May « 2025 « Isegoria

His research started with sixteen albino mice

Saturday, May 31st, 2025

When he launched the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, David Smith left a loose end dangling in his past, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) — he’d never actually received his PhD in pharmacology:

He’d completed a two-year research project on amphetamines and their effects on groups of confined mice, but he never finished his dissertation. Although he shrugged off the lapse—he’d already completed medical school, after all, and he’d taken quickly to his new life in the Haight—it surprised many of his closest friends, and in our interviews, he was reluctant to admit it. It wasn’t like him to leave something undone.

[…]

His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.

In another attempt, some of the mice were dosed with other chemicals—mescaline, chlorpromazine, or reserpine—before they received amphetamine injections. The extra drugs sometimes had a sorting effect, segregating the mice that would kill from the mice that wouldn’t. Or they had a soothing effect, all but eliminating the violent tendencies.

Smith told me he’d started his research having foreseen an influx of amphetamine abusers in San Francisco. He didn’t say how he’d predicted that influx, but he was right. In the summer of ’67, as he opened his clinic, amphetamines exploded in popularity in the Haight.

“When the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody,” he told me. “Suddenly, what I’d learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was applicable [to people].”

Throughout Love Needs Care, Smith draws parallels between the rodents he’d studied and the speed-addled hippies in the Haight. The mice on speed, he wrote, “become inordinately aggressive and assaultive… [turning] upon one another with unexpected savagery. Their violent behavior is probably intensified by confinement for it is strikingly similar to that observed in amphetamine abusers who consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres.”

In the Haight, Smith watched as people living cheek by jowl took huge doses of speed, inspiring paranoia and hallucinations. Once peaceful and well-adjusted, the “speed freaks” of San Francisco now “lashed out with murderous rage at any real or imagined intrusion,” assaulting, raping, or torturing to relieve the paranoid tension. “Cut off from the straight world, crammed together in inhuman conditions, and controlled by chemicals,” Smith concluded, “they behaved, quite naturally, like rats in a cage.”

[…]

In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion of Smith’s rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines. Suggestibility was among the most prized effects of LSD from a clinical perspective. And yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never mentioned acid.

I asked Smith if LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it—then, a moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself.

“Yeah, I stuck LSD in them,” he said.

But he couldn’t explain why. “I was sticking all different kinds of drugs in them,” he added. In his recollection, LSD “produced disorganized behavior, but not violent behavior.” The rats would just wander around in a daze.

If you’ve noticed that I’ve used “rats” and “mice” interchangeably, there’s a reason for that—Smith used them interchangeably, too, even though the two species have vastly different behavioral patterns, especially in groups. In his Journal of Psychedelic Drugs article, he calls them mice; in Love Needs Care and another book he published, they’re rats. Schoenfeld insisted that he’d worked with rats during his part of the research. But Smith was adamant that they were mice, and he couldn’t explain his confusion on the subject.

Like the San Francisco Project and Roger Smith’s Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), some of David Smith’s research, according to his academic papers, was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which, as mentioned earlier, later acknowledged that the CIA used it as a front for LSD research. And though David never mentioned it in his writing, his work owed a clear debt to the landmark research of another NIMH psychologist, John B. Calhoun, who’d studied rat populations since 1946.

Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves. The strangest group to emerge was “the probers”: “hypersexualized” male rats that stalked and raped both males and females, and often cannibalized their young. The probers would commit “frenzied” and “berserk” attacks against rat families sleeping in their burrows, leaving the remains of half-eaten victims. Again, no drugs were involved here; the probers emerged simply as a result of their confinement. They deferred only to the dominant male rat, fleeing if he caught sight of them.

Calhoun’s study was a watershed. In the midsixties, amid growing concerns about population density, social scientists, politicians, and journalists cited him to explain the riots in America’s overcrowded ghettos. His term “behavioral sink”—defined as “the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers… aggravating all forms of pathology that can be found within [the] group”—entered the scientific lexicon almost right away. David Smith used it extensively in his writing and in interviews with me.

[…]

Plus, the more interesting subtleties of Calhoun’s research—the emergence of a dominant male, a harem of subservient females, and an underclass of “probers,” all of which, it had to be said, sounded a lot like the Family—had gone entirely unnoted in Smith’s project. I wondered if amphetamines, with or without LSD, had increased the dominant male’s grip on his followers.

