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Saturday 31 May 2014

Financial Times – Kenneth Rogoff (Harvard): “Time to Phase Out Paper Money”

CryptoCoins News

Kenneth Rogoff, the professor of Economics at Harvard, writing in Financial Times, poses the question “Is it time to consider the phasing out of paper money?” Kenneth Rogoff is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Harvard. Any opinion expressed by Rogoff has to be taken extremely seriously as from 2001-2003, he served as Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund. Rogoff’s treatise Foundations of International Macroeconomics (joint with Maurice Obstfeld) is the standard graduate text in the field worldwide, and his monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published regularly in over 50 countries.

Writing in Financial Times, in an article titled: Paper Money is unfit for a world of high crime and low inflation, Rogoff argues that abolishing physical currency would achieve currency’s two important objectives. First, it would eliminate Zero Bound on policy interest rates that has acted to handcuff central banks since the financial crisis. At the moment, if central Banks set interest rates too low, in an attempt to stimulate growth, people simply move their money into cash. Secondly. phasing out large denomination notes would make it difficult for criminals to conduct their business; it is believed that a high proportion of large denomination notes are in the hands of criminals. Large denomination notes  facilitate tax evasion and illegal activity.

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Tens of thousands of Belgian savers see money disappear from their bank.


Translation: " Because of a new taxation on investment funds the government introduced recently, tens of thousands Savers saw money dissapear from their bank accounts yesterday. Years ago, they bought a certain type of investment fund because the capital gains on this type of funds were taxfree. But the government changed this rule and introduced a tax on these funds, with retrospective effect to 1 juli 2008, last summer. Only now, BNP paribas has programmed their computers to make the automatic collection of these taxes possible. Test-aankoop(magazine that safeguards & reviews consumer rights) already got hundreds of complaints." 

http://imgur.com/LfF85Nr

Summary of important points:
  • Customers of BNP Paribal Fortis buy the "Fortis B FIX 160 Equity" for 1000 euro in 2005. The fund only contains Belgian stocks, on which capital gains are taxfree at that time.
  • During the crisis, the fund drops to 815 euro a piece.
  • On the expiration date, the fund is worth 1004 euro.
  • The Belgian Government changes the rules and says holders of the funds made a capital gain of 189 euro between 2008 and 2013, taxing it for €30 a piece.
  • The tax is automatically subtracted from the bank accounts of customers, without their consent.
  • People think it is ridiculous they have to pay tax on a gain they never made.

Challenging “All Forms of Injustice”? Who is the “Real Pope” Francis I?

Global Research

Pope Francis I has been portrayed in chorus by the Western media as a champion of “Liberation Theology” committed to global poverty alleviation. 

Pope Francis has urged world leaders to challenge “all forms of injustice” and resist the “economy of exclusion… the throwaway culture, … and the “culture of death,” [which] … sadly risk becoming passively accepted.”  

Who is the Real Pope Francis I

 Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis I) was one of the main supporters –within the Catholic hierarchy– of Argentina’s military dictatorship which came to power in a CIA supported coup in 1976.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio not only supported the dictatorship, he also played a direct and complicit role in the “Dirty War” (la guerra sucia”) in liaison with the military Junta headed by General Jorge Videla, leading to the arrest, imprisonment, torture and disappearance of progressive Catholic priests and laymen who were opposed to Argentina’s military rule.

GRTV Interview with Michel Chossudovsky



Can narcissists be moved to show empathy?

Science Daily

Researchers at the University of Surrey and the University of Southampton have investigated whether narcissists can elicit empathy for another person's suffering. It has been well documented that narcissists lack empathy, but why is that the case, and do they have the capacity to change that behavior? New research suggests that with the right focus, people with narcissistic tendencies can feel empathy for another person's suffering.

The research is published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Characterizing narcissism

When we think of narcissism most of us can all think of a colleague, friend, or former significant other that would fit the description; "A bit full of themselves, self-centered, and don't seem too concerned about the effects they have on other people," says lead researcher, Erica Hepper. This lack of empathy has a detrimental effect on interpersonal relationships, social bonding and prosocial behavior.

For the purposes of this research, the researchers focused on individuals who exhibit subclinical narcissism, rather than a clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Dr. Hepper explains that this distinction was made because "people high in subclinical narcissism are psychologically healthy and well-adjusted, often even very successful, whereas people with NPD are inflexible and volatile, and don't manage day-to-day life well." Subclinical narcissism is also more common, and the number of people exhibiting narcissistic traits in our society continues to increase. The participants were broken down into two categories, 'low narcissists' and 'high narcissists,' which identifies participants as being less narcissistic or more narcissistic than the average person.

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Driverless cars: In the self-driving seat

The Economist

TO GOOGLE is now in broad usage as a verb for retrieving information from the internet. If the tech giant has its way, “I Googled” will become a standard reply to the question, “How did you get here?” On May 28th Google said it would build 100 prototype driverless cars devoid of pedals, steering wheel or controls save an on/off switch. It is the next stage in its apparent quest to be as ubiquitous on the road as on computer screens.

People have dreamed about driverless motoring since at least the 1930s, but only in recent years have carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo given the matter more thought, kitting out test cars with the sensors and sophisticated software required to negotiate busy roads. Google has roared ahead by designing a driverless car from the ground up.

 But bringing autonomous motoring to the world is proving harder than Google had envisaged. It once promised it by 2017. Now it does not see production models coming out before 2020. The technology is far advanced, but needs shrinking in size and cost—Google’s current test cars, retrofitted Toyota and Lexus models, are said to be packed with $80,000-worth of equipment.

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POLICE STATE Headlines - Another week of State sanctioned crimes against civilians

News round up from Police State USA:

Minnesota gubernatorial candidate arrested while exercising free speech in a park - "There's no free speech in public spaces? Is this a no-free-speech zone?" 
SWAT team throws concussion grenade into baby playpen during no-knock raid -"Bad things happen to good people," says the Sheriff, with every intention of continuing the raids. 
Retiree dies mysteriously in police custody, cops try to have him quickly cremated -"I watched the video, and I had no words. Everything that I was told while I was here was a lie... He was murdered by those officers." 
Carjacking victim calls police for help, gets threatened with jail-time -“I figured they were here to help me. Turned out, they were here against me.” 
Police give elderly man drug charges after pharmacy issues incorrect prescription -An 83-year-old man and his wife were violently arrested because of a pharmacy screw up. 
Officer receives only 30 days in jail for framing his ex-wife with a felony -A malicious scheme to ruin someone's life results in a fraction of the punishment that the victim nearly received. 
SWAT team ambushes innnocent man as he works on tractor in his driveway-"I was minding my own business, you know, and they came in for the kill." 
Paralyzed man raided by SWAT, sentenced to 25 years for possessing his own medicine -A wheelchair-bound MS patient is oppressed by the state for coping with his chronic pain. 
Two women cavity searched by police after being pulled over for littering -"I had a finger in my a** and a finger in my p****, and this is so embarrassing to me." 
Supreme Court: Police can stop vehicles based on anonymous tips -"The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail," argued Justice Scalia. 
Empty home destroyed in 4-hour SWAT siege, innocent woman left with $100,000 in damages -“They wiped my whole life from underneath me and now I’m trying to pick it up and move on.” 
93-year-old Texas woman shot to death by police - Inviting the government to deal with the mentally impaired is often a deadly proposition. 
Colorado police cuff, search dozens of innocent people at gunpoint in frenzied manhunt-Motorists caught up in the dragnet were “detained, removed, searched, restrained — and terrified.” 
Michigan teen fined $200 after using naughty words in public park -“If we allowed police to ticket individuals for swearing, our jails and courts will be filled with people with filthy mouths." 
DEA retroactively gets warrant after violent, botched raid on wrong address -"I don’t need to show you a F-----g warrant," sneered the rifle-toting federal enforcer. 
Man cooked to death in scalding shower as punishment by prison guards -“I can’t take it no more, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’’ he screamed, until his skin separated from his dead body.
Police confiscate Indiana man’s bodily fluids using forced catheterization -The forced penetration was described as "painful, degrading and humiliating." 

