret programs that have really succeeded in erasing our collective memory. Canadians live in amnesia, with little or no awareness of crimes against humanity that have happened right here and in our lifetime.
(E. Jane Mundy is a photographer and researcher who has documented child abuse, especially on Canadian native reserves and residential schools. Her website is at http://survivorsspeak.ca/)
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Vive La Gazette Libre
I left the Gazette under a cloud. I could drag out the dreary details, and weave them into a plot, but I'll stick to the basics. For six months I had a weekly column, and wrote about books. I got on well with the Books Editor, who was planning an expanded Books and Art section, and asked me to become a regular contributor. One day in January 1994, he invited me out to lunch. I imagined this was to discuss the new section. Instead, he told me he had received an ultimatum from upstairs — meaning the Editor in chief and publisher.
The message from the boss was: stop using me as a freelancer, or just forget the expanded section. He was upset, and wanted to hear my side. I didn't have a side. I couldn't begin to imagine how I had become the single biggest obstacle to getting his project approved. He asked if I had some long-term feud going on and named the managing editor. I had never even met her. "Well, she certainly seems to know you."
Our Peking Duck had arrived, and we had to roll up those little crepes. That gave me something to do while I pondered what to say. Something about me must have ticked off the editors, but what? Why would someone as uninvolved in politics as I was, who had almost no known enemies, become a focal point of so much aggression? In a way, I was relieved. I knew I should never have started writing for the Gazette in the first place. I didn't belong there. For the 3 or 4 years I'd freelanced on and off, I'd carefully kept my contributions as anodyne as possible. I'd gone out of my way not to reveal how much I despised that paper, which I never read if I could avoid it.
I certainly wasn't the only one who felt that way. Several times, I'd been stopped in the street by Montrealers who recognized me from my photo and thanked me for writing about things they actually cared about. For a while, I'd even imagined I might settle in and start reaching out to a younger audience. Here was my comeuppance for entertaining such a silly notion.
Of course I would miss the income, but maybe it was a blessing in disguise — just the push I needed! I didn't tell my editor that, though. I told him I was sorry, and how could I respond to critics I'd never met in person? He seemed dissatisfied but we left it at that. Over the next few months, he handed me rare assignments. In the fall, he had me review Robertson Davies' unbelievably tedious, incoherent last novel, THE CUNNING MAN. I no longer cared if I offended the people upstairs. I was shocked that such a mediocre book had even been published, let alone become a best-seller in Toronto. I called it "a dim portrait of the Canadian ruling class in all its tacky self-complacency."
The publisher of McClelland and Stewart wrote an enraged letter, almost as long as my review, which the Gazette published over three columns. It accused me of being a Marxist because I'd used the phrase "ruling class." A little firestorm broke out at the Gazette, but that week I happened to be in Louisiana at a Rolling Stones' concert. I arrived home to messages from my editor begging me to respond and defend myself. He said that people around the paper had been celebrating all week. Another of those odd moments when I wondered what kind of outfit I had been working for.
In fact, the publisher's list of accusations were mostly baseless, and easy to refute. I wrote a page-long reply, which appeared the following week in the Letters section of the Gazette. Some editor had reduced it to four lines, adding a sentence of their own which (a) was false, and (b) contradicted the other three lines – making me appear to be a total idiot. I phoned to complain, but no one ever called back.
I was angry and shaken, but not surprised. A couple of years earlier, the Gazette had done the same thing to a friend of mine: misquoted him wildly in a way that ended up damaging his career. They'd also refused to return his calls — it was obviously a pattern. He'd ended up leaving Montreal, a city he loved, out of disgust at their monopoly, and lived in Europe, where he won a major award for his photography before moving to New York.
I felt I had no one to blame but myself for not cutting all ties with that faceless gang downtown. I pulled myself together, and got on with my life. No point arguing with a gorilla, especially the kind that ran the Gazette. It seemed very simple and obvious. At the time.
I never wrote for them again. Instead I eked out a small freelance income writing for local weekly entertainment papers, often dipping into my savings to survive. After those ran out, I taught creative writing workshops, was a writer in residence at a college in British Columbia, spent some time in other countries trying to figure out what to do next. I was still relatively young, more interested in forward motion than gathering hindsight.
Back in 1990, when I was new to freelancing for the Gazette, I'd been invited to what I thought was a dinner party at the home of a colleague. It turned out to be a meeting of a cabal. When I realized this, and also – shocking to me at the time — that the people at this meeting (including my editor) were completely serious about forming a secretive club to further their careers in journalism, I stood up, thanked them all, and walked out. Needless to say, they never invited me to dinner again. Which was fine by me because in my mind, they were a pathetic, deluded bunch of losers and bores. The next best thing to zombies. I had no interest in wasting my life and talent in such company. The fact is, though, for the next twenty years most of them steadily advanced in their careers, while I became roadkill in their rear-view mirror.
Even back then, I was naively grateful for the freedom that came with so-called failure. Free to indulge my fantasies, pursue my eccentric obsessions, I got used to hitting walls, bouncing off them, and running onward to the next adventure. It became my trademark pattern, and considering the alternatives, I have few regrets.
Having distanced myself by rejection from the increasingly controlled world of print journalism, I was able to watch its death throes as one newspaper chain swallowed another. In 1996, I helped launch a class action suit against the Gazette and its parent company, Southam Inc., later bought by Hollinger, later absorbed by CanWest which collapsed in 2009 and filed for bankruptcy protection. Our lawsuit was about electronic rights for freelancers, and like other similar class actions, a possible way to define the future of journalism in the age of the internet.
I've spent the past two decades living like a flea on the back of a dying animal. Over time, prospects for freelance writers have grown much bleaker, to the point that independent journalism has almost disappeared as a profession, a casualty of corporate concentration and the proliferation of free information on the web.
The cabal people — those who attended that meeting, and others like them — are still around. Perhaps some now feel they're hanging on by their fingernails, but most have acquired real estate and middle class lifestyles. As an aging road warrior who no longer can afford my own apartment and live from contract to contract, I still prefer my way of life to theirs. I'm free to blow with the wind. Whereas some of them seem to be staring into the abyss these days.
I sense their desperation, although I can't help noticing how well-off they are, compared to me. Then again, when you've sold your soul once, it gets easier to keep on doing it. Especially in these "uncertain times."
Something else has been going on. Something I could not have imagined, if I hadn't been watching it develop over decades. Maybe it's nothing new. Maybe in the past I stupidly ignored the background warnings.
Those I call the "cabal people" have not scattered, or given up. If anything, they've pulled together under a new, more secretive cover. They now control my writers' association. In a way, this makes sense, I suppose: that they would move out into the community, take on new protective colouring — especially now that newspaper jobs are practically non-existent.
