Shabbat: The Hebrew Prozac

As a convert, the rest of my family isn't Jewish so I did my rituals alone and joined everyone when I came back from temple.

I look at the backyard and realized it had been crying for attention. I have been too ill to do much but I decided to go give the family's garden some TLC. I know, it was shabbat, I should have been resting - but something drew me outside.

I had already reseeded my small lawn, put down soil, weed killer and then covered everything with compost. I put out all my delicate glass windchimes and left the metal ones in my collection out. I cleaned rakes, hoes, trowels, clippers and the weed wacker. I uncovered my table, chairs and cafe umbrella, swept up the pine needles and put away my numerous bird feeders. And I felt calm. I also put out a banner which hangs among the morning glories and peonies in my yard that says "Gardening is the best therapy."

Later on this afternoon, one of my family came to sit with me. She also loves to garden and we agreed it truly is good therapy for us. For a while I didn't have to think about anything but the plants, the dirt, the yard and what to plant. Nothing else. Mental freedom from worries of anything life-changing.

In that time, I wasn't watching a clock but the sun and daylight. I wasn't trying to do anything but just be. Meditation of the best kind, for me.

While I paid for my hard work with a flare of my pinched spinal nerves - it was somewhat worth it. I didn't feel so bad about utilizing my shabbat this way. I believe Hashem pulled me out to that yard, so for just a few hours I could breathe the fresh air and work in his creation - spending time with Him and no worries.

Gut Vach, my friends.

Meditation: The Seat Belt Of Mental Health
by Susan Smalley

I once heard a world-renowned psychiatrist pose a question to a room full of mental health experts. He asked, "What is the 'seat belt' of mental health? Seat belts save lives, they are a simple thing people can do to protect themselves from physical harm, but what is the comparable tool to protect us from the mental hazards of life? What is the seat belt to protect against the risks for unhappiness, depression, anxiety, pain, and suffering?"

We all know that the road of life is bumpy with unexpected drop-offs, accidents, and only the occasional smooth-sailing highway. I believe that meditation -- a practice for increasing awareness -- is truly a seat belt of mental health, a protection for us on the hazardous road of life. Meditation doesn't mean sitting and reciting a mantra , although one could practice that way. Meditation is a mental exercise that heightens your awareness to experience. We have a center at UCLA where we teach meditation to the public as well as investigate the science behind it. I often look at our work promoting meditation and think that it's like the early days of seat belts -- only a few people thought it was a good idea, and most people didn't want to be bothered with it.

I remember when cars started coming with seat belts, and I remember that no one wore them. In fact, I remember consciously choosing not to wear a seatbelt. Over time, more and more people started to "buckle up," then cars had to have them, and finally the laws required us to wear them. I'm not advocating that we have laws requiring us to meditate (but I wouldn't mind if all schools and workplaces offered meditation and places for people to find a little peace and quiet). The biggest shift would be that we as a society started to see the value of meditation, in taking time to discover our inner sense of awareness, to heighten awareness of our experiences.

To get there, we will likely need the science of meditation to be disseminated by some PR firm with a large scale marketing campaign, like "Buckle up for Safety, Buckle Up" was back in the day. The science is pretty convincing -- meditation can improve your health (boost your immunity) and lead to happier and more compassionate living (it is strongly associated with happiness and well-being). Given the simplicity of meditation-- it's free, easy to do, and available to everyone--I think it is likely merely a matter of time before it becomes as routine as putting on a seat belt.

Until then, take note of the little things you already do that heighten your awareness, like paying attention to a breath or two, and consider practicing a little meditation every day. Try it and see for yourself. Meditation alone won't protect you from all things hazardous to your mind, but like a seat belt, it can help!

SOURCE

April is Child Abuse Prevention Month

My children are my first thought and act in the morning and my last thought at night. They are my day, night and everything. I would step in front of a bullet for them. They are such bright, articulate wonderful children. Having grown up under the influence of a Narcissistic Parent - I make sure they always know how loved, how important and how special they are.

This blog post moved me to tears. Children never, ever forget.

from MY THOUGHTS ALWAYS

I am doing all this to raise awareness of child abuse. It's important that every child find someone who will fight for them and not against them. As I have stated in the previous post these are my life experiences. They aren't a soap opera or a TV show this is my real life.

After telling the guidance counselor things would only get worse, things did get worse. My brother and I were always arguing and fighting. We are siblings that's what siblings do, fight and fuss. After one such incident in which we were fighting dear 'ol dad yanked me away from my brother and proceeded to beat my brother.

I'm not talking a smack on the butt, that I don't consider abuse. The first thing dad grabbed was a man's dress shoe. He brought his arm back and slammed it into my brother. I tried to jump in front of my brother. I tried to make it stop. He was too strong and managed to beat my brother and hold my mom, grandmother, and myself back. The shoe I guess wasn't effective enough and he tossed it to the side and a book was the next object to slam against my brother's twelve-year-old body. The shoe and the book weren't effective enough. He unbuckled his belt and pulled it out of his blue work pants and whipped my brother like the stories you hear about slavery and the masters that were abusive. When it was all done my brother had welts all over his back and was covered in bruises.

God, why wasn't I able to stop this insanity? I think to this day I still blame myself for this incident. If I had just kept my mouth shut when my brother and I were fighting... Why was that nasty man created?

My mom knew she had to find a way to protect my brother but what. She also knew that I had reached a stage in my life at which I fight back and she didn't need to worry about me. I'm way too vocal and had he touched me I would have gone to school and told and he would have been arrested. Which I should have done to begin with hindsight sucks. My mom enrolled my brother into Karate. It worked; my brother and I fought less and he could now defend himself.

The old man raised his fist to my brother and my brother kicked him in the crotch. This was the beginning of the end of the physical abuse for my brother. The fact that my little brother could now kick his butt was a dream come true and now the abuser learns what it is to have pay back.

The old man stopped beating my brother. I guess it's real easy to beat up someone smaller than yourself, someone who can't defend themselves. Once my brother could defend himself we became unstoppable me with my sassy 'tell you off' attitude and my brother with his 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle' pizza loving self.

After my eighteenth birthday I moved to Cleveland, Ohio to go to school. I knew my brother would have been fine. I was no longer worried that he would get beaten. The tables had turned.

I did not get help through all of this. There was no escape. I didn't know what to do especially since the only guidance counselor I ever spoke to practically ignored me. There are other children who don't know what to do or where to go. That's why everything I do or say is so important. If you know or suspect child abuse it is more than important to report it. Children can't speak for themselves sometimes. Adults need to do it for them. Children are told "Don't tell" or "It's your fault." They don't understand that it truly isn't their fault.

So, once more I will offer a few resources and the numbers to call if you or someone you know is a child of abuse.

Reporting abuse numbers:
Child Help USA 8004-A-CHILD 800422-4453 (this is the number you would use if you reside in Mexico.)
Alaska (AK)800-478-4444
Arizona (AZ)888-SOS-CHILD(888-767-2445)
Arkansas (AR)800-482-5964
Connecticut (CT)800-842-2288800-624-5518 (TDD/hearing impaired)
Delaware (DE)800-292-9582
Florida (FL)800-96-ABUSE(800-962-2873)
Illinois (IL)800-252-2873
Indiana (IN)800-562-2407
Iowa (IA)800-362-2178
Kansas (KS)800-922-5330
Kentucky (KY)800-752-6200
Maine (ME)800-452-1999
Maryland (MD)800-332-6347
Massachusetts (MA)800-792-5200
Michigan (MI)800-942-4357
Mississippi (MS)800-222-8000
Missouri (MO)800-392-3738
Montana (MT)800-332-6100
Nebraska (NE)800-652-1999
Nevada (NV)800-992-5757
New Hampshire (NH)800-894-Jersey (NJ)800-792-8610800-835-5510 (TDD/hearing impaired)
New Mexico (NM)800-432-2075
New York (NY)800-342-3720
North Dakota (ND)800-245-3736
Oklahoma (OK)800-522-3511
Oregon (OR)800-854-3508
Pennsylvania (PA)800-932-0313
Rhode Island (RI)800-RI-CHILD(800-742-4453)
Texas (TX)800-252-5400
Utah (UT)800-678-9399
Virginia (VA)800-552-7096
Washington (WA)800-562-5624
West Virginia (WV)800-352-6513
Wyoming (WY)800-457-3659
Canadian directory this has a list of numbers and places to go to in Canada to get help.

SOURCE

Victim-Blaming Still at Large

by Katie Buckland

As a former domestic violence prosecutor, I am gratified and relieved by the jury's decision in the Phil Spector murder case in the Superior Court of Los Angeles County.

Spector, 69, a former music producer, was convicted Monday after his second trial of second-degree murder in the shooting death of Lana Clarkson almost six years ago.

The jury system is at best an imprecise arbiter of justice.

It is undoubtedly true, as one juror in the first trial in 2007, remarked, that Spector bought himself some forensic evidence by introducing bogus scientific evidence about the pattern of the blood splatter and position of the gun that tricked two jurors into thinking Clarkson had killed herself.

According to comments after the first trial, one of the jurors found it relevant that the county coroner's office did not produce a "psychological autopsy" of Lana Clarkson.

What exactly is a "psychological autopsy"? And are Americans really so addicted to crime solving shows that attaching the word "autopsy" gives this ridiculous concept some validity?

No, this is simply a made up term for the age-old practice of blaming women for the violence that pervades their lives.

Life Up for Grabs
Lana Clarkson's entire life was dissected and described with psychobabble during both trials, which may warrant taking another look at the California Evidence Code. The rules for what goes on in California state courts give the judge wide latitude in determining what evidence is relevant. Perhaps that code should be amended to specifically rule out trash psychology such as this.

The entire defense was premised on the theory that Clarkson was suicidal and thus planned to be in the presence of a gun-waving maniac with a history of violence against at least five other women.

There was never a scintilla of evidence to support this theory, yet it allowed her life to be on display.

The defense never introduced evidence that Lana Clarkson knew of Spector's previous violent behavior.

If she didn't know he was capable of such violence, how could her trip to his faux castle possibly have been motivated by a desire to end her life?

Let's Back Up
The implied theory was that she was so despondent over her circumstances that she threw caution to the wind when she got into the car with Spector to tour his house. But let's back up for a moment.

Before she accepted a ride in the chauffeured town car she clarified with the driver that he would accompany them during their visit to Spector's mansion and return her to the lot where her car was parked. This is hardly risky behavior by any stretch of the imagination.

So she hated her job at The House of Blues where she worked as a hostess in the VIP room and complained about it when e-mailing friends. That's a thought familiar to most working people, at least occasionally. She also went out and bought appropriate and comfortable shoes, a clear indication that she planned to be working as a hostess for the foreseeable future.

And then there is Phil Spector's statement to the chauffeur; "I think I killed someone."

Maybe my years as a prosecutor have made me cynical, but that sounds pretty close to a confession if you ask me.

Most chilling is the testimony of five other women who had guns waved in their face when they tried to leave his residence, behavior going back almost 20 years.

This is a man with a pathological hatred of women, a gun collection, and enough name recognition many years after his producing career ended, to lure Lana Clarkson to her death.

The details of her phone calls, her shoe shopping and her e-mailed intentions to attend a party that weekend had no place in this trial, and seemingly caused her family unnecessary pain.

The defense theory of "suicide by insane gun wielding former music producer" was enough to hang one jury, but not the second, and we thank those prosecutors who endured a second trial to ensure that justice was served.

Katie Buckland is the executive director of The California Women's Law Center and can be contacted at katie.buckland@cwlc.org.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.

Blog Reader Appreciation Day

A HEARTFELT THANK YOU TO READERS OF SANCTUARY FOR THE ABUSED!!!

This week Sanctuary for the Abused got it's 467,000th hit. That's 467,000 hits in the 6 years since I opened that site to the public.

I am honored and awed that so many have found resources and answers there. I am moved often to tears by the thank you letters I get from women & men who found the strength and information they needed to reclaim their lives there.

I started that blog in November, 2003 as a way to keep my own personal research on abuse private and out of view from people around me, including my abusive ex. As a voracious reader and a research junkie... I needed answers and I got them.