Given how eerily Smith’s research prefigured the creation of the Family—under David’s nose, in the Haight, during the summer of ’67—I wondered if he had deliberately underreported it. I’ve never come close to proving that he did, but I haven’t been able to explain the holes in it, either. Why would he use LSD to induce suggestibility in rats before injecting them with amphetamines and making them berserk?

[…]

The reams of record keeping you’d expect from clinical experimentation simply weren’t there. Stephen Pittel, a forensic psychologist who’d worked with both Smiths at the HAFMC, volunteered a stunning bit of information that Roger and David had neglected to share with me.

“The only thing I remember about ARP was that it got burglarized one night and Roger lost all of his files,” Pittel told me. Their disappearance had been jarring, in part because Roger was “an unusually paranoid guy to begin with.”

[…]

The HAFMC’s original chief psychiatrist, Dr. Ernest Dernburg, remembered the theft of the ARP files, too. As he recalled, they’d gone missing right after the announcement of Manson’s arrest for the Tate–LaBianca murders and that “Roger, understandably, was pretty upset.” Nothing else was taken from the HAFMC, which led the staff to believe that the police or some federal agency might’ve removed the files. These were research papers, he reminded me: “It didn’t make sense for someone to steal these things when they didn’t inherently have any value to the average individual. It seemed to have a more nefarious purpose.”

The Smiths both denied that the theft had ever happened. “You’re dealing with aging memories,” David said. But Dernburg and Pittel—full-time doctors, and credible sources, I thought—stood by their stories. “They were absolutely stolen,” Pittel said. Dernburg, perturbed by David’s insinuation about his faculties, told me more that he remembered. “It was a considerable amount of research—the premier amphetamine research conducted at a street level. It would have been very important to the clinic… and it disappeared. Call David. Ask Roger if he has the files or knows where they are.”

[…]

David Smith had studied these same phenomena, formulating an idea that he called “the psychedelic syndrome,” first articulated in 1967 or early ’68. The gist was that acid, when taken by groups of like-minded people, led to a “chronic LSD state” that reinforced “the interpretation of psychedelic reality.” The more often the same group of “friends” dropped acid, the more they encouraged one another to adopt the worldview they’d discovered together on LSD, thus producing “dramatic psychological changes.”

Usually the psychedelic syndrome was harmless, but regular LSD use could cause “the emergence of a dramatic orientation to mysticism.” And in people with “prepsychotic personalities,” Smith wrote, LSD precipitated “a long-term psychological disorder, usually a depressive reaction or a schizophrenic process.”

Had Smith seen this “syndrome” in the Family? After Manson had been arrested for the murders, David wrote, “Charlie could probably be diagnosed as ambulatory schizophrenic.” He said the same thing when I asked about Manson: “I felt that he was schizo.” It was Roger Smith who’d had the better diagnosis, and the earlier one, David maintained: “Roger said that he knew from day one that Charlie was a psychopath.”

But Roger apparently never thought it was necessary to intervene—to send his parolee back to prison or to get him proper psychiatric care. Instead, he sent him to the Haight and watched him drop acid every day, accruing suggestible young followers as he went. Meanwhile, David was studying the exact psychological conditions that gave rise to the Manson Family while he treated them at his clinic.

Posted in Science | 2 Comments »

The subterranean humanity was nonsense

Friday, May 30th, 2025

Invented to make beef last through a long voyage, Bovril became a famous British kitchen staple:

Less well-known is its link to an odd, pioneering science fiction novel.

A stout black jar of Bovril with a cheery red top lurks in many a British kitchen, next to tins of treacle and boxes of tea. The gooey substance, made of rendered-down beef, salt and other ingredients, can be spread on toast or made into a hot drink, but what many people don’t realise is that this old-fashioned comfort food has a surprising link to science fiction.

The “Bov” part of the name is easy enough to decipher — from “bovine”, meaning associated with cattle. But the “vril” bit? That’s a different story, literally.