A Meta-Law to Rule Them All: Physicists Devise a “Theory of Everything”

Scientific American

“Once you have eliminated the impossible,” the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes famously opined, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” That adage forms the foundational principle of “constructor theory”—a candidate “theory of everything” first sketched out by David Deutsch, a quantum physicist at the University of Oxford, in 2012. His aim was to find a framework that could encompass all physical theories by determining a set of overarching “meta-laws” that describe what can happen in the universe and what is forbidden. In a May 23 paper posted to the physics preprint server, arXiv, constructor theory claims its first success toward that goal by unifying the two separate theories that are currently used to describe information processing in macroscopic, classical systems as well as in subatomic, quantum objects.

Computer scientists currently use a theory developed by the American mathematician and cryptographer Claude Shannon in the 1940s to describe how classical information can be encoded and transmitted across noisy channels efficiently—what, for instance, is the most data that can be streamed, in theory, down a fiber-optic cable without becoming irretrievably corrupted. At the same time, physicists are striving to build quantum computers that could, in principle, exploit peculiar aspects of the subatomic realm to perform certain tasks at a far faster rate than today’s classical machines.

But the principles defined by Shannon’s theory cannot be applied to information processing by quantum computers. In fact, Deutsch notes, physicists have no clear definition for what “quantum information” even is or how it relates to classical information. “If we want to make progress in finding new algorithms for quantum computers, we need to understand what quantum information actually is!” he says. “So far, the algorithms that have been discovered for quantum computers have been surprises that were discovered by blundering about because we have no underlying theory to guide us.”

In 2012 Deutsch outlined constructor theory, which, he believes, could provide the underlying foundation for a grand unification of all theories in both the classical and quantum domains. This latest paper is a first step toward that larger goal—a demonstration of how classical and quantum information can be used to unify two physical theories. According to constructor theory, the most fundamental components of reality are entities—“constructors”—that perform particular tasks, accompanied by a set of laws that define which tasks are actually possible for a constructor to carry out.


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Bilderberg conference: Spies, CEOs and politicians gather

CNBC

It's a guest list that most conference organizers can only dream of, with attendees ranging from royalty to business leaders, spies to politicians. 

But this isn't any conference – this is the Bilderberg conference, a top-secret annual gathering attracting the richest and most powerful people from across the globe. 

Attendees at this year's Bilderberg meeting, which kicks off in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Thursday, include Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. 

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen will also be in attendance, along with American diplomat Henry Kissinger and ECB Executive Board Member Benoît Coeuré.

One of the main draws of the conference, which was founded in 1954, is the high level of secrecy – despite the fact that a number of journalists are invited. 

Read More: Rich, Famous and Powerful Converge at Bilderberg


This is because meetings take place under what's known as "Chatham House Rules," meaning that people can use the information received, but can't reveal the identity or affiliation of the speaker.
"Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions," the Bilderberg Meetings website said. "As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights."


The level of secrecy is particularly interesting this year, as one of the topics up for discussion is: "does privacy exist?". On this issue, the thoughts of the former director of the National Security Agency, Keith Alexander, and the head of the U.K.'s Secret Intelligence Service - or MI6 - John Sawers, are likely to be highly sought after. 

Big business names at this year's event include Klaus Kleinfeld, chairman and CEO of Alcoa, Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, and BP CEO Bob Dudley. From the world of finance, HSBC Chairman Douglas Flint and Chairman and CEO of Lazard, Kenneth M. Jacobs, will be in attendance. 

Read More2013 Bilderberg Protests: Police Create No-Fly Zone
 
 

Friday 30 May 2014

Why watching too much porn could be bad for the brain

The Independent 

Men who watch regularly pornography could be reducing the size of their brain, a study has found. 

Researchers discovered less grey matter in the brains of men who regularly view pornography compared with those who don’t.

Experts say it’s the first evidence for a link between watching sexually explicit material and reductions in brain size – but the new study doesn’t prove that pornography causes changes to the brain.

They say an alternative explanation could be that men with a certain type of brain with overly-sensitive reward stimuli – known as the ‘striatum’ - could be more likely to use pornography.

Dr Simone Kühn from the Max Planck Institution in Berlin led the study. “Unfortunately we cannot answer this question based on the results of the present,” she said.

“It’s not clear, for example, whether watching porn leads to brain changes or whether people born with certain brain types watch more porn”.

Dr Kühn and colleagues from Berlin’s Charite University used 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and studied their porn-watching habits.

They matched their survey results with scans of the men’s brains and observed both the volume of the brain and the way they reacted to sexually explicit images.

The findings, published in the JAMA Psychiatry Journal, have been met with scepticism from some experts who say that watching pornography in moderation was probably not harmful.

Dr Gregory Tau from Columbia University said that porn-watching was “probably not terrible in moderation”.

“It is possible that there are individuals with a certain kind of brain that are more susceptible to these kinds of behaviours,” he said.

“Or, it’s possible it’s the excessive use (of porn) that’s perpetuating itself to causing brain changes.

Or, it could be both.”

Dr Kühn has called for future studies to conduct deeper investigations into the effects of pornography on the brain over time.


IPCC findings dispute ABC, CBS, NBC and BBC alarmist and flawed Antarctica sea level rise claims

Watt's Up With That?

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
 
IPCC report shows Antarctica has “negative contribution to sea level” over the 21st century

The recent ridiculous and scientifically flawed media claims of large Antarctica related sea level rise impacts due to “unstoppable” glacier ice loss supposedly reflected in two recent scientific papers looks even more absurd when these made up claims are compared against the Antarctica scientific findings of the UN IPCC AR5 WGI climate report.

Recapping the wonderfully informative reporting by the major “news” networks on May 12 about these two Antarctica ice loss studies we have:

NBC’s anchor Brian Williams asserting that these new studies reflect that sea levels would rise by 13 feet over the next 100 years because of the glacier ice loss which was caused by global warming and is unstoppable. Virtually nothing Williams said was reflected in what was contained in the new studies.

Williams failed to understand that the two studies did not say anything about sea level rise projections, made no mention that man made global warming was driving these glacier ice loss results and additionally appears to have ineptly borrowed his made up 13 foot number from a newspaper article (The Guardian which claimed a 4 meter sea level rise) which managed to confuse “feet” with “meters”. What impressive reporting by the NBC news anchor!!

But Williams was not alone in his zeal to invent the alarmist story line regarding the two new Antarctica studies. ABC’s anchor Diane Sawyer warned us that NASA had issued an “alert” about rising sea levels based on a 40 year study of glaciers in Antarctica that showed they were melting so fast is was unstoppable. She warned that low lying states like Florida would be hardest hit with sea level rise of 3 feet (another made up number) or more by 2100.