Five years ago I was 'emotionally raped' by a narcissistic sociopath. Someone who I had cared for and felt I was friends with for more than 1/2 my life and yet - had no idea of his true nature for those 28 years. Someone who, to this day, tells a very backward, upside-down and twisted version of the truth (projecting all the things he did on to me) I was left feeling very used & alone with no one to trust. Particularly myself. I made a decision to open that site to the public not only for my own therapy - but because the pain I realized so many others were going through was so similar to mine. I was told by to "move on" and "get over it" when psychologists and trauma counselors let me know - that would never be fully possible.

I won't tell anyone what to do about the abuse in their lives. I know I personally turned a blind eye to it for years and even rationalized it away. I learned that one big reason was because I was raised by a pathological parent so had no idea and was brainwashed to accept the unacceptable. I simply put the information out there. You must reach your own decisions.

In the last years many, many painful revelations have come for me. Only through reading, therapy and helping others - has any of what I have personally experienced made any sense at all.

In 2004 after finally getting clarification on one of the more soul-rending experiences I have had with being abused, I decided that only by trying to help others could I be right with myself about decisions I made. Since I am not being allowed to make any direct amends for any wrongs I participated in, I am hoping that site helps others - and somehow heals us all.

I know first hand what it is to be taken advantage of, brainwashed, emotionally raped, used, lied to, manipulated, laughed at, slandered, covertly abused, verbally abused, ignored, sexually used, psychologically abused and much more. I spend time seeing where people who visit there come from... what groups & links brought them to me.... and what I post there hopefully answers that.

I want to remind all of you that I am trying to make the site a one-stop-shopping place without detracting from anyone's work.

The sad thing about the site reaching 467,000 hits is that it shows the deep need for validation from victims.

It shows me that abuse, particularly non-physical abuse, is running rampant. Sociopathy and Narcissism are becoming more prevalent in our society. Women & men are suffering in silence every day for a variety of reasons -- embarassment, lack of information, feeling alone, etc. And the Internet has opened not only avenues for predators to stalk and prey on the trusting but new pathways for victims to find healing and fellowship.

I believe in the "Bumblebee Effect." The Bumblebee Effect says that in theory - a bumblebee flapping its wings in Italy, can cause an eventual tornado in Toledo, Ohio.

I believe in not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.

I participate in hands on support of other abused women as I attempt to muddle through my own ongoing issues.

Ironically, 3/29, the date 10,000 hits was reached by, was the birthdate of my original, first abuser. My history has a lot of varying types of abuse in it; abuse that I translated into my personal life - and I am determined that it will stop with me. How about you?

Again, I thank each and every one who uses Sanctuary for the Abused. I want to especially thank Jude - who showed me what blogging was, Shira, Sandra, Nani, Beth, Holly, Sandy Brown, the late Kathy Krajco, Anna Valerious and my friends who listened to me, and who - even when I showed them all the bad things I'd done - still supported me & understood, cried with me and helped me not demonize the computer but turn it into a tool for good.

And most of all, my therapist of 15 years, the late Dr. Kathryn Faughey - who when I showed her the site told me to "Continue!" and gave me advice, support, straight talk and compassion.

I even want to say thank you to my abusers - who forced me to look for ways keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Bless you all -
I remain your humble servant & fellow victim-survivor

International Con Man: Barack Obama

It's scary how close to truth The Onion gets sometimes:

In a devastating blow to millions of unsuspecting Americans, newly elected president and international con man Barack Obama fled the country Wednesday with nearly $85 million in campaign funds.

According to FBI investigators, Obama's sudden disappearance was discovered at 6:15 p.m. when the former Illinois senator failed to arrive at a gala event in Lincoln Square, prompting several aides to rush back to his campaign headquarters. At 6:23 p.m., flight logs at O'Hare International Airport confirmed that two passengers, a male carrying two silver briefcases and dressed in a perfectly tailored Brioni tuxedo, and an African-American female wearing a fur coat and speaking in a thick Russian accent, were seen boarding a private plane.
Enlarge Image Letter

A note was left behind by Obama, in which he claims the American public "never stood a chance."

Obama's campaign office, sources said, was completely vacant aside from a discarded Abraham Lincoln portrait, behind which was an emptied safe that his aides claimed never to have seen before.

In addition, three unconscious Secret Service agents were discovered at the scene, along with two lit cigarettes still burning in an ashtray, and Obama's daughters, who authorities now believe were taken from an Alabama foster home six years ago.

The only item found inside the metal safe was a letter, handwritten with a fountain pen and titled "An Explanation, My Dears."

"To my tender little pawns, the all-too-trusting people of America," said FBI lead investigator Ray Hilland, quoting the letter at a press conference Wednesday. "If you are reading this, then I have already left your silly country in my private jet, and am right now sipping fine champagne with my lovely associate, a woman you have come to know as 'Michelle.'"

"I assure you, this was the most pleasurable and fulfilling con I have ever pulled off," the note continued. "Not since the Moroccan elections in 1984 have I taken so much joy in raising, and then crushing, the hopes and dreams of so many pathetic, disenfranchised, and downtrodden people."

"It's been an absolute delight doing business with you. Rest assured, your generous contributions will be well spent," the note concluded. "Fondly yours, Ψ."

After initiating a further search of his campaign office, officials found more than two dozen counterfeit passports inside Obama's desk drawer. Authorities suspect that this is not the first time that the man who inspired millions has preyed upon a leadership-starved country, raised a record amount of money by running for office, and then vanished without a trace.

"This explains Portugal in '86, Finland in '94, and Greece in '90," CIA director Michael Hayden said. "He used the same faultless cover in those elections as he did here—a dead mother, a runaway father, a grandfather who fought in Patton's or Järnefelt's or Papdopoulous' army, and his signature calling card: change."

Multiple translations of Obama's books Dreams From My Father and The Audacity Of Hope were also discovered at the scene, each seemingly authored by a different world leader, including former Malaysian president Mohamad Mahathir, former Belgian prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, and the 14th Dalai Lama.

Of particular interest were the titles Les Rêves De Mon Père and L'audace D'espére, both of which feature a cover photo of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, a man Paris officials claim hasn't been seen or heard from in nearly eight months.

According to investigators, it appears that over the past 15 years, Obama has been elected president or prime minister in nearly 45 countries, many of them African. Officials estimate that since 1983 Obama has amassed more than $2.3 billion in stolen campaign financing.

"He's good, real good," Hayden said. "Sometimes he'll have three campaigns going on at once. Recently uncovered video of him in Bangladesh, Ukraine, and Italy in 1989 shows him shifting seamlessly between three languages. And no matter what dialect he speaks, he speaks it passionately. He also abides by a flawless formula: a desperate country, plus hope, plus the promise of a bold new tomorrow equals big bucks."

"Hell, even I donated the $2,400 to his campaign," he added.

Obama's closest aides, including head campaign strategist David Axelrod, admitted that they never once suspected their candidate was anyone other than who he claimed to be. Nevertheless, Axelrod said that the recent revelation did explain why he once overheard Michelle Obama tell her husband that "the time had come for their coup de grâce."

"He completely suckered me," said a visibly dejected vice president-elect Joe Biden, who estimated that he raised over $10 million for Obama. "I trusted him. Change, 'Yes We Can,' a new kind of politics, bringing the nation together, valuing an open dialogue about the issues—I trusted all of it."

Added Biden, "I should have known it was too good to be true."

Everyday Americans, whom Obama referred to as "so many unwitting chess pieces in my elaborate game," also expressed shock Wednesday.

"I'm devastated," Pennsylvania resident and Obama donor Denise Bell told reporters. "I just hope he comes back soon so he can be our president."

Lipstick on a Pig?

She needs more than a full-time make-up artist.

She needs plastic surgery and an attitude adjustment.

Narcissists - ALLLLLL about the image.



GLAMOUR 'FIRST'
by Annie Karni

She's America's top "model."

Michelle Obama is the nation's first first lady to add a full-time makeup artist to her traveling entourage, according to stylists who have worked with presidential wives over the past 16 years.

Makeup artist Ingrid Grimes-Miles, 49, helped create Obama's signature look on her inaugural trip to Europe last week.

Grimes-Miles, who has been working with the first lady for six years, now splits her time between DC and Chicago, where she dolls up morning-news anchors for WGN TV.

"No other first ladies have consistently traveled with a makeup artist," said hairdresser Bernard Portelli, who styled Hillary Rodham Clinton's blond mane in 1993 and tracks trends in first-lady style.

"It took Laura Bush four years to finally look good. It's taken Michelle Obama two months. She wears fake eyelashes that are beautiful. She can't do those herself."

Style watchers suspect that Grimes-Miles is behind Obama's most prominent beauty reinvention: Her eyebrows. After the first lady drew criticism for looking angry, her high-arched eyebrows were reshaped with a softer arc that gave her a friendlier appearance.

Grimes-Miles has described Obama's makeup as "not an avant-garde look . . . We want her to [look] very natural and polished."

Last week, Grimes-Miles joined "First Hairstylist" Johnny Wright, 31, aboard Air Force One as official guests of the president, during their six-day trip across Europe.

The Obamas privately paid for the travel expenses of the styling team, according to a spokeswoman for the first lady. But the high-profile jobs don't pay much, say former White House stylists.

"You do it because you know you will have some prestige and you will be able to make money later," Portelli said.

Wright, a former LA-based stylist for Frederic Fekkai, relocated to the capital for his position in January. But he wasn't the first lady's first choice.

Michael "Rahni" Flowers, 54, who has tamed Mrs. Obama's locks since she was 18, said he couldn't relocate from Chicago. "I thought it was better to help train someone to manage her in DC," Flowers told The Post.

SOURCE

The Language of Babel

by Kathy Krajco

Quite a few years ago, I saw a documentary on TV about batterers. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the program or the expert being interviewed, but what he said I think is self evident to anyone who has ever tried to communicate with an abusive person.

What was it? He pointed out that in arguments between the victim and the batterer (not beatings, just arguments), the victim always argued circles around the batterer, beating him hands down. I mean she whupped him.

They actually captured examples on film, from counseling offices and even from cameras placed in the home.

This should be no surprise. Of course she whupped him to shame. Reason was 100% on her side. He either had to concede her points or be totally irrational and blow back a wall of gibberish and bullshit at her, like a character in a Monty Python skit.

Any fair and rational judge of the debate must award the victory to her, by pinning him on every point.

If you live or work with a narcissist, you know that all you ever get is fallacious arguments from them.

But we get so used to the irrational blather of these people that we grow tired of fielding it all and blasting it by exposing it for the nonsense and gobbledygoop it is.

So we need to remind ourselves now and then that the way people use language can be a red flag.

I know of a narcissistic administrator who ordered his charges to do despicable and even illegal acts while remaining unaccountable simply by issuing these orders in the Biblical language of Babble.

What is it? It’s confused language, language that confuses things with what they ain’t. I have given examples of this before, like confusing patriotism with nationalism to make patriotism sound like a vice.

If you examine Babble closely, you see that it is nonsense, language as literally meaningless as the babbling of baby. Just noise. Blather.

Nonetheless, listeners get the message the babbler intends from it. How? Through the power of suggestion. And, as they say, Never underestimate the power of suggestion.

It’s bullshit, in other words. What writers call gobbledygook. The chief tool of propagandists. A way of saying things without really saying them. A way shooting a sentence through the forest without nicking a single tree. A way to confuse the listener enough that he or she misses the absurdity in what you say.

It works because we are in the habit of fixing other people’s English on the fly. We must, because we all make errors in speaking even our native language on the fly. We start out a sentence one way, see it won’t work, and change some crucial grammatical element like the number of subject or the subject itself mid-sentence. Our listeners follow what we’re trying to say and correctly interpret the sentence anyway.

Experiments have shown that listeners naturally fill in words you leave out, without even realizing that you have left them out. They correct nonsensical phrases to make sense of them.

When, for example, Radar O’Reily rushes in crying, “Major Hoolihan went to get married to Japan!” we are but momentarily thrown overboard and instantly fix his sentence to “Major Hoolihan went to Japan to get married!”

