Fair Use Notice

FAIR USE NOTICE

OCCUPY THE COMMONS


This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0


Saturday, December 31, 2011

10 Pop Monstrosities That Almost Destroyed Our Culture in 2011


Here are the worst TV shows, movies, and songs of 2011.
December 30, 2011 |
Every year, things go down in pop culture that seem to signal the coming armageddon -- like offensive and popular reality shows, for instance -- and we wonder, could it possibly get worse? And every year, it does. We could list 2011 terrible things in American culture this year and not even come close to completing the list, so for brevity’s sake, here are the top 10 worst things that happened in pop culture this year. May 2012 have fewer of them.

1. Movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1

Even if this movie wasn’t predicated on dismal Rand-worship and probably the most tedious/annoying book of her career, it’s bad based on sheer artistry. Set in the dystopian near-future of 2016, it bumps up against every dramatic action film cliche imaginable, a Tea Party fingerpainting of corporate greed. That said, this movie is AMAZING in its hilarity, possibly the best unintentionally humorous American film since National Treasure, with all the requisite deep melodrama and overacting that is somehow also stiff. It’s terrible but a pleasure to watch, particularly when you consider that with all the rich libertarians in the world, no one could pool their money for better talent! Haha.

2. Documentary: The Undefeated

If Sarah Palin’s fawning, lionizing documentary weren’t crafted for the sole purpose of revising her career and casting her in a noble light, the tale of how it came to be might have been funny: gleaming fanboy Stephen K. Bannon piles compliments on his feckless heroine, his love blinding him to her mishaps. It almost deserves a Mel Brooks script—only it’s real, and the Palin faithful brought in around $75k the first week in only 10 theaters. The Palin hustle has quieted down a bit, but expect this to be trotted out as evidence of her wondrousness closer to the election (and as absurd GOP candidates mention her as a potential running mate). It’s just depressing that it requires actual political propaganda to get her there.

3. TV Miniseries: "The Kennedys"

What was up with propagandist revisionism this year? The intensely reviled recasting of the Camelot era was so full of historical inaccuracies that Brave New Films launched a successful effort to keep the History Channel from airing it. With Greg Kinnear as JFK and Katie Holmes as Jackie, the whole piece was criticized as wholesale character assassination, hand in hand with the strange conservative impulse to cast JFK as somehow evil. And they didn’t even use theincriminating Jackie tapes!

4. Reality Show: “Toddlers and Tiaras"

Hitfix called it “a clarion call for a Social Services intervention,” and was it ever. Eager and often deluded moms entering their mostly reluctant tiny, tiny daughters into beauty pageants and stage-momming them into internalizing the princess premium before they can really utter words with three syllables. If the ghost of JonBenet Ramsey doesn’t loom over this show for you in a disturbing way, perhaps some of the choice things moms say to their children will, such as one mom telling her eight-year-old to shake her butt around, but not too much “like a stripper.” Ugh.

5. Novel: Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris

It’s unfortunate that an author with the imagination of Charlaine Harris can apparently only make her work more interesting by adding an endless stream of fantastical characters, rather than making said characters do more interesting things. The creator of Sookie Stackhouse, upon which HBO’s popular “True Blood” is based, Harris is up to book 11 in the series, and it might be time to pack it in (or at least create a spin-off). Add this to tossed-off and confusing plot elements that mess around with continunity and logic (many longtime fans have accused Harris of not actually reading the books in her own series), and you have a beach read that’s more frustrating and convoluted than light and fun.

6. Song (and video!): Bruno Mars, “The Lazy Song”

Stumbling over himself to be viewed as America’s least threatening nice guy, Bruno Mars reached the point of pure banality with “The Lazy Song,” which sounds delivered straight from a can. An accomplishment, at least, in that he became the most innocuous person of the year, but even the tempo was boring with “The Lazy Song.” Add a cutesy and inexplicable band of monkeys wearing Wayfarers in the video and it’s like a pipe bomb that, upon explosion, politely delivers a full-scale affront to the senses.

7. Musical Group: Lady Antebellum

Aside from the obvious—that the group’s name fetishizes an era in which black people were enslaved—this year the Nashville trio released Own the Night, an album that was completely offensive in its non-offensiveness. Ciphoning any semblance of personality until it was an opaque wisp of music, it thrived on cliche lyrics, boring harmonies, terrible interludes and completely generic everything. The musical equivalent of being inside a shopping mall, the place that varies only slightly no matter where you are in the world, Own the Night is an attempt to whitewash its own world into empty vertigo. Horrifying.

8. Twilight Movie: Breaking Dawn, Part 1

Going into the movie adaptations of Stephenie Meyer’s ridiculously popular vampire love stories, we knew they were highly Christian, but Breaking Dawn is too much: an entire (pretty long!) treatise that basically says sex is 1) only for married people; and 2) for the sole purpose of procreation and abortion is never, ever an option, even if it means the mother is going to die. Pro-life to the point of squeamishness, and even the gorgeous visage of Rob Pattinson couldn’t take away the sting.

9. Non-Reality Television Show: "Last Man Standing" (ABC)

There was a lot of competition for this category in 2011: The short-lived, regressive Playboy Club; the incredibly racist and blogger-cutesy 2 Broke Girls; the ridiculous bro-show Man Up, which reached the infantilized nadir of the Peter Pan syndrome comedy wrought by Judd Apatow and his ilk. But nothing was more offensive, less funny, and more harmful to every gender and sexual orientation than Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen vehicle based on the premise that traditional masculinity is being bled out by independent women and femme-y men, whose proliferation is ripping apart the fabric of tradition and ruining a world where manly (white) men rule.

When he’s not trying to decipher the arcane and impenetrable language of women, he’s ascribing his masculinity to things that are frankly unisex (such as sports) and mocking as somehow emasculated men who prefer, for instance, Mel Gibson’s romantic movies over his violent ones. Aside from the feeling that the misogynists writing this show are of the he-man, woman-haters club variety, they also seem not funny at all.

10. Dramatic Moment of Outrage from Right-Wingers: Parents Television Council on Janet Jackson Nipplegate

The Parents Television Council is a source of endless, paranoid hilarity of handwringing over relatively minor infractions on TV, but one point was the funniest this year: when it responded in outrage over the accidental exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast on the 2004 Superbowl halftime. In November, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a fine was not necessary for the incident, which as anyone who’s seen it knows, was clearly an accident (unless Jackson and Justin Timberlake are such exceptional actors they can register pure horror before an entire stadium midway through a strenuous performance). But of course, the PTC called it a “striptease” (which is repulsive, sexualized and racialized) and called for an appeal to the appeal. Let’s hope 2012 brings less of this stuff.

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The Giving Season: Why the 99% Are Actually More Philanthropic Than the 1%

AlterNet.org


The 99% is more generous, and gives primarily to the church, while the 1% is more connected to cultural institutions that offer some payoff in social status.
This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.

How The 1% Differs

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.

To discover what motivates giving Paul K, Piff, a PhD candidate in social psychology at University of California carried out a series of experiments. He discovered that people earning $15,000 or less are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than those earning more than $150,000.

The 99% tend to give primarily to their church. Giving by the 1%, on the other hand, according to Judith Warner writing in the New York Times “was mostly directed to other causes—cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters—which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.”

Indeed, empathy and compassion seem in short supply among the 1%. Piff comments, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others”. Which, as Warner notes, affirms economist Frank Levy’s observation in his 1999 book about the new inequality--The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. “The welfare state rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonable say, ‘There for the grace of God…’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.”

We should bear in mind that what is reported as charitable giving by the 1% significantly overstates the actual private sacrifice, as economist Uwe E. Reinhardt points out. If the wealthy donate $10,000 to charity and are in the combined 50% federal, state and local tax bracket then their effective sacrifice is $5,000 and society as a whole, without its advice and consent, subsidizes the rest.

Foundations and the Public Good

Much of the giving by the very wealthy is done through foundations. Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. "At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent," opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. "We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities."

While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite. This movement may have begun in the early 1980s when William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford and principal in leveraged buyout and private equity firms and the President of the Olin Foundation joined with others to start the Philanthropy Roundtable.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon declared, "Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends."

The Philanthropy Roundtable was established to channel the contributions of the 1% in more self-serving directions.

In 2011 the Roundtable awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Charles G. Koch. In 2008 Koch, or rather the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation entered into an agreement with Florida State University to provide millions for the school’s economics department. The catch, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that Koch would have the authority to approve who ultimately filled the positions. Moreover, the professors it approves must be hired with tenure and FSU must continue to support them for at least four years past the period in which Koch had promised funding

Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.

In the last few years a growing number of billionaires have established their own private foundations. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full value of their contribution even though the foundation is only required to give away 5% of that endowment each year. Which means that for every $1 million contributed, which can mean a $500,000 loss to the public sector, the foundation must give away only $50,000.

Moreover, the billionaire has the right to decide where that money is spent.

The Gates Foundation and Public Education

The most dramatic example to date may be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates endowed the Foundation, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes and now heads the Foundation and decides how it spends its money.

