I recently had a rather interesting conversation with one of those people who, in a way that's hard to come by in America these days, can look you in the eye and treat you like a human being.

How rare, I thought.

I was impressed by how simple, how nice, this man was. Before I realised it, we'd spent nearly an hour talking while the sun set and the dull darkness fell on our dull American street, a street made momentarily more habitable by the genuine kindness of a stranger.

And then, the inevitable occurred. The dreaded question: "So, who are you going to vote for?" I looked away for a moment. "You do vote, don't you?" he pressed.

Being respectful toward a person who had just offered me the simple pleasure of conversation, I gave as real an answer as I thought was suitable. "Nope. I'm pretty burnt out by the whole thing." And surprisingly, he actually acknowledged my answer before, well, you know, 'the lecture'.

How 400 trucks to feed Gaza became just 67

Six and a half years go, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian national elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel's planned response. "The idea," he said, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterisation of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.

Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called "Red Lines" document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defence ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.

The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to "make sure Gaza didn't starve".

But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition - requiring 170 trucks a day - military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.

God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred.

The "debates" revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real problem and dangerous development. For example, you would never know that US citizens can now be imprisoned and executed without due process. All that is required to terminate the liberty and life of an American citizen by his own government is an unaccountable decision somewhere in the executive branch.

No doubt that Americans, if they think of this at all, believe that it will only happen to terrorists who deserve it. But as no evidence or due process is required, how would we know that it only happens to terrorists? Can we really trust a government that has started wars in 7 countries on the basis of falsehoods? If the US government will lie about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in order to invade a country, why won't it lie about who is a terrorist?

America needs a debate about how we can be made more safe by removing the Constitutional protection of due process. If the power of government is not limited by the Constitution, are we ruled by Caesar? The Founding Fathers did not think we could trust a caesar with our safety. What has changed that we can now trust a caesar?

If we are under such a terrorist threat that the Constitution has to be suspended or replaced by unaccountable executive action, how come all the alleged terrorist cases are sting operations organized by the FBI? In eleven years there has not been a single case in which the "terrorist" had the initiative!

It was, starting at least in 2007, the goal of the US, Saudis, and Israelis to trigger a region wide sectarian war with which to overrun the governments of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. This was documented in detail in Seymour Hersh's 2007 New Yorker article, "The Redirection" which was covered in depth in, "Syrian War: The Prequel".

A recent bombing in Beirut, Lebanon left high ranking security chief Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan dead. Al-Hassan is described as "anti-Syrian." Before Al-Hassan's death was announced, and literally as bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage caused by the bombing, politicians from Saad Hariri's faction began immediately blaming Syria for the attacks. Hariri himself also laid the blame on Syria, offering no other details or supporting evidence.

Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran have all condemned the bombing and cite it as a provocation to start a greater sectarian war, from which none will benefit. Each in turn suspect Israel and the West, as greater sectarian tension is expected to result, playing into long documented attempts by US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia to trigger a sectarian war they hope will be the downfall of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

Suspicious op-eds in pro-Western "Lebanon Now" insist that Syria is responsible, and again without evidence, concludes that blaming Israel is inappropriate, and that the Wall Street-London militant beachhead is by far a lesser threat to Lebanon than what it calls "the most deadly virus" of President Bashar al-Assad's Syria.

"The simplest explanation for some phenomenon is more likely to be accurate than more complicated explanations." Occam's razor

For those of us keeping up-to-date in the alternative-news-a-sphere, political theatre has become increasingly predictable. Events occur, tragedies happen, 'evil' scapegoats are blamed, politicians say craftily scripted words and the media exalts them. Innocent victims suffer and the general 'herd' are delivered top-ups of fear to maintain their terror-anxiety levels and faith in Governments to protect them from non-existential threats. This process has played out time and time again, especially over the last decade in the wake of 9/11, and remains effective on an ill-informed populace that is unaware the FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US.

In the run-up to elections, terror-related popularity-boosting events are laid out for politicians to capitalise on. They are normally precise and clearly orchestrated. Take the recent case of the FBI foiling their own terror plot against the New York Fed. This is a classic tried and tested method of framing a patsy in order to perpetuate the myth of Islamic extremists for political gain. However, when a terror attack happens that causes confusion and finger-pointing amongst the political elite in the run-up to a presidential election, then clearly something is not quite 'optimal'.

Five weeks after the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the way that the Obama administration, intelligence services and media have reacted has been somewhat perplexing. No elected official has yet to reveal with certainty who led the attack, and at times, both the White House and the US State Department have provided completely different explanations for the assumed motives of the attackers.

What on earth is going on?

The Vice-Speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Danny Danon, issued an open call for terrorist operations on the lives of Palestinian leaders.

"Israel should assassinate the Hamas leaders to revive its deterrence power," Danon was quoted as saying by Felestin al-Yom news network on Wednesday.