These people never seem to start out at the bottom of any organization — but move directly onto the executive, bringing their habits of secrecy and closed-circuit networking along with them. These are people of whom it can be said, "Everything they do will succeed." In place of ideas or charisma, they have organizational savvy. They sit at meetings, engulfed in an aura of eminence grise. Adept at gathering in grant money, they also determine policy, and most of what they do is behind closed doors. Once a year, they get up at the AGM, present their financial statements, and then withdraw into their chambers to go on running the association in secrecy. Like some mysterious, private club. They don't see it that way, of course. But all questions and other incursions into their territory are carefully rebuffed while everything they touch runs very, very smoothly.
People will say, that's how it is. That's just how organizations work. Who am I to disagree? Except I've been observing that there is more going on than mere rule by a clever, able oligarchy. If that were all, the obvious solution would be "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
These former journalists, who I might have considered colleagues in the past, appear to me to have switched professions. They are no longer employed as freelance writers, although some still write articles and books, and get them published. I'm not sure who reads these books and articles. As far as I know, there's not much of an audience out there for print anymore. And the subjects seem carefully chosen to be inoffensive.
What these writers seem to be involved in, these days, is much closer to surveillance. Since the internet's viral invasion of every area of our lives, spying has become a universal human function. We are all spies nowadays, and most of us don't even get paid for it.
There's another insight I've gleaned from all this. I used to assume the people in power were somehow out to get me. But now I realize it's not me, but "people like me." We are in the process of being removed, in ways that make it hard to see what is going on.
When I lost my "job" as a freelancer, at first I took it personally even though I knew I was just one of many casualties of a much larger phenomenon: consolidation and globalization of the media. This geopolitical trend entailed liquidation of undesirable elements in order to clear the way for our replacements. A new, alien race of journalists displaced the old guard that had included left wingers, sixties types, people who believed in certain values that stood in the way of total control by faceless strangers. Social activists, rebels, and also indefinable creative types – and the list goes on. It also includes most of the locals, those who had grown up in the city and knew its recent history as a newcomer never can.
As one media giant swallowed another, there were fewer and fewer places left for freelancers. Anyone who didn't sign up for the secret agenda was on the hit list. And suddenly career advancement depended on being the sort of sociopath who would do anything to get ahead.
First came a whole new climate of extreme censorship. Since writers have sensitive antennae and adapt quickly to changing signals, they soon started practicing self-censorship. Later, they even became "self-policing."
My writers' association, which used to be a loose assortment of varied individuals with literary aspirations and abilities, now runs like any corporation. It draws on a network of people, some innocent newcomers, others shadowy lifers. They operate very smoothly. They have 600 members, 5 of whom actually attend the AGM. It's almost impossible to meet the other 595 – who support the association with their membership fees, sign up for workshops, receive the newsletter, etc. Like any group of shareholders.
This is convenient for the people who took it over, some years back, and decided this was the way to secure grant money. But it's not so interesting for anyone raised in a world where, sometimes, writers got together in organizations to express their views on important subjects – lend their weight to political causes – and generally kick up a fuss. Which is what, I always thought, a writer's role was in this world.
But apparently not.
We have writers' associations because there are so few other places for them to be. Writers are annoying, as is free speech. One solution is to gather them into organizations, and keep them busy taking workshops, attending readings, etc. – so they're less likely to notice that all the writing jobs have been taken by company people. Without anyone noticing.
Because, really, nothing succeeds like success. And when you function inside a secretive network, your rise to the top is often inevitable, like the continuous forward motion of a locomotive.
Hello, Brave New World…
I used to think certain people were just more organized, assertive, and professional — that's why they got the positions working for the corporations I despised. But now I subscribe to the theory that they are chosen, less for their abilities, than their loyalties. They slide into positions because they already work for the "Company."
But which company is it? It would be tempting to think "the CIA." Some of these people do act just like operatives. Most are simply ambitious sociopaths, while others are probably sincerely naive, or just useful idiots. Like any collection of eager beavers, they come in all shades: liberal, conservative, even radical. Something unites them, though. They don't come from "here." They are not "one of us." They came from outside, and moved up a ladder that might as well have been invisible. I couldn't see it. I stayed at the bottom, and when I climbed, it was only a couple of rungs before I was called to a meeting of the insiders – at least they invited me, once. And once I'd listened and looked, I knew I could never live with myself if I didn't get up and leave.
But who was the man upstairs, on whose behalf they had called this meeting? That's what I couldn't see, back then.
Fifteen years later, it's become a lot clearer. At the top, in those days. were people like the editor-publisher of the Gazette, whose own ascent to prominence had been swift and inevitable. Starting out as a cub reporter for a small regional paper owned by the young Conrad Black, he'd risen in five years to become Editor-in-chief and Publisher of the Globe and Mail. Quite an achievement! How did he do it? Sheer talent and grit, I guess. Not to mention the Brewster family's long-standing connections to the CIA and US military.
Norm Brewster's dad, Lorne, is mentioned in certain CIA files in the MKULTRA archive in Washington, along with the then-chancellor of McGill University, as part of a long list of "friends of McGill University." It might seem odd that McGill had so many friends in New York City, during the years it harboured a notorious secret program that used kidnapped children from Quebec orphanages and native reserves .as guinea pigs for the military. That's a topic for another day, another blog. Also, Norm Brewster's wife, Pamela happens to be related to a US army General and a Senator — something I learned by visiting her Facebook page and looking at her Thanksgiving photos.
So what's a family like this doing, running Canadian media? It's certainly not Norm's wide-ranging intellect. It might be his secret society connections, though. I guess some people are bred to power.
I once watched him chair a panel discussion, in which he introduced the first speaker with a series of Masonic hand signals, and suddenly a bright rainbow aura, the intensity of luminous car paint, appeared to surround the woman's body, and continued pulsating through her entire talk. I thought I must be hallucinating. All around me, the sparse audience appeared to slumber in a deep trance. After a while, her aura settled down and became a brilliant duo-tone purple and green.
That was back in 2003, when I had just begun to wake up to my own past. The panel discussion was on The History of the Scots in Montreal.
It was the first time I had laid eyes on Brewster, the editor who ten years earlier had ended my career as a freelancer at Montreal's only English-language newspaper. Thin, bald, pale to the point of translucence, he seemed like a nondescript twin of Mr. Burns , the evil nuclear plant owner on The Simpsons.