The Gates Foundation originally gave its money to school districts to encourage smaller schools that have a better track record at improving student performance. But, says Allan C. Golston, President of the Foundation’s U.S. program, “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes. The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer”. In 2009 the Foundation gave almost $80 million for advocacy to influence the $600 billion various levels of government spend annually on education. In partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walmart Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation has become the dominant player in writing the rules for the future of public education.

The New York Times has reported on how astonishingly comprehensive and influential these Foundations’ campaigns have been.

The 2009 stimulus package included $6 billion to help the public education system. The Gates Foundation and its partners swung into action to make sure it was spent “correctly”. They were helped by the fact that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff and Assistant Deputy Secretary came from the Gates Foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving door policy limiting involvement with former employers.

Gates financed the New Teacher Project to issue and influential report detailing the flaws in existing evaluation systems. The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers developed the standards and Achieve, Inc. a non-profit organization coordinated the writing of tests aligned with the standards, each with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. The Alliance for Excellent Education received half a million “to grow support for the common core standards initiative”. The Fordham Institute received a million to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials”.

And when the rules were issued and the competition began, the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 to help each state apply so long as the state agreed with the Foundations’ market oriented approach.

And to educate the general public, the Foundation spent $2 million on a campaign focused on the film Waiting for Superman that demonized teachers’ unions.

Most charter schools, the preferred solution for Gates, Broad and the Walmart family, are non-profits. But they see no reason why they need to remain non-profits. A 2009 guide book by the Philanthropy Roundtable noted, “many education reformers believe that EMOs (profit oriented management companies) hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. If investors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achievement and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have discovered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schools specifically and public education generally.”

Today more than 700 public k-12 schools around the country are managed by for profit companies. In May, Ohio adopted legislation allowing for-profit-businesses to open their own taxpayer-financed charter schools, which led Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools to express his concern that this could “take the public out of public charter schools.”

In 2011 the Gates Foundation seems to have deepened its anti-government efforts, giving almost $400,000 to the conservatives’ legislative privatization network ALEC.

Warren Buffett is a major investor in the Gates Foundation. In 2011 he gave another $1.5 billion to the Foundation bringing the total to almost $10 billion so far.

Buffett is well known for writing and speaking about the unfairness of the tax system. He has signed on to an effort to force the 1% to pay a higher, not a lower tax rate than the 99%.

To date Buffett hasn’t been willing to give millions to underwrite a comprehensive campaign to convince legislators and the country to raise taxes on the rich. And the Gates Foundation hasn’t to my knowledge entertained the idea that it might spend $80 million on a campaign to increase the resources devoted to public education.

Eliminate the Charitable Giving Tax Deduction

In June 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, asking their wealthy compatriots to give away half or more of their wealth. Several dozen billionaires reportedly have signed on. Many will set up their own foundations and reap substantial tax benefits while retaining the right to decide where the money is invested. CPA Robert A. Green has estimated that this could result in $250 billion or more being diverted from the treasuries of state and federal governments.

We should eliminate the tax deduction for charities. The impact on giving will be modest while the savings to the public sector will be substantial.

A 2006 survey by the Bank of America found that over half of high-net-worth donors said their giving would stay the same, or even increase, if the tax deduction for charitable gifts fell to zero. The American Enterprise Institute notes “research shows that virtually no one is motivated meaningfully to give only because of our tax system.” Jack Shakely who ran the California Community Foundation for 25 years recently penned an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he noted that while the top tax bracket for individuals has plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 35% in 2003 (and according to the IRS the very rich are today taxed at an effective rate of 17 percent) charitable donations have remained almost constant, hovering between 1.7% and 1.95% of personal income per year.

This year governments may lose $50 billion or more because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector. We can’t stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes (although we should certainly enact laws to stop them from unduly influencing legislation and elections). But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.

David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minn., and director of its New Rules project.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Small Towns, Small Minds: Democracy Only Money Can Buy

Small Towns, Small Minds

excerpted from the book

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

by Greg Palast


p298
To understand what I mean, let's begin with this. The United States is ugly. A conspiracy of travel writers have sold the image of America the Beautiful: Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets over New Mexico's plateau, the wide-open vistas of the Grand Canyon. But to get there, you must drive through a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald's up to and . leaning over the Canyon wall.

From New Orleans jambalaya, to Harlem ham hocks, to New England crab boil, whatever is unique to an American region or town has been hunted down and herded into a few tourist preserves. The oppressive ubiquity of contrived American monoculture has ingested and eliminated any threat of character. The words of McDonald's late CEO Ray Kroc, ''We cannot trust some people who are nonconformists," have become our national anthem.

p299
The world's three hundred richest people are worth more than the world's poorest three billion.

p299
Dr. Edward Wolff, director of the Income Studies Project at the Jerome Levy Institute, New York, tells me that between 1983 and 1997, 85.5 percent of the vaunted increase in America's wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent. In that time, overall U.S. income rocketed-of which 80 percent of America's families received zero percent. The market's up, but who is the market? According to Wolff, the Gilded One Percent own $2.9 trillion of the nation's stocks and bonds out of a total $3.5 trillion.

Not coincidentally, the rise in the riches of the rich matches quite well with the wealth lost by production workers through the shrinking of their share of the production pie. U.S. workers are producing more per hour (up 17 percent since 1983) while keeping less of it (real wages are down 3.1 percent). So there you have it: The market did not rise on a bubble of fictions but on the rock-hard foundation of the spoils of the class war.

What's going on here? Let's start with computers. Forget Robert Reich's sweet notion that computers can make work more meaningful and worthwhile. The purpose of every industrial revolution, from the steam-powered loom to the assembly line, is to make craft and skills obsolete, and thereby make people interchangeable and cheap. And now, computerization is speeding the industrialization of service work.

p312
The United Kingdom has an Official Secrets Act, libel laws l that effectively privatize censorship of journalism, privacy laws protecting politicians-as do all nations in some form or other, except America. You may be surprised to learn that the mother of our Democracy has no legal freedom of the press, no First Amendment-no Bill of Rights. (Maybe they can borrow ours- we're not using it. And we may have no Official Secrets Act- yet-but we are on the cutting edge of creating an unofficial corporate secrets act.)

And that's why I'm so ornery about fighting for the First Amendment-which our president and bobbing heads in Congress would snatch from us in the name of "security." Just try working in a nation without the right to a free press, and worse, without the will to fight for it. I have. An unholy number of British journalists seem to have fallen in love with their shackles.

p313
Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day-that's one thousand libel notices a year... The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation.

p314
Truth alone is not a defense in English courts.

p331
[The USA], where nothing can be censored - but where nothing printed is worth censoring.


The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Index of Website

Home Page

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

Open Salon

The Lawless Lawyer

OCTOBER 4, 2011 11:32AM

Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

As the sensationalist trials of Amanda Knox come to a dramatic end in Italy, commentators are beginning to highlight the striking differences between the American and Italian legal systems. These differences meant that Knox's appeal played out as a fully new trial rather than an American-style bench review restricted largely to procedural challenges, allowing her to present new evidence of faulty DNA testing to a jury of fresh eyes. The Italian system also ensured that Knox received a sentence of 26 years for the sexual asault and murder of her roommate, a slap on the wrist by American standards. As other commentators have pointed out on Salon and in the New York Times, had Knox been falsely convicted in the United States, she could well have shared the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia two weeks ago after a conviction based solely on the testimony of witnesses who have since recanted.

But now that Knox's trial is over, and American legal commentators are largely in agreement that a wrong has been righted, the focus should turn to the glaring failures of the American system that are exposed by what went right in Knox's case. First, we should look at the failures of our appellate system, which are undeniable in light of a case like Knox's (or any case where a defendant is found guilty in spite of a dearth of evidence.) Knox's fate hinged on her ability to show a new, unbiased jury that the DNA evidence upon which she and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had been convicted was so flawed that it was thoroughly incredible. In contrast, a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts embeds in the American legal system the notion that defendants have no constitutional right to even test new DNA evidence that surfaces or becomes technologically available after a conviction. In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented when the Supreme Court stepped in to order new DNA testing in the Troy Davis case, arguing that "[T]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." (As noted above, Davis was eventually executed anyway; there is no scientific test to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony.)

In addition to scrutinizing our appellate system, which at least one Supreme Court justice believes does not guarantee the right of an innocent person to escape execution, Americans must have a conversation about the disproportionately long sentences meted out by our judicial system. The sentence lengths for almost all crimes, from drugs to murder, are unfathomable to most of the developed world. The United States incarcerates the highest percentage of its population of any country, and does so for such lengthy periods of time that states are beginning to open geriatric prisons focused on the health needs of the growing elderly prison population. But Knox's case is an excellent jumping off point in particular to highlight the sentences given to young people, even children. In Florida, prosecutors are attempting to charge 12-year-old Christian Fernandez as an adult for the murder of his 2-year-old brother, in spite of numerous factors in his case pointing to the need for leniency: the mother waited over six hours to bring her younger son to the hospital, and Christian's numerous behavior problems - including aggression toward his brother - did not stop his mother from leaving him alone with the younger boy . If convicted and sentenced to life, Christian could conceivably spend an astounding 90 years of his life behind bars. In 2010, the Supreme Court stepped in to bar states from handing out life sentences to juveniles for crimes other than murder; three justices, including Justice Scalia, dissented in full, and Chief Justice Roberts dissented in part. As a result of this ruling, over 100 children around the country were resentenced to shorter terms.

