Staring at goats

I've just been watching a TV programme, The Crazy Rulers of the World about the use of psychological and parapsychological warfare in the US military over the last 30 years. There's a summary of most of the programme here.

It seems there's some strange stuff going down. Major General Stubblebine reasoned that since atoms are mostly space, and people and walls are made of atoms, then people and walls are mostly made of space, so it should be quite straightforward to merge one through the other. To train soldiers to pass straight through solid walls. He banged his nose a lot. But respect to the guy for having the courage of his convictions and attempting to do the feat himself in his office rather than ordering the lower ranks to run straight at walls themselves.

Elsewhere, at Fort Bragg, there is Goat Lab. Goat Lab is where the army practices stopping the hearts of goats using the power of their minds alone. This is not easy to do, but there are a couple of people who claim to be able to do it. One is now dead (either killed in a helicopter accident, or run over and killed by a jeep whilst attempting to show that it wouldn't harm him to be run over by a jeep, depending on which story you believe). The other runs a dance/martial arts studio and recently killed his own hamster by staring at it, because the hamster was irritating him.

Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but they changed because it was "just about impossible to form an emotional bond with a goat".

Also revealed are plans that would have seen US special forces entering hostile territory carrying young lambs, playing "indigenous music and words of peace" through loudspeakers and giving "automatic hugs" to any hostiles they encountered. Now I have zero combat experience (apart from some paintball), but I'm pretty sure that if I was a Hostile, I wouldn't let the enemy come towards me carrying lambs and playing Fleetwood Mac covers with a view to hugging me. I expect I'd shoot, or maybe just run away. But I wouldn't let enemy soldiers come and hug me. Though the originator of these ideas does accept that there was "a possibility that these measures might not be enough to pacify an enemy". No shit.

It seems that this, in part, has led to the torture that was going on in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. A second article gives details of the a strange use of the music of Matchbox Twenty and Kris Kristofferson by the US military on a guy from Manchester who was held (and later released) in the Bay for two years. Strange...