In 1871, an anonymous novel was published about a race of super-humans living underground. The narrator of The Coming Race, who has fallen into their realm during a disastrous descent into a mine shaft, is shocked to learn that they are telepathic, thanks to the channeling of a mysterious energy called vril.

“Through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics,” the narrator realises. Vril gives them strength, as well, rendering them capable of incredible feats. The people call themselves the Vril-Ya, and their society seems in many ways superior to that of the surface dwellers.

The Coming Race was a runaway bestseller. It eventually became clear that the anonymous author was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the prominent politician and writer (and, to give you a sense of his prose, the first person to start a novel: “It was a dark and stormy night…”). It became such a cultural touchstone that 20 years later, the Royal Albert Hall in London played host to the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, to raise money for a school of massage “and electricity”.

In 1895, a writer for The Guardian newspaper started a review of a new novel with this statement: “The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth.” The work under review? The Time Machine, by H G Wells.

And so you can see how, in the 1870s, when John Johnston, Scottish meat entrepreneur, was coming up with a name for his bottled beef extract, “vril” was a tip-of-the-tongue reference.

[…]

Johnston and other makers of the substance were responding to a demand for beef products in Europe, where raising cattle was prohibitively expensive, and the growth of cattle ranches in South America, Australia and Canada.

There was no way to get fresh meat from these far-flung places to Europe. But rendering the meat down into a paste and sealing it in jars yielded a shelf-stable product that could make the long journeys involved. (Johnston was not the only player in the meat extract game — Justus von Liebig, one of the founders of organic chemistry, founded Leibig’s Extract of Meat Company to commercialise his process. The company later went on to produce Oxo bouillon cubes and Fray Bentos pies.)

How do you make a salty meat paste sound nourishing? By linking it to a fantastical substance with great powers. An excitable advert for Bovril in the program from the Vril-Ya Bazaar reads, “Bo-VRIL is the materialised ideal of the gifted author of ‘The Coming Race’… it will exert a marvellous influence on the system, exhilarating without subsequent depression, and increasing the mental and physical vitality without taxing the digestive organs. It is a tonic as well as a food, and forms the most Perfect Nourishment known to Science.”

[…]

Members of the theosophy movement, including the spiritualist medium Madame Blavatsky, claimed that vril was real. Willy Ley, a German rocket enthusiast writing about conspiracy theories in Germany during the rise of the Nazis in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction, said there was a society in Berlin that believed in vril: “They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this ‘power’.

“The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not. Possibly it had enabled the British, who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire.”

I have discussed the pursuit of the almighty vril before.

Posted in Media, Science | 10 Comments »

The Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism

Thursday, May 29th, 2025

The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but it had grown less relevant:

On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded.

[…]

Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813.

[…]

Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Angola is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders

Wednesday, May 28th, 2025

Sub-Saharan Africa’s second-largest oil producer, Angola, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is one of the African nation states with natural geographical borders:

It is framed by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by jungle to the north, and by desert to the south, while the eastern regions are sparsely populated, rugged land that acts as a buffer zone with the DRC and Zambia.

The majority of the 22 million–strong population live in the western half, which is well watered and can sustain agriculture; and off the coast in the west lie most of Angola’s oil fields. The rigs out in the Atlantic are owned mostly by American companies, but more than half of the output ends up in China. This makes Angola (dependent on the ebb and flow of sales) second only to Saudi Arabia as the biggest supplier of crude oil to the Middle Kingdom.

Angola is another country familiar with conflict. Its war for independence ended in 1975 when the Portuguese gave up, but it instantly morphed into a civil war between tribes disguised as a civil war over ideology. Russia and Cuba supported the “socialists,” the United States and apartheid South Africa backed the “rebels.” Most of the socialists of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) were from the Mbundu tribe, while the opposition rebel fighters were mostly from two other main tribes, the Bakongo and the Ovimbundu. Their political disguise was as the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Many of the civil wars of the 1960s and 1970s followed this template: if Russia backed a particular side, that side would suddenly remember that it had socialist principles, while its opponents would become anti-Communist.