As Amanda Knox's appeal drew to a close, her alleged victim Meredith Kercher's family begged the media not to forget her. While there is no way to bring Kercher back to life, her memory can be honored by any justice done as a result of the steps - and grave missteps - taken to bring her killer to justice. The media should look beyond the Italian system, and beyond Amanda Knox herself, to put pressure on all legal systems to save innocent defendants and grieving families from the pain of a broken justice system. Regardless of differences of opinions regarding Knox's particular case, we can start by demanding justice right here at home.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

We Used to Be a Country; Now We’re a Staging Area

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


We Used to Be a Country; Now We’re a Staging Area

If any of us were wondering where the United States ranks, relative to the rest of the world, in the general category of “worker protection,” there is now a precise answer available—one supplied by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri (St. Louis), who based his findings on statistics supplied by OECD members.

The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) is a group of 34 comparatively “rich” industrialized nations that was founded in 1961 and whose stated purpose, more or less, is to meet semi-regularly to discuss ways of increasing economic progress through world trade. It might help to think of the OECD as an international version of the Chamber of Commerce. Its headquarters are in Paris, France.

The following countries are members of the OECD: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

So what did Professor Thomas learn from his survey? Where does the proud and accomplished United States rank? Shockingly, the U.S. not only finishes dead last overall, but in many of the specific categories (maternity leaves, medical leaves, education, etc.) we’re not even within shouting distance of the rest of the pack.

Now a sharp-eyed realist might attempt to mitigate these findings by arguing that getting beaten in these categories by Denmark, Sweden and Norway is no disgrace and certainly no surprise. After all, Scandinavia is/was known as a veritable “workers paradise.” But Estonia and Mexico? Chile and Slovenia? Surely, someone is joking.

But it’s no joke. Thomas shows that the U.S. not only lags well behind its fellow OECD members in worker protection, it even trails the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries in many areas. Among the categories considered in the OECD study: being fired unfairly, not receiving severance pay, not getting enough notice on mass layoffs, and the use of non-vested, non-permanent employees.

Arguably, the U.S. is undergoing a shift in self-identity. Instead of seeing ourselves, collectively, as a “country”—a society, a culture, a national community—we now see ourselves as nothing more than an economic arena—a gladiatorial arena where it’s every man for himself, where there are only winners and losers. And while no one knows how all of this will ultimately play out, it’s safe to say it will end badly for the majority (formerly known as “citizens”; now referred to as “losers”).

There are two (and only two) sources of worker protection: federal and state labor laws, and union contracts. In the absence of these two safeguards, it’s economic free-fall. As for our laws, they’re being tested and challenged every day by predatory corporations looking for shortcuts and loopholes. Making it worse, the courts and media reflexively defend these corporations. Meanwhile, the Democrats—labor’s putative “friends”—are terrified of doing anything that will make them look pro-labor.

Which leaves only the unions to provide a modicum of worker protection and dignity. And, as everyone knows, union membership now hovers at a mere 12.4%, down from a high of nearly 35% back in the glory days of the 1950s, when the middle-class was thriving and prosperous. Who would’ve thought it possible? Who would’ve dreamed the day would come when the American worker looked to Estonia for inspiration?

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), was a former union rep. He can be reached at: dmacaray@earthlink.net. Read other articles by David.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control




Updated: Today
Topic:

2012 Elections

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control, lab finds
iStockphoto/dcdp

It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab's scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton's demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system -- as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 -- relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team's attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine's proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive "alien electronics" into the machine.

The Argonne team's demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog [posted below]. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.

The new findings of the Vulnerability Assessment Team echo long-ignored concerns about e-voting vulnerabilities issued by other computer scientists and security experts, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security), and even a long-ignored presentation by a CIA official given to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"This is a national security issue," says Johnston. "It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security."

The use of touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems of the type Argonne demonstrated to be vulnerable to manipulation has declined in recent years due to security concerns, and the high cost of programming and maintenance. Nonetheless, the same type of DRE systems, or ones very similar, will once again be used by a significant part of the electorate on Election Day in 2012. According to Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, "About one-third of registered voters live where the only way to vote on Election Day is to use a DRE."

Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2012, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year's election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab.

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at "security by obscurity" largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.

"This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks]," says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. "There's a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed."

The team's video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a "bad guy" virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away.

"The cost of the attack that you're going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities," explains Warner in the video. "If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that's another $15. So the total cost would be $26."

The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well.

In what Warner describes as "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the intruder would allow the voter to make his or her selections. But when the voter actually attempts to push the Vote Now button, which records the voter's final selections to the system's memory card, he says, "we will simply intercept that attempt ... change a few of the votes," and the changed votes would then be registered in the machine.

"In order to do this," Warner explains, "we blank the screen temporarily so that the voter doesn't see that there's some revoting going on prior to the final registration of the votes."

This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as "correct" the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be "a high probability of being detected." But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine "sleepovers" when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are unguarded.

"The more realistic way to insert these alien electronics is to do it while the voting machines are waiting in the polling place a week or two prior to the election," Johnston said. "Often the polling places are in elementary schools or a church basement or some place that doesn't really have a great deal of security. Or the voting machines can be tampered while they're in transit to the polling place. Or while they're in storage in the warehouse between elections," says Johnston. He notes that the Argonne team had no owner's manual or circuit diagrams for either the Diebold or Sequoia voting systems they were able to access in these attacks.

The team members are critical of election security procedures, which rarely, if ever, include physical inspection of the machines, especially their internal electronics. Even if such inspections were carried out, however, the Argonne scientists say the type of attack they've developed leaves behind no physical or programming evidence, if properly executed.

"The really nice thing about this attack, the man-in-the-middle, is that there's no soldering or destruction of the circuit board of any kind," Warner says. "You can remove this attack and leave no forensic evidence that we've been there."

Gaining access to the inside of the Diebold touch-screen is as simple as picking the rudimentary lock, or using a standard hotel minibar key, as all of the machines use the same easily copied key, available at most office supply stores.

"I think our main message is, let's not get overly transfixed on the cyber," team leader Johnston says. Since he believes they "can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine," he recommends a number of improvements for future e-voting systems.

"The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them," he says. " If you're just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example."

"Don't do things like use a standard blank key for every machine," he warns. "Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock. You don't have to have state of the art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in."

------------

The video demonstration and explanation of the Diebold "Man-in-the-Middle" attack, as developed by Argonne National Lab's Vulnerability Assessment Team, follows below. Their related attack on a Sequoia voting system can be viewed here.


"Official Culture" in America: A Natural State of Psychopathy



Studies in Psychopathy




THE PSYCHOPATH - The Mask of Sanity

Special Research Project of the Quantum Future School


Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?

What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?

The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. [...]

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.

If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. [...]

Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 4 percent of the population....

The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated a 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality. The high-profile disorders classed as schizophrenia occur in only about 1 percent of [the population] - a mere quarter of the rate of antisocial personality - and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the rate of colon cancer in the United States, considered "alarmingly high," is about 40 per 100,000 - one hundred times lower than the rate of antisocial personality.

The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 4 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.

Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system.

We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.

Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish.

Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person.

Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.

The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender.

What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference betwen an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity.

What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. [Martha Stout, Ph.D., The Sociopath Next Door] (highly recommended)


For those of you who are seeking understanding of psychopathy, Hervey Cleckley's book The Mask of Sanity, the absolutely essential study of the psychopath who is not necessarily of the criminal type. This book is no longer available. We have it scanned and our team of researchers spent two weeks going over the text carefully to eliminate text conversion errors. You may download the entire book FREE as a PDF from the link at left, top. (Read A Sample Chapter of The Mask of Sanity)

"Likeable," "Charming," "Intelligent," "Alert," "Impressive," "Confidence-inspiring," and "A great success with the ladies": These are the sorts of descriptions repeatedly used by Cleckley in his famous case-studies of psychopaths. They are also, of course, "irresponsible," "self-destructive," and the like. These descriptions highlight the great frustrations and puzzles that surround the study of psychopathy.

Psychopaths seem to have in abundance the very traits most desired by normal persons. The untroubled self-confidence of the psychopath seems almost like an impossible dream and is generally what "normal" people seek to acquire when they attend assertiveness training classes. In many instances, the magnetic attraction of the psychopath for members of the opposite sex seems almost supernatural.

Cleckley's seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a very real mental illness indeed: a profound and incurable affective deficit. If he really feels anything at all, they are emotions of only the shallowest kind. He does bizarre and self-destructive things because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience.