The hand gesture he repeated three times in his introduction – bringing fingertips together to form a pyramid — was also one frequently used by Mr. Burns in Simpsons' episodes. I turned to the man sitting next to me – whom I also just happened to know – and repeated the gesture while whispering in his ear: "That's a Masonic signal!" He whispered back, "How do you know?" Coincidentally, I'd just been reading about Masonic hand signals on the internet. I knew this represented a calling together of the energies.
The speaker herself was quite frog-like, a Scottish historian from Glasgow. My ancestors also came from there. When her aura lit up like a Christmas tree, I stole a quick look around the room to see if others were reacting to these subtle fireworks. I saw only bored, pained-looking faces.
Maybe my mimicking this gesture had gained me entrance into some secret ritual. While she droned on, I doodled my thoughts. Sitting on my right was a woman in a blue suit whose eyes were on my notebook. When I wrote "The speaker has a rainbow aura" I noticed she leaned in closer and squinted to read it.
After the panel discussion was over, she turned to me and said "Are you Ann Diamond?"
This was Pamela Brewster, wife of Norm, who was chairing the panel that day in her place. She asked me what I was writing about these days.
Before I could answer, she mentioned a short story of mine she had read years ago. It opened with a scene from my childhood, when my twin brother and I played on an oriental carpet in our living room, which was also the scene of a dream I had at age five – of my mother being bitten by a poisonous snake.
Pam remembered that scene in detail. I certainly found that strange. Only the day before, I'd decided to use that passage as the opening for a new book about my family in the Cold War. And the previous week, I'd spent several hours at the Gazette library, looking through their old clippings about the Allan Memorial Institute, the notorious Montreal psychiatric hospital where CIA-funded experiments were carried out on unwitting patients – including my father, who spent six weeks there in 1962. I'd also taken a walk over to the Montreal Neurological Institute, where my father had been sent for more tests, and noticed the plaque on the wall honouring the Brewster family's generous donations to neurological research.
Looking into Pam Brewster's icy blue eyes, fixed on me with great attention, I had the strangest feeling she somehow already knew that, too, and also guessed what I was writing about.
It made me uncomfortable to be speaking to her, now. Or rather, listening to her go on on about how, years ago, she'd attended a performance I had written and presented in the Fringe Festival. I hadn't known her back then, or known she was my fan...
For more on the strange, Luciferian world of Canadian media, see "The Wednesday Night Club" (below)
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
I first heard of this documentary, and the project it was based on, when I was in my late teens. Like many kids back then, I had heard about "free schools" and was interested in going into education but not the traditional kind. My dad was a Montreal high school teacher and back then I didn't want to be like him -- so I bought a subscription to THIS MAGAZINE IS ABOUT SCHOOLS -- what a cool name! -- published out of Toronto. Reading it made me believe new and exciting things were happening in Canadian culture and education. Such as Warrendale and its founder, John Brown.
Warrendale always struck me as wrapped in mystique. The first time I saw the documentary (in the early 70s) I found it more disturbing than anything, and I tried to forget about it. Or rather I buried my feelings about it. It wasn't the profanity that upset me. It was the atmosphere. And the disappointment of having been set up to believe it was a great documentary, when it wasn't even good.
Flash forward 35 years. A German documentary filmmaker who has investigated the CIA-MKULTRA mind control program gets in touch with me because I have written MY COLD WAR, about being involved as a child in Dr. Cameron's notorious experiments at McGill. Put together from childhood memories, certain writings I had published, strange "dreams" of being tortured as a little girl in an underground laboratory, MY COLD WAR also grew from my reading thousands of pages of documents and testimonies and books and articles about secret experiments on children that went on in North America in the 1950s and 60s.
The German filmmaker, Egmont Koch, introduced me to a German judge who had a strange story. "Judge Henry" was born in Toronto in about 1960 -- his birth certificate was falsified -- and had discovered late in life that not only was he adopted in infancy, but also that he was born at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. After much research, and a fact-finding trip to Toronto, Henry had learned his real father was Dr. Martin Fischer, a psychiatrist who came to Toronto from Nazi Germany in 1940 and later worked at Lakeshore. Along with came the discovery that his presumed birth father was somewhat famous.
Henry showed me an excerpt from the documentary WARRENDALE in which Dr. Fischer appears. There was a noticeable physical resemblance suggesting that Henry and Dr. Fischer could very well be father and son -- he certainly looked much more like Fischer than he resembled his adoptive parents.
There is much more to Henry's story, but for me it felt rather peculiar to be watching WARRENDALE with a German judge who believed he was the product of some strange experiment. I sympathized strongly with his predicament, but as we watched the scene with Dr. Fischer, I felt embarrassed, both for Henry and also for Canada, the country that produced this film, because it seems so utterly obvious that Dr. Fischer is a fraud, or worse, a pedophile.
It was my second time viewing WARRENDALE, and it brought back the feelings I had in my twenties. I watched it again a few months later in 2011, and once again, I had to fight an urge to switch it off. Instead of feeling moved by its "compassion" -- as so many reviews I find it an unpleasant, dark, confusing film that leaves me with an unshakeable chill. It plunges me into a world of chaos that some inner sense tells me is bogus, with no roadmap to indicate who these children are or what their real story is. I also have a nauseating suspicion that these children are also being manipulated and abused in ways that the film covers over.
Recently, I watched it for the fourth time with someone who was there and appears in the film for a few seconds as a small boy.
"Larry" wrote to me last winter to say he had been at Warrendale and had a story to tell me about "mind control." Several emails and phone calls later, I realized I needed to meet Larry in person. I travelled to his city and over two days he told me his life story and shared his memories of Warrendale. He also brought the DVD. This time we could pause it, discuss each scene, analyse it -- in the light of Larry's memory of what was really going on.
Granted, he was a little boy back then, and his life after Warrendale was no picnic. Still, he has benefited from a happy second marriage and a dedicated therapist who supports his view that he is very lucky to have survived Warrendale.
As we watched the documentary, I gradually began to see how much of it had to have been staged. Warrendale is not cinema verité, or cinema direct, but some strange hybrid that perhaps grew out of Alan King's friendship with John Brown, Warrendale's founder and director.
The final "cathartic" scene where the kids supposedly grieve for the death of Dorothy, the West Indian cook, had always left me unmoved. Watching it with someone who was at Warrendale when it happened, I understood why.
This scene, or rather sequence, was set up from beginning to end. Only one child mourns hysterically: Carol. The others appear numb, confused about what they are supposed to feel. There is a discussion in which one boy asks how Dorothy died and gets no answer. Then Walter tells the children they are not to think they "caused Dorothy's death" with their "thoughts and feelings." Then staff begin forcing kids to the floor, and manufacturing the climax that the film called for.