The Mbundu had the geographical but not the numerical advantage. They held the capital, Luanda; had access to the oil fields and the main river, the Cuanza; and were backed by countries that could supply them with Russian arms and Cuban soldiers. They prevailed in 2002, and their top echelons immediately undermined their own somewhat questionable socialist credentials by joining the long list of colonial and African leaders who enriched themselves at the expense of the people.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025

Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence, so Palantir has announced its Meritocracy Fellowship:

Based solely on merit and academic excellence, students will be invited to interview, and select applicants will receive an internship offer at Palantir.

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.

[…]

What We Require

U.S High school certificate of graduation at the start of the internship

1460 or higher SAT score / 33 or higher ACT score

Candidates cannot be enrolled in an accredited US university

Taking the full fall 2025 semester off (4 months) to work at Palantir. Candidates cannot be enrolled in university classes

Salary

The salary range for this position is estimated to be $5,400/month.

Posted in Business, Education | 2 Comments »

Okay

Monday, May 26th, 2025

I was watching American Primeval (on Netflix), when the boy said “okay,” and I thought, that sounds anachronistic. Then I thought, wait, “okay” was a fad from the 1800s that stuck; let’s look into this.

The show is set in 1857, around the Utah Territory. The boy has traveled west from Philadelphia.

The origin of OK is disputed:

Most modern reference works hold that it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of abbreviating misspellings; that it is an initialism of “oll korrect” as a misspelling of “all correct”. This origin was first described by linguist Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.

[…]

Read argues that, at the time of the expression’s first appearance in print, a broader fad existed in the United States of “comical misspellings” and of forming and employing acronyms, themselves based on colloquial speech patterns:

The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 … and used expressions like OFM, “our first men,” NG, “no go,” GT, “gone to Texas,” and SP, “small potatoes.” Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, “oll wright.”

The general fad is speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK’s original presentation as “all correct” was later varied with spellings such as “Oll Korrect” or even “Ole Kurreck”.

The term appears to have achieved national prominence in 1840, when supporters of the Democratic political party claimed during the 1840 United States presidential election that it stood for “Old Kinderhook”, a nickname for the Democratic president and candidate for reelection, Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York. “Vote for OK” was snappier than using his Dutch name.[11] In response, Whig opponents attributed OK, in the sense of “Oll Korrect”, to the bad spelling of Andrew Jackson, Van Buren’s predecessor. The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in OK’s history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States.

[…]

In “All Mixed Up”, the folk singer Pete Seeger sang that OK was of Choctaw origin, as the dictionaries of the time tended to agree. Three major American reference works (Webster’s, New Century, Funk & Wagnalls) cited this etymology as the probable origin until as late as 1961.

The earliest written evidence for the Choctaw origin is provided in work by the Christian missionaries Cyrus Byington and Alfred Wright in 1825. These missionaries ended many sentences in their translation of the Bible with the particle “okeh”, meaning “it is so”, which was listed as an alternative spelling in the 1913 Webster’s.

Byington’s Dictionary of the Choctaw Language confirms the ubiquity of the “okeh” particle, and his Grammar of the Choctaw Language calls the particle -keh an “affirmative contradistinctive”, with the “distinctive” o- prefix.

Posted in Linguistics | 2 Comments »

Anything insatiable is dangerous

Sunday, May 25th, 2025

Anything insatiable is dangerous, and thus AI fears usually center around runaway maximizers:

But there are reasons to be optimistic.

For starters, the main reason to expect that artificial intelligence is possible is the existence of natural intelligence. If you can build a human-level intelligence out of carbon, it seems reasonably likely that you could build something similar out of silicon.

But humans and all other biological intelligences are cybernetic minimizers, not reward maximizers. We track multiple error signals and try to reduce them to zero. If all our errors are at zero — if you’re on the beach in Tahiti, a drink in your hand, air and water both the perfect temperature — we are mostly comfortable to lounge around on our chaise.

As a result, it’s not actually clear if it’s possible to build a maximizing intelligence. The only intelligences that exist are minimizing. There has never been a truly intelligent reward maximizer (if there had, we would likely all be dead), so there is no proof of concept. The main reason to suspect AI is possible is that natural intelligence already exists — us.