Cleckley also gives grounds for the view that psychopathy is quite common in the community at large. He has collected some cases of psychopaths who generally function normally in the community as businessmen, doctors, and even psychiatrists. Some researchers see criminal psychopathy - often referred to as anti-social personality disorder - as an extreme of a "normal" personality dimension (or dimensions).

We would characterize criminal psychopaths as "unsuccessful psychopaths." The implication, of course, is that many psychopaths may exist in society who cope better than do those who come to the attention of the judicial and welfare systems.

Harrington goes so far as to say that the psychopath is the new man being produced by the evolutionary pressures of modern life. Other researchers criticize this view, pointing out the real disabilities that the clinical psychopath also suffers.

The study of "ambulatory" psychopaths - what we call "The Garden Variety Psychopath" - has, however, hardly begun. Very little is known about subcriminal psychopathy. However, some researchers have begun to seriously consider the idea that it is important to study psychopathy not as an artificial clinical category but as a general personality trait in the community at large. In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human.

One very interesting aspect of the psychopath is his "hidden life" that is sometimes not too well hidden. It seems that the psychopath has a regular need to take a "vacation into filth and degradation" the same way normal people may take a vacation to a resort where they enjoy beautiful surroundings and culture. To get a full feeling for this strange "need" of the psychopath - a need that seems to be evidence that "acting human" is very stressful to the psychopath - read more of The Mask of Sanity, chapters 25 and 26.

Also, read Cleckley's speculations on what was "really wrong" with these people. He comes very close to suggesting that they are human in every respect - but that they lack a soul. This lack of "soul quality" makes them very efficient "machines." They can be brilliant, write scholarly works, imitate the words of emotion, but over time, it becomes clear that their words do not match their actions. They are the type of person who can claim that they are devastated by grief who then attend a party "to forget." The problem is: they really DO forget.

Being very efficient machines, like a computer, they are able to execute very complex routines designed to elicit from others support for what they want. In this way, many psychopaths are able to reach very high positions in life. It is only over time that their associates become aware of the fact that their climb up the ladder of success is predicated on violating the rights of others."Even when they are indifferent to the rights of their associates, they are often able to inspire feelings of trust and confidence."

The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change.


Psychopaths In the New Age

At the present time, there is a veritable explosion of reports from our readers about their experiences with individuals they have encountered in the "alternative research" fields, as well as in general interactions of their lives. What is so shocking is the number of such individuals that must exist, based on these reports. This is not just an occasional event, it seems to be almost a pandemic!

Our research team and egroup have been engaged for some time in researching and analyzing these interactions and the characteristics and the dynamics and the personalities. Our research has led us to identify them with "Psychopaths." They can also be Narcissists since Narcissism seems to be merely a "facet" of the psychopath or a "milder" manifestation. You could say that the Narcissist is a "garden variety psychopath" who, because of his or her "social programming," has less likelihood of running afoul of the law. In this way, they are very efficient "survival machines," living out their lives doing untold damage to their families, friends and business associates.

It is only when a person takes a long and careful look at the full-blown psychopath - a sort of exaggerated Narcissist - that they are able to see the caricature of the traits that then make it easier for them to identify the "garden variety" psychopath - and/or the Narcissist.

Our world seems to have been invaded by individuals whose approach to life and love is so drastically different from what has been the established norm for a very long time that we are ill- prepared to deal with their tactics of what Robert Canup calls "plausible lie." As he demonstrates, this philosophy of the "plausible lie" has overtaken the legal and administrative domains of our world, turning them into machines in which human beings with real emotions are destroyed.

The recent movie, "The Matrix," touched a deep chord in society because it exemplified this mechanistic trap in which so many people find their lives enmeshed, and from which they are unable to extricate themselves because they believe that everyone around them who "looks human" is, in fact, just like them - emotionally, spiritually, and otherwise.

Take, for example, the "legal argument" as explicated by Robert Canup in his work on the "Socially Adept Psychopath." The legal argument seems to be at the foundation of our society. This amounts to little more than con-artistry: the one who is the slickest at using the structure for convincing a group of people of something, is the one who is believed. Because this "legal argument" system has been slowly installed as part of our culture, when it invades our personal lives, we normally do not recognize it immediately.

Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other human beings are - at the very least - trying to "do right" and "be good" and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a person who has entered our life is, in fact, a "good person." And when a conflict ensues, we automatically fall into the cultural assumption that in any conflict, one side is partly right one way, and the other is partly right the other, and that we can form opinions about which side is mostly right or wrong. Because of our exposure to the "legal argument" norms, when any dispute arises, we automatically think that the truth will lie somewhere between two extremes. In this case, application of a little mathematical logic to the problem of the legal argument might be helpful.

Let us assume that in a dispute, one side is innocent, honest, and tells the truth. It is obvious that lying does an innocent person no good; what lie can he tell? If he is innocent, the only lie he can tell is to falsely confess "I did it." But lying is nothing but good for the liar. He can declare that "I didn't do it," and accuse another of doing it, all the while the innocent person he has accused is saying "I didn't do it," and is actually telling the truth.

The truth - when twisted by good liars, can always make an innocent person look bad - especially if the innocent person is honest and admits his mistakes.

The basic assumption that the truth lies between the testimony of the two sides always shifts the advantage to the lying side and away from the side telling the truth. Under most circumstances, this shift put together with the fact that the truth is going to also be twisted in such a way as to bring detriment to the innocent person, results in the advantage always resting in the hands of liars - psychopaths. Even the simple act of giving testimony under oath is useless. If a person is a liar, swearing an oath means nothing to that person. However, swearing an oath acts strongly on a serious, truthful witness. Again, the advantage is placed on the side of the liar. [Robert Canup]

This highlights one of the unique things about the psychopath: their seeming inability to conceive of the abstract idea of "the future."

It has often been noted that psychopaths have a distinct advantage over human beings with conscience and feelings because the psychopath does not have conscience and feelings. What seems to be so is that conscience and feelings are related to the abstract concepts of "future" and "others." It is "spatio-temporal." We can feel fear, sympathy, empathy, sadness, and so on because we can IMAGINE in an abstract way, the future based on our own experiences in the past, or even just "concepts of experiences" in myriad variations. We can "predict" how others will react because we are able to "see ourselves" in them even though they are "out there" and the situation is somewhat different externally, though similar in dynamic. In other words, we can not only identify with others spatially - so to say - but also temporally - in time.

The psychopath does not seem to have this capacity.

They are unable to "imagine" in the sense of being able to really connect to images in a direct "self connecting to another self" sort of way.

Oh, indeed, they can imitate feelings, but the only real feelings they seem to have - the thing that drives them and causes them to act out different dramas for effect - is a sort of "predatorial hunger" for what they want. That is to say, they "feel" need/want as love, and not having their needs/wants met is described as "not being loved" by them. What is more, this "need/want" perspective posits that only the "hunger" of the psychopath is valid, and anything and everything "out there," outside of the psychopath, is not real except insofar as it has the capability of being assimilated to the psychopath as a sort of "food." "Can it be used or can it provide something?" is the only issue about which the psychopath seems to be concerned. All else - all activity - is subsumed to this drive.

In short, the psychopath - and the narcissist to a lesser extent - is a predator. If we think about the interactions of predators with their prey in the animal kingdom, we can come to some idea of what is behind the "mask of sanity" of the psychopath. Just as an animal predator will adopt all kinds of stealthy functions in order to stalk their prey, cut them out of the herd, get close to them and reduce their resistance, so does the psychopath construct all kinds of elaborate camoflage composed of words and appearances - lies and manipulations - in order to "assimilate" their prey.

This leads us to an important quesion: what does the psychopath REALLY get from their victims? It's easy to see what they are after when they lie and manipulate for money or material goods or power. But in many instances, such as love relationships or faked friendships, it is not so easy to see what the psychopath is after. Without wandering too far afield into spiritual speculations - a problem Cleckley also faced - we can only say that it seems to be that the psychopath ENJOYS making others suffer. Just as normal humans enjoy seeing other people happy, or doing things that make other people smile, the psychopath enjoys the exact opposite.

Anyone who has ever observed a cat playing with a mouse before killing and eating it has probably explained to themselves that the cat is just "entertained" by the antics of the mouse and is unable to conceive of the terror and pain being experienced by the mouse, and the cat, therefore, is innocent of any evil intent. The mouse dies, the cat is fed, and that is nature. Psychopaths don't generally eat their victims.

Yes, in extreme cases the entire cat and mouse dynamic is carried out and cannibalism has a long history wherein it was assumed that certain powers of the victim could be assimilated by eating some particular part of them. But in ordinary life, psychopaths and narcissists don't go all the way, so to say. This causes us to look at the cat and mouse scenarios again with different eyes. Now we ask: is it too simplistic to think that the innocent cat is merely entertained by the mouse running about and frantically trying to escape? Is there something more to this dynamic than meets the eye? Is there something more than being "entertained" by the antics of the mouse trying to flee? After all, in terms of evolution, why would such behavior be hard-wired into the cat? Is the mouse tastier because of the chemicals of fear that flood his little body? Is a mouse frozen with terror more of a "gourmet" meal?

