Big Brother
January 20, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Editorial
January 20, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Editorial
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
President Bush's latest tool for disrespecting the Constitution, Congress and the American people, used more than a hundred times so far, is the presidential signing statement.
That statement is normally a few words that a president says when he signs a bill passed by Congress. In the past it was an occasion for the president to congratulate legislators who had been particularly active in passing the bill and to praise the new legislation generously, even if he himself had been unsympathetic to it.
There is no mention of the statement in the Constitution, nor does it have any role in how laws are passed and put into effect.
Yet Mr. Bush has taken the presidential signing statement as another means of asserting his will over and above the country's laws, whatever they may say. In effect, he is trying to establish that whatever he says when he signs the bill overrides whatever the legislation itself may stipulate. Historians and presidential scholars, among others, find it alarming.
By Joseph Menn and Chris Gaither
Times Staff Writers
January 20, 2006
By Joseph Menn and Chris Gaither
Times Staff Writers
January 20, 2006
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
Yahoo and others reveal queries from millions of people; Google refuses. Identities aren't included, but the data trove stirs privacy fears.
Comment: Comment: What is really mind-blowing is that the Bush Gang have the nerve to do this immediately after Bush announced that he has been spying on Americans illegally for quite some time. Even more astonishing than the gall of these criminals is the fact that Bush was not immediately arrested for Treason against the American people! But then, that is the special talen of the psychopath:
In spite of their deficiencies as regards normal psychological and moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a natural worldview.
They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them.
They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, take a paraspecific variety.
Natural human reactions - which often fail to elicit interest because they are considered self-evident - strike psychopaths as strange and therefore interesting, even comical. They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.
They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments upon us.
Neither a normal person nor our natural worldview can perceive or properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts.
...
Our first contact [with the psychopath] is characterized by a talkative stream which flows with ease and avoids truly important matters with equal ease if they are uncomfortable for the talker. His train of thought also avoids those matters of human feelings and values whose representation is absent in the psychopathic world view. [
] From the logical point of view, the flow of thought is ostensibly correct
The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them. [
] [Life to the psychopath] is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, pleasure and power. They meet with failure along this road, along with force and condemnation from the society of those other incomprehensible people....
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon.
They are aware of being different as they obtain their life experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into us and them - their world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally.
Their sense of honor bids them cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or obligations is customary behavior.
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals....
Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner. Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of the psychopath, and it is fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to decriterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis. [
Lobaczewski]
By Lisa M. Krieger
Mercury News
19 Jan 06
By Lisa M. Krieger
Mercury News
19 Jan 06
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
Every day on the Stanford University campus, Larry Diamond teaches his students that the president of the United States is not above the law.
Which is why Diamond decided to sue President Bush when he learned that the president had authorized spying on Americans without consent of Congress or the courts. Diamond believes he is among the targets of surveillance.
Financial Times
19 Jan 06
Financial Times
19 Jan 06
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
The Bush administration is expected to announce on Thursday a controversial restructuring of its foreign aid system under Randall Tobias, a retired pharmaceuticals executive who currently heads the US global Aids programme.
Comment: Comment: As Andrew Lobaczewski tells us, a pathocracy MUST install psychopaths in all important positions in order to ensure its own survival. Why else would Bush appoint a Pharmaceutical company exec to head up a Global Aid program?
If the many managerial positions of a government are assumed by individuals deprived of sufficient abilities to feel and understand most other people and who also have deficiencies as regards technical imagination and practical skills - faculties indispensable for governing economic and political matters - this must result in an exceptionally serious crisis in all areas, both within the country in question and with regard to international relations.
The following question thus suggests itself: what happens if the network of understandings among psychopaths achieves power in leadership positions with international exposure? This can happen, especially during the later phases of the phenomenon. Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest
They do not understand that a catastrophe would ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.
Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally, whether in economics, culture, science, technology, administration, etc.
Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything.
Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down....
[
Lobaczewski]
ACLU
ACLU
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
The CIA is engaging in an unlawful practice extraordinary rendition abducting foreign nationals for detention and interrogation in secret overseas prisons. Extraordinary rendition must be stopped before more innocent victims are targeted. Americans cannot tolerate kidnappings and secret prisons.
