I've lately been thinking about the "continuous vs categorical" debate in relation to psychopathy. I just started reading a book called Thinking about Psychopaths and Psychopathy edited by Harvard professor Ellsworth Lapham Fersch. It's a collection of questions and answers from seminars he's given on psychopathy, with contributions by various academics. Based on Fersch's introduction, it looks promising and insightful.

However, I wonder if Fersch really "gets it". While he talks about the importance of psychopathy quite eloquently and identifies the problems inherent in the conflation of psychopathy with antisocial personality disorder, there is a question and answer in the first chapter that is puzzling. (It is possible one of his colleagues answered this question, as the individual author is not listed for each section.)

In this question on the debate between psychopathy as either categorical (i.e. you either have it or you don't, like Turner's syndrome) or continuous (the extreme end of traits shared by everyone, as in someone with very high intelligence), he firmly takes the "continuous" side. However, I get the impression that he does so without understanding the crux of the matter, or the implications of such a position.

Last week, Barack Obama was (we presume) elected president of the United States as the country fell deeper into recession. Nearly 300,000 jobs were lost in October in the United States as the official unemployment rate rose almost a half percent since September to 6.5%. The Dow fell 4% last week despite all the good feelings. When he takes office in January 2009 the new president will surely face an economic situation as dire as Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933 Not only the United States, but the rest of the world, is looking to him to find a way out of economic disaster. Will he deliver?

On both sides of the Atlantic there is incredulity at the gall of bankers. Goldman Sachs is reported to have set aside $7 billion for bonuses having received $6 billion from the federal government in bailout funds; while The Royal Bank of Scotland is scheduled to pay out a much more modest $2.9 billion equivalent.

The age old argument that bonuses have to be paid to keep people from walking has of course been trotted out. In the current atmosphere, it might be said that bankers are lucky not to be walking the plank let alone getting a bonus. Indeed, in any just society many of them would be in jail already.

The month of October came and went leaving more panic about the global economic situation - evidence of a Shock Doctrine strategy necessary for the installment of a New World Order. The US election show is following its course, ready for the "grand finale" in just a few days, while behind the curtain US troops are being called back home to take care of any possible civil unrest.

Meanwhile, the sun is still taking some time off, more fireballs are lighting the sky, and we were surprised by an early arrival of extreme cold weather. Flu pandemic scares came with it, but we believe they are not really related to the weather. There is also an increase of reports of UFO sightings and cold-blooded acts by pathological individuals.

But hang on, because there is always hope!

Hailstorm swamps one small town in 6ft drifts - and it's still only October

These astonishing scenes are the aftermath of a deluge of hailstones that buried a town in a river of ice.

Ottery St Mary, in Devon, was plunged into chaos by the storm in the early hours yesterday.

First, the area was battered by an astonishing 12in of hail in just two hours. This blocked drains, which led to widespread flooding as the rain began to fall.

More than 100 people had to be evacuated from their homes and 25 were airlifted to safety or rescued by firefighters.

This week Alan Greenspan saw the error of his ways amid dire, and no doubt accurate, predictions that hundreds if not thousands of hedge funds will collapse in the next few months, unleashing a global financial firestorm.

Just one week after bailing out the banking sector to the tune of $4 trillion, leaders in the U.S., Europe and Japan sought to assuage their citizens anger by announcing a raft of proposals to 'stimulate the economy', cut income and business taxes and fund schools. Sarkozy even announced a sovereign wealth fund that will hold stakes in French companies to prevent them being taken over by foreigners.

Brasil has stumped up $50 billion to defend the Real. Imagine what that sort of money could do inside Brasil for schools, infrastructure, medical facilities or policing. The Venezuelan Bolivar is also under pressure.

In a sign that the real economy is being hit very hard, shipping rates for commodities have dropped 90% since May, exposing the very real fact that as Thomas Kositgen put it:-

The emerging markets rely on the strength of the bigger economic powers to grow, [...]

And here is the sad end game of the ripple effect: it takes food out of the mouths of children, it shuts the water taps and it sends hordes of people into lives of despair.....a matter of life and death.

It is already taking the food out of the mouths of people in the West, although the Western media is strangely silent about that aspect. We can expect the situation to get much worse.

Summary: A battle for global economic hegemony is under way. The banking bailouts have moved from the original US proposal of simply buying bad assets to substantial recapitalisation and even nationalisation of banks that just months ago were considered strong and healthy. Bank deposits are rapidly being guaranteed around the world and government guarantees for short and medium term bank debt are freely available. Just who is running these bailouts, and for who's benefit?

Behind much of the apparent debacle lie derivatives and structured assets so, as Tuesday October 21st saw the settlement of many of these instruments effected by the Lehman bankruptcy, we take a look at Credit Default Swaps and some of the myths behind them.

Fundamental changes are being affected to the way banks are required to account for their assets with the hasty dropping or limiting of "mark-to-market" or fair value accounting - what is behind these changes and who benefits?

**************************
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson 3rd president of the US (1743-1826), Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)

Thomas Jefferson was right; he was right when in 1863/64 US agricultural loans were called in at the behest of the Rothschild bankers in London, he was right in the panic of 1906, he was right in the agricultural crisis of 1920/21, he was right in the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the early 1930's and he's right today. However, not even he could foresee that it is not just the people of the US that are slaves to private banking interests but all the peoples of the world.

SOTT Editors Simon Davies and Joe Quinn appeared on UK-based TV show On The Edge on Thursday 9th October 2008.

Watch the 1 hour show (streaming video) below:

SOTT can exclusively report that the legendary and elusive Penn Guinn was recently spotted in the heart of darkness that is England. Our UK correspondent caught up with him and he was gracious enough to tell us about his experience.

Summary: In a week defined by unprecedented government bailouts and collapsing stock markets all financial logic flew out of the window as the US dollar strengthened and gold hardly budged leading many to speculate as to the extent of the rigging of the global gold market in the face of its purported safe haven status.

The announcement, Monday 13th October, that the British government is to take substantial stakes in 2 major UK banks, HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland and the proposal in the US that the Fed is to take similar stakes in US banks while providing guarantees of bank's senior debt, caused the markets to rally. This despite the fact that it should be clear to anybody that the US is going way beyond bailing banks out and is in fact transferring the future wealth, in the form of future labour and taxation, of ordinary American's into the hands of a tiny financial elite.

Additionally, following the G7 meeting at the weekend it was announced that central banks around the world would provide unlimited US dollar funding to the markets in order to ensure sufficient liquidity is available at all times.

Amid this turmoil the auction of Lehman Brothers bonds at just 8.825 cents on the dollar, resulting in Credit Default Swap payout this coming week of 91.375 cents on the dollar by all sellers of Lehman CDS's, a devastating payout for the sellers, passed almost silently.