[…]

Reward maximizers are always unstable. Even very simple reinforcement learning agents show very crazy specification behaviors. But control systems can be made very stable. They have their own problems, but we use them all the time, in thermostats, cruise control, satellites, and nuclear engineering. These systems work just fine. When control systems do fail, they usually fail by overreacting, underreacting, oscillating wildly, freaking out in an endless loop, giving up and doing nothing, and/or exploding. This is bad for the system, and bad when the system controls something important, like a nuclear power plant. But it doesn’t destroy the universe.

Posted in Economics, Technology | 3 Comments »

The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to

Saturday, May 24th, 2025

The story of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic is a confusing story to tell, because it involves two Smiths who ran in the same circles, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, and David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the clinic:

David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield, California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town, and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers, always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never get an A if he didn’t go.

Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of 1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol. By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same substance.”

He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them. The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.

When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.

As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long, beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.

In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.

[…]

Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.

David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”

When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they obeyed him unquestioningly.

Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought. Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.

Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me, when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a paranoid speed delusion.”

[…]

Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years, a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a 2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too, took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there, and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his delusions.

Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there, thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever insights about Manson. (“ He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.) “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote. “He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”

[…]

But his remark about Manson’s hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.

In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator, but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”

Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the “messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter whites.

Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”

Posted in Crime | No Comments »

The whole trick is to get the rest of the world to pay

Friday, May 23rd, 2025

In theory, Juliet Samuel notes, the dollar ought to be a medium of exchange like any other, only useful to foreigners who want to trade with Americans, but in reality, dollars, in the form of US Treasury bonds, have become the backbone of the world’s piggy bank:

The dollar solves a dilemma. When a country accrues lots of savings, perhaps because it sells huge amounts of oil or has built a whole economy around battery or semiconductor exports, it needs to store the cash. Storing it in the country’s own currency presents two problems.

The first is that a lot of these supersaver countries have volatile exchange rates because they are ruled by capricious, thieving dictators, or because their financial markets are very small so it’s risky to have all the money in local lira or whatever. The second is that if they convert their savings into local cash, they’ll push their exchange rate up, and that will make their exports more expensive until they become uncompetitive, killing the golden goose. This, incidentally, is how a healthy trading system ought to rebalance itself.

So they don’t let that happen. Instead, what all these governments and sovereign wealth funds (and a few rich families or pensions) do is buy US Treasury bonds. Treasury markets are big and stable, open to anyone and underpinned by the rule of law.

When the US was by far the world’s biggest economy, this activity didn’t affect Americans much. In fact, letting the dollar become so important gave the US exceptional power to sanction foreigners and to borrow, seemingly without limit. But over decades, and especially since China became a full-fledged member of the trading system in 2001, the US economy has become smaller and smaller relative to the rest of the world, while the savers have become bigger and bigger. We are now at the point where there are an estimated $7 trillion worth of bonds squirrelled away as reserves by non-US savers: $3 trillion in China, the rest in Japan, Europe, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Korea and Singapore. This has inflated the value of the dollar to the point where it is pricing American exporters out of the game. Products made using dollars and priced in dollars are just too expensive.

[…]

Back [during Trump’s trade war in 2018–19], the tariffs were not actually paid by consumers. As far as one can tell from the data, they were paid in two ways: first, US importers accepted lower margins on goods bought from abroad, and second, the dollar rose in value, boosting US spending power almost by exactly as much as Trump had put up tariffs.

Self-evidently, a rising dollar is not what a Trump White House would want if its aim is to revive American manufacturing. But this underscores a central trade-off not just with tariffs but with any solution to the problem of gargantuan trade and currency distortions: someone, somewhere has to pay. If Trump lets the dollar appreciate, then American consumers don’t have to bear the cost. But then American factories won’t recover either. So the whole trick, as far as US policy is concerned, is to get the rest of the world to pay.

If there is a grand strategy behind the trade war, which there certainly is in the mind of Trump appointees like the Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, it is an opening salvo in a struggle to fix the US trading position and to sort allies from enemies in doing so. Start with tariffs on everyone, let them feel the pain, then offer relief to those willing to help gradually deflate the dollar by slowly selling down Treasuries, opening up their own markets to US goods and agreeing to impose a tariff wall on China.

[…]

At the same time, domestically, the US could embark upon a massive deregulatory programme to cut production costs, pump more oil, clear away planning hurdles, cut payroll taxes and so on.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France

Thursday, May 22nd, 2025

Napoleon had an ambivalent relationship, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), with the Jewish population:

On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).