This suggests that we ought to revisit our ideas about psychopaths with a slightly different perspective. One thing we do know is this: many people who experience interactions with psychopaths and narcissists report feeling "drained" and confused and often subsequently experience deteriorating health. Does this mean that part of the dynamic, part of the explanation for why psychopaths will pursue "love relationships" and "friendships" that ostensibly can result in no observable material gain, is because there is an actual energy consumption?

We do not know the answer to this question. We observe, we theorize, we speculate and hypothesize. But in the end, only the individual victim can determine what they have lost in the dynamic - and it is often far more than material goods. In a certain sense, it seems that psychopaths are soul eaters or "Psychophagic."

Conscience seems to depend on the ability to imagine consequences. But most "consequences" relate to pain in some way, and psychopaths really don't understand pain in the emotional sense. They understand frustration of not getting what they want, and to them, that is pain. But the fact seems to be that they act based solely on a sort of Game Theory evaluation of a situation: what will they get out of it, and what will it cost? And these "costs" have nothing to do with being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging the future, or any of the other possibilities that normal people consider when making a choice. In short, it is almost impossible for normal people to even imagine the inner life of the psychopath.

This leads us to what psychopaths DO have that is truly outstanding: an ability to give their undivided attention to something that interests them intensely. Some clinicians have compared this to the concentration with which a predator stalks his prey. This is useful if one is in an environment with few variables, but most real life situations require us to pay attention to a number of things at once. Psychopaths often pay so much attention to getting what they want that they fail to notice danger signals.

For example, some psychopaths earned reputations for being fearless fighter pilots during World War II, staying on their targets like terriers on an ankle. Yet, these pilots often failed to keep track of such unexciting details as fuel supply, altitude, location, and the position of other planes. Sometimes they became heroes, but more often, they were killed or became known as opportunists, loners, or hotshots who couldn't be relied on - except to take care of themselves. [Hare]

It should be emphasized that psychopaths are interesting as all get out - even exciting! They exude a captivating energy that keeps their listeners on the edge of their seats. Even if some part of the normal person is shocked or repelled by what the psychopath says, they are like the mouse hypnotized by the torturing cat. Even if they have the chance to run away, they don't. Many Psychopaths "make their living" by using charm, deceit, and manipulation to gain the confidence of their victims. Many of them can be found in white collar professions where they are aided in their evil by the fact that most people expect certain classes of people to be trustworthy because of their social or professional credentials. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, generally do not have to earn our trust because they have it by virtue of their positions. But the fact is: psychopaths are found in such lofty spheres also!

At the same time, psychopaths are good imposters. They have absolutely no hesitation about forging and brazenly using impressive credentials to adopt professional roles that bring prestige and power. They pick professions in which the requisite skills are easy to fake, the jargon is easy to learn, and the credentials are unlikely to be thoroughly checked. Psychopaths find it extremely easy to pose as financial consultants, ministers, psychological counselors and psychologists. And that's a scary thought.

Psychopaths make their way by conning people into doing things for them; obtaining money for them, prestige, power, or even standing up for them when others try to expose them. But that is their claim to fame. That's what they do. And they do it very well. What's more, the job is very easy because most people are gullible with an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of man.

Manipulation is the key to the psychopath's conquests. Initially, the psychopath will feign false emotions to create empathy, and many of them study the tricks that can be employed by the empathy technique. Psychopaths are often able to incite pity from people because they seem like "lost souls" as Guggenbuhl-Craig writes. So the pity factor is one reason why victims often fall for these "poor" people.

Psychologist Robert Hare cites a famous case where a psychopath was "Man of the Year" and president of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town. (Remember that John Wayne Gacy was running for Jaycee President at the very time of his first murder conviction!) The man in question had claimed to have a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He ran for a position on the school board which he then planned to parlay into a position on the county commission which paid more.

At some point, a local reporter suddenly had the idea to check up on the guy - to see if his credentials were real. What the reporter found out was that the only thing that was true about this up and coming politician's "faked bio" was the place and date of birth. Everything else was fictitious. Not only was the man a complete impostor, he had a long history of antisocial behavior, fraud, impersonation, and imprisonment. His only contact with a university was a series of extension courses by mail that he took while in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. What is even more amazing is the fact that before he was a con-man, he was a "con-boy." For two decades he had dodged his way across America one step ahead of those he had hoodwinked. Along the way he had married three women and had four children, and he didn't even know what had happened to them. And now, he was on a roll! But darn that pesky reporter!

When he was exposed, he was completely unconcerned. "These trusting people will stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people," he said. Amazingly, he was right. Far from being outraged at the fact that they had all been completely deceived and lied to from top to bottom, the local community he had conned so completely to accrue benefits and honors to himself that he had not earned, rushed to his support!

I kid you not! And it wasn't just "token support." The local Republican party chairman wrote about him: "I assess his genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln." As Hare dryly notes, this dimwit was easily swayed by words, and was blind to deeds.

What kind of psychological weaknesses drive people to prefer lies over truth?

This may have something to do with what is called Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger developed the theory of Cognitive Dissonance in the 50's when he apparently stumbled onto a UFO cult in the Midwest. They were prophesying a coming world cataclysm and "alien rapture." When no one was raptured and no cataclysm he studied the believers response, and detailed it in his book "When Prophecy Fails." Festinger observed:

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

But man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

It seems that part of the problem has to do with ego and the need to be "right." People with a high "need to be right" or "perfect" seem to be unable to acknowledge that they have been conned. "There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker." People will go along with and support a psychopath, in the face of evidence that they have and ARE being conned, because their own ego structure depends on being right, and to admit an error of judgment would destroy their carefully constructed image of themselves.

Even more amazing is the fact that when psychopaths do get exposed by someone who is not afraid to admit that they have been conned, the psychopath is a master at painting their victims as the "real culprits." Hare cites a case of the third wife of a forty year old high school teacher:

For five years he cheated on me, kept me living in fear, and forged checks on my personal bank account. But everyone, including my doctor and lawyer and my friends, blamed me for the problem. He had them so convinced that he was a great guy and that I was going mad, I began to believe it myself. Even when he cleaned out my bank account and ran off with a seventeen-year-old student, a lot of people couldn't believe it, and some wanted to know what I had done to make him act so strangely!

Psychopaths just have what it takes to defraud and bilk others: they can be fast talkers, they can be charming, they can be self-assured and at ease in social situations; they are cool under pressure, unfazed by the possibility of being found out, and totally ruthless. And even when they are exposed, they can carry on as if nothing has happened, often making their accusers the targets of accusations of being victimized by THEM.

I was once dumbfounded by the logic of an inmate who described his murder victim as having benefited from the crime by learning "a hard lesson about life." [Hare]

The victims keep asking: "How could I have been so stupid? How could I have fallen for that incredible line of baloney?" And, of course, if they don't ask it of themselves, you can be sure that their friends and associates will ask "How on earth could you have been taken in to that extent?"

The usual answer: "You had to be there" simply does not convey the whole thing. Hare writes:

What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out.

But there is something else about the speech of psychopaths that is equally puzzling: their frequent use of contradictory and logically inconsistent statements that usually escape detection. Recent research on the language of psychopaths provides us with some important clues to this puzzle, as well as to the uncanny ability psychopaths have to move words - and people- around so easily. […]

Here are some examples:

When asked if he had ever committed a violent offense, a man serving time for theft answered, "No, but I once had to kill someone."

A woman with a staggering record of fraud, deceit, lies, and broken promises concluded a letter to the parole board with, "I've let a lot of people down… One is only as good as her reputation and name. My word is as good as gold."

A man serving a term for armed robbery replied to the testimony of an eyewitness, "He's lying. I wasn't there. I should have blown his fucking head off."

From an interview with serial killer Elmer Wayne Henley:

Interviewer: "You make it out that you're the victim of a serial killer, but if you look at the record you're a serial killer."
Henley: "I'm not."
I: "You're not a serial killer?"
H: "I'm not a serial killer."
I: You're saying you're not a serial killer now, but you've serially killed."
H: "Well, yeah, that's semantics."

And so on. The point that the researchers noted was that psychopaths seem to have trouble monitoring their own speech. What is more, they often put things together in strange ways, such as this series of remarks from serial killer Clifford Olson: "And then I had annual sex with her." "Once a year?" "No. Annual. From behind." "Oh. But she was dead!" "No, no. She was just unconscientious." About his many experiences, Olson said, "I've got enough antidotes to fill five or six books - enough for a trilogy." He was determined not to be an "escape goat" no matter what the "migrating facts." [Hare, Without Conscience]

Those of us who have had experiences with psychopaths know that the language of the psychopath is two-dimensional. They are, as someone once said, as "deep as a thimble." An analogy is given of the psychopath as a color blind person who has learned how to function in the world of color by special strategies. They may tell you that they "stopped at a red light," but what it really means to them is that they knew that the light at the top means "stop," and they stopped. They call it the "red" light like everyone else, but they have no experience of what "red" really is.

A person who is color blind who has developed such coping mechanisms, is virtually undetectable from people who see colors.