Next time you’re listening to someone, pay attention to how many times you think, “Huh? Oh, he actually means this” or “He actually means that.”

That’s great. But when a particular person requires you to do too much of that, look out: it’s no accident. It just someone blowing a wall of blather at you.

It’s full of extraneous gobbledygook that makes it hard to follow what they are saying. Characteristically, these people put so many miles between the subject and verb, interrupting the thought with everything but the kitchen sink, that by the time your poor cerebral software gets the verb, it has forgotten what the subject was.

You are supposed to get confused and think, “Well, I don’t understand it but it must make sense.”

No it need not make sense! Run a logic check on everything people say before you let it into your head.

The administrator I mentioned above wasn’t nervous at all before an audience. To the contrary, he was in his glory. And he was perfectly capable of speaking perfect English to an audience when he wanted to. But when he wanted to avoid responsibility for what he was saying, he mangled his sentences; he left words and whole phrases out; he started sentences over so many times in the middle of one that there was no way to make English out of that gibberish.

And don’t even get me started on the hints and innuendo. His charges understood exactly what he was telling them to do, though any direct quotes you could have supplied law enforcement authorities were nothing but innuendo and incoherent gibberish.

We see this now even in writing. It’s politically incorrect to expect even the most basic standards in email. Blowhards exploit this green light. When educated people, even writers and editors, cannot get through a sentence of email without some unbelievable spelling or grammatical error, or way-off misuse of a word, look out. They are doing that on purpose, to make it seem as though they typed this with blazing speed and cannot be held accountable for making sense or meaning what they say.

Why? Well, because this is email, Baby. And you know the rules of political correctness about email:

we babblers can throw up smokescreens, confuse the issues, cloud the issues, sidestep the issues, and utter Nimrodean nonsense as freely in email as we do in speech. And it’s against the rules for you to call us on it. Ha-ha!”

And that’s why the victim blasts every argument of the abuser to smithereens. All she has to do is take his blather one piece at a time and say, “Huh?” exposing it for what it is – bullshit and irrational absurdity.

Narcissists and other abusers never do have a leg to stand on. Reason is never on their side. They never have even a single legitimate point to make. The wall of blather they throw at you is just an attempt to conceal that. It’s like the inky cloud an octopus exudes to conceal its escape route from a predator.

That’s why communication with a narcissist is impossible. Communication is another thing on that long list of things that the poor babies call “threats” to themselves. So, communication with them is impossible simply because they block it, throwing up this wall of flak to prevent anything you say from getting through.

SOURCE

Terrorism = Tantrums

Hat tip GIYUS

Ever observed a child having a tantrum? I have. One of my children is learning disabled and has tantrums that resemble cyclones.

Now, how many of you have seen adults have them?

I have - I've seen bosses, people on line at a store and people on mass transit have them. They don't want to "share" or admit to anything. They want it their way. Now.

Of course, we've seen a lot of it online. People who just aren't getting their way. Bloggers who don't like reality or don't deal well with disagreement. And most of all trolls who decide that rather than dealing with things in an adult fashion - like civil debate - they will malign, smear, lie and cheat to gain sympathy and to gain the upper hand. They may even write blog posts about you or covert posts about you to tear you down. Its their site, and they figure - they will wield it like a bat if need be.

Terrorism is a form of a tantrum. Albeit a deadly one. They don't get what they want - they kill you. Of course there's the net terrorists who simply hack websites or spam your comments. And then the ones who shoot up universities, launch kassams or riot in the streets. Wahh waahh waaahhh

What does having a tantrum get them? Same as a child. You'll do anything to make the tantrum stop - so you'll give in, right? Wrong.

So they escalate the tantrum. Again.

Here's a couple of good articles on tantrums & rage in adults.


The Successful Tantrum
How to Win by Losing It.

Initiation
Lose your temper only during an argument or immediately after receiving an offending piece of information. An apology is going to be inevitable, and those are the only two situations that can adequately set one up. Telling someone “I yelled at you because I felt insulted by [situation X]” is a step down the road to mutual understanding.

Likewise, go crazy only if you’re capable of affecting the situation or personal dynamic in question. If you’ve already suffered a disappointment or defeat, are not in the presence of the person who provoked you, or are taking on a clear superior, aggressive behavior only highlights your lack of status, like the vindictive cries of a child who knows, deep down, that making a scene is not actually going to increase his chances of eating
Chicken McNuggets.

Execution
Physically, your actions should be intimidatingly forceful without threatening
anyone else’s person or possessions. Breaking stuff, whether it belongs to a person or a company, leaves you in their debt; actual physical confrontation leaves you liable to a status-deflating retaliatory face-punch and an even more status-deflating immediate firing. Hit things that will make loud noises without breaking, or angrily sweep everything on your own desk onto the floor. Consider keeping a deactivated cell phone to smash into tiny pieces.

Verbally, the same guidelines apply. Express disappointment (the “parental gambit”), confusion, or disillusionment: Screaming, “This is just so fucking sad and pathetic I want to shoot myself!” makes everyone feel bad but contains no words or phrases prohibited by company codes of conduct or hate-speech laws.

The goal is to accentuate someone else’s malfeasance, not commit your own.

Conclusion
Unless you really do hate the people you work with, you should eventually turn your thoughts toward letting your victim save face. With this in mind, wrap things up quickly, and either get out or simmer down. An appropriately bat-shit punctuating gesture—the door-slam is, of course, time-honored—will allow the target of your tirade to look around, shrug, and earn sympathetic looks of “Wow, that sure was crazy” from everyone who witnessed the scene until you come back to say you’re sorry.

Alternately, you can give him an opening to get the proverbial word in edgewise, gradually taking the intensity level down notch by notch to the point where onlookers get bored. Then you can leave for a private conversation or a cup of coffee, returning together to indicate that things are “all good.”

For now …

ORIGINAL

TANTRUMS & THE
DESTRUCTIVE NARCISSIST

The grandiose fantasies of the narcissist inevitably and invariably clash with his drab, routine, and mundane reality. We call this constant dissonance the Grandiosity Gap. Sometimes the gap is so yawning that even the narcissist - however dimly - recognizes its existence.

Still, this insight into his real situation fails to alter his behaviour. The narcissist knows that his grandiose fantasies are incommensurate with his accomplishments, knowledge, status, actual wealth (or lack thereof), physical constitution, or sex appeal - yet, he keeps behaving as though this were untrue.

The situation is further exacerbated by periods of relative success in the narcissist's past. Has-been and also-ran narcissists suffer from a Grandiosity Hangover. They may have once been rich, famous, powerful, brilliant, or sexually irresistible - but they no longer are. Still, they continue to behave as though little has changed.

The balding, potbellied narcissist still courts women aggressively. The impoverished tycoon sinks deeper into debts, trying to maintain an unsustainable and lavish lifestyle. The one-novel author or one-discovery scholar still demands professional deference and expects attention by media and superiors. The once-potent politician maintains regal airs and holds court in great pomp. The wizened actress demands special treatment and throws temper tantrums when rebuffed. The ageing beauty wears her daughter's clothes and regresses emotionally as she progresses chronologically.

Human collectives - firms, nations, clubs - develop Grandiosity Hangovers as easily and as frequently as do individuals. It is not uncommon to come across a group of people who still live in a bygone buy glorious past. This mass pathology is self- reinforcing.

Members feed on each other's delusions, pretensions, and lies. Ostrich-like, they bury their collective head in the sand of time, harking back to happier moments of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

The Grandiosity Hangover and the Grandiosity Gap are the two major vulnerabilities of the narcissist. By exploiting them, the narcissist can be effortlessly manipulated. This is especially true when the narcissist is confronted with authority, finds himself in an inferior position, or when his Narcissistic Supply is deficient or uncertain.

Here are a few of the things the narcissist finds devastating: Any statement or fact, which seems to contradict his inflated perception of his grandiose self. Any criticism, disagreement, exposure of fake achievements, belittling of 'talents and skills' which the narcissist fantasizes that he possesses, any hint that he is subordinated, subjugated, controlled, owned or dependent upon a third party. Any description of the narcissist as average and common, indistinguishable from many others. Any hint that the narcissist is weak, needy, dependent, deficient, slow, not intelligent, naive, gullible, susceptible, not in the know, manipulated, a victim.

The narcissist is likely to react with rage to all these and, in an effort to re-establish his fantastic grandiosity, he is likely to expose facts and stratagems he had no conscious intention of exposing.

The narcissist reacts with narcissistic rage, hatred, aggression, or violence to an infringement of what he perceives to be his entitlement.

Narcissists believe that they are so unique and that their lives are so cosmically significant that others should defer to their needs and cater to their every whim without ado. The narcissist feels entitled to special treatment by unique individuals, over and above the regular person.

Tell the narcissist that he and his motives are transparent and can be easily gauged, that he will do what he is told, that his temper tantrums will not be tolerated, that no special concessions will be made to accommodate his inflated sense of self, that he is subject to court procedures, etc. - and the narcissist will lose control.

Wah! Wah! Israel's Bullying Us!

And they go crying to their enablers - the meaningless, anti-Israel U.N. Projection. Pure & simple. Spare us all!!
Iran complains to UN about Israeli 'threats' Iran on Tuesday urged the United Nations to respond firmly to what it described as Israel's "unlawful and insolent threats" to launch an attack on Tehran's nuclear installations.

Israeli officials, including President Shimon Peres, recently have suggested that Israel could use military force to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons, as the West suspects it is doing.

Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, insists it is only interested in building reactors that peacefully generate electricity.

The Islamic Republic's UN ambassador, in a letter to Mexican UN Ambassador Claude Heller, said Israel was violating the UN charter and urged the international body to respond clearly and resolutely. Mexico holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council.

"These outrageous threats of resorting to criminal and terrorist acts against a sovereign country and a member of the United Nations not only display the aggressive and warmongering nature of the Zionist regime, but also constitute blatant violations of international law," Iranian Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee wrote.

The letter came two days after Peres told Israel's Kol Hai radio that Israel would respond with force if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refused to soften his position on proceeding with a uranium enrichment program.

"We'll strike him," Peres said in the interview.

An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted last month by Atlantic magazine as saying the government was weighing the military option.

Khazaee said the remarks were "unlawful and insolent threats" based on "fabricated pretexts."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has said that Israel should be "wiped off the map," has vowed to continue his country's nuclear program.

Iran said on Monday it would welcome constructive dialogue on its nuclear program with the the five Security Council permanent members - the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia - as well as Germany.

The Security Council has adopted five resolutions demanding that Iran freeze its uranium enrichment program, three of which imposed sanctions against Tehran. Iran has so far refused to stop enriching uranium.

In his interview with Israeli radio, Peres also urged Ahmadinejad to speak with U.S. President Barack Obama, who has promised to adopt a policy of engagement with Iran and has said he is willing to meet with its leaders.

Washington cut off ties with Tehran in 1980 after militants seized the U.S. embassy in the Iranian capital. Former U.S. President George W. Bush pursued a policy of isolating Iran during his eight years in office.

U.S. officials, diplomats and analysts say Obama opposes the use of military force against Iran's nuclear sites but is worried Israel, which bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osiraq in 1981, might bomb Iranian sites if engagement fails.

If Tehran continues to enrich uranium, analysts say, Obama will have no choice but to support a push for a new round of UN sanctions against the Islamic Republic later this year.

Why Don't Painkillers Work for People with Fibromyalgia?

from PhysOrg.com

People who have the common chronic pain condition fibromyalgia often report that they don’t respond to the types of medication that relieve other people’s pain. New research from the University of Michigan Health System helps to explain why that might be: Patients with fibromyalgia were found to have reduced binding ability of a type of receptor in the brain that is the target of opioid painkiller drugs such as morphine.

The study included positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the brains of patients with fibromyalgia, and of an equal number of sex- and age-matched people without the often-debilitating condition. Results showed that the fibromyalgia patients had reduced mu-opioid receptor (MOR) availability within regions of the brain that normally process and dampen pain signals – specifically, the nucleus accumbens, the anterior cingulate and the amygdala.