[…]

This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.

[…]

He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).

[…]

He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.

[…]

Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.

[…]

The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.

[…]

Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’

[…]

‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’

[…]

On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.

[…]

In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.

[…]

There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France,

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country

Wednesday, May 21st, 2025

By size, population, and natural resources, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), Nigeria is West Africa’s most powerful country:

It is the continent’s most populous nation, with 177 million people, which, with its size and natural resources, makes it the leading regional power. It is formed from the territories of several ancient kingdoms that the British brought together as an administrative area. In 1898, they drew up a “British Protectorate on the River Niger” that in turn became Nigeria.

[…]

In colonial times the British preferred to stay in the southwestern area along the coast. Their “civilizing” mission rarely extended to the highlands of the center, nor up to the Muslim populations in the north, and this half of the country remains less developed than the south. Much of the money made from oil is spent paying off the movers and shakers in Nigeria’s complex tribal system.

[…]

The kidnapping of foreign oil workers is making it a less and less attractive place to do business. The offshore oil fields are mostly free of this activity and that is where the investment is heading.

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which wants to establish a caliphate in the Muslim areas, has used the sense of injustice engendered by underdevelopment to gain ground in the north.

[…]

Most of the villages they have captured are on the Mandara mountain range, which backs onto Cameroon. This means the national army is operating a long way from its bases and cannot surround a Boko Haram force. Cameroon’s government does not welcome Boko Haram, but the countryside gives the fighters space to retreat to if required.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles

Tuesday, May 20th, 2025

The Department of Defense is now squarely focused on China, Thomas Shugart explains, with deterring or defeating a potential invasion of Taiwan as its top operational priority:

The Pentagon’s strategy is likely grounded in denial—aiming to prevent the PLA from achieving its objectives in the first place, rather than simply responding after the fact. Reflecting this shift, the U.S. Army is undergoing a major transformation, moving away from some traditional maneuver formations and toward long-range fires, autonomous systems, and electronic warfare.

[…]

A war over Taiwan, if it comes, will not resemble the last one the United States fought. It will not be won by the kinds of small-unit, ground-centric operations that defined the Global War on Terror. It will be decided—perhaps before the first shot is fired—by which side can sense more, strike faster, and impose greater disruption. More specifically, it will be decided in the air, at sea, in space, and across the electromagnetic spectrum. “Trigger-pullers” of either side may ultimately finish the war on the ground, but its outcome will have been largely decided—and in some cases predetermined—by “button-pushers” who control information, aircraft, ships, submarines, drones, and precision fires.

[…]

Two decades of GWOT reinforced the picture of a soldier (or sailor) in camouflage with a rifle and night vision, operating in villages or mountains. In fact, for years now even U.S. Navy uniforms have come to reflect that idea. But in a Taiwan scenario, the key variables will be control of the air and sea by air and naval units, supported by long range strike, resilient ISR, reliable satellite access, and spectrum control. Ground troops will still fight with courage, skill—and if necessary, sacrifice. Yet if China achieves air and maritime dominance, its landing force will be able to reinforce at will from China’s near-inexhaustible number of ground troops—and Taiwan’s ground forces, no matter how motivated, will eventually be overrun. Conversely, if the PLA loses control of the air and sea, its invasion force will be stranded, exposed, and defeated. Likewise, no matter how well-trained, well-equipped, or numerous U.S. ground forces might be, if China secures air and naval superiority in the early phases of the conflict, those forces will never reach the battlefield: reinforcement and resupply at scale across the Pacific will be impossible in a contested or denied maritime environment. Strategic access hinges on winning the air and sea fight first. Again, the outcome will have been decided at sea and in the air.

We have seen this pattern before. In the early months of World War II, U.S. and Filipino forces in the Philippines fought with determination and courage. But despite their best efforts, they were ultimately forced to surrender—not for lack of grit or leadership, but because sea and air control around the Philippines had been lost to Japan. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, these troops were eventually subjected to the Bataan Death March, one of the war’s most infamous atrocities. Their defeat was not the result of tactical failure at the unit level, but of larger operational conditions set by loss of control of the surrounding maritime and air domains. It would take the United States years of sustained naval and air campaigning to fight its way back across the Pacific and reverse the strategic tide.