Psychopaths use words about emotions the same way people who are color blind use words about colors they cannot perceive. Psychopaths not only learn to use the words more or less appropriately, they learn to pantomime the feeling. But they never HAVE the feeling.

This quality of the mind of the psychopath has been extensively tested with word association tests while the subjects are hooked up to an EEG. Words that have emotional content evoke larger brain responses than do neutral words which is apparently a reflection of the large amount of information that can be packed into a word. For most of us, the word cancer can instantly bring to mind not only the description of the disease, but also fear, pain, concern, or whatever, depending upon our experiences with cancer - whether we or someone we love has had it, or if it had some impact on our lives, and so on. The same is true with many words in our collective and individual vocabularies. And, unless we had a traumatic experience with it, a word such as box or paper will be neutral.

Psychopaths respond to all emotional words as if they were neutral. It is as if they are permanently condemned to operate with a Juvenile Dictionary. Hare writes:

Earlier I discussed the role of "inner speech" in the development and operation of conscience. It is the emotionally charged thoughts, images, and internal dialogue that give the "bite" to conscience, account for its powerful control over behavior, and generate guilt and remorse for transgressions. This is something that psychopaths cannot understand. For them, conscience is little more than an intellectual awareness of rules others make up - empty words. The feelings needed to give clout to these rules are missing.

What is more, just as the color blind individual may never know he is color blind unless he is given a test to determine it, the psychopath is unable to even be aware of his own emotional poverty. They assume that their own perceptions are the same as everyone else's. They assume that their own lack of feeling is the same for everyone else. And make no mistake about it: you can NOT hurt their feelings because they don't have any! They will pretend to have feelings if it suits their purposes or gets them what they want. They will verbalize remorse, but their actions will contradict their words. They know that "remorse" is important, and "apologies" are useful, and they will give them freely, though generally in words that amount to blaming the victim for needing to be apologized to.

And this is why they are so good at using Game Theory. And unless we learn the rules of how they think, they will continue to use it on us with devastating results. Normal people HURT when treated cruelly and insensitively. Psychopaths only feign being hurt because they perceive hurt as not getting what they wanted, and tried to get by manipulation!

In the book Violent Attachments, women and men have noted the particular stare of the psychopath - it is an intense, relentless gaze that seems to preclude his destruction of his victim or target. Women, in particular, have reported this stare, which is related to the "predatorial" (reptilian) gaze; it is as if the psychopath is directing all of his intensity toward you through his eyes, a sensation that one woman reported as a feeling of "being eaten." They tend to invade peoples' space either by their sudden intrusions or intimidating look-overs (which some women confuse for sexuality.)

Another extremely interesting study had to do with the way psychopaths move their hands when they speak. Hand movement can tell researchers a lot about what are called "thought units." The studies indicate that psychopaths' thoughts and ideas are organized into small mental packages. This is handy for lying, but makes dealing with an overall, coherent, integrated complex of deep thoughts virtually impossible.

Most people are able to combine ideas that have consistent thought themes, but psychopaths have great difficulty doing this. Again, this suggests a genetic restriction to what we have called the Juvenile Dictionary. Not only are they using extremely restricted definitions, they cannot, by virtue of the way their brains work, do otherwise. Virtually all of the research on psychopaths reveals an inner world that is banal, sophomoric, and devoid of the color and detail that generally exists in the inner world of normal people. This goes a long way to explain the inconsistencies and contradictions in their speech.

The situation is analogous to a movie in which one scene is shot under cloudy conditions and the next scene - which supposedly takes place a few minutes later - is shot in brilliant sunshine. […] Some moviegoers - the victims of psychopaths - might not notice the discrepancy, particularly if they are engrossed in the action.

Psychopaths are notorious for not answering the questions asked them. They will answer something else, or in such a way that the direct question is never addressed. They also phrase things so that some parts of their narratives are difficult to understand. This is not careless speech, of which everyone is guilty at times, but an ongoing indication of the underlying condition in which the organization of mental activity suggests something is wrong. It's not what they say, but how they say it that gives insight into their true nature.

But this raises, again, the question: if their speech is so odd, how come smart people get taken in by them? Why do we fail to pick up the inconsistencies?

Part of the answer is that the oddities are subtle so that our general listening mode will not normally pick them up. But my own experience is that some of the "skipped" or oddly arranged words, or misused words are automatically reinterpreted by OUR brains in the same way we automatically "fill in the blank" space on a neon sign when one of the letters has gone out. We can be driving down the road at night, and ahead we see M_tel, and we mentally put the "o" in place and read "Motel." Something like this happens between the psychopath and the victim. We fill in the "missing humanness" by filling in the blanks with our own assumptions, based on what WE think and feel and mean. And, in this way, because there are these "blank" spots, we fill them in with what is inside us, and thus we are easily convinced that the psychopath is a great guy - because he is just like us! We have been conditioned to operate on trust, and we always try to give the "benefit of the doubt." So, there are blanks, we "give the benefit of the doubt," and we are thereby hoisted on our own petard.

Psychopaths view any social exchange as a "feeding opportunity," a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse. [Hare]

One psychopath interviewed by Hare's team said quite frankly: "The first thing I do is I size you up. I look for an angle, an edge, figure out what you need and give it to you. Then it's pay-back time, with interest. I tighten the screws." Another psychopath admitted that he never targeted attractive women - he was only interested in those who were insecure and lonely. He claimed he could smell a needy person "the way a pig smells truffles."

The callous use of the old, the lonely, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, is a trademark of the psychopath. And when any of them wake up to what is happening, they are generally too embarrassed to complain.

One of the chief ways psychopaths prey on others is to make use of the normal person's need to find meaning or purpose in life. They will pose as grief counselors, or "experts" of various sorts that attract followings of people who are looking for answers. They are masters of recognizing "hang-ups" and self-doubts that most people have, and they will brazenly pander to them to gain a follower to use later. Hare tells of a staff psychologist in a mental hospital whose life was destroyed by a psychopathic patient. He cleaned out her bank account, maxed out her credit cards, and then disappeared. How did he get to her? She said that her life had been "empty" and she had just simply succumbed to his sweet words and verbal caresses. As we already know, such words are cheap legal tender to the psychopath. They can say "I'll pray for you," or "I love you" just to create an impression. It really, really doesn't mean a thing. But some people are so lonely and so desperate that even imitations are better than nothing.

Then, of course, there are people who are just simply so psychologically damaged themselves that the psychopath is the obvious choice for a partner. They may have a need to be treated badly, or a need to be excited by danger, or a need to "rescue" or "fix" somebody whose soul is in obvious peril.

In a book about Richard Ramirez, the Satan-worshipping "night Stalker," the author described a young coed who sat through the pretrial hearings and sent love letters and photographs of herself to Ramirez. "I feel such compassion for him. When I look at him, I see a real handsome guy who just messed up his life because he never had anyone to guide him," she is reported to have said. [Hare]

Sadly, as we see, psychopaths have no lack of victims because so many people are ready and willing to play the role. And in many, many cases, the victim simply refuses to believe the evidence that they are being victimized. Psychological denial screens out knowledge that is painful, and persons with large investments in their fantasies are often unable to acknowledge that they are being deceived because it it too painful. Most often, these are women who rigidly adhere to the traditional role of the female with a strong sense of duty to be a "good wife." She will believe that if she tries harder or simply waits it out, her husband will reform. When he ignores her, abuses her, cheats on her, or uses her, she can simply just decide to "try harder, put more energy into the relationship, and take better care of him." She believes that if she does this, eventually he will notice and will see how valuable she is, and then he will fall on his knees in gratitude and treat her like a queen.

Dream on.

The fact is, such a woman, with her fierce commitment to such a man, her dedication to being a proper wife, has allowed such fairy tales to distort her sense of reality. The reality is that she is doomed to a lifetime of abuse and disappointment until "death do us part."

One of the basic assumptions of psychotherapy is that the patient needs and wants help for distressing or painful psychological and emotional problems. The psychopath does not think that they have any psychological or emotional problems, and they see no reason to change their behavior to conform to standards with which they do not agree. They are well-satisfied with themselves and their inner landscape. They see nothing wrong with they way they think or act, and they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile world in which others are competitors for power and resources. They feel it is the optimum thing to do to manipulate and deceive others in order to obtain what they want.

Most therapy programs only provide them with new excuses for their behavior as well as new insights into the vulnerabilities of others. Through psychotherapy, they learn new and better ways of manipulating. What they do NOT do is make any effort to change their own views and attitudes.

One particular psychopath studied by Hare and his team of researchers was in a group therapy program in a prison. The prison psychiatrist had written in his record: "He has made good progress… He appears more concerned about others and to have lost much of his criminal thinking."

Two years later, Hare's staff member interviewed the man. At this point, it ought to be made clear that, in order to make the research more accurate, the terms were that nothing said by the subjects to Hare or his staff could or would be repeated to the prison authorities, and they kept to their agreement in order to insure that the subjects felt free to talk to them. Psychopaths, if they know that they won't be penalized for what they express, are very happy to boast about their prowess in deceiving others. The man, assessed above by his prison psychiatrist as having made such remarkable improvement, was described by Hare's staffer as "the most terrifying offender she had ever met and that he openly boasted about how he had conned the prison staff into thinking that he was well on the road to rehabilitation. "I can't believe those guys," he said. "Who gave them a license to practice? I wouldn't let them psychoanalyze my dog! He'd shit all over them just like I did."