“The reduced availability of the receptor was associated with greater pain among people with fibromyalgia,” says lead author Richard E. Harris, Ph.D., research investigator in the Division of Rheumatology at the U-M Medical School's Department of Internal Medicine and a researcher at the U-M Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center.

“These findings could explain why opioids are anecdotally thought to be ineffective in people with fibromyalgia,” he notes. The findings appear in The Journal of Neuroscience. “The finding is significant because it has been difficult to determine the causes of pain in patients with fibromyalgia, to the point that acceptance of the condition by medical practitioners has been slow.”

Opioid pain killers work by binding to opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord. In addition to morphine, they include codeine, propoxyphene-containing medications such as Darvocet, hydrocodone-containing medications such as Vicodin, and oxycodone-containing medications such as Oxycontin.

The researchers theorize based on their findings that, with the lower availability of the MORs in three regions of the brains of people with fibromyalgia, such painkillers may not be able to bind as well to the receptors as they can in the brains of people without the condition.

Put more simply: When the painkillers cannot bind to the receptors, they cannot alleviate the patient’s pain as effectively, Harris says. The reduced availability of the receptors could result from a reduced number of opioid receptors, enhanced release of endogenous opioids (opioids, such as endorphins, that are produced naturally by the body), or both, Harris says.

The research team also found a possible link with depression. The PET scans showed that the fibromyalgia patients with more depressive symptoms had reductions of MOR binding potential in the amygdala, a region of the brain thought to modulate mood and the emotional dimension of pain.

The study subjects were 17 women with fibromyalgia and 17 women without the condition.

SOURCE

Escape

B"H

Make a part of your life an act that takes you beyond your bounds -- helping people that are not part of your family or circle of friends, doing something that does not fit within your own self-definition.

Escape yourself.

A Daily Dose of Wisdom from the Rebbe
-words and condensation by Tzvi Freeman

The Psychopath's Tricks of the Trade

I've been reading Laura Knight-Jadczyk's blog off and on for a while now. Along with one of her other sites, SOTT.net, I get a lot of interesting esoterica and others things to think about. Especially she and her fellow writers' stances on narcissism & psychopathy.

Having been victimized by pathologicals myself as well as observing them at 'work' in society - a lot of this interview resonated with me.

Laura is one of the editors of the book POLITICAL PONEROLOGY by Andrzej Łobaczewski. I am going to get my hands on a copy as it looks to be a must read.

Herewith are excerpts from Swiss journalist, Sylvia Cattori's interview with Ms. Knight-Jadcyzk and her fellow book editor, Henry See.

After reading the book Political Ponerology, A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes by Andrzej Łobaczewski, I wished to interview the author. However, given that he was sick, he was unable to respond to my questions except in the shortest way, a single paragraph. Fortunately, I was able to interview Laura Knight-Jadczyk and Henry See, editors of the book who discussed the questions with him via telephone and were thus able to speak on his behalf.

I think everyone should read this book because it provides the keys necessary for understanding events that we often can't comprehend. The book describes the origins of "Evil", its true nature, and illustrates how it spreads throughout society.

Mr. Łobaczewski spent years observing those in power whose actions were the incarnation of evil, people described in psychological terms as anti-social, psychopaths, or sociopaths.

Silvia Cattori: Here is what a Swiss psychiatrist said to me about the book Political Ponerology:

I have never read anywhere else the things Łobaczewski speaks about. No other book has treated the subject in this way. It was immediately useful for me in my work. The things he affirms about perverse/pathological behaviour - in conflicts in business as well as in the political sphere where we see more and more conflicts and more and more people of this type - immediately helped me to better understand, for example, the functioning of these individuals who create conflicts in their work and who, wherever they go, pollute the atmosphere.

Why did he choose a title that is so hermetic, Political Ponerology, for a book that should interest not only psychologists and psychiatrists but everyone?

Laura: ...let me try to answer your question: Why did Łobaczewski choose that title? The first thing is that the work was originally a series of documents, technical and academic, originating from various sources. As Łobaczewski explains in his introduction, very little of the work is original to him, he is just the compiler.... The term, "ponerology" is an obscure theological term that means the study of evil. Andrzej knew this, and decided to reclaim and rehabilitate this word for scientific use since, as it happens, our science really doesn't have a word for the study of "evil," per se. We need one.

Henry: When Łobaczewski sent us the manuscript for his book, we were stunned. We had been preoccupied with the question of why, no matter how much good will there is in the world, there is so much war, suffering and injustice. It doesn't seem to matter what plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. And it has been that way for thousands of years, repeating over and over again.

We had also been researching the question of psychopathy for several years, and had published many articles on the subject on our web sites. We had also transcribed an electronic edition for research of the seminal work on psychopathy by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity, with the permission of the copyright holders because it had gone out of print. It is such an important and seminal text that we made it freely available for download. So we had a good grounding in the question and had some inkling that the question of psychopathy and the dire situation we are facing on the planet were related.

Laura: Let me add that the reason we had been researching psychopathy was, as mentioned above, because we had encountered the phenomenon first hand. We were engaged in working with groups of people and the phenomena that Ponerology addresses in terms of groups and how they are corrupted by pathological deviants insinuating themselves into a group under the guise of normality, was very familiar to us on a small social scale. We had observed it and dealt with it time and again, though in the early days, we were just flying by the seat of our pants. We knew that something strange was going on, we just did not have labels and categories for it. We found some of those labels and categories in texts about psychopathology, but it still did not address the social dynamic.

Henry: But Political Ponerology presents the subject in a radically different way from other texts about psychopathy, suggesting that the influence of psychopaths and other deviants isn't just one of many influences working on society, but, under the appropriate circumstances, can be the primary influence that shapes the way we live, what we think, and how we judge what is going on around us. When you understand the true nature of that influence, that it is conscienceless, emotionless, selfish, cold and calculating, and devoid of any moral or ethical standards, you are horrified, but at the same time everything suddenly begins to makes sense.

Our society is ever more soulless because the people who lead it and who set the example are soulless - they literally have no conscience.

When you come to understand that the reins of political and economic power are in the hands of people who have no conscience, who have no capacity for empathy, it opens up a completely new way of looking at what we call "evil".

Evil is no longer only a moral issue; it can now be analyzed and understood scientifically.

Laura: With Łobaczewski, the word "Ponerology" has been reclaimed from its religious connotations where it never did society as a whole much good, and is the science of evil, of understanding its origins scientifically, and how it can infect individuals and societies like a disease.

When psychopaths are the policy makers in government and the CEOs of big business, the way they think and reason - their 'morality' - becomes the common culture and 'morality' of the population over which they preside. When this happens, the mind of the population is infected in the way a pathogen infects a physical body. The only way to protect ourselves against this pathological thinking is to inoculate ourselves against it, and that is done by learning as much as possible about the nature of psychopathy and its influence on us. Essentially, this particular 'disease' thrives in an environment where its very existence is denied, and this denial is planned and deliberate.
....

Sylvia: Łobaczewski has studied these people not from a political point of view, but from a psychological point of view. He has managed to understand how it happens that mad people, ideologues, and repressive powers, in spite of their inhumanity, can obtain the support of large populations. Does not everyone have a perverse/pathological basis, periods when they pass through a perverse/pathological life?

Henry: First of all, it needs to be said that "mad people" don't need the support of large populations, only a powerful minority that can both "drive" the population and control it. Look at the polls in the United States. Bush has been hovering around 30% popularity for years - and that is the population as a whole. But because he is backed by a very powerful minority, the people who own the media, the arms industry and their military supporters, the oil companies, among others, popular discontent doesn't matter. And as long as Bush's politics don't overtly affect the ordinary American negatively, they don't care enough to do anything about it.

Laura: In the U.S. - and elsewhere in the world - even the most oppressed and unfairly treated people are easily controlled by fear, by threats to their affordable materialism: entertainment, sports, gambling, so on. Even the failure of schools, medical care, social safety nets, do not drive people to really question what is going on. It is, as Aldous Huxley wrote, a scientific dictatorship: bread and circuses. In short, most Americans are aware of their oppression, and express this in polls, but those in power have successfully drugged them with a plethora of distractions - fear and pleasure - sufficient to keep them under control.

Henry: There is the carrot and the stick. As long as people can continue living in the illusion, they will do so. When the illusion starts to crack, then the stick comes in.

Laura: People are afraid of making waves for fear of losing what they have, of losing their peace, of having to exert effort to resist. After all, it does take all their time to keep the illusion going, they must slave daily to keep the SUV from being repossessed, and they want to have time for the football game on Saturday.

Henry: They also figure that Bush only has a couple of years left anyway. The system will take care of itself. Łobaczewski's book shows us why this is an extremely naïve way of thinking. The system that is in place is a pathological system that is at odds in a very profound way with the being or nature of most people.

People of conscience are being ruled by people with no conscience. This fact is the primary injustice and is the basis for the other ills of society.

Laura: For many years this system has been covert because there were still people in high positions with conscience, but over time, they have all been replaced or disposed of in one way or another, and now the pathology of the system is out in the open, but nobody cares. If you look back over the history of the past fifty years or so, you will find that nearly every public figure who has died tragically was one who had conscience, concern for people, and influence enough to make waves against the pathological types.

Henry: The second part of your question is very important, because it is this idea that we are all somehow perverse or pathological in some ways,

that we all have a shadow side as Jung put it, that serves as a major prop to the pathocratic system and makes it possible for psychopaths to hide in the general population. We have been convinced that we are all just animals and that each of us is capable of becoming a Hitler or a Bush or a Mengele, given the right circumstances. We buy into this because we have all done things in our lives for which we are ashamed, for which we feel a sense of remorse. We know those thoughts that come to us in moments of heated emotion, thoughts we wouldn't want anyone else to know or to hear. We sense that we do have this shadow side, a part of ourselves of which we aren't proud. Because we feel this sense of shame and remorse about this aspect of ourselves, we project onto others that they have the same capacity. This projection is where we make the fatal mistake.

There are two issues this raises. First, there is a world of difference between someone who, in the heat of an argument with a significant other, for example, loses control and physically or psychologically abuses that person, and someone who coldly, with calculation and forethought, carries out the same thing. The acts are wrong in both cases. I am not trying to diminish the abuse done in a moment of emotion. But that same person, who loses control momentarily, would be unable to think through and coldly plan out the same act. Something inside of him or her would recoil. In the psychopath, that voice of conscience does not exist. .... One person may be killed in a heated argument. Many thousands can die from cold calculation.

Laura: One way of understanding this is that studies show that psychopaths not only have higher rates of violent crime, they commit different types of violent crimes than non-psychopaths. One study showed that two thirds of the victims of psychopaths were male strangers while two thirds of the victims of non-psychopaths were female family members or acquaintances - crimes of passion.

Normal people can commit acts of violence while in states of extreme emotional arousal, but psychopaths cold-bloodedly select their victims for revenge or retribution or to achieve some end. That is to say that psychopathic violence is instrumental, a means to an end, predatory.

Henry: Secondly, in a society dominated by pathological values, if one can call them that, the existence of a small group of conscienceless people promoting a culture of greed and selfishness creates an environment where the pathological becomes the norm. In a society, such as the United States today, where the president can lie with impunity on matters of life and death, a pathological environment is created where lying becomes acceptable. Violence is acceptable. Greed is acceptable. It is part and parcel of the ideology of the American Dream, that anyone can be a success no matter who you have to hurt to do it. And, it is in what they must do to actually succeed that the seeds of pathology are sown. In that environment, people of conscience who are weak and easily influenced take on the characteristics of the pathological in order to survive and succeed. They see that their leaders lie and cheat, and they figure that if they want to get ahead, then they can lie and cheat as well.

Laura:... Psychopathy is an adaptive life strategy that is extremely successful in American society, and thus has increased in the population. What is more, as a consequence of a society that is adaptive for psychopathy, many individuals who are NOT genetic psychopaths have similarly adapted, becoming "effective" psychopaths, or "secondary sociopaths." In other words, in a world of psychopaths, those who are not genetic psychopaths, are induced to behave like psychopaths simply to survive. When the rules are set up to make a society "adaptive" to psychopathy, it makes psychopaths of everyone.

