Science of the SpiritS


Magnify

Flashback SOTT Focus: Hope

Hope is often a fragile thing. We hope for so much, yet we seem to attain so little. Looking back, we see our hopes are often based upon illusion, and it is therefore not surprising that they are dashed, that they amount to nothing. And if it is so with our petty, individual hopes, what of our hopes for the world at large?

What of the hope for peace, for a world free from violence and war and fear, a world where the needs of everyone are met?

Star

Flashback SOTT Focus: The Fall of Reason in The West

As a scientist with a conscience, I am shocked almost every day by the uses that science has been put to on our planet in our present time. Science tells us that we have evolved as human beings from primates and then go on to make the assumption that this biological evolution is paralleled by cultural and social evolution. Indeed, science has given us the space program, laser, television, penicillin, sulfa drugs, and a host of other useful developments, which would seem to make our lives more tolerable and fruitful. However, we can also see that after three centuries of domination by science, it could be said that never before has man been so precariously poised on the brink of such total destruction. Why are so many scientists blind to this? Why aren't scientists - as a whole - standing up against the madness we see in the world around us?

The answer is that scientists, like any other group of people, come in all different shapes, sizes and with varying inner content in terms of conscience. I would like to give an example...


Evil Rays

Flashback SOTT Focus: The Protocols of the Pathocrats

Pathocrats
© Signs of the Times
In this week's podcast [Links: Part One, Part Two] we discuss what we have identified as the very first problem that must be solved in order for positive changes to be undertaken in America and elsewhere in the world: the Media.

Knowledge is power. Those who control information can control the masses; it's that simple.

As we researched the subject of the media, we came across The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. As everyone knows, this is a vicious anti-Semitic hoax. We agree. We do not for a minute think that this represents Judaism or ordinary Jewish people.

However, what was shocking for us was our realization that the Protocols is being implemented almost line by line by many of the members of the Bush Administration and the various government 'think-tanks' that formulate their policy. In other words, the Protocols is not a hoax because it is nonsense, but rather it is only a hoax because it was attributed to Jews.

Here, we present the text of Protocol 12 from which several excerpts were read on the podcast and which we jokingly referred to as "The Gospel According to Karl Rove."

Read it and understand that this is, indeed, the number one issue that America must deal with before they can do a single other thing.

Bizarro Earth

Flashback SOTT Focus: The 'Ponerization' of Humanity

Surprise Surprise! Yet another "Bin Laden tape" has surfaced wherein the Harry Houdini of the Islamic terror world and eternal straw man for American and Israeli demagogues reiterates his call to arms for the destruction of Western civilisation...

What is shocking in all of this is the unbelievable mendacity and wilfulness of the mainstream press in furthering this most vile and dangerous of myths that "Islamic terror" threatens Western countries and their populations. As with every previous such tape, we are told that the "authenticity could not be verified" but that unnamed "U.S. intelligence officials believe it to be from Bin Laden". Even the BBC, once a responsible news outlet (before its evisceration by the Blair government after the David Kelly "suicide" affair), irresponsibly parroted the details of the unverifiable recording as if there was no doubt about its origin or authenticity. In a sane world, it would not be standard policy for allegedly objective media corporations to publish such unverified claims as if they were fact. But there is nothing sane about global power politics and if a story involves "Bin Laden tapes" or otherwise supports American and Israeli war mongering and vicious anti-Islamic/Arab propaganda, then no questions are asked.

Take 2

SOTT Focus: Evil is Real


Ambulance

Best of the Web: Bush Madness: The scruffy charms of an insecure president


Comment: Psychologist and author, Andrzej Lobaczewski, outlines the characteristics of the Schizoidal psychopath in his book Political Ponerology. He also describes how it is that many people can be taken in and influenced by, such characters. Certainly two people can observe the same behavior and give it entirely different interpretations; an example would be the difference between how a journalist interprets the behavior and how a trained clinical psychologist would interpret the behavior.

Robert Draper seems to have succumbed to the "charms of the deviant" in that he has taken the "critically corrective" approach of the psychologically ignorant layperson to interpreting the character of George W. Bush. See the comments at the end of this article for a fuller explication of this problem.



Biographer Robert Draper explains that Bush has a surprising intellect but is incapable of curiosity and owning up to mistakes.

