Plan B Forum

loCAtek

Yup, shoulda just put coal in his stocking.

Worst parents in the world punk kid into thinking he got an Xbox 360
By Ryan Block posted Feb 29th 2008 5:54PM

When you were a kid did your parents ever do anything mean to you for their own amusement? Whatever it was, something tells us it wasn't as evil as what Jonathan's (above) family did on Christmas morning, having him unwrap an empty Xbox box with some shirts inside -- while on video, mind you -- and then everyone laughing at him when he got upset and cried over being hoodwinked. For the love of all that is holy in the gadget-loving world, that is so wrong. Despite the fact his family told Jonathan multiple times in the video, "C'mon, you know we can't afford an Xbox!", the kid's shining example of an older brother (who uploaded the video) claims that they actually did get him the console, and that he'd eventually upload the video of the "real" unwrapping. He never did. Right.

Jonathan, you out there? Screw those people, they clearly don't understand what it is to be a kid and to want an awesome gadget so badly you can taste it. We've been there our whole lives. Since, as a publication, we can't just adopt you and raise you as our own, I will personally send you an Xbox 360 and some games -- but only on the condition that you swear to you'll never let your douchebag family play with it. Hit me up at engadget at gmail dotcom, make sure you can identify yourself so I know I've got the right person.

Update: We've been flooded with email from well-meaning geeks and even Microsoft; just about everyone wants to help us hook up Jonathan. We totally appreciate the sentiment, but we've got this covered. We think we've gotten in touch with his family (who let us know he never got an Xbox, and the whole thing really was a prank on the poor kid); once we know for sure we have the right people we'll post again.

Lord Jim wrote:Nice sentiment, but if somebody did send this kid an X-Box, I have no doubt that this bunch of scum bags would sell it for beer and cigarette money, and have a good laugh about it.

oldr_n_wsr wrote:And you wonder where serial killers come from.

liberty wrote:That is so sad. Love should surround a family and each member should love the others as much as they love themselves.

So I'm guessing there is some serious self-loathing pathology going on in that family - and most of the 'real' families I know.

bigskygal wrote:rubato, you really should elaborate.

As to the OP - assholes, through and through. And did you check out the MONSTER FAT ASS on the momma?!? She certainly affords to shovel food in her face at 3x the necessary rate!

rubato wrote:

bigskygal wrote:rubato, you really should elaborate.

As to the OP - assholes, through and through. And did you check out the MONSTER FAT ASS on the momma?!? She certainly affords to shovel food in her face at 3x the necessary rate!

I'm looking for either a text version or a link to the NPR story. The story is only alluded to briefly and indirectly in his wiki-bio.

But Ted was psychologically brutalised by a professional sado-masochist conducting experiments on undergraduates when Ted was a 16-year old Harvard student. Periodically they would make the students sit down individually and watch a film of their own humiliation. Per the description of the 'researcher' Ted's physiological responses were off the chart compared to the other student/subjects partly because of his younger age, lesser state of physical development, and vulnerability.

Pointless cruelty to children, like in the OP, is really vile.

yrs,
rubato

While at Harvard, Kaczynski was taught by famed logician Willard Quine, scoring at the top of Quine's class with a 98.9% final grade. He also participated in a multiple-year personality study conducted by Dr. Henry Murray, an expert on stress interviews.[4] Students in Murray's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student.[6] Instead, they were subjected to the stress test, which was an extremely stressful and prolonged psychological attack by an anonymous attorney. During the test, students were strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a two-way mirror. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began. Kaczynski's lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind control to his participation in this study.[6][7]

After this intriguing start Kaczynski told me little more about the Murray experiment than what I could find in the published literature. Henry Murray's widow, Nina, was friendly and cooperative, but could provide few answers to my questions. Several of the research assistants I interviewed couldn't, or wouldn't, talk much about the study. Nor could the Murray Center be entirely forthcoming. After considering my application, its research committee approved my request to view the records of this experiment, the so-called data set, which referred to subjects by code names only. But because Kaczynski's alias was by then known to some journalists, I was not permitted to view his records.
Through research at the Murray Center and in the Harvard archives I found that, among its other purposes, Henry Murray's experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation -- what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, assaulting his subjects' egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.

It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Michael Mello, author of the recently published book, "The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes that at some point in his Harvard years--1958 to 1962--Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of "a psychological experiment". Mello identifies the chief researcher for these only as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.

Because most MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then CIA Director Richard Helms, it has been difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research sub-projects sponsored by MKULTRA and related CIA programs.[18]
.....
Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKULTRA experiments, including deaths, will never be known.[18][22][38][39]
....
•

A considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MKULTRA experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[50] During World War II, Henry Murray, the lead researcher in the Harvard experiments, served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a forerunner of the CIA. Murray applied for a grant funded by the United States Navy, and his Harvard stress experiments strongly resembled those run by the OSS.[50] Beginning at the age of sixteen, Kaczynski participated along with twenty-one other undergraduate students in the Harvard experiments, which have been described as "disturbing" and "ethically indefensible."[50][51]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_M ... nry_Murray

Thanks, rubato for your observation - that was an interesting and very educational little 'net meander for me