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Meet the Nepalese Woman Who Has Saved 50K People from Human Trafficking

Vice News 

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

Anuradha Koirala is a 65-year-old Nepalese woman who has saved 50,000 lives from human trafficking. Koirala is the founder of Maiti Nepal, a non-profit organization founded in 1993 with roots in Kathmandu. Maiti Nepal works to identify, rescue, and rehabilitate Nepalese women after they have been trafficked and forced into prostitution. She has positioned Maiti Nepal and its extension Maiti India as both a border watchdog and a rescue service for Nepalese women who are moved across these borders on a daily basis.

Immigrants are being kept as slaves in European grow ops. Read more here.

Koirala herself is modest. She relates a story about losing 15 children during a rescue raid in a Mafia-ridden brothel in Mumbai like she is talking about the weather. It’s eight in the morning in Nepal and she has already started working. I can hear her grandson yelling from the other room. I don’t dare ask this woman what she does on her downtime. As we speak one thing becomes fundamentally clear: There is no neat divide or even haphazard line between work and play for Anuradha Koirala. It appears that Maiti Nepal is, instead, her life’s mission and any implication otherwise is a misunderstanding of her work entirely.

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World Bank sounds alarm on rising global food prices

Yahoo News

World food prices rose in the first quarter of the year for the first time since their all-time high in August 2012, driven by rising demand in China, drought in the United States and unrest in Ukraine. 

According to the World Bank, internationally traded food prices increased by a sharp 4.0 percent. The leap was led by wheat and maize, up 18 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

As a result, international food prices in April were only 2.0 percent lower than a year ago and 16 percent below their record level in August 2012, the bank's quarterly food price report said.

"Increasing weather concerns and import demand -- and, arguably, to a lesser extent, uncertainty associated with the Ukraine situation -- explain most of the price increases," the report said.

World Bank economists said prices increased despite bumper crops in 2013 and continued projections of record grain harvests and stronger stocks expected for 2014.

Persistently dry conditions in the United States and strong global demand, particularly from China, partly explained the price rises.

- Ukraine has role -

But Ukraine, the breadbasket of eastern Europe, played a part, posting the largest domestic price increases for wheat and maize.

Ukraine, the world's sixth-largest wheat exporter, saw domestic wheat prices jump by 37 percent, driven in part by currency depreciation.

Overall, international wheat prices soared by 18 percent quarter-over-quarter.

"Such a steep price increase had not occurred since the months leading to the historical peak in the summer of 2012," the report said.

International maize prices rose by 12 percent, with Ukraine, the third-largest exporter of maize, experiencing a 73 percent rise in domestic prices because of delayed plantings and increasing costs.

"Geopolitical tensions in Ukraine have not disrupted exports so far, but might have effects on future production and trade if uncertainty increases," the report said.

ther countries in the grip of political and economic stresses also saw prices shoot higher. In Argentina, for example, wheat prices were up 70 percent from a year ago.

Sugar prices rose 13 percent and soybean oil prices gained 6.0 percent quarter-over-quarter.
The first-quarter price increases were offset by a 12 percent decline in rice prices and a 7.0 percent drop in fertilizer prices.

The average price of crude oil rose 3.0 percent to $104 a barrel. 

The United Nations reported last month that world food prices reached their highest level for 10 months in March due to poor weather in major producing countries and the crisis in Ukraine.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said its monthly food price index in March rose by 2.3 percent from February to the highest level since May last year.

Experts are concerned that rising prices will hurt the world's most vulnerable and could foment food riots and other social unrest.

"Over the next few months, we must watch these prices carefully, making sure that any further increases do not put additional pressure on the least well-off around the world," senior World Bank official Ana Revenga said.

In 2007 and 2008, soaring food prices had sparked dozens of riots across the globe, including in Haiti, Cameroon and India.

According to the lender, 51 food riots have occurred in 37 countries since 2007, most of them linked to a jump in food prices and aimed at local authorities.

This was the case in the crises in Tunisia in 2011 and in South Africa in 2012, the bank said.
"Food price shocks can both spark and exacerbate conflict and political instability, and it is vital to promote policies that work to mitigate these effects," the report warned.

Europe has an even bigger crisis on its hands than a British exit

The Telegraph

If Europe’s policy elites could not quite believe it before, they must now know beyond much doubt that they have lost Britain. This island is no longer part of the European project in any meaningful sense.

British defenders of the status quo were knouted on Sunday. UKIP won 27.5pc of the vote, or 29pc after adjusting for the negligence - or worse - of the Electoral Commission in allowing a spoiler party with much the same name to sow confusion. Margaret Thatcher’s Tory children are scarcely more friendly to the EU enterprise.

Britain’s decision to stay out of monetary union at Maastricht sowed the seeds of separation, as pro-Europeans fully understood at the time, though almost nobody expected EMU officialdom to clinch the argument so emphatically by running the currency bloc into the ground with 1930s Gold Standard policies and youth unemployment levels above 50pc in Spain and Greece, and above 40pc in Italy.

European leaders must henceforth calculate that the British people will vote to leave the EU altogether unless offered an entirely new dispensation: tariff-free access to the single market along lines already enjoyed by Turkey or Tunisia; and deliverance from half the Acquis Communautaire, that 170,000-page edifice of directives and regulations that drains away sovereignty, and is never repealed.

Ideological hardliners would prefer to see Britain leave rather tolerating any reversal of the one-way Monnet Doctrine, and some talk of shutting British goods out of the European markets. They are fanatics. Others know that the EU’s global credibility would be shattered if one of its largest states - and twin-leader in projecting military power - were to walk away in disgust, as Germany’s Wolfgang Schauble has repeatedly warned.

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How Effective is Electromagnetic Mind Control?

RINF
Jon Rappoport 

The number of methods of mind control has proliferated as funding for research has expanded.

Here, I want to consider what could be called thought substitution, one ongoing facet of this research.

My conclusions on this subject come from accounts of modern mind control research, which utilize forms of signal-broadcasting aimed at the brain.

More importantly, I’m drawing on my observation of the differences among people, when it comes to their awareness of their own thoughts and emotions.

First of all, we need to make the distinction between passive and active people. Passive people are either sedentary or going through the motions in life. They are easily controllable, and it doesn’t take sophisticated electronic measures to do the job.

Television, a few tranquilizing drugs, peer pressure to conform, and the game is over.

Such people will also mistake the invasion of outside thoughts for their own. It doesn’t really matter where the impulses come from or who delivers them.

By active people, I mean those who are passionately pursuing conscious objectives. They know why they’re doing what they do. They have energy. They’re inventing their own futures. They’re aware of repressive forces in the world.

They’re also quite familiar with their own feelings and thoughts.

Yes, mad scientists can affect these people via electronic harassment, no doubt about it—just as you can affect someone by kicking him in the ribs. But this is no monumental scientific achievement.

The early CIA MKULTRA programs were all about harassment and torture and disorientation, utilizing high-dose drugs, isolation, threats, hypnotism, and the provoking of fear.

The combination of these elements, according to witness (victim) statements, could result in programmed personae. Multiple personalities. But it should be understood that the primary driver in this operation was fear/pain—the very same combination that made the Catholic Inquisition successful.

Active people, as I define them here…could they be fooled into believing that electronic signals aimed at their brains are really their own thoughts?

This is an important question. And I must say, too many casual observers are eager to jump on the bandwagon and assert that, yes, this is eminently probable.