Similarly, on Guadalcanal the fight on land was intense and costly, but it was control of the surrounding sea and air that determined the result. In fact, more American sailors died in the waters around Guadalcanal than Marines and soldiers died on the island. The same war offers a reminder that the most dangerous roles were often off the traditional battlefield. RAF Bomber Command suffered a 44% fatality rate. U.S. submariners lost 22% of their force—one of the highest fatality rates in the U.S. military during World War II and more than ten times the average for the rest of the Navy. If war comes to Taiwan, the most critical and at-risk roles may not wear body armor or carry rifles, but instead fly aircraft and crew ships, manage satellites, operate kill chains, or maintain resilient communications.

The PLA understands this dynamic. In 2024, it announced a sweeping reorganization that created three new co-equal forces: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, and the Information Support Force.

[…]

The United States must demonstrate that even a well-planned first strike will not ensure Chinese success. This requires hardened, distributed networks, prepositioned capabilities, and personnel trained to operate through disruption.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

This is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons

Monday, May 19th, 2025

Bret Devereaux explains why archers didn’t volley fire:

You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then holds up his hand with that ‘wait for it’ gesture and then shouts ‘loose!’ (or worse yet, ‘fire!’) and all of the archers release at once, producing a giant cloud of arrows. And then those arrows hit the enemy, with whole ranks collapsing and wounded soldiers falling over everywhere.

[…]

Archers didn’t engage in coordinated all-at-once shooting (called ‘volley fire’), they did not shoot in volleys because there wouldn’t be any point to do so. Indeed, part of the reason there was such confusion over what a general is supposed to shout instead of ‘fire!’ is that historical tactical manuals don’t generally have commands for coordinated bow shooting because armies didn’t do coordinated bow shooting. Instead, archers generated a ‘hail’ or ‘rain’ (those are the typical metaphors) of arrows as each archer shot in their own best time.

More to the point, they could not shoot in volleys. And even if they had shot in volleys, those volleys wouldn’t produce anything like the impact we regularly see in film or TV.

[…]

We want to start by understanding what volley fire is and what it is for. Put simply, ‘volley fire’ is the tactic of having a whole bunch of soldiers with ranged weapons (typically guns) fire in coordinated groups: sometimes with the entire unit all firing at once or with specific sub-components of the unit firing in coordinated fashion, as with the ‘counter-march.’ In both cases, the problem that volley fire is trying to overcome is slow weapon reload times: this is a solution for slow-firing but powerful ranged weapons.

[…]

Volley fire can cover for the slow reload rate of guns or crossbows in two ways. The first are volley fire drills designed to ensure a continuous curtain of fire; the most famous of these is the ‘counter-march,’ a drill where arquebuses or muskets are deployed several ranks deep (as many as six). The front rank fires a volley (that is, they all fire together) and then rush to the back of their file to begin reloading, allowing the next rank to fire, and so on. By the time the last rank has fired, the whole formation has moved backwards slightly (thus ‘counter’ march) and the first rank has finished reloading and is ready to fire. The problem this is solving is the danger of an enemy, especially cavalry, crossing the entire effective range of the weapon in the long gap between shots.

[…]

The other classic use is volley-and-charge. Because firearms are very lethal but slow to reload, it could be very effective to march in close order right up to an enemy, dump a single volley by the entire unit into them to cause mass casualties and confusion and then immediately charge with pikes or bayonets to try to capitalize on the enemy being demoralized and confused.

[…]

Crucially, note that volley-and-charge works because it compresses a lot of lethality into a very short time, which I suspect is why we don’t see it with bows or crossbows (but do see it with javelins, which may have shorter range and far fewer projectiles, but seem to have had higher lethality per projectile). As we’re going to see in a moment, the lethality of bows or crossbows against armored, shielded infantry – even in close order – was pretty low at any given moment and needed to add up over an extended period of shooting.