Henry: Were that pathological influence removed from society by putting psychopaths into quarantine, by educating people of conscience on the signs of pathology, of what to look for and how to deal with manipulation, by changing the systems created by psychopaths; if through such methods we were able to remove this ponerogenic influence, then the other pole, that of conscience, would be the more influential of the two, and people would gravitate towards altruism and truth rather than selfishness and lies.

If we were able to remove the pathological influence, we might find that our conceptions of "human nature" are wrong and are weighted wrongly because we accept those who are genetically without conscience as "human". Remove them and their acts from the data set, remove their influence from society as a whole, and the higher qualities of human nature capable of conscience might find room for expression in ways that we have never dreamed possible.

Sylvia: How can we distinguish between psychopaths and healthy people? Can you give us the portrait of a true psychopath? Which of their faculties have problems?

Laura: The simplest, clearest and truest portrait of the psychopath is given in the titles of three seminal works on the subject: Without Conscience by Robert Hare, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley, and Snakes in Suits by Hare and Paul Babiak. A psychopath is exactly that: conscienceless.

The most important thing to remember is that this is hidden from view behind a mask of normality that is often so convincing that even experts are deceived and, as a result, they become the Snakes in Suits that control our world. That's the short answer.

Henry: Popular culture sees psychopaths as characters such as Hannibal Lector from Silence of the Lambs, that is, as serial killers. However, while a certain number of psychopaths are criminals and have had run-ins with the law and some are, in fact, serial killers, there are a great number of them that never fall afoul of the law. These are the smarter ones, and they are the ones that are the most dangerous because they have found ways of working the system to their advantage.

There are a number of traits that we find in psychopaths:

• An obvious trait is the complete lack of conscience.
• They lack any sense of remorse or empathy with others.
• They can be extremely charming and are experts at using talk to charm and hypnotize their prey.
• They are also irresponsible. Nothing is ever their fault; someone else or the world at large is always to blame for all of their 'problems' or their mistakes. Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, identifies what she calls the pity ploy. Psychopaths use pity to manipulate. They convince you to give them one more chance, and to not tell anyone about what they have done.
• So another trait - and a very important one - is their ability to control the flow of information.
• They are also incapable of deep emotions.
  

In fact, when Hare, a Canadian psychologist who spent his career studying psychopathy, did brain scans on psychopaths while showing them two sets of words, one set of neutral words with no emotional associations and a second set with emotionally charged words, while different areas of the brain lit up in the non-psychopathic control group, in the psychopaths, both sets were processed in the same area of the brain, the area that deals with language. They did not have an immediate emotional reaction.

Our whole emotional life is a mystery to them, while at the same time providing a tremendous tool for them to manipulate us. Think of those moments when we are strongly affected by our emotions and how our ability to think is impaired. Now imagine that you were able to feign such emotion, remaining cool and calculating, while the person you were exchanging with was really trapped in an emotional cauldron. You could use tears or shouting to get what you wanted, while your victim was driven to despair by the emotions they were living.

They also seem to have no real conception of past or future, living entirely for their immediate needs and desires. Because of the barren quality of their inner life, they are often seeking new thrills, anything from feeling the power of manipulating others to engaging in illegal activities simply for the rush of adrenaline.

Another trait of the psychopath is what Łobaczewski calls their "special psychological knowledge" of normal people. They have studied us. They know us better than we know ourselves. They are experts in knowing how to push our buttons, to use our emotions against us.

But beyond that, they even seem to have some sort of hypnotic power over us. When we begin to get caught up in the web of the psychopath, our ability to think deteriorates, gets muddied. They seem to cast some sort of spell over us. It is only later when we are no longer in their presence, out of their spell, that the clarity of thought returns and we find ourselves wondering how it was that we were unable to respond or counter what they were doing.

Many of the books written in English on psychopathy talk about psychopaths as a group which share a common constellation of traits. The most widely used scale for measuring psychopathy was developed by Dr Hare. It is the PCL-R. It lists twenty traits that are found in the personality. If the trait is found sometimes, then it is given a 1; if the trait is prominent in the personality, then it is given a 2. The highest total then is 40. People who have more than 30 on the PCL-R scale are considered as psychopaths.

But what Łobaczewski has done is to go further and give a taxonomy of different types of psychopaths and other pathological types, and he shows how their deviations work together to form a pathological system. He has brought out some work from psychologists in Europe that were lost during the years of communism.

Laura: Diagnosis is a contentious issue ; there is a controversy that needs to be explained in order to understand the possibilities of detection. [1]
....

Based on first hand observations of the phenomenon in question, Łobaczewski states that the repression of knowledge is undertaken in the typical manner of the psychopath: covertly and behind a "Mask of Sanity." In order to be able to control the psychological sciences, one must know or be able to sense what is going on and which fragments of psychopathology are most dangerous. A pathological political regime locates those individuals in the field who are psychopaths, (usually very mediocre scientists), facilitates their academic studies and degrees and the obtaining of key positions with supervisory capacity over scientific and cultural organizations. They are then in position to knock down more talented persons, governed both by self-interest and that typical jealousy which characterizes a psychopath's attitude toward normal people. They are the ones monitoring scientific papers for their "proper ideology" and attempting to ensure that a good specialist will be denied the scientific literature he needs.

The fact is that, over the past 50 years, the concept of psychopathy has been narrowed sharply and now refers to a specific personality disorder though there have been attempts to do away with the classification entirely, switching to "Antisocial Personality Disorder" which can embrace a wide variety of behaviors without necessarily requiring the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy.

Robert Hare insists that it is important to understand that psychopathy is not synonymous with criminality or violence; not all psychopaths engage in violence and criminal behavior. At the same time, not all violent persons or criminals are psychopaths.

According to Robert Hare et al, Cleckley, Łobaczewski, and many other experts in psychopathy, a diagnosis of psychopathy cannot be made on the basis of visible behavioral symptoms to the exclusion of interpersonal and affective symptoms because such a procedure essentially makes psychopaths of many people who are simply injured by life or society and allows the true psychopaths who have a well-constructed "mask of sanity" to escape detection.

Based on a growing body of literature, many (or most) psychopaths grow up in stable, well-to-do families, and become white collar criminals who, because of money and position, never have their private destructive behaviors exposed to public view and repeatedly avoid contact with the justice system.

Now, getting down to diagnosis and/or detection specifically: There are a number of theories on the The Etiology of Psychopathy such as Psychopathy as an adaptive strategy, as a variant of normal personality, a brain dysfunction, an expression of attachment or pathology in early childhood, a learning disorder, and so on. There is very little empirical evidence to support the idea that the true psychopath is the result of an abused childhood, and much empirical evidence to support that it is genetic. The neurobiological model offers us the greatest hope of being able to detect even the most devious psychopath.

As Henry has mentioned, in a study of reaction times to various words, emotional, neutral, pseudo words, it was noted that the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) in lexical decision tasks among non-criminals indicate that responses to both positive and negative words are more accurate and faster than are those to neutral words. In the brains of these subjects, the central and parietal sites indicated early and late ERP components in respect of emotional words. The late components of the ERP were thought to indicate continued processing of the word.

In this same study, non-psychopathic criminals also demonstrated sensitivity to the emotion laden words. The psychopaths, however, failed to show any reaction time or ERP differences between neutral and emotional words. More than that, the morphology of their ERPs was strikingly different from that of non-psychopaths. The late component of the ERP that was long and large in non-psychopaths was small and brief in psychopaths. It is thought that this reflects the fact that psychopaths make lexical decisions and process information in a shallow way. This is supported by recent brain-imaging studies which show that psychopathic substance abusers have less cerebral activity during performance of a lexical decision task than non-psychopathic substance abusers.

Hare and others have also discovered that the ERP anomalies of psychopaths are not specific to affective language but also include abstract language. Another curious finding noted in two separate studies was an unusually large negative wave that swept over the frontal areas of the brain. A tentative interpretation of this is that it is a reflection of a profound cognitive and affective processing anomaly.

Other recent studies lead to similar results and conclusions: that psychopaths have great difficulty processing verbal and nonverbal affective (emotional) material, that they tend to confuse the emotional significance of events, and most importantly, that these deficits show up in brain scans. Psychopaths exhibit unusual inter-hemispheric distribution of processing resources, have difficulty in appreciating the subtle meanings and nuances of language such as proverbs, metaphors, and so forth, have poor olfactory discrimination, possibly because of orbito-frontal dysfunction, and may have what appears to be a sub-clinical form of thought disorder characterized by a lack of cohesion and coherence in speech. All of these cognitive and affective anomalies cannot be explained by any of the other models of psychopathy, and they can be detected with brain scans.

The latter issue: the thought disorder problem, is something that we have been working on, trying to find some general rules so that the average person can make personal assessments after applying some covert tests during discussions with anyone they may suspect has some reason to deceive or manipulate them.

But this is a loaded issue. As Łobaczewski points out, if a psychopath considers himself normal, which is of course significantly easier if he possesses authority, then he would consider a normal person different and therefore abnormal. A normal person's actions and reactions, his ideas and moral criteria, strike psychopaths as abnormal.

A normal person strikes a psychopath as a naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories about love and honor and conscience; calling him "crazy" is not all that far away.That explains why pathological governments always have considered dissidents as "mentally abnormal".

The legal system is not set up to deal with this because, of course, the legal system is often a creation of pathological individuals, or at least administered by them. Well - thought out legislation should require scientific testing of individuals whose claims that someone else is psychologically abnormal are too insistent or too doubtfully founded.

On the other hand, any pathological social or ruling system in which psychiatry is used for political reasons presents additional problems. Any person rebelling against a governmental system, which strikes him as foreign and immoral, can easily be designated by the representatives of said government as "mentally abnormal", someone who has a "personality disorder" and who should submit to psychiatric treatment and there are plenty of ways for them to gain control of the testing system. A scientifically and morally degenerate psychiatrist can be found for this.

So, this is a thorny issue.
.....

Sylvia: Can you give us examples that will help us understand more generally the problem?

Henry: Łobaczewski's contribution is his analysis of the way the different types of psychopathic types work together to form a system where people who are clinically pathological have the positions of power and rule over people who are psychologically normal.

Early in the book, Łobaczewski describes his experiences in university where he first encountered the phenomenon. He went into the library to get some books on the question of psychopathy and found to his amazement that they had all been removed! This fact demonstrates a self-awareness of their difference amongst at least some of them, and in the case of Poland under communism, of those in a position of power highly enough placed to get books removed from the university library. Laura said reading that passage made the hair stand up on her neck! The implications of this fact are far-reaching in understanding our world, how it got that way, and what we need to do to change it.

But here are some examples of psychopathic behaviour as reported by other authors:

A mother plays a game of hide and seek with her 4 year old daughter. She is holding a large kitchen knife in her hand. She tells the daughter, I am going to count to one hundred, and if I find you, then I am going to cut off your thumbs. The girl, terrified, hides in her closet, and the mother, knowing that is likely where she will be, lets her stay there, terrified, frightened, traumatized, until the very end. When the mother opens the door, she bends down over her daughter and cuts the skin under one of her thumbs.

A family has two sons. One of them commits suicide using a hunting rifle. The next Christmas, the parents offer the very same gun to their other son as his Christmas gift. When asked about why, they respond, "It was a perfectly good gun."

How does such behaviour fit into a belief system that we all have some divine spark within us or that everyone has a conscience? Can you imagine doing such things to your own children?

Our moralizing doesn't give us any means of treating this sickness. It must be understood for what it is. These people cannot be 'healed'.

Imagine that same individual in a position of power and you can explain scandals like Enron. Hare reports on psychopaths who go after the elderly. Say an elderly person has been conned out of his or her life savings - obviously by a psychopath. There are other psychopaths who will contact the victim, claiming to be a lawyer who, for a fee, can get the money back. The victim will then borrow money from a friend or relative and lose that to the shyster lawyer.