Revelations from "Dead Certain," Robert Draper's new biography of President George W. Bush, have received marquee play since the book's publication on Sept. 4. The disclosures have ranged from the petty -- Bush, a stickler for punctuality, once locked a late Colin Powell out of a meeting -- to the momentous. Among the more uncomfortable for the White House: Bush's claim that Paul Bremer, head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, made the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi army without Bush's knowledge, an assertion rapidly rebutted by Bremer.

Comment: The following are excerpts from Political Ponerology by Andrzej Lobaczewski. After reading Draper's descriptions of Bush's behavior as well as the behavior of those who surround him, I think that the reader can draw their own conclusions as to how close a match we have here.
Schizoidia: Schizoidia, or schizoidal psychopathy From the [early days of modern psychiatry, schizoidal psychopathy] was treated as a lighter form of the same hereditary taint which is the cause of susceptibility to schizophrenia. However, this latter connection could neither be confirmed nor denied with the help of statistical analysis, and no biological test was then found which would have been able to solve this dilemma. For practical reasons, we shall herein discuss schizoidia with no further reference to this relationship.

Literature provides us with descriptions of several varieties of this anomaly, whose existence can be attributed either to changes in the genetic factor or to differences in other individual characteristics of a non-pathological nature. Let us thus sketch these sub-species' common features.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, but they pay little attention to the feelings of others, tend to assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses.

Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations upon other people's intentions.

They easy become involved in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage upon themselves and others.

Their impoverished psychological world view makes them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and writings: "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the name of some higher idea." Let us call this typical expression the "schizoid declaration".

Human nature does in fact tend to be naughty, whenever the schizoids embitter other people's lives, that is.

When they become wrapped up in situations of serious stress, however, the schizoid's failings cause them to collapse easily. The capacity for thought is thereupon characteristically stifled, and frequently the schizoids fall into reactive psychotic states so similar in appearance to schizophrenia that they lead to misdiagnoses.

The common factor in the varieties of this anomaly is a dull pallor of emotions and a feeling for the psychological realities of this essential factor in basic intelligence. This can be attributed to the incomplete quality of the instinctive substratum, which is working as though on sand.

Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of activity.

Because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider themselves intellectually superior to "ordinary" people.

The quantitative frequency of this anomaly varies among races and nations: low among Blacks, the highest among Jews. Estimates of this frequency range from negligible up to 3 %. In Poland it may be estimated as 0.7 % of population. My observations suggest this anomaly is autosomally hereditary.

A schizoid's ponerological activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On the small scale, such people cause their families trouble, easily turn into tools of intrigue in the hands of clever individuals, and generally do a poor job of raising the younger generation.

Their tendency to see human reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider "proper", transforms their frequently good intentions into bad results. However, their ponerogenic role can take on macro-social proportions if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions.

(Or if they become president of the U.S.)

In spite of their typical deficits, or even an openly schizoidal declaration, their readers do not realize what the authors' characters are like; they interpret such works in a manner corresponding to their own nature.

The minds of normal people tend toward corrective interpretation thanks to the participation of their own richer, psychological world-view. However, many readers critically reject such works with moral disgust but without being aware of the specific cause. [...]

The famous utterances attributed to Zionist wise men at the turn of the century start with a schizoidal declaration.

The nineteenth century, especially its latter half, appears to have been a time of exceptional activity on the part of schizoidal individuals, often but not always of Jewish descent. After all we have to remember that 97 % of all Jews do not manifest this anomaly, and that it also appears among all European nations, albeit to a markedly lesser extent.

Our inheritance from this period includes world-images, scientific traditions, and legal concepts flavored with the shoddy ingredients of a schizoidal apprehension of reality. [...]

In spite of the fact that the writings [or actions] of schizoidal [individuals] contain the above described deficiency, or even an openly formulated schizoidal declaration which constitutes sufficient warning to specialists, the average reader accepts them not as a view of reality warped by this anomaly, but rather as an idea to which he should assume an attitude based on his convictions and his reason.

That is the first mistake.

The oversimplified pattern, devoid of psychological color and based on easily available data, exerts an intense influence upon individuals who are insufficiently critical, frequently frustrated as result of downward social adjustment, culturally neglected, or characterized by some psychological deficiencies [of their own]. Others are provoked to criticism based on their healthy common sense; also they fail to grasp this essential cause of the error.