BY JOHN CREWDSON
Chicago Tribune
19 Jan 06
BY JOHN CREWDSON
Chicago Tribune
19 Jan 06
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
WASHINGTON - The CIA warned its operatives to stay out of Italy after learning that Italian prosecutors were preparing to seek arrest warrants in the agency's 2003 kidnapping of a radical Muslim preacher, according to an e-mail message recovered from the computer drive of the chief suspect in the case.
One CIA employee who received the e-mail later wrote to the agency's retired chief in Milan, Robert Seldon Lady, that she was "extremely relieved" to learn that Lady had managed to cross the border into Switzerland and was "in Geneva until this blew over" rather than "sitting in some Italian holding cell."
David Teather in New York
Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian
David Teather in New York
Saturday January 21, 2006
The Guardian
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
Google is defying a request by the US government to hand over data revealing what its users are searching for online. The Bush administration wants a list of requests entered into Google's online search engine in an unspecified single week. It also wants 1m randomly selected web addresses from Google's databases.
The White House said the information is part of an effort to protect children from online pornography, and would not violate personal privacy - but the request immediately raised concerns.
By Shmuel Rosner
Haaretz Correspondent in Washington and AP
20 Jan 06
By Shmuel Rosner
Haaretz Correspondent in Washington and AP
20 Jan 06
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
WASHINGTON - Former Pentagon analyst Larry A. Franklin was sentenced Friday to a 12 years and seven months imprisonment for passing classified information to former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists.
Franklin was also found guilty of sharing classified information with Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. He was also fined $10,000.
Comment: Comment: So when can we expect prison terms for the Israeli side of the spying operation?
by Jersey Girls: Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg
January 19, 2006
by Jersey Girls: Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg
January 19, 2006
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
We are now almost four and a half years post 9/11, and once again, Usama bin Laden is grabbing the headlines with the release of his latest threatening audiotape.
It is utterly horrifying that bin Laden still, after all this time, has the ability to strike terror in our hearts with his threat to strike our nation's heartland.
Additionally, we are incredibly disturbed to learn that even with the use of his illegal domestic NSA spying program, President Bush first learned of the bin Laden audiotape, along with American citizens, as it was being aired on national television.
Comment: Comment: "The President's unsettling statement regarding Bin Laden on March 13, 2002, "I don't know where he is. You know, I just dont spend that much time on him ... I truly am not that concerned about him." seems to illustrate that this Administration did not understand our enemy nor the threat that they posed."
What these poor women don't even think about is the fact that the murderer of their husbands lives in the White House.
by Michel Chossudovsky
27 december 2002
by Michel Chossudovsky
27 december 2002
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:00 EST
Unknown to most, UNOCAL's partner in the Cent-Gas trans-Afghan pipeline consortium, the Saudi Company Delta Oil is owned by the bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi clans which allegedly have ties to bin Ladens Al Qaeda.
According to a 1998 Senate testimony of former CIA director James Woolsey, powerful financier Khalid bin Mahfouz younger sister is married to Osama bin Laden,. (US Senate, Senate Judiciary Committee, Federal News Service, 3 Sept. 1998, See also Wayne Madsen, Questionable Ties, In These Times,12 Nov. 2001 )
Bin Mahfouz is suspected to have funnelled millions of dollars to the Al Qaeda network.
Now, "by sheer coincidence", former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, the man chosen by President Bush to lead the 9/11 commission also has business ties with bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi.
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In spite of their deficiencies as regards normal psychological and moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a natural worldview.
They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them.
They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, take a paraspecific variety.
Natural human reactions - which often fail to elicit interest because they are considered self-evident - strike psychopaths as strange and therefore interesting, even comical. They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.
They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments upon us. Neither a normal person nor our natural worldview can perceive or properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts.
...
Our first contact [with the psychopath] is characterized by a talkative stream which flows with ease and avoids truly important matters with equal ease if they are uncomfortable for the talker. His train of thought also avoids those matters of human feelings and values whose representation is absent in the psychopathic world view. [ ] From the logical point of view, the flow of thought is ostensibly correct
The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them. [ ] [Life to the psychopath] is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, pleasure and power. They meet with failure along this road, along with force and condemnation from the society of those other incomprehensible people....
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon.
They are aware of being different as they obtain their life experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into us and them - their world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally.
Their sense of honor bids them cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or obligations is customary behavior.
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals....
Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner. Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of the psychopath, and it is fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to decriterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis. [Lobaczewski]