There are many indications that Warrendale, the film, was faked for the cameras. Much like other films being made at the time, parts of it are improvised and parts are role-playing. Terry Adler and Walter Gunn play themselves interacting with kids and also demonstrating the "Warrendale method" in lengthy "holding" sessions that are both hard to watch and also fascinating.
The Warrendale agenda remains unclear, after all these years. Larry believe it failed to treat 'emotionally disturbed children' but actually taught them the lifeskills that enabled some to become drug dealers, prostitutes, small-time criminals, even assassins. Others would survive and move on to live normal lives -- although they would probably remain traumatized.
This experiment would then be passed down, remembered decades later as a milestone in Canadian documentary filmmaking. The "best ever made" according to CBC which originally refused to air it.
I have yet to find one negative review of Warrendale. It seems everyone who saw it, loved it. Nobody analysed it very closely. After all, reality is flawed -- and Warrendale is about reality. So they say. No journalist talked to the children to see what they thought about the documentary at the time. I was lucky to be contacted by one survivor, Larry, who feels the truth about Warrendale has never been told.
Warrendale kids, he says, were never taught the difference between right and wrong. It was a world unto itself, where kids did pretty much what they wanted, and were never disciplined for anything. One worker was stabbed in the stomach, another had a knife thrown at his head, a secretary was terrorized in her office -- and the kids were never even reprimanded. He says he witnessed, and participated in, extreme animal torture, with staff present.
There was more than one Warrendale. The film shows one version, designed for public viewing, but here and there the filmmakers's slipped and allowed a few glimpses into another Warrendale. Warrendale was only one of many facilities where children were abused by doctors and scientists. It just happens to have been made public at the time. We should ask ourselves: why?
John Brown ran many centres after the Ontario government closed down Warrendale. Famously, the kids "went on a rampage" insisting no one but Brown could provide the special care they needed. Several hitchhiked, others were picked up in cars by former staff, and one even walked 60 km. to be reunited with John Brown in Aurora.
Why did so many respectable people get on the Warrendale bandwagon? Why was it presented to Canadians as an exciting new model of child care? I have friends who trained with the Warrendale model. What lay behind it?
Scattered through this award-winning documentary are moments that don't quite make sense, unanswered questions and plot-threads left dangling. A few months ago, I had a shocking thought comprised of cold logic and gut intuition. This hunch doesn't go away -- it just keeps growing. It explains so much about Warrendale, the film, and also the place. This hunch kept thrumming in my mind as bits and pieces of the film replayed in my memory.
For reasons I will now explain, I believe Dorothy's death, near the end of the film, was not an accident. I also believe Warrendale Court was the headquarters of a trauma experiment disguised as a therapeutic environment. The makers of Warrendale needed a way to spice things up, to further traumatize the kids and staff -- if they weren't traumatized enough already.
Larry described flashbacks he has had to scenes of animal torture at Warrendale Court. He says he has asked others who were there, and some say they remember the staff laughing and egging the kids on. It doesn't sound all that therapeutic. Neither does "holding," the way Larry describes it. He says "holding" was used "all the time, for no reason" to bring a child to a state of uncontrollable rage and total breakdown. It was emotional provocation carried to physical extremes. Larry is not the only one making such claims.
"Holding" was part of "attachment therapy," whose discredited techniques have resulted in children's deaths and a number of lawsuits. Attachment therapy is really a bastardization of`the more scientific "attachment theory" developed by John Bowlby at Tavistock Institute in the early part of the twentieth century.
Tavistock should ring a few bells. It was the home of MKULTRA mind control and much else that we all need to research and learn about. At Warrendake, Dr. Martin Fischer was the expert who promoted holding as well as bottlefeeding. He came to Canada in 1940 courtesy of British intelligence (who set up Tavistock as part of their psychological warfare program). He was Toronto's first "psychoanalyst" although he never joined the professional association, never published a book or article, and went on to found the Canadian Art Therapy Institute where he is remembered for his`"legacy of harm" --according to former students who set up a website to expose him. Not such a great choice for director of Warrendale, you might think -- but Canadians are very trusting.
For all these reasons, I think Warrendale deserves some closer scrutiny.
There are reasons to think Warrendale was part of a vast program devised in the UK (and Nazi Germany) that aimed at breaking down the family, changing human behaviour beginning in childhood, and preparing a new generation to accept a New World Order.
That's quite an agenda, and one we never heard about back in the sixties.
What we heard about, back then, was that the times were a-changin' and certain visionary thinkers and artists would be our guides to a better world. In Canada, Alan King was held up as a pioneer of cinema verité -- also known as "direct cinema." Warrendale was his breakthrough film, as well as a milestone in Canadian culture, gathering awards and international attention. Hard to argue with the kind of unanimous praise that surrounded this documentary from the beginning, and continued through his lifetime until his death in 2009.
King prided himself on seeking the truth behind human behaviour, although "he was quite flexible about re-arranging things for dramatic effect," according to Liam Lacey and a string of other journalists, who all parrot the same example from the documentary: "... he saved a revelation of the cook's death, which occurred earlier during the filming, as a climactic event in the film."
Let's talk about that notion, before we talk about Dorothy: that an artist can reveal "the truth" by rearranging events for dramatic effect. Obviously, it works both ways, folks. Didn't anyone ever notice that? By rearranging events in a story, you can also reinvent, or conceal, the truth. Endings are absolutely crucial in storytelling. They reveal the story's ultimate meaning, the truth we've been waiting for.
In this case, a sudden, unexplained death that triggers an absurd eruption. "Absurd" because if you watch closely, the gruelling climax of Warrendale does not flow naturally and inevitably from what has come before. In fact, it appears to be a setup.
This will be hard for some people to accept.
By the way, I've studied Dramatic Structure. I've even taught courses in it at Canadian universities. Classical dramatic structure recognizes the absolute importance of chronology. That does not mean all stories should be slavishly told in chronological order -- nobody's saying that -- just that chronology matters. That's why crime investigators make detailed notes on when events have taken place, and in what order: because when one event precedes another, or comes at the beginning of a series of events leading up to, say, a murder, there may be a causal relationship between the earlier events and the outcome.
Causality is essential to storytelling, whether the story is the "cinema verité" or fictional kind. Without causality, stories leave us dissatisfied and frustrate our need for meaning. They also tend to be boring, unless they can provide sensational moments that re-engage our alienated emotions.
Warrendale is that kind of sensationalistic film. It relies on close-up shots of suffering, screaming children to make its impact felt. A lot of people have claimed to be deeply moved by Warrendale. But the fact of the matter, Warrendale offers little in the way of story. Warrendale is a really filmed theatre of the absurd, masquerading as a socially-sensitive documentary. As a drama, it fails to deliver a sense of meaning. At the end, we have no more insight into the lives of its protagonists than we did at the beginning.