Societal interpretation of such activities is broken down into the main trifurcations, engendering divisiveness and conflict.

The first branch is the path of aversion, based on rejection of the contents of the work due to personal motivations, differing convictions, or moral revulsion. This already contains the component of a moralizing interpretation of pathological phenomena.

We can distinguish two distinctly different apperception types among those persons who accept the contents of such works: the critically-corrective and the pathological.

People whose feel for psychological reality is normal tend to incorporate chiefly the more valuable elements of the work. They trivialize the obvious errors and complement the schizoid deficiencies by means of their own richer world-view. This gives rise to a more sensible, measured, and thus creative interpretation, but is not free from the influence of the error frequently adduced above.

Pathological acceptance is manifested by individuals with diversiform deviations, whether inherited or acquired, as well as by many people bearing personality malformations or who have been injured by social injustice. That explains why this scope is wider than the circle drawn by direct action of pathological factors. This apperception often brutalizes the authors' concepts and leads to acceptance of forceful methods and revolutionary means. [...]

Schizoidia has thus played an essential role as one of the factors in the genesis of the evil threatening our contemporary world. Practicing psychotherapy upon the world will therefore demand that the results of such evil be eliminated as skillfully as possible.



Red Flag

Best of the Web: A Generation of Vipers with the Patrick Bateman Shimmy

A few years ago, Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book called American Psycho. It was about a psychopath called Patrick Bateman who killed people in horrible ways with no remorse whatsoever. The book was roundly condemned, often reviewed as without merit of any kind. The result was that it flew off of the shelves and made the author a pot of money. It later got made into a film with Christian Bale.

In recent times we've seen some disturbing characters come down the pike. From Charles Manson on we've had an epidemic of serial killers. We've had the celebrated cases of John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dalmer and Ted Bundy. Then there have been the Menendez Brothers and O.J. Simpson. A certain personality type has become commonplace in society and spans the gamut from the very poor to the obscenely rich. This personality type is defined as a Psychopath. They've always been around but never so many as today.

Vader

SOTT Focus: Insiders and Outsiders in Everyday Life

We all know stories of qualified and skilled people who can't find work or who are passed over for promotion when someone who specializes in office politics gets the nod. This situation is another example of the insider/outsider dichotomy I discussed in my last article. It not only applies to Washington, it also applies to the facts and events of our daily lives. How many Americans are working for companies that are "offshoring" jobs to India and China? Ordinary people are on tenterhooks with the announcement of each round of layoffs while management have that glassy-eyed glare of bigger stock options and pay-offs when the year's profit margins improve and stock prices soar.

Magic Hat

SOTT Focus: The Art of the Con



©Sekretagent Productions
Spell Game of Confidence

Not one of the people getting on the I-35W Bridge on August 1st had any reason to suspect what was going to happen that night. The day before, and the day before that, the bridge had held just as much traffic as it did on the 1st. The bridge had held up just fine since its opening in 1967. It had a history of holding the weight of vehicles traveling across the Mississippi River without any problems.

If someone with knowledge of the bridge's lack of structural integrity stood at one end of the bridge trying to warn commuters of their imminent demise, he would've been laughed off as a nut case. Political cartoonists would have, if they had the time, probably drawn him as a long-haired, bearded, sandal-wearing lunatic carrying a sign reading "THE END IS NEAR!"

And yet, at 6:05pm on August 1st, the I-35W Bridge did collapse. The collapse was so sudden and catastrophic that some thought explosives had gone off. Cars plummeted into the water, below. A school bus full of children just managed to stop before going over the edge. Panic ensued.

USA

SOTT Focus: Insiders and Outsiders in Washington



©Signs of the Times

You have probably heard the terms "insiders" and "ousiders" used in reference to the people in Washington. The insiders are the people who are members of the exclusive think tanks, policy organizations, lobby groups, and other groups that influence and decide policy. The outsiders are those who aren't.

The insiders are also those with connections to important sectors of the economy like the oil and gas industries, the pharmaceutical companies, the major food conglomerates, the media, the secretive Skull & Bones fraternity at Yale that counts among its members both George W. Bush and John Kerry, and long-time politicos who have made a career out of doing the bidding of the aforementioned groups. And then there is the infamous, and, according to the media, non-existent, Israel lobby, the lobby that is so strong you aren't even allowed to talk about it.