©Unknown

Ted Bundy and George Bush. Seperated at birth?

The research of Dr. Hervey Cleckley and Dr. Robert Hare exploring the personality and character traits of psychopaths, when applied to George Bush, shows that Bush fits exactly the profile they developed for the psychopath. Demographis show that Republicanism is much worse than psychopathy.

An excerpt from the book Blood Relations, by Eric Konigsberg, about his great-uncle Harold, a convicted murder:

Hervey Cleckley in his book, The Mask of Sanity, describes the psychopath as a certain type of cruel manipulator whose harmful actions are accompanied by an absence of delusion. The psychopath, he wrote, "does not hear voices. In theory, he can foresee the consequences of injudicious or antisocial acts." A psychopath is a person who knows full well the difference between right and wrong and yet, without compunction, chooses to do wrong. Checkley cited the protagonist of The Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel by Mary Astor, as a quintessential psychopath. "Charlie is a genius in reverse with dangerous charm. Sisters lie for him, parents defend him, friends obey him. While calmly and casually, Charlie Carewe literally gets away with murder."

Let's try an experiment. Think of opinions you may have formed, beliefs that may have arisen due to one or a group of photographs that were distributed in the media. When you saw those images, did you feel anger, bitterness, or even hate? Were you elated, joyous, or perhaps confused? Were you compelled to somehow change the way you perceived the world based on the emotions that were triggered by an image?

Now imagine for a moment that a certain number of photographs in the media - let's say half, for the sake of this experiment - are forgeries. Would you be compelled to re-evaluate that position if you had learned said photograph was false?

©Unknown

Josef Fritzl: does he look like his acts?

There's news that Josef Fritzl, the man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years in a dungeon of his own making, will plead insanity when his case goes to trial. I also saw Glenn Wilson, who works at the IoP on TV speculating that Mr Fritzl is a psychopath.

©Tooz

So, we've seen Obama being put on the ropes by Hillary over the question of Israel. The two are involved in a spitting match to see who can support Israel in the most rabid and mindless manner.

It seems some influential supporters of Israel had a little get-together back in March to challenge representatives from the three presidential candidates who have Israel's backing to make the most outrageously pro-Israel statements imaginable.

©Unknown

The infant believes that mother/the breast/ food, everything, is part of itself; it experiences itself solely through neural input.

[T]the problem of group violence, is one of the most important issues facing society. Not only is this a most crucial topic for our American society but we are confronted with events that are occurring all over the globe, on all continents and in all countries...

So said Dr. Ernest Wolf in a talk given to the International Self-Psychology Symposium in Dreieich, Germany, in May of 2001, four months before 9-11.

This essay was recently brought to our attention, having been posted on the SOTT Forum for the express purpose of highlighting Wolf's description of Narcissistic Rage. Frankly, that was the best part of the essay; the rest was hopelessly muddled and naive.

Why?

Well, Dr. Wolf attempts to explain the causes of evil - individual and macro-social - using the framework of Heinz Kohut's theory of "Self Psychology" (or psychoanalytic psychology of the self). With all due respect to Dr. Kohut and Dr. Wolf, we think that this theory isn't bad if you are just talking about normal human beings who are born healthy and live in basically healthy environments. What this theory does not take into account is the role of pathogenic factors in our society - human beings who are carriers of abnormal psychopathological traits - who can infect groups and even entire societies, bringing pandemic evil on macro-social scales. More than that, it seeks to "spread the blame" over all people, to ignore the fact that moral evil and psychobiological evil are, in effect, interlinked via so many causal relationships and mutual influences that they can only be separated by means of abstraction. Yes, the body social must be weakened before it can succumb to an infection, but if there is no infecting pathogen, it will merely be weak and ineffectual.

In short, Wolf's essay amounts to little more than apologia for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Psychopathy and only adds to the confusion of our times when the problems pressed upon humanity by such types are nothing short of catastrophic.

But, like we said, Wolf has provided one heck of a description of Narcissistic Rage. Since it really is good, let's take a look at it:

©SOTT

Some people just don't get it.

Ken Gude is a senior advisor to the Institute for Public Policy Research's Commission on National Security in the 21st Century. He wrote a piece called "Tortured Explanations" that ran this weekend in the Guardian. It is a review of a book by Philippe Sands on who drew up the current US torture policy.

Well, in the first paragraph we find this pearl:

Ever since the first horrific images from Abu Ghraib emerged almost exactly four years ago, I have repeatedly asked myself: how in the world could my country be responsible for such terrible things? I know a lot of people out there think that this is not an aberration and believe the worst about the United States, its motives and its actions. The Bush administration has certainly added a lot of fuel to that fire. But in this case, the "hate America" crowd are simply wrong: never before in the modern history of the United States has there been an officially sanctioned, government-wide system of inflicting torture and abuse on detainees. Until now.