For some people, this is because Warrendale captures "the human condition." If you think the universe is fundamentally absurd, fine. Stay in your corner, I'll stay in mine. But some works of art go deeper and actually bring meaning out of the depths of human suffering. I think I'll watch those, if you don't mind.
Allan King did not conceal the fact that the final scene in Warrendale actually occurred soon after he began shooting. In fact, he even bragged about it. It was, he said, a lucky break because it resulted in heightened emotions, i.e. more drama, by which he seemed to mean "more screaming." Canadian theatre tends to equate shouting with drama. In Warrendale, as in much Canadian theatre, there is no real violence, in the sense of characters following through on their extreme feelings -- but there is an awful lot of screaming.
But in hidden ways, it's a violent film. My hunch is the violence in Warrendale occurs off camera. Someone dies. In the film she dies near the end, but in real life Dorothy died early ob. One might therefore say we are watching the film backwards. Or that the climax actually occurs at the beginning and everything that occurs afterwards is dénouement. Or, my position: Dorothy's death was the triggering incident that lies behind all the extreme acting-out that makes up the story-line of this confusing film.
This causes me to wonder -- since the children's behaviour is so extreme throughout -- if what we are actually seeing is the aftermath of Dorothy's death, played out by the children in scene after scene.
If that's actually the case, then we are being misled by the director who wants us to think these children always acted the way they do in Warrendale. His cinema verité technique -- no narration of any kind -- leaves us with the impression this is just how it is at Warrendale Court.
By moving the defining event of the film to the end, without any explanation,he lets us walk away from the movie with the uneasy impression that this is a film about disturbed children, reflecting the human condition (i.e. we are all disturbed).
The really disturbing thing about all this is that audiences (encouraged by critics) seemed to accept this explanation, and came away deceived.
Some of us, on the other hand, were just disappointed.
Otherwise, Larry says, there were few rules. Kids frequently ran away from the centre. There were incidents of violence. One staffer was stabbed in the stomach, another had a knife thrown at him, a secretary was terrorized in her office by a band of kids. Warrendale kids -- known around the neighbourhood as "retards" -- were not welcome at the local movie theatre because they disrupted the showings. Nevertheless, he says, they were never punished, not even reprimanded, no matter how seriously they mishehaved. Warrendale did not teach kids the difference between right and wrong. Beginning when he arrived as a six-year-old he remembers being allowed to smoke and drink beer. Sex play, he says, was also encouraged and is mentioned in his records, which he obtained with great difficulty a few years ago.
Into this strange environment comes a film crew: director Alan King, plus a camera and sound person. They live with the children for a month before they start to film. And soon after they start filming, the children's favourite adult -- Dorothy, the cook -- suddenly dies.
I try to imagine how I would react, (a) if I were a child and (b) if I were Allan King. As a child I would be in shock. And then I would start to question, as one boy in the film does: How does a young healthy woman suddenly die for no reason? This question never gets answered. Instead the filmmakers focus on children being "held" in an exhausting scene that Larry and I agree appears to have been cooked up by the staff to satisfy the filmmakers' need for "catharsis."
If I were (b) Allan King, and I were shooting a documentary in a children's home, and the cook died during the first week, I might go ahead (like King) and film the children's emotional reaction to the announcement, and also the funeral a few days later. However, I think I would feel obligated to look into the cause of death. I'd make sure to record the children's conversations as they talked about it. I'd get the staff to weigh in, plus the results of the autopsy. I can't imagine this strange early plot twist not becoming part of the filming over the next seven weeks at Warrendale Court.
Of course I am not Alan King, and that's not what Alan King did. Instead what he recorded were all those scenes of (apparently pointless) emotional meltdown. Carol refusing to get out of bed. Tony climbing on top of an armoire to avoid going to bed. Children running away. Carol sitting on Dr. Fischer's lap as he coaches her in writing a nasty letter to her parents in which she expresses the wish never to see them again. Other children fighting with staff. Children spitting, crying and being "held" and bottlefed. Irene attending her "anniversary party" so drugged on Largactil she can barely walk and needs to be helped to sit down.
These are the scenes Alan King filmed in the weeks after Dorothy died. Dorothy's death never comes up until the end.
Neither am I one of those kids. But if I were, during those seven weeks I would have been wondering, from time to time, if not "Who killed Dorothy?" then "How did she die?"
Larry says they were never told anything, but that he overheard two staffers saying Dorothy had died after having an abortion. He passed this on to the other kids, although it may only have been a rumour. I can understand why, if true, the filmmakers omitted it. Abortion was illegal in Ontario in 1966, therefore it would have been the shameful, dangerous, backroom variety from which many women died.
Nevetheless. If there was secrecy about this traumatic event, these kids would wonder if it was connected to the presence of strangers on the property. How could they not? Which would tend to undermine trust, something Alan King emphasized was an essential part of the filmmaking process.
Do the kids in the film appear to trust the adults they are living with, night and day? I can't recall a single scene suggesting they do. And if I were a kid, living at Warrendale, and the one adult I could relate to mysteriously died, yes, I would be traumatized by the loss of that trusted person. And further traumatized by the presence of the film crew.
Under the circumstances, I think suspicion of "the strangers" would be a predictable reaction.
So two questions: how does most of Warrendale: the movie, avoid being about all that? If the filmmakers simply chose not to make Dorothy's death an integral part of the story they were filming for those seven weeks, what caused them to make that strange choice?
The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.
Maybe I'm making too much of all this. I'm really just trying to imagine that eight-week shoot as it really was. Some filmmakers are living with a group of emotionally disturbed kids whom they've previously been observing for a month, about whom by now they must know quite a lot. For instance, they must realize these kids have never been taught to tell right from wrong, and can be quite dangerous. Some have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, while others are autistic. There may even be a psychopath or two in the group.
Perhaps you've been told she died from an abortion. In that case, wouldn't you want to share this fact with the children, if only to gain their trust, i.e. so they will not start to think that you, the stranger in their midst, killed Dorothy?
Perhaps I'm over-reacting but I can't get over the "announcement" scene where Walter tells the kids they must not think their thoughts and feelings somehow causes Dorothy's death. A strange thing to be telling them, while Carol screams hysterically and the rest of them look stunned. The same boy who asked how she died, asks Walter what he means by that. Well, Walter explains, children often imagine they are to blame when someone dies. The boy still doesn't see why he should be devasted. "She was no relative of mine." When Walter repeats that the kids could not have killed Dorothy with their minds, the boy says "I'm aware of that." His expression seems to be saying, to Walter, "You're nuts to suggest we think we killed her."