But I point out, mind control is not just about planting suggestions, it’s also very much about slipping them past a person’s overwhelming history of knowing how his own thoughts feel.

That’s the kicker. That’s the limiter.

The eager beavers who want to believe, full bore, in the efficacy of thought substitution, would rather not consider this limiter. But they should.

Active people would instantly become aware that an idea masquerading as their own is a charlatan. And they would reject it.

Researchers are attempting to use a person’s own brainwaves—capturing them and then outfitting them with thought-impulses and broadcasting them back to the brain. This is an effort to carry off a grand deception.


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Obama Administration Desperate to Censor Assassination Memo


All Gov.

After announcing it would comply with a federal court order, the Obama administration has decided that it wants to conceal more portions of a controversial memo authorizing the assassination of Americans overseas. 

Last week, officials with the U.S. Department of Justice said they would make public parts of the internal document written in July 2010 by then-federal lawyer David Barron that justified the use of drones or other means to kill U.S. citizens accused of terrorist involvement. 

The declaration came as the U.S. Senate was considering Barron’s confirmation as a judicial appointee to the First Circuit Court of Appeals—a move that helped convince at least one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, to support the nomination. 

Now, with Barron’s place on the federal bench secure, the Justice Department says it needs to censor some sections of the memo dealing with national secrets, not legal reasoning for the assassinations. 

“Some of the information appears to have been ordered disclosed based on inadvertence or mistake, or is subject to distinct exemption claims or other legal protections that have never been judicially considered,” Sarah Normand, an assistant U.S. attorney, told The New York Times

The 41-page memo led the way for a drone strike in Yemen three years ago that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric suspected of plotting terrorist attacks.

The judicial order calling for the document’s partial disclosure came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeking to obtain a copy.

In seeking to keep additional redactions to the memo, the Justice Department asked the court to keep its request a secret—that next month’s hearing concerning the requested redactions be held privately, barring the presence of attorneys for the Times and the ACLU. But the judge denied that request.

Sen. Udall found it significant that the Obama administration gave its assurance that Barron’s legal reasoning for the drone assassinations would not be among the redacted portions of the memo.

“I intend to hold the White House to its word,” he said in a statement.
-Noel Brinkerhoff

To Learn More:

Feds Want to Censor More of the Drone Memo (by Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service)
New York Times Company, et al v. United States Department of Justice, et al (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) (pdf)


Thursday 29 May 2014

Being a Cynic Linked to Tripled Risk of Developing Dementia, Finland Study Suggests

National Post

Cynics are three times more likely to develop dementia than those who have faith in humanity, a study has shown.

Believing that others are motivated by selfishness, or that they lie to get what they want, appears to radically increase the risk of cognitive decline in later life.

Read more

INSIDE THE RING: DIRECTIVE OUTLINES OBAMA’S POLICY TO USE THE MILITARY AGAINST CITIZENS

Washington Times 

A 2010 Pentagon directive on military support to civilian authorities details what critics say is a troubling policy that envisions the Obama administration’s potential use of military force against Americans.  

 

The directive contains noncontroversial provisions on support to civilian fire and emergency services, special events and the domestic use of the Army Corps of Engineers. The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest.

“This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive.

Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.”

Read more

 

The Best Way to Win an Argument


How do you change someone’s mind if you think you are right and they are wrong? Psychology reveals the last thing to do is the tactic we usually resort to.

You are, I’m afraid to say, mistaken. The position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to elaborate on the many, many reasons why I’m right and you are wrong. Are you feeling ready to be convinced?

Whether the subject is climate change, the Middle East or forthcoming holiday plans, this is the approach many of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds. It’s also an approach that, more often than not, leads to the person on the receiving end hardening their existing position. Fortunately research suggests there is a better way – one that involves more listening, and less trying to bludgeon your opponent into submission.

A little over a decade ago Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they understand how something works when in fact their understanding is superficial at best. They called this phenomenon “the illusion of explanatory depth“. 

They began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked, before asking them to explain what they understood and then answer questions on it. The effect they revealed was that, on average, people in the experiment rated their understanding as much worse after it had been put to the test.

What happens, argued the researchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for the belief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Usually, nobody tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look. Psychologists call this idea that humans have a tendency to take mental short cuts when making decisions or assessments the “cognitive miser” theory.

Why would we bother expending the effort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so? The interesting thing is that we manage to hide from ourselves exactly how shallow our understanding is.

It’s a phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. Usually, it only takes the first moments when you start to rehearse what you’ll say to explain a topic, or worse, the first student question, for you to realise that you don’t truly understand it. All over the world, teachers say to each other “I didn’t really understand this until I had to teach it”. Or as researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped: “I find that no matter how badly I teach I still learn something”.

Explain yourself

Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how the effect might be used to convince others they are wrong. The research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of the University of Colorado, reasoned that the phenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Perhaps, they figured, people who have strong political opinions would be more open to other viewpoints, if asked to explain exactly how they thought the policy they were advocating would bring about the effects they claimed it would.

Recruiting a sample of Americans via the internet, they polled participants on a set of contentious US policy issues, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and then provide reasons for why they held that view. This group got the opportunity to put their side of the issue, in the same way anyone in an argument or debate has a chance to argue their case.

Those in the second group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they were asked to explain how the policy they were advocating would work. They were asked to trace, step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have.

The results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before the experiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of the issues. People who had previously been strongly for or against carbon emissions trading, for example, tended to became more moderate – ranking themselves as less certain in their support or opposition to the policy.

So this is something worth bearing in mind next time you’re trying to convince a friend that we should build more nuclear power stations, that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs co-existed with humans 10,000 years ago. Just remember, however, there’s a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. Otherwise you might end up being the one who changes their mind.

This is my BBC Future column from last week. The original is here.


America's Obesity Epidemic Hits The Military: 1 in 5 Recruits "Too Fat To Fight"

Zero Hedge

Students consume almost 400 billion junk food calories at school per year, equal to almost 2 billion candy bars and while the epidemic of childhood obesity is not 'news' per se - for one big employer in America, it is a major problem. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports, the number one reason people can’t join the military is that they’re overweight or obese, and "still too fat to fight." The problem is large for active service members also with over 51% overweight (though better than the civilian population) as the DoD alone spends an estimated $1 billion per year for medical care associated with "weight-related health problems."

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Wednesday 28 May 2014

Donald Rumsfeld and the Demolition of WTC 7

Washington's Blog
Kevin Ryan

When former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked about World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7), he claimed that he had never heard of it. This was despite the unprecedented destruction of that 47-story building and its relationship to the events of 9/11 that shaped Rumsfeld’s career.

Although not hit by a plane, WTC 7 experienced free fall into its own footprint on the afternoon of 9/11—through the path of what should have been the most resistance. The government agency charged with investigating the building’s destruction ultimately admitted that it had been in free fall during a portion of its descent. That fact makes explosive demolition the only logical explanation. Considering how WTC 7 might have been demolished leads to some interesting facts about Rumsfeld and his associates.

The one major tenant of WTC 7 was Salomon Smith Barney (SSB), the company that occupied 37 of the 47 floors in WTC 7. A little discussed fact is that Rumsfeld was the chairman of the SSB advisory board and Dick Cheney was a board member as well. Rumsfeld had served as chairman of the SSB advisory board since its inception in 1999.

