Alex Constantine - November 21, 2008
Leary supervised mind control experimentation at a CIA front in Berkeley, CA for 15 years prior to his massive media promotion in the latter '60s. Leary's role was to drug, distract and discredit the American anti-war movement. At the same time, the Agency - after an Army study proposed using potent hallucinogens for chemical warfare purposes - planted directions for the manufacture of LSD and STP in academic journals accessible to the public. Lysergic acid was in large part responsible for the decimation of the left in the '70s, just as heroin would be used to destroy the Haitian Rastafarian movement - it took no more than one year - a decade later. Hippies who defend Leary are wrong-headed and have an unconscionable view of Vietnam-era progressive history, IMhO. The drug's influence was destructive, and any "revelations" that came from it were personal and subjective, like reading Proust, self-indulgent, politically useless. - AC
" ... her godfather was the late L.S.D. guru, Dr. Timothy Leary (Winona's father, Michael, formerly served as Leary's archivist and ran a bookstore called Flashback Books) ... "
Winona Ryder Detailed Biography
www.netglimse.com
THE daughter of free-lovin', counterculture types who named her after the Minnesota town in which she was born (and she's the lucky one - her siblings are named Yuri, Sunyata, and Jubal), Winona Horowitz enjoyed what you'd call an unorthodox childhood - the Horowitz clan's idea of family bonding was a good-and-rowdy protest against Agent Orange. It will come as no surprise then, that her godfather was the late L.S.D. guru, Dr. Timothy Leary (Winona's father, Michael, formerly served as Leary's archivist and ran a bookstore called Flashback Books - need we say more?), or that Beat poet Allen Ginsberg rounded out her parents' circle of friends. Winona hastens to explain when asked about her rather nontraditional upbringing that her parents are politically active intellectuals, and not acid-dropping, Grateful Dead-dogging clichés.
Leary himself summed them up as ''hippie intellectuals and psychedelic scholars,'' a judgment bolstered by the fact that the couple collaborated on a book detailing Aldous Huxley's psychedelic experiences, and then co-authored a book alleging that Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women while dosed up on opium. Growing up in a house where a high value was placed on reading, Winona's bible became J.D. Salinger's coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye. With a world view shaped by such iconoclastic parents and an idol the likes of Holden Caulfield, it's little wonder that Winona would one day prove so deft at portraying offbeat characters.
When she was 7 years old, Winona's family repaired to an upscale commune located on a 300-acre plot of land in the northern California town of Elk, where they coexisted with seven other families and a bunch of horses. The kids obviously didn't have televisions (after all, they had no electricity in their homes), but Winona's mother operated a movie theatre in an old barn, where she screened the classic films that provided her enthralled daughter with the key to her future.
After a year of living in the sticks, the family moved back to the relative civilization of Petaluma, California. During her first week at her new school, Winona, a fresh-off-the-commune tomboy, was jumped by a gang of pubescent thugs who proceeded to trounce her good for being such an obvious wuss. (''They thought I was a gay boy,'' she has offered by way of explanation.) The unfortunate thrashing yielded fortunate results: Ryder earned a stint of home study, but more importantly, her parents let her enroll in acting classes at the prestigious American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, where bullies were few and far between.
Talent scouts spotted her on the A.C.T. stage and had her test for the role of Jon Voight's daughter in Desert Bloom. She didn't get the part, but her audition was impressive enough to gain her representation by Triad Artists, which set her up with a role as a poetry-loving teen in Lucas (1986). When the credits rolled, Winona Horowitz officially became Winona Ryder; her new surname was inspired by a Mitch Ryder album belonging to her father. ...
http://www.netglimse.com/celebs/bio/winona_ryder.shtml
Also see: "MK-ULTRA's Louis "Jolly" West & the First Elephant Ever Given LSD"
“Catcher” is the MK-Ultra handbook. Good parents don’t make Timothy Leary their daughter’s godfather. No wonder she shoplifted.
The drawing at the top of this page was made by Adam Pinson and is 100% color pencil
Actually, Leary was innocent of intent to work as an MKUltra researcher. That cannot be said about Alan Ginsburg and Richard Alpert, his associates. Leary was surrounded by spooks from the start, but was a true believer that L.S.D. was the wave of the future. The spys at the C.I.A., being paranoid murderers, had bad trips when they put the substance in each others coffee cups as a joke at Langley. Their intent was to redirect the left’s emphasis towards introspective navel gazing and away from immediate revolt. What they did not realize, however, is that L.S.D. in the brain of a normal person can actually galvanize revolt, albeit in a different sphere of consciousness. A prisoner in the same cell as Leary in Lexington, KY reported that Leary at one point returned to the cell with his head shaved and blue locational lines drawn across his skull. This was used to precisely interface two radiation beams that intersected at the desired point of brain destruction. This would not be done to one who had been an asset to the powers that be. After that, Leary spoke only about such nonsense like us all relocating to orbiting cylinders in outer space. Don’t forget that L.S.D. was the central sacrament in both the Greek and Roman religions, and the partaking of it was considered to be an honor only offered to the finest citizens like Socrates and Plato. Socrates was ordered to commit suicide for the crime of “profaning the Mysteries”. This was because he brewed up his own batch at his villa in the country and gave it to his students, explaining that there was no mystery, it was a drug. Leary was a hero, and had his keen mind taken for what he sincerely believed.