[…]

But as you’ve hopefully noted, these tactics are built around firearms with their long reload times: good soldiers might be able to reload a matchlock musket in 20-30 seconds or so. But traditional bows do not have this limitation: a good archer can put six or more arrows into the air in a minute (although doing so will exhaust the archer quite quickly), so there simply isn’t some large 30-second fire gap to cover over with these tactics. As a result volley fire doesn’t offer any advantages for traditional bow-users.

[…]

Of course the other reason we can be reasonably sure that ancient or medieval armies using traditional bows did not engage in volley fire is that they couldn’t. You will note in those movie scenes, that the commander invariably gives the order to ‘draw’ and then waits for the right moment before shouting ‘release!’ (or worse yet ‘fire!’). The thing is: how much energy does it take to hold that bow at ready? The key question here is the bow’s ‘draw’ or ‘pullback’ which is generally expressed in the pounds of force necessary to draw and hold the bow at full draw. Most prop bows have extremely low pulls to enable actors to manipulate them very easily; if you look closely, you can often see this because the bowstrings are under such little tension that they visibly sway and wobble as the bow is moved. This also helps a film production because it means that an arrow coming off of such a bow isn’t going to be moving all that fast and so is a lot less dangerous and easier to make ‘safe.’

[…]

Which neatly answers why no one had their archers hold their bows at draw to synchronize fire: you’d exhaust your archers very quickly. Instead, war bow firing techniques tend to emphasize getting the arrow off of the string as quickly as possible: the bow is leveled on the target as the string is drawn and released basically immediately.

[…]

Maybe two-third to three quarters of our arrows just miss entirely, hitting the ground, shot long over the whole formation and so on. Of the remainder, another three-quarters at least (probably an even higher proportion, to be honest) are striking shields. Of the remainder, we might suppose another three-quarters or so are striking helmets or other fairly solid armor like greaves: these hurt, but probably won’t kill or disable. Of the remainder, a portion – probably a small portion, because of those big shields – are being defeated by body armor that they could, under ideal circumstances, defeat. And of the remainder that actually penetrate a human on the other side, maybe another two-thirds are doing so in the arms, feet or lower legs, many of them with glancing hits: painful, but not immediately fatal and in some cases potentially not even disabling.

After all of those filters, we’re down to an estimated arrow lethality rate hovering 0.5-1%, meaning each arrow shot has something like a 1-in-100 or 1-in-200 chance to kill or disable an enemy.

I’ve discussed the physics of medieval archery before, by the way.

Posted in War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

The three deadliest weapons in the world today

Sunday, May 18th, 2025

The deadliest weapon in American history, Kulak notes, is the handgun, because more Americans have been killed in ordinary criminal homicides than all the wars America has fought:

Applying the logic which we have already seen, that outside of the most war-ravaged countries ordinary homicide, gang wars, feuds, and clasdestine actions are VASTLY more likely to kill people than high intensity warfare, you quickly notice a trend.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today in terms of body-count (your likelihood to be killed by them) varies between

Handguns in the New World where guns are plentiful but open carry of rifles is not the norm

Auto and semiautomatic (and previously bolt-action) rifles in the third world of Africa and failed parts of the Middle-East where it is perfectly acceptable for gangs to walk about with AK-47s in their arms

Knives and bladed weapons in Gun restrictionist jurisdictions (Europe), Asia, Prisons, etc.

If you die a violent death, dear reader, whether in the killing fields of darkest Africa, darkest Detroit, the trenches of forever war or the smuggling tunnels of Mexico, to an enemy you’ve never spoken a word to or to a spouse you said just one word too many to, it will almost certainly be to one of these 3. Even in the age of FPV Drones, IEDs, cluster munitions, and thermobaric rocket artillery, a super-majority of the time the person who decides you need to die will be within 2-200 meters of you, see you with their bare eye or possibly a simple optic, and decide in sight of your face to end your life with the tool they have at hand: knife, handgun, or rifle.

And it’s very hard to tell which of the three actually leads the pack globally.

In the US where guns are widely available knife homicides are only about 10–15% of what firearm homicides are, In the UK this is reversed, and firearm related murders are 10% of knife murders.

Posted in Crime, War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines

Saturday, May 17th, 2025

Roger Smith, the academic who became Charles Manson’s parole officer, may have had ulterior motives, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury:

As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[ I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”

There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.

[…]

To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.

Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.

Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.

Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses.