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Bad Guys

Dick Cheney, the Ultimate American Terrorist

William Rivers Pitt
Truthout
Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:44 UTC
Dick Cheney
© Doug Mills / The New York Times
Vice President Dick Cheney in a June 20, 2007 file photo.
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

- Dick Cheney

It is axiomatic by now: when someone leaves government service, especially from a high-profile position, they write a book. They all do it, sometimes more than once. Richard Nixon is the main example of one who produced a multi-volume apologia; by the time he went into the ground, he'd penned enough books to fill a wide shelf. Henry Kissinger was similarly prolific, which leads one to wonder about the relationship between criminal activities and the printed page. Nixon was chased from office after a series of crimes that, at the time, had no precedent, and Kissinger is still so infamous that he cannot travel abroad for fear of arrest. Both wrote enough books to take up half the political science section of any local bookstore, perhaps in the vain attempt to explain away the lasting damage their actions did to the republic.
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Attention

7 Reasons To Brace For Impact

Snordelhans/Zen Gardner
YouTube
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:48 UTC

Comment: The PTB appear to be setting the stage for a US-China clash to usher in the next level of the post-9/11 Reign of Terror.

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Book

Book Review: Women Who Love Psychopaths

Haley Verrin
psychcentral.com
Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:09 UTC
Image
© psychcentral.com
This book has many reasons to recommend it. Two are most powerful. First, its postulation through neuroscientific indications that the psychopath's brain is genetically different from his fellows and so he cannot change is paramount to letting go. Not understanding this, the victim is drawn, over and over again into the "vortex" of his power play. The term psychopath is used in the book to describe most of the "low/no empathy and conscience diagnoses" (p. 19). Further, the author delineates her hypothesis with a nature v. nurture debate regarding whether people become or are born this way. It is compelling.

The second, powerful hypothesis that Ms. Brown asserts is regarding the "Super Traits" (p. 206) of the victim that dovetail with the psychopath's. It would seem that the stronger and more independent the woman is, the more challenge and usefulness she provides for the man behind the mask. The psychopath is an opportunist as well as a sadist (in varying degrees). His parasitic lifestyle depends upon the strength of his victim and oftentimes her wealth. He will have many relationships to be certain that he always has a fresh supply of whatever he feels his needs are. The stronger woman will last longer. And yet, even after he has broken her, victims have reported that they have heard from these men a year or even ten years later. Many a woman will ask herself how this debacle happened; the book will give her a blow-by-blow description. And identifying the issue is a powerful way to begin a healing journey.

Comment: The author of Women Who Love Psychopaths, Sandra L. Brown wrote an excellent article in issue 13 of The Dot Connector Magazine titled The Unexamined Victim: Women Who Love Psychopaths . The article provides the reader with additional information and research about psychopaths and their negative effects on their victims.

In addition the following documentaries provide important information about psychopaths:

Defense Against the Psychopath

Documentary: Psychopath
"There are many psychopaths in society, that actually, we virtually know nothing about. These are the psychopaths who don't necessarily commit homicide, commit serious violence, or even come to the attention of the police. They may be successful businessmen. They may be successful politicians. They may be successful academics. They may be successful priests. They exist in all areas of society. There is a growing awareness that psychopathic behavior is around us in all walks of life."
For an in-depth view of psychopathy please see: Political Ponerology: The scientific study of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes

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Bad Guys

US: A Tip for Joe the Machinist and All Who Labor, Watch Your Back!!

Sam Pizzigati
Other Words
Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© Kheel Center / Flickr
A Labor Day reflection: Corporate America no longer even pays lip service to the importance of encouraging hard work and skill.

You work hard. You do good work. You loyally stick with your employer through good times and bad. Do you have a right to a paycheck that rises over time?

On any Labor Day over the last 50 years, the answer - from labor and management alike - would be obvious: Of course!

But that answer doesn't seem to hold any more. Earlier this year, a trio of top business consultants openly challenged the notion that good employees doing valuable work deserve to see their paychecks steadily increase. This past July, the Harvard Business School circulated their challenge throughout corporate America's upper echelons.

This remarkably brazen assault on core American workplace values originated at Booz & Co., one of the nation's most prestigious corporate consulting firms. America's corporations, Booz analysts advised earlier this year, need to start attacking the "exorbitant" paychecks now going to their most prized, "steady and reliable" veteran workers.

The Booz analysts offer an example of the "significantly overpaid" worker they have in mind. They call him Joe the Machinist, "a stellar employee who knows the ins and outs of the organization, the result of his many years on the job."
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Dollar

25 Corporations Paid More To Their CEO Last Year Than They Paid In Taxes

Pat Garofalo
ThinkProgress
Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:19 UTC
Last year, as Americans across the country grappled with the widespread effects of the Great Recession, tax dodging by corporations and the wealthy cost the average U.S. taxpayer $434, even as corporate profits soared 81 percent. In fact, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, "corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes."

Image
© Unknown
- Of last year's 100 highest-paid corporate chief executives in the United States, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes.

- These 25 CEOs averaged $16.7 million, well above last year's $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Most of the companies they ran actually came out ahead at tax time, collecting tax refunds from the IRS that averaged $304 million.