Also, in hostile remarks after the Zionist regime intensified air strikes against the Gaza Strip, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Wednesday threatened to launch another offensive on the coastal area.

"If we need a ground operation, there will be a ground operation. We will do whatever necessary to stop the wave," Barak said.

Zionist officials have repeatedly made bold calls for terrorist operations against Palestinians and the international community is shockingly mum about such a flagrant of international rules and Tel Aviv's bold acknowledgement of its terrorist nature.

In 2009, the then Israeli Minister of Religious Affairs, Yitzhak Cohen, had similarly called for the assassination of Hamas leaders.

Cohen, who resided in the Southern city of Ashkelon at the time, said it was time to "remove Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal, Mahmoud Al-Zahar and Ismail Haniyeh".

Cohen's call for the assassination of Hamas leaders later met action. Mashaal, Al-Zahar and Haniyeh are alive, but several other Palestinian leaders were killed in terrorist operations by the Israeli regime, mostly in the form of helicopter air raids on specific targets.

The myth of "pure evil" is a bad joke, resulting from and sustained by other unhelpful binaries: good and bad, right and wrong, normal and abnormal, and hot and cold.

How bad? How wrong? How abnormal or cold?

Science can speak to this question of degree and enrich our understanding of what "evil" might be. Specifically, the sciences of the mind have a variety of approaches to illuminate our understanding of natural phenomena like "evil" on a psychological and neurobiological level.

Take, for instance, the psychopath. The term "evil" is popularly equated with psychopathy, and together they readily evoke thoughts of ruthless dictators - Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler - and sadistic serial killers - Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Gary Ridgeway (the "Green River Killer"). While this subsample of infamous and sensationalized historical figures represents only a very narrow and conventional portrait of what people casually refer to as "evil," psychopathology is generally understood as one of several other personality disorders that fall along a continuum of antisocial behaviours.

Former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black attacked Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday, calling the News Corporation chairman a "psychopath" and comparing him to Joseph Stalin.

The former owner of the Daily Telegraph in Britain and the Chicago Sun-Times, who spent 37 months in a U.S. prison for fraud, said the media magnate - a longtime business adversary - was an "astonishingly cold man."

"He's a psychopath ... like Stalin, except that he doesn't kill people," Black told the Telegraph. "I'm not suggesting he's a homicidal psychopath - he just severs people out of his life like that. I have great admiration for what he's achieved but he's a terrible man."

Canadian-born Black, who served in the House of Lords and became a British national in 1999, was in the United Kingdom promoting his memoirs on the BBC satirical show, "Have I Got News For You."

That wasn't his first "psychopath" attack on Murdoch during his book tour.

Gaza City - Multiple Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip have killed four people and injured eight since late Tuesday, medics said.

Israeli warplanes struck a target in Rafah early Wednesday, killing Muhammad al-Sheikh, 32, a member of the PRC's military wing the Nasser Saladin Brigades.

One other person was also injured in the attack.

Israel's army said it was targeting a launching squad which moments earlier had fired a rocket at southern Israel.

At midnight, an airstrike on Beit Lahiya in Gaza's north killed Ismail al-Tille, a member of Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades, and injured three others, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra told Ma'an.

Another overnight strike in an area northwest of Beit Lahiya killed Loai Abed al-Hakeen Abu Jarad, 24, and Yousef Abu Jalhoum, al-Qidra said. One other person was seriously wounded.

Israel's army said it targeted a squad in the northern Gaza Strip "during its final preparations to fire rockets towards southern Israel."

Last week the Associated Press reported:

Israeli authorities blockading the Gaza Strip in 2008 went so far as to calculate how many calories would be needed to avert a humanitarian disaster in the impoverished Palestinian territory, according to a newly declassified military document... [Critics said] the document was new evidence that Israel used food as a pressure tactic to try to force Gaza's Hamas rulers from power...

What bothers me are the number of parallels to this right here, throughout US history. We've used chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare against our alleged enemies, have had concentration camps for far more people than the Japanese; starved our enemies with "sanctions" while denying them medical care at the same time; and much worse -back well into the First World War and the Civil War. But people don't like to remember these things, whether they're about Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, or Japan or against the enemies in our midst, like the Red Man - and god only knows how many others. Starving people through sanctions or sieges is, as Allen says, just a primitive form of biological warfare.

In its early years, our beloved, exceptional Republic, used germ warfare by deliberately giving small-pox infected blankets to groups of Native Americans, often wiping out entire tribes - and then grabbing their land. The concentration camps we devised for them still exist in places like the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, the Tohono O'odham desert outside Ajo, Arizona, or the dustlands of Oklahoma. Go back to the Crusades for examples of enforced starvation and creative torture such as the art of burning living people at the stake in the name of religion.