According to the financial disclosures he made in his nomination process, during the same period Rumsfeld had also been a paid consultant to the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet. Rumsfeld and Cheney had to resign from their CIA and SSB positions in 2001 when they were confirmed as members of George W. Bush’s cabinet.

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“Masters of Manipulation”: Psychopaths Rule The World

Global Research
Joachim Hagopian
 obamadoublespeak (2)


Psychopaths dominate the halls of power in both the United States and throughout the world. The current economic, political, military and legal system breeds psychopaths, rewarding psychopathic behavior and punishing those with conscience and integrity. Psychopaths will naturally be drawn to and converge at the apex of the power pyramid as much from their own drive for ambitious power as the hierarchical system that both requires and reinforces those who can comfortably operate without conscience, guilt or any genuine level of empathy toward others. 
 
Psychopaths are in love with power and risk taking, masters of manipulation, self-serving opportunism and self-aggrandizement, and hold doctorates in deceit and deception. Psychopaths are super intelligent charmers who are highly skilled at playing others in order to get what they want. They are keenly perceptive at reading people, understanding their motives and values, brilliant at learning their weaknesses and blind spots, and highly effective at inducing both sympathy and guilt in others.

Instinctively knowing what others want to hear, psychopaths are gifted at winning over others, making them feel special and wanted. They are adept at making positive and lasting first impressions and initially demonstrating that they appear to be caring and considerate, but only on the most superficial, disingenuous level. Their innately keen intelligence, social charisma and charm, extroverted energies, over-the-top confidence are all weapons they utilize in their powerful arsenal to win over, defeat and control others, especially to win over those imbued with power and position that they yearn for themselves.

Psychopaths have an uncanny ability to pick brains, soliciting information, knowledge, creative ideas and even secrets from others, yet opportunistically utilize them to their own advantage as living proof that information is power, parading them as their own ideas and knowledge, and craftily taking and receiving undeserving credit and accolades from bosses and those in power. They are gifted actors, able to take on chameleon-like colors according to their particular social setting and company. Though they lack a capacity to feel emotions with any depth or intensity, as actors and manipulators they are able to manufacture crocodile tears for effect whenever it suits and benefits them.

The part of the brain that regulates emotions, the amygdala, is less active in psychopaths. Thus, they do not feel fear, sadness, regret or disgust that the rest of us experience. Only when it is self-serving will psychopaths act scared, sorry, indignant or surprised, and the key operable word here is act because that is all they can do when it comes to showing real emotion. They have no trouble putting on the act of emotions when they are determined to manipulate others most often into feeling guilty or sympathetic toward them. The only genuine emotion psychopaths express is anger whenever their manipulations are thwarted or rebuffed. They frequently use intimidation tactics and can behave impulsively and even violently when angered, especially in response to a perceived personal insult or perceived betrayal of trust or perceived lack of respect for their authority. But most often their emotional tirades are to manipulate, gain power and control over others.

Psychopaths are extremely confident, bold, outgoing and superficially friendly. Along with their air of assured confidence comes a bombastic arrogance, maverick eccentricity and Machiavellian grandiosity. Their gamey nature lusts for the competition of battle, an insatiable desire to win at all costs, and a gloating, short lived gratification that brings victor’s spoils. They also make formidable enemies, poker-faced while tactically holding their cards close to their chest, yet instinctively aware of when to strategically assert themselves to initiate decisive action, launch aggressive attacks and predatorily move in for their strategic kill. They are perennial predators bloodthirstily lusting for more power.

Psychopaths are masters of impression management and the art of ingratiation, crucial skills fully utilized in impressing those in positions of power while ruthlessly navigating up the treacherous and slippery if not slimy ladder to success. In addition to their characteristic lack of conscience and empathy, perhaps their signature trademark is their penchant for spewing out never ending pathological lies. Not surprisingly, psychopaths flourish in cultures that value competition and winning, boldness and risk taking, success and materialism, ambition and power, social namedropping and social climbing, status and prestige, style and appearance over substance and depth, and suave, witty charm and game-playing artificiality over sincerity, honesty and moral integrity. In short, they especially thrive in Western cultures based on competition and exploitation of fellow man and nature.

Psychopaths see others in terms of how they can be conveniently and cunningly used and manipulated to assist them in achieving their selfish goals and ambitions. Superficial friendships, transitory alliances and even partnerships (including marital) manifest as psychopaths perceive others in terms of their utilitarian value as tools, steppingstones or springboards toward achieving their success. As soon as psychopaths believe others have served their purpose, they are deemed no longer of any real value and quickly disposed of, discarded and/or betrayed. Loyalty is a foreign and abstract construct to psychopaths.

Psychopaths instinctively know how to lie their way out of trouble. It comes natural to them and over time they become experts at it. Skilled in logic and debate, they can readily rattle off an explanatory excuse using double talk for virtually anything. Many end up utilizing their innate skills as lawyers who in turn end up as politicians. In fact most of the politicians in the US Senate are attorneys. Just as effective as they are at absolving themselves of any and all responsibility and culpability of being completely blameless, they are equally skilled at pointing the finger at others and throwing them under the bus. In order to get elected and stay elected, psychopathic politicians must be extremely convincing in their powers of persuasion. And of course using their cunning charm and capacity to fabricate seamlessly at will, their power to manipulate and persuade is among their chief assets. They are experts in bullshitting and playing the fake pretense game.

Another strength is their capacity to keep their cool under fire. While the rest of us are reacting to normally stressful and dangerous situations with fear and anxiety, they manage to not sweat it and operate with relative calm. This skill of course places them at a distinct advantage in professions where constraint and self-control are required under pressure. Thus typically they fare well in the fast paced world of politics, the military and finances.
As anyone can readily see from the preceding prototype description of the psychopath, the high powered arena of politics, the dog-eat-dog corporate world and the strong arm tactics of the military domain are all ideal and ripe fields of endeavor for those imbued with psychopathic traits.


study out of Great Britain last year using a psychopathic survey to assess the presence of psychopathic traits within the national workforce showed that CEO’s, politicians, media honchos, lawyers, surgeons, military generals, police officers and the clergy all scored highest. Generally any line of work characterized by a hierarchical infrastructure that places those in positions of power ruling over others with relative impunity proves to be the most fertile ground attracting those with a psychopathic personality.

By design the morally bankrupt oligarchic system is structured in such a way as to identify, groom and regularly promote up the power pole ladder slick psychopaths who play their cards right. They inherently know how to say the right words to the right persons at the strategic moment to calculatingly scheme and coldheartedly plot their rise to the highest echelons of power. As mere policymaking stewards for their puppet master oligarchs who are not just the shadowy, full fledged members of an elitist club of psychopaths, but like everything else, they are in fact bona fide role models and outright owners of this exclusive club of psychopaths. Without any conscience, remorse, guilt or even second thought, they wield increasingly absolute power and control over the earth’s dominions, causing unconscionable amounts of suffering and pain to billions of fellow human beings in this world. For all the theft, death and destruction they perpetrate, if oligarchs are not psychopaths, than they are simply not human.

A politician spends more time, energy and money trying to get elected/reelected to public office than any other single pursuit or pastime. In this pragmatic way, the psychopathic description that they are mere public cons and hustlers selling themselves on the highest, competitively demanding stage is neither too simplistic nor an exaggeration. Robert Hare, the leading expert on psychopathy as a mental disorder who devised a psychopathic checklist, observed that psychopaths representing just one percent of the general population possess an especially heightened need for both power and prestige, seemingly prerequisite essentials for every aspiring politician. Moreover, psychopaths score low on measures of stress reactivity, anxiety and depression while scoring high on measures of competitive achievement, positive impressions with first encounters and fearlessness. Substitute the word politician for the word psychopath and you will find the two interchangeable and synonymous because they pretty much actually are one and the same. 