Laura: One of the main factors to consider in terms of how a society can be taken over by a group of pathological deviants is that the only limitation is that of the participation of susceptible individuals within that given society. Łobaczewski gives an average figure for the most active deviants of approximately 6% of a given population. Of course, this figure will vary from country to country depending on many variables. Western society has a broad selection of susceptible individuals.

The essential psychopath is at the center of the web. The other psychopathies and characteropathies described by Łobaczewski and others form the first tier of the Pathological Control System and it should be noted that they are far more numerous than the essential psychopaths. So, this group is about 6% of a given population. (1% essential psychopath and up to 5% other psychopathies and characteropathies.)

The next tier of such a system is composed of individuals who were born normal, but are either already warped by long-term exposure to psychopathic material via familial or social influences, or who, through psychic weakness have chosen to meet the demands of psychopathy for their own selfish ends. Numerically, according to Łobaczewski, this group is about 12% of a given population under normal conditions. It is difficult, as Łobaczewski points out, to draw a distinct boundary between these latter types and the genetic deviants without the input of genuine, non-psychopathic, science. At this point, the distinctions can only be descriptive.

So it is that approximately 18% of any given population is active in the creation and imposition of a Pathocracy (or the attempt to create and impose same). The 6% group constitute the Pathocratic nobility and the 12% group forms the new bourgeoisie, whose economic situation is the most advantageous.

Once set up, the elitist psychopathic system corrodes the entire social organism, wasting its skills and power. Once a Pathocracy has been established, it follows a certain course and has certain "attractive" powers. In a Pathocracy, the socioeconomic system arises from the social structure which is created by the system of political power, which is a product of the particular elitist world view of pathological deviants. Thus it is that a Pathocracy is more a macrosocial disease process created by human pathogens, and it can come to affect an entire nation to a degree that is equivalent to a cancer metastasizing. And just as the process of cancer in a body follows a characteristic pathodynamic process, so does the macrosocial disease of Pathocracy.

It is impossible to comprehend such a pathological phenomenon using the methods of "normal" people which do not take into account the deviant thought processes of human pathogens. Certainly it could be said that the entire world has been governed by a "covert pathocracy" (or cryptopathocracy) for a very long time. Many researchers suggest that there has always been a "secret government" that operates even though the "out in the open" government is not, technically, a Pathocracy. The suggestion is that psychopaths are technically ALWAYS in the background, even in the cycles of history that are NOT pathocracies (i.e. during "good times" in what Łobaczewski describes as the foundation for a hysteroidal cycle that opens the door to an overt Pathocracy).

If we use the term pathocracy for "secret government rule", then all of history becomes a "pathocracy" and the word loses its meaning, so it is important to note that the term "Pathocracy" is the specific phenomenon that comes as a result of the hedonism of good times, and that it is characterized by 100% of essential psychopaths assuming some type of leadership position, out in the open, as occurred in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and Eastern Europe. And, I should add, is occurring now.

One cannot really designate the issues that confront us today as "political", using the ordinary names of political ideologies because, as noted above, pathological deviants operate behind a complete mask, by deception and other psychological tricks which they practice with great cunning. If we think or believe that any political group that has such and such a name is heterogeneous with regard to its true nature, we will not be able to identify the causes and properties of the disease. Any ideology will be used to cloak the pathological qualities from the minds of both experts and ordinary people. So, trying to refer to this or that as "left" or "right" or "center" or "socialist", "democratic," "communist," "democrat" or "republican," and so on, will never help us to understand the pathological self-reproduction and its expansionist external influences. As Łobaczewski says, Ignota nulla curatio morbi! No movement will ever succeed that does not factor psychopathy and ponerology into its considerations!

Sylvia: The perverse are those who in the face of problems they have created say, "It is the fault of others. I have nothing to do with it."

Henry: Exactly. One example that comes to mind is of the psychopath cited by Hare who killed his parents and then pleaded for sympathy because he was an orphan!

Nothing is ever their fault. They are never responsible for anything.

Laura: I'd like to explain this phenomenon a bit more. The psychopath is an individual who divides the world into black and white, good and evil, and this division is very rigid. The psychopathic structure is organized around a very simple structure: "feels good, is good / feels bad, is bad." But, just because this structure is rigid, that doesn't mean it is rational or stable! Things are good or bad, but what is good or bad depends on the immediate circumstances, i.e. what the psychopath wants at the moment.

But this is not a "defense mechanism," it is just simply that, for the psychopath, the locus of reality is centered in what "feels good" with no reference to any other human being at all except as objects that can serve this need. You might almost say that the psychological structure of the psychopath is equivalent to a newborn infant, and it never develops, never grows up.

An infant has no internal self other than being at the center of a bundle of neurological inputs and outputs that seek pleasure and reject discomfort. Of course, with a grown up psychopath, there are highly developed neurological circuits that have developed in the process of learning what works to get his needs and demands met.

Under the influence of this internal structure, the psychopath is not able to appreciate the wants or needs of other human beings, the subtle shades of a situation or to tolerate ambiguity. The entire external reality is filtered through - made to conform to - this rigid and primitive internal structure.

When the psychopath is frustrated, what they seem to feel is that everything in the world "out there" is against them and they are, good, long-suffering and only seeking the ideal of love, peace, safety, beauty, warmth and comfort. That is, when a psychopath is confronted with something displeasing or threatening, that object (person, idea, group, whatever), is placed in the "all bad" category because, of course, if the psychopath does not like it, it cannot be good!

Now, here's the kicker: when the evidence mounts that some choice or act of the psychopath created a problem or made a situation worse, this, too, must be denied as part of the self and projected as coming from "out there."

That is, anything that is defined as "bad" is projected onto someone or something else because the internal structure of the psychopath will admit to no wrong, nothing bad, no errors. And keep in mind that this is not because they choose to do that, it is because they cannot do otherwise. That is the way they are made. They are like a cat that enjoys torturing a mouse before eating it. That's just what they do.

Psychopaths are masters of Projective Identification. That is, they project into others everything that is bad (remembering that "bad" changes according to what the psychopath wants), and seek in manipulative ways to induce in that other person what is being projected, and seek to control the other person who is perceived as manifesting those "bad" characteristics. In this way, the psychopath gains enjoyment and feels "in control."

Keep in mind that what the psychopath considers to be good has nothing to do with truth, honor, decency, consideration for others, or any other thing than what the psychopath wants at any given moment. In this way, any violation of the rights of others, any foul, evil deed, can be perpetrated by a psychopath and he will still sleep like a baby (literally) at night because he has done nothing wrong!

.......

Sylvia: Is this to suggest that the modern pathocrats, operating in today's so-called 'information society' are no different than the supporters of Hitler? Except that they are more dangerous because they have more sophisticated tools and are able to use the various means of communication in a more conscious way?

Laura: That sums it up very well.

Henry: The pathocratic system, that is, a government staffed by psychological deviants, will produce similar effects whether it is hidden behind the mask of fascism, communism, or capitalism. The ideology itself is unimportant. It merely serves as a cover and a rallying point for a certain percentage of the population who are needed as a support base. This support group believe the slogans and are unable to see behind the mask. A certain percentage of them will interpret the ideological slogans with the eyes of conscience and believe that the aim is to improve our lot. Therefore we get slogans about the brotherhood of man, or of the exploited, empty phrases about justice and freedom, bringing democracy to Iraq, and so on, while the reality is one of powerlessness, division, and enslavement. As certain individuals who support the ideology come to see the gulf between the ideals and the actions of the leaders or Party, some will leave to be replaced by others.

In the world today where information is controlled by a small number of media outlets, and those media outlets have much in common with the pathological governments, greater numbers of people can be influenced and infected with pathological thinking. An example of this is the famous remark made by Madeleine Albright back in 1996 when she was asked about the 500,000 deaths in Iraq, mostly of children, due to the embargo. She responded that she thought 'It was worth it', that is, those deaths were the necessary price to pay to bring down Saddam. That is unquestionably pathological logic, and yet how many Americans would have heard that response and thought nothing of it? Anyone who, on hearing that statement, was not outraged has been infected with pathological thinking, they have been ponerized. Their thinking has become distorted by the pathological infection.

Sylvia: Are the absence of conscience and insensitivity to suffering what distinguishes psychopaths from normal people?

Henry: That is probably the key point that people need to understand. For years artists, writers, philosophers, and others have attempted to understand how it is that our world is an endless stream of suffering. They have attempted to find moralistic explanations. Łobaczewski spends the first part of his book discussing the futility of this approach, suggesting instead a scientific approach based upon an understanding of evil as a societal disease, as the actions of pathological deviants within a society. Without the ability to empathize with others, these people cannot feel that suffering, any more than a cat feels the suffering of a mouse when it toys with it prior to killing it. ....There is no hardware in these people that can process these emotions. They are incapable at the physiological levels of doing so.

Laura: They don't have the hardware to run that program.

Henry: The only suffering the psychopath knows is when his food is taken away from him, and I am using food in a symbolic sense: that is, when he doesn't get what he wants. That is the depth of their emotional life. Anything else that we would read into them comes from our own imagination projecting back onto them our own internal reality.

And we do it all the time because it is very difficult to really grasp that there are people who do not have the rich inner lives that normal people have.

Laura: Actually, when we project our own inner structure onto the psychopath, we are behaving most psychopathically! We are then in a "black and white" world where the nuances of human existence are not being considered. The fact is, everyone is not created equal in terms of intelligence, talent, physical appearance, and so on. And just as everyone looks different, so are they different in their psychological make-up even if there are certain things that are shared as a species. Łobaczewski points out that it is a universal law of nature that the higher a given species' psychological organization, the greater the psychological differences among individual units. Man is the most highly organized species; hence, these variations between individuals are the greatest. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, psychological differences occur in all structures of the pattern of human personality.

Experience teaches us that psychological differences among people are often the cause of problems. We can overcome these problems only if we accept psychological differences as a law of nature and appreciate their creative value. These differences are a great gift to humanity, enabling human societies to develop their complex structures and to be highly creative at both the individual and collective level. Thanks to psychological variety, the creative potential of any society is many times higher than it could possibly be if our species were psychologically more homogeneous.

The normal human personality is in constant flux, learning, growing, changing. A lifelong evolutionary process is the normal state of affairs. Some political and religious systems attempt to induce excessive stability and homogeneity in our personalities, but this is unhealthy for the individual and society from a psychological point of view.

A society that is properly educated, psychologically, will know about and understand differences, and will also know about the main thing that normal humans have in common: the ability to develop a mature conscience. In this way, differences can be celebrated and the creative potential fully optimized.

Sylvia: If we find more and more manipulators and perverse people at all levels, is it because our society favours narcissists and individualists?

Henry: Isn't that what we see with the values of the neoliberals? The entire idea of capitalism is a narcissistic idea. In the United States, which is the model that is held up to the rest of the world, we are told "anyone can become president". It is the myth of individual success. "Look out for Number 1." "If only you work hard enough, you, too, can become rich and successful." "Failure is your own fault."

Faced with this mythology, with this ideology, psychopaths are better prepared to succeed than people of conscience because they have no ethical or moral sensitivities that will put a brake on their actions. They are quite willing to step on anyone necessary to get to the top: backstabbing, lying, spreading stories about their rivals, are fine, with never a moment lost in remorse.

The pushing of neoliberalism on the rest of the world is also a way to ponerize greater portions of the globe. It is a pathological ideology hiding behind an economic pseudo-science.
........

Sylvia: Can things only get worse because macrosocial Evil is the same Evil that has been affecting humanity since of the dawn of time? An evil somehow inherent in human nature before which we are impotent?

Henry: The evil is not inherent in human nature - at least not in normal humans who have been educated properly. This issue is one of the most important points made by Łobaczewski in his analysis of the pathocratic system. This systemic evil comes from a small group of people who have no conscience, either because they were born that way, that is, they are genetic psychopaths, or because, due to injuries when young or due to upbringing, their conscience died or withered away.