Oh, yeah. The "hate America crowd". That group of loony tunes who have this irrational hatred of the US for no reason at all.

©Unknown

Angela Merkel discusses how to eat fish with her friend George.

Speechless.

Stunned.

Beyond the valley of the sick bag.

We've heard some incredible statements in the last few years, since the coup d'état of 911, but this one is unbelievable even by the standards of GW. Listen to Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, explain why there is a food shortage:

©Unknown

We ran an article recently on the Signs page about the elite that run the world. It is from a mainstream publication, about as mainstream as they get in the US: Newsweek. It is about the group of people the author calls the "Superclass" and who are:

"part of a new global elite that has emerged over the past several decades. I call it the 'superclass.' They have vastly more power than any other group on the planet. Each of the members is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power, and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members. This new class of elites is both more permeable, and more transient, than elites of the past...

The top 10 percent of all people, for example, now control 85 percent of all wealth on the planet.

That such a group exists is indisputable. It includes the heads of the biggest financial institutions, the 14 families Blankfein joked about, and then some; the top 50 control almost $50 trillion in assets. The heads of the world's biggest corporations are also members; the top 2,000 support perhaps 500 million people, generate almost $30 trillion in sales and have well over $100 trillion in assets. The list also includes top government officials with real cross-border influence... media barons...religious leaders...cultural icons..."

On 21 October 2006 I wrote The Mystic vs. Hitler The remainder of this article will be that item in toto with additional commentary added.

~~~ ~~~

Recently, the formerly highly respected web essayist, John Kaminski, wrote a new piece entitled "Parasite alert: Outing those who pretend to be friends of the truth" in which he took a strange jab at yours truly as follows:

©Les Visible

Les is More!

One of SOTT's favorite essayists, Les Visible of Smoking Mirrors, was interviewed by Mike Rivero of WhatReallyHappened on April, 12, 2008. A SOTT Forum member has provided a rush transcript where we read the following:

Mike Rivero: Getting back to the lessons of history and to the remembrance that our President's grandfather was business partner with what's his name?... We have all heard about that type of a good German who, just went along and helped Hitler, became a cliché of somebody who thought of being good while doing incredible evil. It seems like in our society we have the same thing going on. We have a good American who supports the president, no matter what he does; he turns the blind eye on torturing people. You mentioned Kafka before. My image of that, of course, is we have tortured Iraqis to find weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist! What do you think about Americans? What is going to happen to them?.

Les: You know, I'm going to have to like qualify that in metaphysical terms. You are an atheist, right, Mike?

Mike: Yes, I thank God

Les: Anyway, I am anything but... but I am not religious at all. I am not into religions at all, but I have daily experiences of another power, a greater power that surrounds us, that penetrates us as a living force. And it is what is responsible for my ability to write.

In fact anything I say or do it's just a matter of me getting out of the way. I am sort of a toreador who dances away from my own bull and somehow the sword is able to penetrate and this sword is one of the light and it then fires up the bull and uses it for fuel, and the next thing you get warmed.

But anyway I believe that my point in bringing all of it up is everything is under control. It's always has been under control. You look, you see stars, you see the planets, you see orderly configurations. You look at the sequences of nature, you look at all different cycles that we observe in the natural world... There is the force that holds all of this together and one day science will actually discover this. It is on the verge of it already. And my belief is that every human being is more or less in contact with this, but when they are willfully not in contact with it like when they are a good Germans and when they are good Germans they are moving increasingly into temporal or the materially based. Now, you know, pressure creates heat, right?

Mike: Right

Les: OK. Well, when you press a whole lot of people together, people move deep into a materialistic darkness, more and more heat, more fire occurs. And this has a good point too - hopefully - one would hope. But for people moving into that state of darkness unfortunately certain karmas, certain laws apply.

For instance, if you live in a particular hurricane zone, you know, you are going to get hurricanes. If you live there, that's something you have to factor in. If you are going to live out in a jungle, you've got to be aware of tigers and other things. There are natural dangers that exist and that is a kind of a lifestyle or a place of living. So, when people put themselves into a situation when they have given power, their will, to forces which are unfortunately not very life-affirming, they in some way share that destiny. But for people who are moving towards the light I will put it this way: as the world is being torn down and recycled, a new world is rising up.

I am always extremely optimistic. I know that bad things are going to happen and it's possible that millions and millions of people will die. But I do believe that something very very good is going to happen.

I see the whole of life, Mike, as a Shakespearean play in which the same stories are told over and over again and people are given the opportunity to learn from them. If they do not learn, then there are certain pains that happen. Pain is the great instructor. For those who do learn, they do move away from pain.