To test and confirm this hypothesis, simply go back to every previous reference to the word psychopath and substitute either politician, general or CEO and you will realize that in every sense of the word, the present system as it currently exists produces leadership in every sector and realm that is well endowed with an abundance of psychopathic traits. While these particular professions may attract psychopaths, as a disclaimer it is important to mention that psychopathic traits and tendencies are on a continuum, and a specific politician or general may possess certain traits and tendencies but may not exhibit severe or enough symptoms to qualify with an official diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy.

When renowned Harvard clinical psychologist and author of The Sociopath Next Door Dr. Martha Stout (who uses sociopath and psychopath interchangeably) was asked if politicians are more likely to be psychopaths, she answered:

“Yes, politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/ psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow – but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”
Even a cursory examination of the most powerful leaders who reach the very top in America – President Barrack Obama and the most famous living US general ex-CIA Director David Patraeus – both illustrate as psychopathic poster boys what has gone most wrong in America. The psychopathic traits and tendencies of their actions, misdeeds and public records will be examined next.

Barrack Hussein Obama is a Machiavellian pathological liar of the first order. His mounting pile of shattered and broken promises to the American people used during his meteoric rise to power from relative obscurity as a largely unknown junior senator from Illinois a dozen years ago to becoming the most powerful leader (albeit as elected figurehead front man to the true power of the oligarchy that owns him) in the most powerful nation on earth is the stuff of urban psychopathic legends. We all remember the man who captured the hopeful, yearning hearts of so many Americans who were so exhausted and demoralized by the psychopaths Bush and Cheney and their brutal evil psychopathic agenda. Obama campaigning on his mantra of hope appeared on the national scene like a desperately needed breath of fresh air. The first African American president rode in on his white horse wave of hope that weary America had finally found its first populist champion of the people since FDR and Lincoln’s four score and seven years ago days.

Of course Obama is but one man in a morally bankrupted, highly dysfunctional political system with two corrosive and corrupt parties representing the same oligarch interests whose political agenda was and remains simply to play partisan politics and cancel each other out as the most lame and ineffective Congressional body in US history. So our fantasy of wonder boy riding his white horse into the White House on America’s hopes and dreams realistically was but a set-up for failure from the get-go (from the populists’ point of view, obviously not from the oligarchs’ POV who were carefully grooming him years prior to his meteoric rise).

After all, Barrack Obama was a man who felt destined for historic greatness and as such would do anything to become arguably the most powerful man on earth. His lust for power even as the thoroughly compromised, sold out, half black front man to his puppet slave masters was certainly unquenchable from the start. That particular criteria on his psychopathic checklist has clearly been met in aces.

Returning to Obama as pathological liar, Americans were hoping that he would keep his most important promise of all, that he would be honest in contrast with the ultra-secretive, yet not-so-hidden war crime agenda that became an in-our-face, anything but a skeleton in the Bush-Cheney closet, not even their inside 9/11 job. With those neocons we all knew what we were up against with their oppressive fascist regime. But Obama was the great black hope and champion of the little people. So his betrayal of our trust was taken personally. We believed his promise that he would be different in his vow to maintain ultra-transparency and the commitment of always being open and honest with the American people who elected him. This was his biggest, far-from-white lie. As the most secretive, aggressively reactionary, pathological lying president in US history, it is his most sinister and unforgivably darkest sin of them all. He has blocked more requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act than any prior president in history. He has also declared war on the truth in general and on honest journalists and whistleblowers in particular, harassing, indicting and imprisoning more of them on espionage act charges than all previous administrations combined. 

Like all of our public servants from Congress to the Supreme Court, Obama swore to uphold the US Constitution. Yet they have all failed us miserably, constantly violating and running roughshod over US citizens’ rights to privacy, search and seizure and due process protection. That is his second most egregious lie. Under his regime, Obama has not only run with the fascist torch handed off to him by his predecessors, but he has rammed tyranny and oppression down America’s throat, now left gasping for air with our long lost and stolen liberties and fast dying freedoms laying in ashes amidst the Orwellian nightmare come true of an oligarchic militarized police state

Another of Obama’s burn in hell lies is that he was supposed to be the prudent, thoughtful, calm and cool man of reason who was to supposed to restore America’s good will standing with the rest of the world and finally stop the forever war agenda and Empire aggression once and for all. Instead, Mr. Psychopathic Cool under pressure Obama again has only accelerated the megalomaniacal war policies of his predassessor.

He has our nation still mired in another costly counterinsurgency war defeat in Afghanistan that has lasted longer than any previous US war in history. He has polarized the world causing the next cold war after causing a coup in another sovereign nation Ukraine deposing another democratically elected president. He has only continued on steroids the disastrous imperialistic neocon policy of destabilizing targeted nations for more regime changes around the world. Obama has gone after any independent country after independent country that happens to refuse to be subjugated and exploited by the world’s only superpower bully.

And Obama has only continued the psychopathic policy of using onetime allies (like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Kaddafi, Hosni Mubarak and Vladimir Putin just to name a few) and then turning on them one by one whenever they have been used up. 

Instead of bringing war to an end as promised, Obama has chosen to expand Special Operations with unlimited deep taxpayer funded pockets fighting dirty little secret wars around the world in at least 134 nations. Then when it comes to our supposed al Qaeda enemy, he has betrayed the American people once again by misusing their hard earned tax dollars to finance and support lowlife al Qaeda mercenaries in another disastrous losing cause in Syria. Obama never fails to use his personal favorite brand of modern warfare the drone as his excuse to kill not only innocent civilians around the world but even threatens to use them to kill Americans on American soil in the probable near future. That is how boldface his Machiavellian, arrogant, self-righteous, God-like, in-our-face abusive power of betrayal toward his own citizenry has exponentially grown. 

Then there are all those not-so-hidden, out of the closet, scandalous cover-ups that just keep proliferating before our very eyes during his lame duck term. The Benghazi tragedy where he and his
 
partners-in-crime, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his then CIA Director General Petraeus, were responsible for the murder of the Libyan Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Their lies to suppress the truth have manifested as death threats to any of the CIA-Special Ops personnel who were witnesses that also came under attack that fateful 9/11/12 night while their leaders ignored their desperate calls for help. While Americans were dying, Obama flew westward off to another fancy fundraising dinner to make sure he got reelected less than two months later, not losing a wink of sleep, another sure sign of his psychopathic nature. 


Then came the IRS scandal targeting anti-Obama conservative right wing groups, Christian fundamentalists, tea party groups for undue scrutiny and harassment. The subsequent cover-up includes the Obama administration’s continued denial of any and all responsibility. Then there was Obama’s Justice Department’s cover-up of the debacle where the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was caught purposely selling guns to the Mexican drug cartel that were soon used in the murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration officer and US Border agents.