For example, Łobaczewski thinks that Stalin was a characteropath. That is, he was not born a psychopath, but the pathological traits developed due to injuries when he was young. His type of pathology can be identified. So in fact Łobaczewski's research is liberating because it frees us from the idea that these horrible acts of evil are part of normal "human nature". These individuals are like disease pathogens in a body - like a cancer on society, or like leprosy. Certainly, a body can be eaten up and destroyed by the disease, but it is the disease doing it, not the body itself.

We won't really know what human nature is until the pathocratic influence is removed and a truly human society, that is, one led by and with values in accordance with our highest nature, our conscience, is able to be founded.

Sylvia: We have seen the ease with which a George Bush or a Tony Blair are able to lie. They don't even bat an eye, lying without any shame. Do you think liars like Bush and Blair, who present the traits of the narcissist and the manipulator, are born perverse/pathological?

Henry: We are not psychologists, and we are not going to give any diagnosis of individuals. We note, however, that there have been stories that Bush used to blow up frogs with firecrackers when he was a kid. He is also completely irresponsible. Nothing is ever his fault. Blair has the smooth charm that is remarked upon so frequently by psychologists researching the question of psychopathy. They are, as far as I am concerned, pathological figures. But what is important is the system, the pathocratic system. Individuals perform different roles in the system according to type.

Sylvia: Are these traits intrinsic to the individual and can they be corrected?

Henry: Correction depends on many variables.. Before we can think about correcting these abnormalities, we need to find ways of protecting ourselves from their influence. That means first admitting that such people exist and are found in positions of power, and second, learning to recognize the signs of their manipulations and the pathological traits of our own thinking in order to free ourselves from their influence.

Laura: As Henry says, there are many variables. When speaking of psychopaths, specifically, the general consensus today is that they are not only incurable, they are un-treatable.

The first problem is that if you want to treat a problem, you have to have a patient. The word patient comes from Latin, and means "to suffer." A patient, by definition, is someone who is suffering and seeks treatment.

Psychopaths do not experience distress and do not think that anything is wrong with them, they do not suffer stress or neuroses, and do not seek out treatment voluntarily. They do not consider their attitudes and behavior to be at all wrong, and do not benefit from the many treatment programs that have been set up to help them "develop empathy" and interpersonal skills. The psychopath recognizes no flaw in his psyche, no need for change. They will, however, participate in treatment programs in prisons in order to gain their release.

When the recidivism rate of psychopaths and other offenders who had been in treatment was examined, it was found that the rate of general recidivism was equally high in the treated and untreated group, 87% and 90% respectively, however the rate of violent recidivism was significantly higher in the treated group than the untreated group; 77% and 55% respectively. In contrast, the treated non-psychopaths had significantly lower rates of general and violent recidivism; 44% and 22% respectively, than did untreated psychopaths, 58% and 39%. So it seems that treatment programs work for non-psychopaths, but actually make true psychopaths worse.

A Canadian journalist reporting on this study wrote: "After their release, it was found that those who had scored highest in terms of 'good treatment behaviour' and who had the highest "empathy" scores were the ones who were more likely to reoffend after release."

That's the psychopath for you: they can fake anything to get what they want.

The question is: how can therapy make someone worse? Robert Hare's conjecture is that group therapy and insight-oriented therapy actually help psychopaths to develop better ways of manipulating, deceiving and using people but do nothing to help them understand themselves.

Freud argued psychopaths are untreatable in psychotherapy precisely because having a conscience is a prerequisite for being able to use psychotherapy. It is the conscience, and the related capacity for concern for others, that drives the serious scrutiny of one's motives, which underlie one's behaviour. Yet psychopaths lack conscience and concern by definition.

Sylvia: How can one tell if one is not himself a psychopath? That we haven't been influenced ourselves by the effects of their perversion/pathology while they occupy positions of power in an administration where we find ourselves - in a trade union, a political party or elsewhere?

Laura: As to the first part of your question, let me just say that it's not an unusual question - for a normal human - but by now you probably have figured out that if a person thinks they might have something "wrong" with them, they aren't a psychopath!

Remember: The psychopath simply cannot conceive of anything being wrong with him or herself.

Henry: It is very possible - in fact, terrifyingly common - to become ponerized, as Łobaczewski puts it, that is, to become infected with this evil. It happens when you begin to accept pathological thinking as normal. We used the example of Madeleine Albright above. Look at professional sport, for another example. It is now accepted as normal that intimidation on the field is a legitimate part of a sport like football. We saw during the World Cup last year that Materazzi provoked Zidane ruthlessly during the final match. People think nothing of it. They accept it is part of the game today. However, such verbal violence has nothing to do with the game of football. It is only a part of the game because the world of professional sport, and by example, the world of sport as a whole, has become ponerized. What is pathological has become accepted as normal.

And as soon as one area is accepted, that infection spreads. When we begin to accept pathological forms of thought as our own, as normal, our ability to think degenerates.

Sylvia: When you say there are about 6% of these perverse/pathological in the human population, how did you arrive at this number?

Henry: Łobaczewski's 6% comes from his analysis and that of the other members of the group with whom he was working. But that was for Poland. It is possible that the numbers differ from country to country depending upon their particular histories. If we look at North America or Australia, areas colonized to some extent by people either being forced to leave their homes, criminals, or adventurers, we can ask whether or not the prospect of conquering continents might not have appealed to certain types more than others. Does the history of the American west for example, and the genocide of the indigenous peoples, not point to a higher incidence of psychopathy? Perhaps the level in the United States is higher today because of it.

Laura: A recent study of a university population suggested that perhaps 5% or more of this sample might be deemed psychopathic. This was a careful study designed to ferret out psychopaths that are not criminal but are, instead, successful individuals within the community. This study also demonstrated that psychopathy does occur in the community and at what might be a higher than expected rate; and psychopathy appears to have little overlap with personality disorders aside from Antisocial Personality Disorder. Obviously, work needs to be done in order to understand what factors differentiate the law abiding (although not moral-abiding) psychopath from the law-breaking psychopath. This highlights one of the major problems of the research to date which has focused primarily on forensic samples.

Sylvia: Does it include men and women in general?

Laura: Although the vast majority of psychopaths are male, there are female psychopaths. The ratio is more than 1/10 males versus approximately 1/100 females according to one estimate.

Sylvia: How did you establish that it was more frequent among men? This means that in the general population, almost one person in ten has tendencies, more or less strong - to create a climate of conflict?

Laura: This has been established as an average from various studies. As the study cited above, a university population (psychology students, by the way, which ought to give us pause!) gives a figure of 5% or more, we might think that it was the sample - people involved in studying psychology, an easy way to power over others - that gave such high numbers. On the other hand, this study may have netted individuals with psychopathic behaviors who were not necessarily true psychopaths. Of course, the figure could be higher in one place than another, higher in one profession than another, and so on. The one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that psychopaths, because of their nature, rise to the top in whatever milieu they find themselves. So do not imagine that they are down there, in the gutters of society, and that you will not encounter them or be affected by them.

Sylvia: This percentage seems very low. Does it cover only the perverse who have a dominant position and who sow discord and disorder wherever they go?

Henry: It may seem low because in a ponerized society, many people become infected with the disease. They see what others are doing, and not being strong enough themselves to follow their own moral code, if that code differs from that of their neighbours, they follow the herd. These people are the support base for the status quo. They may not be psychopaths themselves, but they support and defend it.

Another aspect to maintaining the support base is the use of fear, from overt threats of imprisonment and torture to the kind of fear from being marked as different, as "opposing the president" and the like.

Laura: Also keep in mind the 12% of individuals who are susceptible to the influence and thinking style of the psychopaths. In the end, you have a total of 18% or more of any given population that seeks to subdue and control the rest. If you then consider that remainder, the 82%, and keep in mind the bell curve, at least 80% of the remainder will follow whoever is in charge. And since psychopaths have no limitations on what they can or will do to get to the top, the ones in charge are generally pathological. It is not power that corrupts, it is that corrupt individuals seek power.

Sylvia: Conflict seems to be a form of food for this type of perverse/pathological personality. Because it permits them to project their aggression, their violence on others and avoid to put themselves into question?

Henry: You might say that, having no emotions of their own, they feed off of their power to stir up the emotions of others. They get a kick out of the power it gives them. It makes them feel superior to be "above" such emotional displays.

Sylvia: Łobaczewski's analysis of lying is very powerful. When he demonstrates that the liar is always right, he is very convincing. There is in this a new matrices for understanding how psychopaths function. He explains very well this mechanism of the lie. The lie is their way of functioning and winning. I would like to know more about this mechanism of the lie and its effects. How does it work? Are these liars in all fields?

Henry: Lying is a very successful strategy because very few people think that there are hardcore liars in society who lie as a matter of course.

Think of a divorce or some other case before a judge and jury. Most of us will go into the proceedings with the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The two opposing sides in a case will tell their stories, each embellishing their story a bit, each putting themselves in the best light, and the judge or jury will assume the truth is somewhere in the middle.

But what happens when one of the people is a liar and the other is a person telling the truth? The liar is at an advantage because the judge or jury will still expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. So someone who is the victim of a liar and manipulator cannot come out ahead. Telling the truth cannot get that person 100% of the justice he or she deserves, while lying will always get the perpetrator something.

Daily life is like that trial. We are always going to give others the benefit of the doubt, if you are a moral person. The liar and manipulator will never do that and will use the good will of the person of conscience against him.

Lying is therefore always a winning strategy. That, in itself, can be an indicator that we are living in a pathological system!

Laura: When you consider the infantile internal structure of the psychopath, it's not so difficult to understand the lying aspect.

The psychopath isn't really even lying, he is just "creating reality" so that it conforms to what he wants.

Let me try to explain. The psychopathic reality exists by fiat: they declare things to be so. To them, these declarations represent what reality is. The present declaration may contradict what they said a moment ago. This means nothing to them. They make no attempt to deal with the contradiction because, for them, there is no contradiction. Remember, the psychopath cannot process abstractions such as space and time, and what they said a moment ago, under one set of influences, is now past, and therefore no longer exists.

Psychopaths demonstrate a total lack of understanding of what we call "facts." Normal humans really have difficulty conceiving of this because to us, facts are a basic part of our lives. We live by them, base our assessments and decisions on them. We establish facts, and then test things and establish more facts. When we debate, we start with facts and show how we derive our conclusions from those facts.

Psychopaths do not do that. But, because they are projecting their own internal structure onto the psychopath, most people do not understand this. Normal humans who are thinking psychopathically try to convince themselves that there is some other reason for this bizarre mental condition.

When psychopaths do not deal with facts, we think that they are doing it intentionally, that they are playing a game with us. We think that they do know what facts are but don't want to admit it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Psychopaths do not know what facts are. The concept of a fact is, in fact, an abstraction that they cannot grasp

One example of this is a case cited by a psychotherapist. He asked his patient, a psychopath, to look at a chair which was situated about six feet away near a wall. He then asked her to describe the chair. She did, in rather complete detail, except for the legs. The chair she described had no legs.

The therapist pointed this out, and asked how the chair could be suspended in air, with no legs to support it. She said: "I put it there." Therapist asked: "If you look away, will it fall to the floor?" She said: "No. If I look away, the chair is no longer there." Therapist asked: "If you look away - and it turns out the chair is still there?" She ignored the question.

The popular "you create your own reality" idea of the New Age is one example of how psychopathic thinking has permeated our society. The principle is: "If enough people believe something to be true, then what they believe is what reality IS."

In response to this, one can rightly point out: "There was a time when everyone, as far as we know, believed the sun revolved around the earth. That didn't make it so." But, if you ask a psychopath: "Are you saying at that time the sun did, in fact, revolve around the earth - and it was only in obedience to a change in what people believed that the earth came to revolve around the sun?" you will be ignored or accused of twisting the "facts." A normal human would naturally think that the psychopath's refusal to answer the question, their shift to attacking you for misrepresenting the facts and them, is a tacit admission that what they are saying is wrong. But you would be wrong about that. They go right on making declarations and pronouncements about what they are insisting is reality in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Ron Suskind, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, wrote:

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

They aren't really lying - they're creating "new realities." Nothing of what we call reality is real to them. When a normal human being talks about a chair, the reference is to a chair that sits there on its own legs. It's there whether anyone sees it or not, whether anyone mentions it or not, whether anyone "declares" it to be there or not. It has its own sovereign existence. But that is not so for the true psychopath.

