Science of the Spirit
WHAT: Antioch University Seattle hosted a day-long Guantanamo Teach-In on October 5. Antioch was one of 300 universities to participate in the nationwide teach-in on issues related to detainees at Guantanamo Bay and U.S. practices that involve detention and torture. The national teach-in began as a project of the Seton Hall Law School, which hosted a simulcast teach-in to the participating colleges and universities. A Noise Room was set up on Antioch's campus that featured video feeds from the national event, as well as a book display and take-action materials. "What Torture Means to 'Us' and What Torture Means to 'Them,'" were the topics of the keynote speech capping the day's activities.
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| ©PA Game Commission |
I recently finished reading "The Sociopath Next Door" by Martha Stout Ph.D. and wanted to share with you some realizations. I hope they are helpful.
Before reading the final pages of the book, I was sure that the idea that psychopaths are NOT like most of other people was pretty much "accepted" in my mind. I was sure that I "understood" it intellectually, even if I did not "believe" it 100% yet. Well, somehow, those few final pages organized everything in my mind, and the realization is profound and shocking: psychopaths ARE different. I'll try to explain what I've understood.
Today I'd like to talk a bit (in a special way) about several items that have caught my eye over the past week or so, all of them having to do with immigration, or mass movements of people in various places around the planet.
Mexicans fear U.S. immigration plan
South Carolina's Republican convention "boo" new immigration proposal
Bush Praises Bipartisan Immigration Deal Nobody Else Likes
Illegals deal alienates everyone
Illegal immigrants refrain: 'Leaving America is not an option'
France says no to mass legalisation of undocumented immigrants
France sends back 24,000 immigrants in 2006
Iran expels 70 000 Afghans
Afghan refugees forced home, but to what?
Too Bad
The Bush Implosion
There is a lot more to this immigration issue than meets the eye!
Mexicans fear U.S. immigration plan
South Carolina's Republican convention "boo" new immigration proposal
Bush Praises Bipartisan Immigration Deal Nobody Else Likes
Illegals deal alienates everyone
Illegal immigrants refrain: 'Leaving America is not an option'
France says no to mass legalisation of undocumented immigrants
France sends back 24,000 immigrants in 2006
Iran expels 70 000 Afghans
Afghan refugees forced home, but to what?
Too Bad
The Bush Implosion
There is a lot more to this immigration issue than meets the eye!
Two stories, little more than 24 hours apart, that lay bare the mendacity and shameless, murderous nature of the Bush government, its military and their bogus war on terror.
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Introduction
Fifteen years in the future an innocent American Muslim is forcibly arrested, his daughter beaten to death - the news reports the break-up of a major terrorist cell. Iran is now Post-Iran, its Southern provinces nuked to oblivion. The War on Terror still rages and the United States is run by a cadre of fanatic evangelicals. Bioterrorism has left Detroit and New Orleans uninhabitable. The American population is implanted with surveillance microchips and Great Britain is following suit. Staged bioterrorism attacks garner support for a major pharmaceutical company to introduce a mind-numbing, conscience-killing drug into the water supply - in the guise of an immune system booster.
There are reports of something called "The Presence", which are denied by officials. The internet monitored, dissenters resort to the use of quantum encryption technology to send a batch of information - websites, banned books, top secret files, music - into the past, in hopes to change the future. Power and greed have run their course and the world is on the verge of utter destruction. It is Year Zero.
Normal people know something is terribly wrong in the world yet they haven't been able to completely identify it nor effectively do anything about it, resulting in frustration and confusion over what's happening, such as the decline of a superpower like America. A book written decades ago but kept from public release until 2006 offers a welcome reprieve from the confusion. Political Ponerology is the first book to adequately explain man's repetitive inhumanity towards man and to provide tools to end such destructive cycles. (Ponerology is a division of theology dealing with evil; the name is derived from the Greek word 'poneros' or evil).
During the oppressive regimes of Nazism and Communism, Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski and colleagues studied how negative ideologies infected entire nations through individuals with various pathologies, mainly psychopathy (absence of a conscience or empathy). Discard your programmed view that serial killers are the only psychopaths, for psychopaths tread heavily upon your life every day. Modern psychologists posit that one in 10 men and one in 100 women are psychopathic.
Lobaczewski says that for centuries, evil has been regarded with a moralistic interpretation that did nothing to help humanity counteract it. His scientific study led him to observe that "evil" acts were most often perpetrated by psychopaths, essentially those with mental diseases, causing him to study evil as a disease not a concept surrounded in moral fluff.
During the oppressive regimes of Nazism and Communism, Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski and colleagues studied how negative ideologies infected entire nations through individuals with various pathologies, mainly psychopathy (absence of a conscience or empathy). Discard your programmed view that serial killers are the only psychopaths, for psychopaths tread heavily upon your life every day. Modern psychologists posit that one in 10 men and one in 100 women are psychopathic.
Lobaczewski says that for centuries, evil has been regarded with a moralistic interpretation that did nothing to help humanity counteract it. His scientific study led him to observe that "evil" acts were most often perpetrated by psychopaths, essentially those with mental diseases, causing him to study evil as a disease not a concept surrounded in moral fluff.
Some people believe that the struggle between good and evil is nothing more than a struggle between knowledge and ignorance, and that good will always prevail because everyone is basically decent and all it takes to overcome the wickedness within them is to somehow educate them about the wrongness of their ways.
While we assume everyone has a conscience restraining them from evil, studies by Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., reveal that about four percent of the population has a sociopathic personality disorder.
In other words, one out of every 25 people is a psychopath - a person with no sense of concern for the well-being of others and no feelings of remorse, regardless of what sort of harmful or immoral action they undertake.
A psychopath is able to lie, steal, cheat and kill with no feelings of sorrow or regret. Sometimes their only motive is the thrill of inflicting pain. This gives the psychopath a competitive advantage over a normal person.
While we assume everyone has a conscience restraining them from evil, studies by Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., reveal that about four percent of the population has a sociopathic personality disorder.
In other words, one out of every 25 people is a psychopath - a person with no sense of concern for the well-being of others and no feelings of remorse, regardless of what sort of harmful or immoral action they undertake.
A psychopath is able to lie, steal, cheat and kill with no feelings of sorrow or regret. Sometimes their only motive is the thrill of inflicting pain. This gives the psychopath a competitive advantage over a normal person.
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| Do we all have a Mr Hyde within? |
There is much evil in the world. A large part of it seems to be centered in the United States, radiating out in its wars of conquest, its television shows, movies, and music, in the fascination with which the world follows the pointless excesses of its stars, in its politics and self-absorption and disdain for the rest of the world. The mythos of the Wild West and men with six-shooters settling arguments with a bullet at high noon before riding off to wipe out the Indians has congealed and hardened the hearts of its population to the reality of invasion and occupations eternally justified with noble slogans as vapid as they are preposterous.
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| ©SpokesmanReview |
| Killing machine. |
Having returned from Afghanistan in March of 2002, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves fatally shoots his wife then himself. Eighteen days later, on June 29, Master Sgt. William Wright, having returned the month before, strangles his wife to death. On July 9, Sgt. Cedric Griffin (who had yet to be deployed) stabs his wife to death. Ten days later, Sgt. 1st Class Brandon S. Floyd and his wife, Andrea, are found shot to death; another murder-suicide. All were stationed at Fort Bragg.