In a growing litany of scandal after scandal, Obama is defensively on the run with the latest story of another Pandora’s box currently breaking as Veterans Administration hospitals across the country have apparently been cooking the books to cover-up unlawful lag times to treating US veterans and hordes of them dying while waiting to receive care. It turns out that the Phoenix VA hospital may be responsible for at least 40 deaths of veterans waiting for appointments that never came in time and this appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as the broken VA healthcare system is just one more institution trying to conceal the ugly truth from getting out to the public. The cracks in the VA’s stonewalling dam are breaking and opening up the floodgate to the hundreds if not thousands of veterans this Memorial Day weekend who have become fatal victims in the overburdened, mismanaged VA health system. 

The US is learning the hard way that the horror of sending young men and women in uniform to fight and die in multiple Empire wars has created an out of control Frankenstein monster of an epidemic unable to properly care for the growing numbers of severely damaged veterans. The year or more spent on a waiting list backlog just to receive services for our returning war veterans is killing 22 of them a day through suicide alone. The VA has come under increasing heat by using Big Pharma to snow under the veterans’ severe PTSD symptoms by treating them only with excessive use of drugs rather than real care involving intensive therapy and long term support groups. The onetime senator on the veterans affairs committee made bold promises to ensure that a grateful nation will always take care of those who bravely serve their country. Looks like yet another broken promise by a president who fails to put his money where his glib mouth is.

The problem goes far beyond either President Obama or VA director General Shinseki. The problem has everything to do with an overextended, corrupt and vicious US Empire murdering millions around the world (including our own) in a last gasp, geopolitical chessboard power grab of a dying and decaying superpower – not unlike the Roman Empire a millennium ago. As much of a psychopath as Obama is as the despotic war criminal terrorist, it is the evil psychopathic system that groomed and produced him that is the underlying root cause. And just as drugs are bandaids, blaming a psychopath president overlooks the underlying systemic cause. Until the power structure of the global oligarchy changes, the monumental, unprecedented theft, death and destruction of our only planet will merely continue until its tragic bitter end.

There are simply too many CEO’s in the psychopathic corporate world to even go into on an individual basis. Suffice it to say that psychopathic birds of a feather flock together as Obama has ensured that not even one white collar Wall Street-bankster criminal has gone to prison over the scandalous home loan mortgage-housing bubble burst fiasco of 2009 that plunged America into a deep recession where millions were defrauded and lost their homes. Yet no sooner does that travesty unfold, the swindled American public still freshly reeling financially were then forced by Obama et al to bail out the largest US corporations and banks. Then adding insult to injury, the CEO’s were touting huge multimillion dollar yearend bonuses off the sacrificial backs of the struggling, disappearing middle class. Those Obama-nation bail outs were as obscene and sinister as any coldhearted psychopathic behavior can get for so many hurting Americans struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table for their families.

One recent study found that 10% of Wall Street traders in the financial services industry are financial psychopaths that can present as “a perfect well-rounded job candidate, CEO, manager, co-worker, and team member because their destructive characteristics are practically invisible.” These individuals thrive in fast-paced, competitive industries, are experts at taking full advantage of company systems and exploiting communication weaknesses in others. They have a propensity for instigating interpersonal conflicts designed to make themselves look good and peer competitors look bad to their bosses. Like all psychopaths, corporate psychopaths lack empathy and interest in what others think or feel. They exhibit loads of charisma and charm as well as intelligence and credentials, a remarkable capacity for lying, fabrication, cutthroat manipulation, and a compulsive drive for thrill seeking, taking high risks and gambling. 

As a West Point graduate and former Army officer, I encountered a sizeable percentage of military psychopaths posing as officers as well. Common characteristics shared with their political and corporate counterparts are a “win at all cost” drive, an unquenchable thirst for power and control over others, a constant concern for appearance and looking good in front of superiors, and a nauseating display of ass kissing ingratiation to gain favors from higher ranking superior officers. Though West Point cadets have an honor code that prohibits them from lying, cheating or stealing, or tolerating those who do, I observed firsthand how too many officers regularly lie through their teeth knowing that higher rank simply permits them to get away with it with impunity – that is until I came along.

I was a West Point dissident who did not believe in the inhumane and unjust system that for way too long has been churning out mindless robots as toxic psychopathic leaders who repeatedly lose costly, protracted and unjustified imperialistic wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. I single handedly forced the less than honorable institution after 170 years to no longer operate above the law by becoming the first cadet to ever challenge and beat the West Point system in a court of law. My landmark 1972 law case brought the constitutional right to due process into the previously impenetrable massive gray stone granite walls. Because I battled psychopaths at West Point who attempted to play God by committing command conspiracy and running up my demerits on a series of false charges to railroad me out of the Academy, I know firsthand what lurks behind the psychopathic military mind. As one individual I am proud of my accomplishment, standing up to their lies and injustice to fight and defeat the psychopaths of West Point.

One of my plebe year roommates was the longest running commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars from 2003 to 2007 General John Abizaid. The reprehensible Abu Ghraib prison scandal occurred while under Abizaid’s command. Fresh off that scandal, former NFL star Pat Tillman’s friendly fire death and subsequent cover-up also happened on my old roommate’s watch. When asked by Congress when he knew Tillman was killed by his own troops, Abizaid said not until several weeks later after the tragedy. Yet General Stanley McChrystal wired General Abizaid at his Central Command headquarters in Qatar right after the accidental death. But the high achieving West Point graduate sitting next to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a couple years later both lied about when they first learned of the circumstances and it was proven that Abizaid was not where he claimed to be in Iraq because the day McChrystal notified him Abizaid was on record having given a press conference in Qatar. Unlike many US generals, I know that my onetime roommate John Abizaid is not a full blown psychopath. In the end he became both scandal- and war-weary himself but nonetheless he still lied before Congress to save his own ass. CYA is the standard norm in both higher echelons of power on down.

While I was rooming with the future war commander Abizaid, my other roommate at the time was to later become General Karl Eikenberry who the day after he retired Obama swore in as the Ambassador to Afghanistan. My two freshman roommates are both currently active members on the Council on Foreign Relations.

Other notables who went on to prominence from the graduating West Point class directly behind me are the infamous General David Patraeus, until last month the equally infamous National Security Administration (NSA) Director General Keith Alexander and the highest ranking general in the land the Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. Having received the exact same higher education and leadership training as these most powerful military men in America, as a West Point insider and whistleblower, I am dedicated to exposing the truth behind the hypocrisy, corruption and inhumane and thoroughly broken system that brainwashes, molds and launches psychopaths into becoming American Empire’s future leaders, the same ones busily pushing humanity off the current doomsday cliff.

Targeting and killing thousands of people including so called “collateral damage” that are innocent civilian families, mothers and children perceived as the sub-human enemy cause no sleepless nights or a tinge of guilt for the hardened, cold blooded psychopathic generals in charge. The brutal savagery of war atrocities and crimes against humanity are simply the way war has always been waged. The risk taking, the thrill and adrenalin rush of combat, the exhilaration that comes with ultimate and absolute life and death power and control over millions of other human beings all in the name of national security and Empire breeds psychopaths to long lasting careers of warmongering and perpetual war on terror. Only the terrorists on this grandest scale are not the Islamic extremists but the US psychopaths that continue leading us to war in a destabilizing agenda for nonstop regime changes around the world by any means necessary, and that invariably means war after war after more war in a never ending curse against all of humanity. The latest frenetic pace of war drum beating and saber rattling accompanied by the old familiar propaganda blitz demonizing other nations and people that happen to resist the already overextended US Empire aggressor is their psychopathic swan song ultimately bent on bringing us all to destruction.