Psychopaths are not "fragile" individuals, as Robert Hare says after years of research. What they think and do is produced from a "rock solid personality structure that is extremely resistant to outside influences." Many of them are protected for years from the consequences of their behavior by well-meaning family and friends. As long as their behavior remains unchecked or unpunished, they continue to go through life without too much inconvenience.

Some researchers think that psychopathy is the result of some attachment or bonding difficulty as an infant. Dr. Hare has turned the idea around, after all his years digging into the background of psychopaths. He says:

In some children the very failure to bond is a symptom of psychopathy. It is likely that these children lack the capacity to bond readily, and that their lack of attachment is largely the result, not the cause, of psychopathy. [Hare]

In other words: they are born that way and you can't fix them.

To many people, the idea of a child psychopath is almost unthinkable. But the fact is, true psychopaths are born, not made. Oh, indeed, there is the psychopath that is "made," but they are generally different from the born psychopath in a number of ways.

The fact is, clinical research clearly demonstrates that psychopathy does not spring unannounced into existence in adulthood. The symptoms reveal themselves in early life. It seems to be true that parents of psychopaths KNOW something is dreadfully wrong even before the child starts school. Such children are stubbornly immune to socializing pressures. They are "different" from other children in inexplicable ways. They are more "difficult," or "willful," or aggressive, or hard to "relate to." They are difficult to get close to, cold and distant and self-sufficient.

One mother said: "We were never able to get close to her even as an infant. She was always trying to have her own way, whether by being sweet, or by having a tantrum. She can put on a sweet and contrite act…"

The fact is: childhood psychopathy is a stark reality, and failing to recognize it can lead to years of vain attempts to discover what is wrong with a child, and the parent blaming themselves. Hare writes:

As the signs of social breakdown grow more insistent, we no longer have the luxury of ignoring the presence of psychopathy in certain children. Half a century ago Hervey Cleckley and Robert Lindner warned us that our failure to acknowledge the psychopaths among us had already triggered a social crisis. Today our social institutions - our schools, courts, mental health clinics - confront the crisis every day in a thousand ways, and the blindfold against the reality of psychopathy is still in place.[…]

The last decade has seen the emergence of an inescapable and terrifying reality: a dramatic surge of juvenile crime that threatens to overwhelm our social institutions. […] Children under the age of ten who are capable of the sort of mindless violence that once was reserved for hardened adult criminals. […] At this writing, a small town in a western state is frantically searching for ways to deal with a nine-year-old who allegedly rapes and molests other children at knife point. He is too young to be charged and cannot be taken into care because "such action may only be taken when the child is in danger, not his victims," according to a child protection official. [Hare]

Why does it seem that we have a veritable epidemic of psychopaths? Sociobiologists are suggesting that increasing psychopathy is an expression of a particular genetically based reproductive strategy. Simply put, most people have a couple of children and devote a lot of time and effort to their care. Psychopaths systematically mate with and abandon large numbers of women. They waste little of their energy raising children, and in this way, psychopathic genes are being propagated like wildfire. The sociobiologists aren't saying that the sexual behavior of people is consciously directed, only that "nature" has made them a certain way so that it will happen effectively.

The behavior of female psychopaths reflects the same strategy. "I can always have another," one female psychopath coldly replied when questioned about an incident in which her two-year-old daughter was beaten to death by one of her many lovers. When asked why she would want to have another child, (two had been taken into protective custody), she said "I love children." Again we see that the expressed emotion is in contradiction to the behavior.

Cheating skills seem to have an adaptive value in our society. The fact is: psychopaths often end up on the top of the heap, John Forbes Nash, for example.

At the present time, there is something very scary going on in the metaphysical community: talk about the so-called "Indigo Children." One of the chief promoters of this idea, Wendy Chapman, writes:

Indigo Children are the current generation being born today and most of those who are 8 years old or younger. They are different. They have very unique characteristics that set them apart from previous generations of children. [...]

These are the children who are often rebellious to authority, nonconformist, extremely emotionally and sometimes physically sensitive or fragile, highly talented or academically gifted and often metaphysically gifted as well, usually intuitive, very often labeled ADD, either very empathic and compassionate OR very cold and callous, and are wise beyond their years. Does this sound like yourself or your child?

Indigos have come into this world with difficult challenges to overcome. Their extreme levels of sensitivity are hard to understand and appreciate by parents who don't share this trait. Their giftedness is unusual in such high numbers. Their nonconformity to systems and to discipline will make it difficult to get through their childhood years and perhaps even their adult years. It is also what will help them accomplish big goals such as changing the educational system, for instance. Being an Indigo won't be easy for any of them, but it foretells a mission. The Indigo Children are the ones who have come to raise the vibration of our planet! These are the primary ones who will bring us the enlightenment to ascend.

Sounds like a severe case of denial and wishful thinking, in my opinion. But, as we already understand the psychological reality is merely a tool for the Theological Reality, I suspect that the reader already has jumped ahead of me here and realizes what a big snow-job this "indigo children" deal is. Ms. Chapman has kindly provided a check-list to determine an "indigo child." After learning what we have about psychopaths, let's have a look at her list:

Have strong self esteem, connection to source
Know they belong here until they are told otherwise
Have an obvious sense of self
Have difficulty with discipline and authority
Refuse to follow orders or directions
Find it torture to waiting in lines, lack patience
Get frustrated by ritual-oriented systems that require little creativity
Often see better ways of doing thing at home and at school
Are mostly nonconformists
Do not respond to guilt trips, want good reasons
Get bored rather easily with assigned tasks
Are rather creative
Are easily distractible, can do many things at once
Display strong intuition
Have strong empathy for others or NO empathy
Develop abstract thinking very young
Are gifted and/or talented, highly intelligent
Are often identified or suspected of having ADD or ADHD, but can focus when they want to
Are talented daydreamers and visionaries
Have very old, deep, wise looking eyes
Have spiritual intelligence and/or psychic skills
Often express anger outwardly rather than inwardly and may have trouble with rage
Need our support to discover themselves
Are here to change the world - to help us live in greater harmony and peace with one another and to raise the vibration of the planet

What we see above is a list that includes certain definitely psychopathic behaviors along with behaviors of gifted children. We have to wonder at the attempt to weave the two together.

Where did this idea of "Indigo Children" come from? The phrase, "Indigo child" was coined by Nancy Ann Tappe in her book Understanding Your Life Through Color (1982) and refers to the color in these children's aura. Ms. Tappe was interviewed by Jan Tober for her book The Indigo Children (1999) and said: "These young children - every one of them I've seen thus far who kill their schoolmates or parents - have been Indigos."

That didn't stop Tober from writing her book and declaring that these children are "Spiritual Masters, beings full of wisdom, here to teach us a new way of being." The way the followers of the idea justify the fact that "not all Indigo children are filled with unconditional love, tolerance and non-judgment," is by declaring that they require "special" treatment and handling with kid gloves because they are so special and delicate and sensitive.

In a pig's eye. They are psychopaths and they have an altogether different agenda. And somehow, they are aware and seek to ensure that their offspring are well cared for, and that a lot of psychopaths grow up without being identified as what they are.

Nevertheless, there is no explaining the extremes that "true believers" will go to in order to find excuses for inexcusable things. Elizabeth Kirby, a businesswoman in southern California, who has "studied and practiced metaphysics for the last 21 years," writes:

In hearing about the school shootings, I knew Indigo children were pulling the triggers. The Columbine High School shooting was so horrific it caught everyone's attention. At the time my eldest daughter said to me, "Because they (Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold) were Indigos they wanted to do it, so they just did it. No remorse, no guilt, they just went ahead and shot all those people because they wanted to and felt they needed to." Indigo children don't have guilt to keep them in check and because they balk at authority they don't believe they have to follow the rules.

Writers in mainstream America like Jonathan Kellerman are lumping the Indigo school shooters with the psychopaths; the dark entities who are bullies, con-men, stalkers, victimizers, serial killers and those who kill for thrills. I don't believe these Indigo children who have taken weapons to school to harm other children are psychopaths. They have been bullied and teased and have an avenger attitude seeking justice for injuries inflicted on them. They aren't killing just for the thrill of killing. These kids know changes have to be made within the school system and they chose violence to make their statement, to give us a wake up call. Some of these metaphysical Indigo children are not hesitant about using violence to bring about change, and to bring us to enlightenment.

Indigo violence is here and it will continue, at least with this present generation of Indigo children. We are seeing with the current Indigo violence how the school system needs to be changed and how imperative it is to address the issues of bullying and intimidation in school. As the Indigo children grow to adulthood, their agendas will move out of the school system into our other systems, our social, political and judicial systems for example. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is an Indigo.