Come to think of it, it's the film's only mention of a possible cause: that the children killed her, with their minds.
If this were a murder mystery, and I were Hercule Poirot, I'd look at motives while I waited for the autopsy report. Who had a motive for killing Dorothy? Who benefited most from her death? The children? I think not.
However Alan King said himself that Dorothy's death was the unforeseen event that gave Warrendale its dramatic edge. It triggered the children's fearful, angry outbursts which impressed critics and audiences around the world. Even Jean Renoir said he'd never seen a documentary as powerful as Warrendale.
So who benefited most? To be on the safe side, let's say: the camera.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
MY COLD WAR and away
Listen to Ann Diamond talk about MY COLD WAR with the Truther Girls
Late in life, I started researching my Cold War background, as one of Montreal's MKULTRA children, who were inducted when they were very young (in my case, three years old) into a covert program of "mind control" experiments inspired by the work of Nazi doctors like Josef Mengele. The MKULTRA kids never officially existed -- because our political and military leaders feared what might happen if these children's stories were known.
The secrecy and fear continue to the present day, while all around us, we daily see evidence of a "vast conspiracy" -- as President Kennedy called it, shortly before his assassination in November, 1963.
Understanding what happened to children of my generation -- Baby Boomers as we're called -- is the key to realizing what lies ahead in our controlled and war-damaged world. Mind Control is a cold, hard fact on Planet Earth, and its effects continue to grow. We have a choice: to face these facts, or live in denial.
Thanks to the internet, and the brave people who are using it to liberate, not enslave, we are waking up. Let's not stop until we've woken everybody else up, too.
I would like to thank all the people whose work has been an inspiration, but for now I can only list a few of them: Lynne Moss Sharman, Carol Rutz, Eleanor White, Fritz Springmeier, Kathy O'Brien, Wanda Karriker, Claudia Mullen, Neil Brick, Aangirfan ... I'll keep lengthening this overdue list and adding links.
I'm still researching and writing. I have a new book, THE BOY FROM MARS, planned for 2012. Please, if you can, BUY MY BOOK. Or make a DONATION (using the PayPal button below).


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NEW YORK ( ETF Expert) -- Hedge fund guru Jim Chanos has been telling investors to avoid China like the plague.
He's been slamming the world's second-largest economy for many years. In May, Chanos described China as being in the midst of an epic property bubble. Fair enough. Chanos sees parallels between the U.S. meltdown and China's "ghost towns."
Yet, there's one fact that Chanos can't gloss over. The Guggenheim China Real Estate Fund (TAO) has gained 37% year-to-date and is sitting atop 52-week highs.
Granted, the China Shanghai Composite may have diminished by 17% or more in 2012. And the popular iShares China 25 Index Fund (FXI) may be flat on the year. Yet, those that have paid attention to the popularity of REITs abroad are not so surprised by the success of Guggenheim China Real Estate. Similarly, why would anyone invest in Mexico? Haven't there been countless drug cartel attacks over the border? Didn't real estate activity along the Baja Peninsula dry up completely in the 2008 collapse? Aren't there consistent border squabbles related to immigration policy uncertainty? In spite of well-documented troubles, Latin America's second largest economy may indeed overtake the more widely discussed Brazil. With 80% of its exports going to the U.S., Mexico's fortunes seem tied to the quantitative easing policies of the U.S. Equally impressive, countries like China have shifted manufacturing costs (and jobs) to Mexico where wages are still significantly less than they are north of the border. In sum, the road may have been rocky for iShares MSCI Mexico (EWW) in 2012. Yet, it is a road where 20%+ gains are better than many emerging markets and most developed markets. Moreover, the current price of EWW is above both a 50-day and a 200-day trendline. This article was written by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.

subset: commoncrawl


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Research Output for Mr Ron Savage
Note: The 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 publications have not been audited.
Jump to: Publications | Grants and Consultancies | HDR completions
2006 School of Engineering and Information Technology
Batten, Lynn and Savage, Ron (2006) Information sharing in supply chain systems, in Lan, Yi-chen and Unhelkar, Bhuvan (eds), Global integrated supply chain systems, pp. 67-82, Idea Group Publishing, Hershey, Pa. [B1]
DRO entry for this publication
2004 School of Information Technology
Batten, Lynn, Castleman, Tanya, Chan, Caroline, Coulthard, Darryl, Savage, R. and Wilkins, L. (2004) Engaging suppliers in electronic trading across industry sectors, in Elliot, Steve; Viborg Anderson, Kim; Trauth, Eileen and Reich, Siegfried (eds), Multi-disciplinary solutions to industry & government's e-business challenges : proceedings of the IFIP WG8.4 Working Conference on E-business, Salzburg, Austria, June 18-19 2004, pp. 182-199, International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Laxerburg, Austria [E1]
DRO entry for this publication
2003 School of Information Technology
Batten, Lynn and Savage, R. (2003) Etransactions in the Australian supply chain setting, in Ang Soo Keng, James (eds), ICEB 2003 : Proceeding of the Third International Conference on Electronic Business, National University of Singapore, Business School, Singapore [E1]
DRO entry for this publication
Grants and Consultancies
All years
Research Income - Other Public Sector Funding
Netto, K, Aisbett, B and Savage, R. The Effects of Military Vehicle Transit on the Physical Performance and Musculoskeletal Health of Military Personnel [U]
- 2013: $25,000
Higher Degree by Research Completions supervised by Mr Ron Savage
No completions found or audited.
- Legend:
- * Not a member of Deakin University at time of output.
DRO to publications collection last synchronised: Friday 29th May 2015 10:04pm


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Update: Doc Rivers, Danny Ainge press conference postponed
|06.21.13 at 10:19 am ET
The Celtics announced that president of basketball operations Danny Ainge and coach Doc Rivers will take part in a press conference at noon on Friday at the team's practice facility in Waltham. Presumably, the status of Rivers for the forthcoming season — chiefly, whether he will return to the Celtics or head to the Clippers — will be resolved at that time.
UPDATE: Shortly after the press conference was scheduled, the Celtics confirmed to WEEI's Mike Petraglia that it had been postponed and rescheduled for noon Monday. Whenever it takes place, the press conference will be carried live on WEEI.
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- Green's Transition to PF Could Reshape NBA Career Arc
- Could Rondo's Play Increase the Chances He's Dealt?


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Tata Consultancy Services Enters Into a Long-Term Engagement With Infineon Technologies AG
TCS brings long-standing domain and SCM expertise to help Infineon optimize operations in the area of SCM Planning within a risk-free environment and achieve improvements in the area of supply chain efficiency. The Infineon SCM Planning operations will be operated out of
Infineon CVP IT & CIO,
About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, business solutions and outsourcing organization that delivers real results to global businesses, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled services delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development.