- CEOs in 22 of these 25 firms enjoyed pay increases in 2010. In 13 of these companies, CEO paychecks ratcheted up while the corporate income tax bill either declined or the size of the corporate tax refund expanded.
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Alarm Clock

Global Warming Caused by Cosmic Rays and the Sun - Not Humans

Lawrence Solomon
The Financial Post
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 22:37 UTC
Image
New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun - not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won't be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun - not human activities - as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world's largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth's atmosphere.
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Smoking

The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking

J. R. Johnstone, PhD and P.D.Finch, PhD
Iinet.net.au
Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:07 UTC
Marlene Dietrich
© Unknown
Marlene Dietrich

Science is not always a neutral, disinterested search for knowledge, although it may often seem that way to the outsider. Sometimes the story can be very different.

Smoking and health have been the subject of argument since tobacco was introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century. King James I was a pioneer antismoker. In 1604 he declared that smoking was "a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." But like many a politician since, he decided that taxing tobacco was a more sensible option than banning it.

By the end of the century general opinion had changed. The Royal College of Physicians of London promoted smoking for its benefits to health and advised which brands were best. Smoking was compulsory in schools. An Eton schoolboy later recalled that "he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking". As recently as 1942 Price's textbook of medicine recommended smoking to relieve asthma.

These strong opinions for and against smoking were not supported by much evidence either way until 1950 when Richard Doll and Bradford Hill showed that smokers seemed more likely to develop lung cancer. A campaign was begun to limit smoking. But Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest statistician of the 20th century, had noticed a bizarre anomaly in their results. Doll and Hill had asked their subjects if they inhaled. Fisher showed that men who inhaled were significantly less likely to develop lung cancer than non-inhalers. As Fisher said, "even equality would be a fair knock-out for the theory that smoke in the lung causes cancer."

Comment: Let's All Light Up!

Aliens Don't Like to Eat People That Smoke!

Health Benefits of Smoking Tobacco

Brain cells work differently than previously thought: Nicotine helps to spark creativity

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Radar

Monsanto's Roundup May End Bananas - Canaries In The Mine

Heidi Stevenson
Gaia-Health
Mon, 29 Aug 2011 19:14 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Bananas are dying. They're killed by a fungus, one known to be caused by glyphosate, which is used on bananas. But the loss of bananas may be only the tip of the disaster.

The bananas we eat today are not the same ones that were eaten in the first half of the 20th century. Those were tastier and creamier. They were lost to monoculture. A fungal infection, Fusarium, couldn't be overcome because nearly all bananas were clones, and therefore susceptible to the same disease.

The bananas we eat today, a different variety that had been secure from Fusarium are now falling to the same fungal infection. Agribusiness responds simply by closing up shop where the disease has taken over and starting up in a new area. In true earth scorching approach, they walk away from their disasters and do exactly the same thing elsewhere, thus recreating the same disaster again and again.
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Bad Guys

Dick Cheney's Heart of Evil, Psychopathic Political Systems, And The Correct Uses of Social Stigma

Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator
Sat, 27 Aug 2011 16:51 UTC
pathocrat graphic
© Hermes Press
"Ponerology was born in the crucible of attempts to understand, scientifically, a macro-social phenomenon of what can only be called extreme and excessive evil: Fascism and Soviet Communism." - Andrew M. Lobaczewski, a Polish psychiatrist and author of the book, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes.

Definition of Pathocracy (from the website The Pathocracy Blog):
pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski).

From Greek pathos, "feeling, pain, suffering"; and kratos, "rule".

A totalitarian form of government in which absolute political power is held by a psychopathic elite, and their effect on the people is such that the entire society is ruled and motivated by purely pathological values.

A pathocracy can take many forms and can insinuate itself covertly into any seemingly just system or ideology. As such it can masquerade under the guise of a democracy or theocracy as well as more openly oppressive regimes.

"That is the nature of professional politics. Many are called, but few survive the nut-cutting hour--which appears to be coming down on our goofy Child President these days. . . . Ah, but it was ever thus, eh? Vicious thieves have always ruled the world. It is our wa. We are like pigs in the wilderness." - Hunter S. Thompson, from Kingdom of Fear.
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Telescope

Electric Universe: Andromeda's Mother Cassiopeia

Stephen Smith
thunderbolts.info
Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:18 UTC
cassiopeia
© Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/Ioffe/D. Page, P. Shternin et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss
The remains of an exploding double layer known as Cassiopeia A with an artist's impression of a theoretical entity called a neutron star.

Rather than searching for exotic explanations, this celestial object can best be described using plasma physics.

According to a recent announcement from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the so-called "supernova remnant" Cassiopeia A (or "Cas A") harbors a strange passenger within the neutron star that is supposed to inhabit its interior, a form of superconductor known as a superfluid.

As theory suggests, neutron stars form when large stars exhaust their fuel supplies as they age. Once a star with about five times the mass of our Sun accumulates enough thermonuclear "ash" composed of non-fusible elements like iron in its core, it undergoes a catastrophic implosion. Since nuclear reactions can no longer be sustained, the star becomes the victim of its own gravity field. The star's outer surface collapses inward at tremendous speed, rebounding off the dense core material. The star then erupts outward in a supernova explosion, blasting its outer layers into space, releasing X-rays, gamma rays, and extreme ultraviolet.
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