For more detailed information than provided in this brief presentation, an entire chapter of my West Point manuscript is devoted to the poster boy for toxic leadership himself General David Petraeus. There exists no other West Pointer more qualified and illustrative an example of the embodiment of a military psychopath than Betray-us-Petraeus. I went to school with him in the same First Regiment my final three years at the Academy. In fact the loser of my court case, General Knowlton who was the sitting Superintendent, happened to be General Petraeus’ father-in-law. Psychopaths are known for using others for self-gain and as a cadet what better way out of the gate to launch his golden parachute of a career than by marrying the Supe’s daughter Holly Knowlton straight out of West Point.

Like my two high profile “star man” roommates, Petraeus also ranked academically within the top 5% of his West Point class and also earned postgraduate degrees from Ivy League institutions (my roommates graduated from Harvard while Petraeus is a PhD Princeton grad). Petraeus’ dissertation was a treatise on lessons learned from the Vietnam War that he failed to put into practice as commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. What is clear from his writing is an imperialistic ethnocentric disregard for the suffering and damage afflicted on the native inhabitants of US occupied nations. He has no understanding or compassion for what his brand of counterinsurgency warfare has on the people whose “hearts and minds” he claims to wanted to win over.

Having literally written the US Army manual on counterinsurgency warfare (called the COIN manual), his war crime aggression murdering thousands upon thousands of people (the US killed a million and a half Iraqis during its decade long occupation) failed completely in winning any hearts and minds other than his neocon bosses in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Desperate to distort the truth in order to save face in Iraq, both Washington DC and the sycophantic mainstream press crowned their golden boy the Iraq War savior for his 2008 surge allegedly bringing much needed security to Iraq (which reality fails to confirm). In any war America wages, it is impossible to anoint a war hero in a war defeat, thus convenient twisting of truth to fit a war hero status falsely elevated Petraeus to being touted as the next Republican president after Bush. 

General Petraeus was responsible in 2004-2005 for training Iraqi death squad commandos to round up for torture and murder many Iraqi citizens detaining them in hundreds of secret prisons similar to Abu Ghraib. The Guardian last year released its investigation exposing Petraeus’ direct role in violating international law with unlawful detainment, torture and murder. Yet this is how counterinsurgency warfare according to General Petraeus is properly waged. And for all its damage and destruction, next to no intelligence information was ever gathered through such war crime atrocity methods. When the story broke a year ago, a Petraeus spokesman stated that Petraeus kept both the Iraqi leaders as well as his bosses Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld fully informed of all the covert operations. Petraeus’ response shows more psychopathic tendencies typical when caught in any wrongdoing by a feeble attempt to absolve guilt by blaming others.

In December 2009 General Petraeus ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile strike from a nuclear naval submarine off the Yemen coast that murdered forty-one people in a small rural village, all women and children except three. After fellow psychopath Obama pressured the Yemen puppet president to falsely claim the missile was from Yemen, then later exposed to be an American missile, Petraeus lied claiming “only one wife and two children” were among the casualties and that the rest were all al Qaeda operatives. So much for his West Point honor code. But then psychopaths go to unlimited lengths to lie and avoid blame in order to save their own powerful careers. When the Yemen reporter that uncovered the truth about the US missile was about to be released from prison by the Yemen president, the vindictive psychopath devoid of any conscience Obama recontacted his Yemen puppet to ensure the journalist was falsely imprisoned longer for simply telling the truth. After three years of false imprisonment the journalist was finally released last July. 

After Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings’ article that resulted in Afghanistan war commander General McChrystal’s forced resignation, once again the next US President Obama called upon the Iraq War savior to work his surge magic as McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan. Except this time the surge man clearly failed as the US military found itself in another unwinnable quagmire in the face of a resurging Taliban enemy. More psychopathic behavior was observed in Petraeus when the pathological liar went before Congress falsely claiming that “significant progress” was being made. The general also lied about the heroin crop being sizably reduced when in fact it was the biggest bumper crop since the war began. But too much US money was being made in the international heroin drug smuggling trade to tell the truth. Prior to his probable assassination nearly a year ago for knowing too much about the wrongdoing of US intelligence agencies, a haven for psychopaths, Michael Hastings wrote another unflattering article this time on General Petraeus’ failed surge in Afghanistan at the same time that a career officer in Lt. Colonel Davis went public disclosing the dismal truth that America was in fact losing yet another prolonged war half a world away. 

Rather than hold psychopaths accountable for gross incompetence and failure, in a psychopathic system one psychopath Obama will only promote another psychopath Petraeus to CIA director. The defeated war commander jumped at the chance of abandoning both his failing military mission and over-rated career after 36 years while involved in an extramarital affair with another West Point grad Major Paula Broadwell who was doing double duty as both his mistress and his All In biographer.

More than any other military leader, Petraeus had been responsible for outsourcing the US military in Middle Eastern wars with the overnight proliferation of corrupt private civilian defense contractors like Blackwater and DynCorp. In fact, by the latter half of those wars, the US had more civilian Americans serving on the warfronts than actual military personnel. 

As CIA director, Petraeus was already seen as an outsider busily replicating the same outsourcing process of the CIA legions. However, his arrogant disregard stepping on the powerful toes of longtime CIA lifers ended up doing him in more than his adultery.
The psychopathic general was used to being the dictator-boss, fully in control wielding unlimited regal-like power over his subordinate armies. Taking thrill seeking risks while surrounded by sycophantic enablers over many decades produced a grandiose sense of inflated omnipotence, entitlement and impunity that in Petraeus’ case eventually came to bite him in his arrogant ass. Disgruntled CIA operatives turned his affair over to the FBI and the day after Obama was reelected in 2012 the psychopathic CIA director was forced to resign in disgrace just in time to conveniently be out of sight for the Benghazi inquest.

As commander-in-chief Obama travels to the US Military Academy to deliver his graduation commencement speech on Wednesday, it gives Americans pause on the heels of this Memorial Day weekend to reflect on the global destruction and war against humanity currently being waged by the psychopathic killing machine of the US Empire. It is both unsettling and tragic that the oligarchic system produces leadership so rampant with psychopaths. But it also becomes incumbent upon us citizens of the world to call a spade a spade and realize that the status quo power structure limits access to the theft and destruction game only to players who are also fellow psychopaths.

Any individuals within this morally decayed and broken system who are honest and possess a conscience, empathy and compassion for fellow human beings is steeped in inner conflict and have to suffer daily from cognitive dissonance. And as such, they cannot relish playing their part in this sinister game. They will either eventually opt out or be screened out by those less principled insiders that are part of the psychopathic club. Throughout my time in the military I struggled for the exact same reason.

Psychopaths at the very top of this power pyramid will only allow like minded psychopaths into their inner club sanctum. This moral betrayal by those wielding the most power and control on earth must be stopped. Since they are too sick in their deviant pathology to ever change their evil ways on their own, it is left up to us who are guided by a common moral compass to courageously step up and hold these psychopaths accountable for their crimes against humanity. This can only be achieved with the distinct advantage that as just 1% of the total population, the psychopaths and oligarchs are overwhelmingly outnumbered by those of us 99% who are committed to doing what is right in making a positive difference on this earth plane before all is lost.

Joachim Hagopian's background in both the military and mental health fields make him uniquely qualified to address psychopaths as a clinician and psychopaths in the military as a West Point graduate and former Army officer. His written manuscript based on his military experience examines leadership and national security issues and can be consulted at: http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now focuses on writing.

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