A part of the Tata Group, India's largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 130,300 of the world's best trained IT consultants in 42 countries. The Company generated consolidated revenues of US
RSS Feeds:
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Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/followtcs
SOURCE Tata Consultancy Services


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In their last-minute efforts to woo voters, candidates shower freebies
Candidates in the fray for polls to the Eluru Municipal Corporation (EMC) and eight other municipalities in West Godavari district have intensified the campaign as the electioneering is set to end on Friday evening. In the last-minute efforts by candidates to woo voters, distribution of money, liquor and doling out of freebies are said to have become the order of the day.Ugadi, a boon for candidates
Parties are leaving no stone unturned to make their candidates sail through the polls which are being considered as the 'semi-finals' for the general elections. Ugadi festival, falling on March 31, has seemingly come handy for the candidates to reach out to voters with the greetings in their own style. The voters are also finding unexpected visitors at their door steps with sweet boxes and other gifts.
Some candidates are said to be on a spree of showering freebies. Some voters in Bhimavaram reportedly received silver anklets from some candidates. Even as the Model Code of Conduct is in force, candidates are reportedly prepared to shell out Rs. 500 for each vote. And, grapevines suggest it may go up to Rs. 1,000 to Rs. 20,000 in prosperous pockets like Bhimavaram and in wards and divisions where Chairperson or Mayor candidates are in fray. The election workers apparently received Rs. 200 each per day, along with a biryani packet and a liquor bottle from candidates whom they campaigned for.Major contenders
The election, due for March 30, is in for a straight fight between the YSRC and the TDP, as the Congress remains out of the race, thanks to its failure to field candidates in most divisions. Of the 291 wards and divisions in the eight poll-bound municipalities and the EMC, the Congress could make its presence felt in just 50-odd seats. 'Real' issues elude
Meanwhile, realtors, financiers, aqua traders and cable operators are finding their way into most wards and divisions as candidates. The denizens in almost all civic bodies are grappling with bad roads, poor drainage system and inadequate water supply. But, such issues eluded electioneering, which tended to be dominated by caste, money and freebies.
Keywords: Money, liquor flow, Campaign, Eluru, Municipal Elections, Assembly, Lok Sabha,


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IF YOU ARE USING THIS: LET ME KNOW ON firstname.lastname@example.com. ------------------------------------------- suspense melody based in the mode of myxolydian#11.
A very small woodblock with two heads, sounding like a cartoon clock, or Final Jeopardy's countdown. Recorded on a Zoom ...
Cartoon style siren whistle - used often in cartoons for that trip up, slip on bananna skin effect.
Bad cartoon man laughter
a little loop made in fruityloops
Cody the monkey screeching
Lush sounds of animals and birds in Kakamega Forest, Western Kenya
Walking in a forest.
A gulp of water.
Fire in our chimney, pieces of wood crackling and cracking. Vivanco EM35, Marantz PMD671
page turning
Variation of turning a page of a book
This is the sound my squeaky rat toy makes when you squeeze it and let go. This sound was recorded ...
see name and tags
Dozens of horses trot on a road in Jaffa city, Israel


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Show time: 'Arts in the Middle' festival is this weekend at Hewick
|Volunteers for the Arts in the Middle Fine Arts Festival prepare to hang a banner at Hewick Plantation where the event will be held athis Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31. From left are Kathy Swinehart, Jody Anglin, Ginny Sawkins, Celane Roden, Kenleighe Longest, Barbie Gillespie and Carol King.
by Hank Trainor Roden
More than 100 juried artists from 11 states, backed by five musical groups and regional fare, will be offered to the public at the bucolic Hewick Plantation on Old Virginia Street, just west of Urbanna, this Saturday and Sunday, May 30-31.
"Arts in the Middle" (AIM) will be from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. on Saturday, and 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Sunday.
Separately, a "Music in the Middle" blues concert and dance featuring the "Planet Full of Blues" band will be held on the grounds of the Urbanna Town Marina on Oyster Road off Virginia Street from 6-8 p.m. on Saturday.
As to how a new, large, public outdoor art festival such as Arts in the Middle was created from scratch "consider a dozen cooks preparing a multi-ethnic 22-course dinner for thousands of fussy eaters," offered volunteer team leader Celane Roden. "It's been exciting; never boring."
Music on Saturday will be by "Jumbo Lump Daddy and the Backfin Boys" (11:30 a.m.-1 p.m.); and "Herbie D and The Dangermen" (2-3:30 p.m.), winners of the 2013 River City Blues Society Blues Challenge.
On Sunday a change of pace will be provided by the "Northern Neck Shanty Singers" (2-3 p.m.), a group of watermen who have been featured on National Public Radio and CBS News; and by "Something Different" (noon-1:30 p.m.), a father/daughter duo that performs a variety of genres spanning multiple decades.
A reception and awards ceremony will be in the event's hospitality tent from 5-6 p.m. on Saturday.
The "Music in the Middle" concert and dance, featuring "Planet Full of Blues," will be at the Urbanna Town Marina from 6-8 p.m. on Saturday.
Admission to both Arts in the Middle and Music in the Middle are free, and the public is encouraged to attend.
Read the rest of this story in this week's Southside Sentinel at newstands throughout the county, or sign up here to receive a print and/or electronic pdf subscription.


text:
Mon-Fri: 7am-1am EST / Sat-Sun: 7am-11pm EST
ApplianceGeneral Electric Refrigerator
Level of DifficultyReally easy
Time to do repair15 - 30 mins
Age of ApplianceMore than 10 years
Screw driversSocket setWrench(Adjustable)
13 out of 16 people found this instruction helpful
The valve is not a direct replacement,seems theyare not available,had to bend mtg. brkt. so valvewould mount in same position and cut off screwtype pressure fitting so could slide dischargetube into new type connection, no instructionscome with replacement valve,asked severalplaces for info wanted to be sure before cuttingoff end of discharge tube. Now valve shuts offbut water still in base of refrigerator must be aleak in inlet tube behind freezer compartment.
Help other customers find the most helpful instructions.
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Part Number: PS304375
All brand logos are trademarks of their respective owners.
The PartSelect logo is a Registered Trademark of Atlantic Laundry Centres, Ltd.
Copyright © 1999-2015 , Eldis Group Partnership. All rights reserved.


text:
- 800.878.7323
New Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
available for shipping or prepaid pickup only
Available for In-store Pickup
in 7 to 12 days
Other titles in the Theory in Practice series:
Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloudby George Reese
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
How can a company's applications be scalable and have high availability?