Amazing, huh? Did you catch the remark: "Some of these metaphysical Indigo children are not hesitant about using violence to bring about change, and to bring us to enlightenment."

Don't we find that just a tiny bit contradictory? Aren't we stretching a bit? How about diving straight into denial?

At the present moment in history, the appeal of the psychopath has never been greater. Movies about psychopaths are all the rage. Hare asks "Why? What accounts for the terrific power that the personality without conscience has over our collective imagination? One theorist proposes that people who admire, believe, or identify with psychopaths, are partly psychopathic themselves. By interacting with a psychopath, even peripherally, they are able to voyeuristically enjoy an inner state not dominated by the constraints of morality. Such people are enabled to enjoy aggressive and sexual pleasures at no cost.

For normal people, such movies may serve to remind them of the danger and destructiveness of the psychopath. They will shiver with the sense of something cold and dark having breathed on their neck. For others, people with poorly developed inner selves, such movies and glorification of psychopathic behavior only serves as a role model for serious acts of violence and predation against others.

Some psychologists propose rationalizations for psychopathic behavior, suggesting trauma, abuse, etc. The problem is, that argument does not hold up in case after case after case.

It seems that t he only difference that family background seems to make is how the psychopath expresses himself. A psychopath who grows up in a stable family and has access to positive social and educational resources might become a white-collar criminal, or perhaps a somewhat shady entrepreneur, politician, lawyer, judge, or other professional. Another individual with the same traits, and a deprived background might become a common con-artist, a drifter, mercenary, or violent criminal.

The point is, social factors and parenting practices only shape the expression of the disorder, but have no effect on the individual's inability to feel empathy or to develop a conscience.

Robert Hare once submitted a paper to a scientific journal. The paper included EEGs of several groups of adult men performing a language task. The editor of the journal returned the paper saying "Those EEG's couldn't have come from real people."

But they did. They were the EEG's of psychopaths.

Some people have compared psychopathy to schizophrenia. However, there is a crucial distinction as we will see:

Schizophrenia and psychopathy are both characterized by impulsive, poorly planned behavior. This behavior may originate from a weak or poorly coordinated response inhibition system. We tested the hypothesis that schizophrenia and psychopathy are associated with abnormal neural processing during the suppression of inappropriate responses.

The participants were schizophrenic patients, nonpsychotic psychopaths, and nonpsychotic, nonpsychopathic control subjects (defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised), all incarcerated in a maximum security psychiatric facility. We recorded behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) during a Go/No Go task.

Results: Schizophrenic patients made more errors of commission than did the nonpsychopathic offenders. As expected, the nonpsychopathic nonpsychotic participants showed greater frontal ERP negativity (N275) to the No Go stimuli than to the Go stimuli. This effect was small in the schizophrenic patients and absent in the psychopaths. For the nonpsychopaths, the P375 ERP component was larger on Go than on No Go trials, a difference that was absent in schizophrenic patients and in the opposite direction in psychopaths.

Conclusions: These findings support the hypothesis that the neural processes involved in response inhibition are abnormal in both schizophrenia and psychopathy; however, the nature of these processes appears to be different in the two disorders.

"More and more data are leading to the conclusion that psychopathy has a biological basis, and has many features of a disease," says Sabine Herpertz, a psychiatrist at the RWTH-Aachen University in Germany.

The brain imaging techniques of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide the opportunity to investigate psychopathy further. They might allow researchers to discover whether psychopaths' physiological and emotional deficits can be pinned down to specific differences in the anatomy or activation of the brain.

Among researchers who are starting to explore this area, there are two main theories of psychopathy. One, championed by Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and supported by the work of Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, gives a starring role to a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex (see diagram, below). This is part of an area of the brain, known as the prefrontal cortex, involved in conscious decision-making.

The other theory, promoted by James Blair of University College London, holds that the fundamental dysfunction lies within the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure that plays a critical role in processing emotion and mediating fear. Recently, using PET scanning, Blair has shown that activation of the amygdala in normal volunteers is involved in responding to the sadness and anger of others, and he hypothesizes that amygdala dysfunction could explain the lack of fear and empathy in psychopaths.

The two theories may not be mutually exclusive, Blair points out, as the orbitofrontal cortex, which does the 'thinking', and the amygdala, which does the 'feeling', are highly interconnected.

Following widespread concern that the criminal justice and mental health systems are failing to deal effectively with dangerous psychopaths, there is a movement in several countries to instigate fundamental legal reform. The most controversial suggestion is to make it possible for individual who have severe personality disorders to be detained in secure mental institutions even if they have been accused of no crime. Although these particular provisions have alarmed civil liberties campaigners, the raft of measures also includes a major initiative within the prison service to improve the handling of those with APD--including psychopaths.

According to one individual who suffered at the hands of a psychopath:

"The World has only one problem, Psychopaths. There are two basic types of Psychopaths, Social and Anti-Social. The essential feature of Psychopaths is a Pervasive, Obssesive- Compulsive desire to force their delusions on others. Psychopaths completely disregard and violate the Rights of others, particularly the Freedom of Association which includes the right not to associate and the Right to Love."

Over and over again we come up against that little problem: religion and belief systems that have to be defended against objective evidence or the beliefs of others. We have to ask ourselves "where did these belief systems come from that so evidentially are catastrophic?" And then, we have to think about the fact that now, in the present day, when many of these systems are breaking down and being replaced by others that similarly divert our attention away from what IS, it becomes necessary to "enforce" a certain mode of thinking. And that is what Psychopaths do best.

Psychopaths dominate and set the standard for behavior in our society. We live in a world based on a psychopathic, energy stealing food chain, because that's just the way things are. Most people are so damaged they no longer have the capacity to even imagine a different system based on a symbiotic network.

They are not only damaged by others, but also by the thousand little evils they have done to others to survive. For them to see the system for what it is, would require them to see the part they have played in perpetuating it. That is a lot to ask of a fragile ego. Also, those who are not psychopaths, still want to make human connections but are afraid to, for fear of being taken advantage of and stolen from energeticaly speaking.

With the brief historical review we have examined, we are acutely aware that this is NOT a phenomenon confined to our present "time." It is a trans-millennial evolutionary strategy that, step by step, has brought us to our present position. What emerges in the present day is just Machiavellian diversion that focuses the attention of those who are easily deceived. This is reinforced by the "clappers" in the audience, and there seems to be an entire army of psychopaths among us whose job it is act as vectors of attention and direction. We hope that the readers of these pages will give themselves permission to imagine, research and implement a different way of being. And to stand up for themselves while doing it. As Wilhelm Reich wrote:

Why did man, through thousands of years, wherever he built scientific, philosophic, or religious systems, go astray with such persistence and with such catastrophic consequences?" […]

The answer lies somewhere in that area of our existence which has been so heavily obscured by organized religion and put out of our reach. Hence, it probably lies in the relation of the human being to the cosmic energy that governs him.

The same question is posed by Castaneda's Don Juan:

I want to appeal to your analytical mind, ' don Juan said. 'Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal.

In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver - stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. […] Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them.[Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity]

The problem is also delineated by Georges Gurdjieff:

"So that in the actual situation of humanity there is nothing that points to evolution proceeding. On the contrary when we compare humanity with a man, we quite clearly see a growth of personality at the cost of essence, that is, a growth of the artificial, the unreal, and what is foreign, at the cost of the natural, the real, and what is one's own.

"Together with this, we see a growth of automatism.

"Contemporary cultures requires automatons. […] One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. [Gurdjieff, op. cit]

Intolerance and cruelty are NEEDED to guarantee the "cover-up." A certain kind of "human being" acts on behalf of this cover-up. And in this sense, psychopaths, as Alien Reaction Machines are the playing pieces in the Secret Games of the Gods.

What Is A Psychopath?

The QFG is committed to bringing to your attention any and all information that will help you to live a life free of the soul-killling manipulations of others.

Our Sincere Thanks to the Owner of the website on Psychopathic Personality Disorder for kind permission to quote her research in assembling this report. Until we began to investigate, we had NO idea how widespread the problem was, and how many victims there are. Visit her site, check her links to support groups. For a more comprehensive look at the problem, based on our OWN research, please read our new article:

"Official Culture" in America:
A Natural State of Psychopathy?


The owners and publishers of these pages wish to state that the material presented here is the product of our research and experimentation in Superluminal Communication. We invite the reader to share in our seeking of Truth by reading with an Open, but skeptical mind. We do not encourage "devotee-ism" nor "True Belief." We DO encourage the seeking of Knowledge and Awareness in all fields of endeavor as the best way to be able to discern lies from truth. The one thing we can tell the reader is this: we work very hard, many hours a day, and have done so for many years, to discover the "bottom line" of our existence on Earth. It is our vocation, our quest, our job. We constantly seek to validate and/or refine what we understand to be either possible or probable or both. We do this in the sincere hope that all of mankind will benefit, if not now, then at some point in one of our probable futures.

Contact Webmaster at cassiopaea.com
Copyright © 1997-2009 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All rights reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Republication and re-dissemination of the contents of this screen or any portion of this website in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.