To achieve this, along with developing the applications, you must also have an infrastructure that can support them. For example, you may need to add servers or increase the capacities of existing ones, have redundant hardware, add logic to the application to handle distributed computing, and add logic for failovers. You have to do this even if an application is in high demand for only short periods of time. Life becomes even more complicated (and expensive) when you start to consider issues such as network latency and security boundaries.
The cloud offers a solution to this dilemma. The cloud is made up of interconnected servers located in various data centers. However, you see what appears to be a centralized location that someone else hosts and manages. By shifting the responsibility of maintaining an infrastructure to someone else, you're free to concentrate on what matters most: the application. If the cloud has data centers in different geographical areas, you can move your content closer to the people who are using it most. If an application is heavily used in Asia, have an instance running in a data center located there. This kind of flexibility may not be available to you if you have to own all the hardware.
Another advantage to the cloud is that it's a pay as you go proposition. If you don't need it, you don't have to pay for it. When demand is high, you can scale up, and when demand is low, you can scale back. Yes, by moving applications to the cloud, you're giving up some control and autonomy, but you're also going to benefit from reduced costs, increased flexibility, and scalable computation and storage. The Windows Azure Architecture Guide shows you how to do this.
Reese explains the differences between traditional server hosting and using Cloud services. He then provides practical guidelines for key decisions and planning required of system administrators.
If you're involved in planning IT infrastructure as a network or system architect, system administrator, or developer, this book will help you adapt your skills to work with these highly scalable, highly redundant infrastructure services.
To provide realistic examples of the book's principles in action, the author delves into some of the choices and operations available on Amazon Web Services, and includes high-level summaries of several of the other services available on the market today.
Cloud Computing is here to stay. As an economically viable way for businesses of all sizes to distribute computing, this technology shows tremendous promise. But the intense hype surrounding the Cloud is making it next to impossible for responsible IT managers and business decision-makers to get a clear understanding of what the Cloud really means, what it might do for them, when it is practical, and what their future with the Cloud looks like.
The Cloud at Your Service helps cut through all this fog to help enterprises make these critical decisions based on facts and the authors' informed unbiased recommendations and predictions.
About the Author
Jothy Rosenberg is a professor-turned-entrepreneur who has founded six companies. He has written two previous technical books and holds several patents. Jothy has a PhD in Computer Science from Duke University.
Arthur Mateos left his career as an experimental nuclear physicist to become a technology entrepreneur. He was an early pioneer of the CDN space and has a patent awarded on Content Distribution technology. Arthur holds an A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from MIT.
Table of Contents
PrefaceChapter 1: Cloud ComputingChapter 2: Amazon Cloud ComputingChapter 3: Before the Move into the CloudChapter 4: Ready for the CloudChapter 5: SecurityChapter 6: Disaster RecoveryChapter 7: Scaling a Cloud InfrastructureAmazon Web Services ReferenceGoGridRackspaceColophon
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text:
WILSON Adult Standard Volleyball Knee Pads
|Eligible for Free Shipping, No Minimum! (see promotion details)
Product Details
Go on, dive for that ball! These WILSON® adult standard volleyball knee pads will keep you protected while you make all those game-winning plays. Each one's thick high-density foam pad provides a cushioned, shock-absorbing layer between you and the court's hard surface.
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Property Details
Condo, 3 Bedrooms, 2 Baths, 8 Sleeps
Our first floor, oceanside condo offers wireless internet, fully stocked kitchen and ceiling fans in every room (in addition to the central air), and new flooring in the main living area. In addition to the new tv in the living room, there are tv's in two of the bedrooms (and a cable hook-up in the third). Two bedrooms have one queen bed each, and the third bedroom has two doubles. The full-size kitchen table (which seats 6) is supplemented with a low counter with stools (great for kids!) We are just seconds from the beach, and a stone's throw away from sub and ice cream shops, and a convenience store. Directly across the street is miniature golf, and we are walking distance to Ocean City favorites like Phillips Seafood and Fisher's Popcorn. We are located on 140th on a quiet street. We have one parking spot at the rear of the building, and plenty of on-street parking.
Recent Review
nice vacation
About the Owner
3 Reviews
3.7 based on 3 traveler reviews
Unprofessional Owner
It has been almost 2 weeks since my stay and have not heard anything back about our security deposit after multiple attempts to contact her.
Also - please note the place has no sheets or towels. I guess a common thing in OC but still annoying - especially traveling long distances.
Finally when we stayed there 1 out of the 2 bathrooms did not have hot water. We had 8 people total staying in the condo so it was a real inconvenience. The owner only notified us the day before and did not offer any compensation.
nice vacation
Wonderful vacation
It was a wonderful week! I would certainly recomend this condo for families!
Activity and Interests
Nearby Activities include parks, trails, fishing, crabbing, boating, golfing, tennis, jet skiing, sailing, movies, minature golf, restuarants, and more.
Rental rates
|Rate Period
|Weekend Night
My Standard Rate
Apr 12 2015 - Sep 27 2015
7 night minimum stay
Payment is usually accepted in the quoted currency (USD) unless the currency and the amount is specifically agreed in advance with the owner / advertiser.
Additional information about rental rates
Weekly Rate: $1000 - $1900
Senior week rentals run Sunday - Saturday - $1800. Max 6 people.
We offer Sunday - Sunday rentals for family/adult groups.
(The following rates are per week, and do not apply to Senior Week rentals:)
6/3 - 7/1 - $1400
7/1 - 8/12 - $1600
8/12 - 8/26 - $1400
8/26 - 9/9 - $1100
- 12
- Available
- 12
- Unavailable
- 12
- Today
Property Type
- condo
- Adventure
- Away From It All
- Budget
- Family
- Air Conditioning
- Clothes Dryer
- Heating
- Internet
- Parking
- Washing Machine
- Coffee Maker
- Dishes & Utensils
- Dishwasher
- Microwave
- Oven
- Pantry Items
- Refrigerator
- Stove
- Toaster
- Dining Area
- Satellite / Cable
- Television
- children welcome
- non smoking only
- wheelchair inaccessible
Location Type
- Beach View
Sports & Adventure Activities
- golf
Floor Area
- 1040 sq. ft.
- 2 Bathrooms
- Bathroom 1
- Bathroom 2
- 3 Bedrooms, Sleeps 8
- Bedroom 1
- Bedroom 2
- Bedroom 3
- Deck / Patio
- Guests provide their own meals
- New floors in living area, wireless internet connection, central AC, dishwasher, washer/dryer, fully stocked kitchen, DVD and VHS players, four TV's, newly extended front porch, cable TV, new windows.