The psychopath with his/her infantile internal structure cannot comprehend that anything else exists on its own separate from them. It is only their acknowledgement that makes it real, and they only acknowledge what is significant to them in terms of what they want, what will make them feel good.

When a normal human demands that the declarations of the psychopath should be evaluated, the psychopath will declare that the one making such a demand has no integrity which really means that their position - the psychopath's declaration - is not being supported !

From the psychopathic point of view, the world is like a holodeck. They "declare" things into being. Everything is a hologram. They program the holograms. They interact with them in any way they choose. They have them under total control. When they decide to cancel a hologram, it vanishes.

A hologram is not supposed to think for itself. A hologram is not supposed to measure, evaluate, appraise, etc. Most importantly, a hologram is not supposed to critique its master.

When this does happen, they first chastise it to bring it back into line. If that doesn't work, they "vanish" it. And if they must kill it to do so, that's what happens.

Experience has shown no matter what we say, no matter what we point out, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for psychopaths. They have one goal: to fool us into classifying them as normal humans so they can continue to deceive us, control us and use us for their own power and glory because that is what makes them feel good.

Sylvia: There is therefore a constant interaction; the perverse/pathological cannot dominate alone and need allies. Therefore he must form clans and unite them, offering advantages to those who serve his interests? Advantages that then tie them to them, keep them in their pockets? In other words, if the system is perverse, then everyone becomes perverse and all is lost?!

Henry: Yes, and no. There are inherent weaknesses in the pathocratic system. What it takes is time. Łobaczewski describes the dynamic in the Eastern countries under communism. The pathocrats are incapable of anything genuinely creative. They depend upon people of conscience for their creativity. Now, a society without creativity will eventually perish. When the major positions of power in that society, in government, in industry, in business are filled by pathocrats, the downward cycle begins.

At the same time, normal people begin to see the society for what it is and devise survival strategies. They begin to recognize that their leaders are not like them.

Unfortunately, as one society comes to its senses, there is another ideology masking another set - or even the same set - of deviants ready to take its place. When communism fell in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, the capitalist pathocrats were ready and waiting to take the spoils, and even some of the communist pathocrats were able to find a comfortable new home in the "new" capitalist democracies.

The question is, has such a process already started in the US, which we would suggest is the centre of gravity for the pathocracy today. Given that the pathocrats seem driven by an agenda to reduce the population of the world by millions if not billions of people by war or other means, we have to ask if we will have time for this cycle to play out. We are not very optimistic.

But even if a particular expression of the pathocracy falls, the system itself remains in place, rearing its head elsewhere, in the new "centre".

Sylvia: The example that goes in this direction is Iraq. Bush wanted war at any price. Bush lies and he wins. He finds allies of the same stripe as himself, like Blair and Berlusconi. The people who denounce their crimes and fight them lose. It seems to be a perfect example of what he is describing in his book. It is hard to believe sometimes how it is that there are so few people capable of seeing what is going on and able to denounce the consequences. Is it impossible to say no to these monsters?

Henry: How do you say "no" when the media is completely controlled by other pathocrats? You can take to the streets, as millions of people did before the invasion of Iraq, but that doesn't matter because the pathocratic political leaders really don't care what people think. They could care less if there are thousands or millions of people protesting their policies - they have the military and scary weapons at their disposal. The media, then, distorted the message of those who dissented and painted them as traitors. They are still painted as traitors four years on and after it has become plain as day that the war was wrong and that Bush and company lied on every point.

Yet the United States is still in Iraq and it is politically impossible to demand more than that future troop reduction should be "discussed".

So one issue is how many people, in such a controlled environment, see reality, and the second is in such a reality, how do people who do see the lies react and respond to bring about change?

The majority of people have had their consciences crushed, have accepted so many compromises, that they are incapable of thinking or feeling things correctly. ....

Think back to what Łobaczewski writes about the befuddled thinking that occurs when someone is in the presence of a psychopath. Via the media, that befuddlement spreads beyond immediate personal contact and becomes a plague on society as a whole. Society itself becomes diseased.

And for those who are struggling to find their mental health, who see the lies, the force they are facing is so overwhelming that they may easily give up. The job appears too great.

Laura: Is it impossible to say "no" to these monsters? No. Difficult? Yes.

Those individuals who think that change can be effected via legal or political processes fail to understand that both the law and politics, by and large, are created and controlled by pathological types, and are set up for their benefit, not the benefit of the ordinary human being. So it is that law and politics are insufficient avenues for counteracting a pathological society that has been created by the efforts and influence of deviants.

Another important thing to remember in regards to seeking solutions via legal or political means is that the cunning of the pathological deviant is far superior to that of normal human beings. Most people are familiar with the idea of the exceptional cunning of the madman, but psychopathy, in its several varieties, has an additional element: the Mask of Sanity.

........

Again and again I receive letters from political action groups asking for money and support. I've given money and support and also written endless letters and emails telling them that their "political actions" aren't going to amount to a hill of beans if they do not factor psychopathy into the equation. They were all so sure that getting the Democrats back in control was going to change everything, and the fact is, nothing has changed. All that money and effort wasted. And now people are realizing it even though we have been saying it all along.

So, I'll say it again - and keep saying it - until the knowledge and awareness of pathological human beings is given the attention it deserves and becomes part of the general knowledge of all human beings, there is no way that things can be changed in any way that is effective and long-lasting. That is the first order of business and if half the people agitating for Truth or stopping the war or Bush or whatever would focus their efforts, time and money on exposing psychopathy, we might get somewhere.

In the end, again, the real problem is that the knowledge of psychopathy and how psychopaths rule the world has been effectively hidden and people do not have the adequate, nuanced knowledge they need to really make a change from the bottom up. Again and again, throughout history it has been "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

When you are dealing with psychopaths, you are dealing with the criminal mind and when such minds are in positions of absolute power - as they are today - there is nothing to restrain them - and nothing will restrain them, you can take that to the bank.

Bush (or, more precisely, his handlers) have almost absolute control of all the branches of government. You can notice this if you observe carefully that no matter what illegal thing Bush does, no one will really take him to task. All of the "scandals" that have come up, any one of which would have taken down any other administration, are just farces played out for the public, to distract them, to make them think that the democracy is still working.

There are only two things that can bring a psychopath under submission:
1) a bigger psychopath;
2) the non-violent, absolute refusal of all others to submit to their controls no matter the consequences.

If every single normal person in the U.S. (and elsewhere) simply sat down and refused to lift a hand to further one single aim of the psychopathic agenda, en masse, if people refused to pay taxes, if soldiers refused to fight, if government workers and corporate drones refused to go to work, if doctors refused to treat psychopathic elites and their families, the whole system would grind to a screeching halt.

But that can only happen if the masses of people KNOW about psychopathy in all its horrible details. Only if they know that they are dealing with creatures that really aren't human can they have the understanding of what they must do. And only when they get miserable enough that the misery that the psychopath will inflict on them in the beginning of their resistance pales in comparison, will they have the will to do this. That, or the understanding of the world the psychopaths are creating for their children in which case love for the future of humanity will motivate them to resist.

Sylvia: Did Chirac, after saying no for Iraq, make major concessions to Bush for fear of becoming the straw man? Do the perverse need straw men?

Henry: Imagine that you are a politician with a conscience facing a world dominated by people who are willing to use every trick in the book to retain power: blackmail, intimidation, threats. To what extent was the scandal in France over Chirac's finances while he was mayor of Paris used to bring him into line? We can only speculate.

We know that Bush was illegally spying on US citizens. Was he doing this to collect data that could be used to blackmail and intimidate opposition politicians or journalists who were asking too many questions? I think it would be naïve not to consider this possibility.

Laura: I sometimes joke that nowadays, you can probably figure out who the good guys are by who gets the worst press! But it really isn't that simple. We can't forget that the real war is between the Controlling Psychopathic Elite and Normal Humans. Do the perverse need straw men? Sure, it's part of the show that they all put on for the rest of us. Just as it is one of their tricks to create false flag attacks to direct hatred against those they wish to destroy, so is it entirely within their style of operation to play "good cop vs bad cop." That's Machiavelli 101.

Sylvia: To protect ourselves from evil, then, it seems that each of us must ask ourselves if we are in the presence of one of these twisted people who lie and are only out for their personal interest. But people can't believe that these perverse/pathological are people who feed on evil, who feed on conflicts. Your book describes this expertly: conflicts are their food; they love this conflict, they need this conflict to exist. A normal person cannot imagine that in society there are a certain number of people who cannot do other than feed on evil.

Do you think that normal people sense that something is not right but they can't quite understand they are victims and that they suffer because of the lies and manipulations of the perverse/pathological?

Henry: Yes. But it takes someone with a strong character to stand for what he or she knows is right in the face of widespread social opposition. We also have the tendency to give others the benefit of the doubt because we project our own ways of thinking and behaving on them. If we are not aware that there are people who are either genetically incapable of empathy and feeling for another, or whose conscience has been crushed and destroyed because of their life experience, (and they cannot be fixed), and if we do not know how they function and manipulate, we will remain victims.

As someone who has been part of organizations and associations working for social change, you have probably seen the same dynamic play out. The good and sincere work of many can be destroyed by the actions of one person. That doesn't give good odds in bringing some sort of justice to the planet! Only when those who are psychologically normal come to understand that we have a natural predator, a group of people who view us as 'a para-specific variety', will they be open to learning about this human-like race.

Laura: If there is any work that is deserving of full time efforts and devotion for the sake of helping humanity in this present dark time, it is the study of psychopathy and propagation of that information as far and wide as possible. For anyone who wants to really do something, let's get the knowledge of social pathogens out to the people, let's learn how to identify them first, and then we can decide how to proceed from there.

Sylvia: Normal people, those who have a conscience, work to find a compromise between the two. Would you say that being kindly towards them is a mistake because the perverse/pathological have no conscience whatsoever, are without scruples, and are not shy about taking positions of power, even if they are incompetent?

Henry: We talked about this earlier when we described society as a trial, with everyone looking for the truth somewhere in the middle.

As long as there is some idea of compromise, the people of conscience will always lose. These psychological deviants have to be removed from any position of power over people of conscience, period. People must be made aware that such individuals exist and must learn how to spot them and their manipulations. The hard part is that one must also struggle against those tendencies to mercy and kindness in oneself in order not to become prey.

Sylvia: Normal people need to retain the awareness that not all people are fundamentally good and don't necessarily take decisions that are good for society. The perverse/pathological don't care at all about morality, for them, only their personal objectives count. They can lie without feeling the least bit implicated in what they say. Taking the case of Bush for example. He can say anything at all and is not at all ashamed about lying. The perverse/pathological have no scruples about lying, about destroying a country, an entire people, as long as it serves their interests?

Henry: The idea that "all men are created equal" and we are all fundamentally good is drummed into us from the time we are born. We are taught that God made us in his image, and that we all have the divine spark within us.

But science is showing us that this religious fairy tale is not true. Mankind has a natural predator, the psychopath, and this predator is invisible because there are no easily discernible markings that set him apart.

Moreover, throughout history we have been divided into groups on the basis of physical, cultural, religious, or whatever other easily recognizable distinctions psychopaths can point out to us, while our real enemy has remained masked.

We have even come across books about psychopathy that attempt to present the case that we are all psychopaths! So we see that there is a move towards damage control. Łobaczewski discusses the use of psychology and psychiatry as a tool of the pathocracy under communism. Well, we see the same thing today in the United States. There are deviants who become psychologists or psychiatrists and who try to rewrite psychology from the viewpoint of the pathological!

Sylvia: Is one of the weak points of our society the tolerance with which we view these monsters? This permits them to create more conflicts and kill more innocents.

Henry: Is it tolerance or ignorance? People are not aware that there exist a category of people, people we sometimes call 'almost human', who look like us, who work with us, who are found in every race, every culture, speaking every language, but who are lacking conscience - and if there is anything that really separates humans from animals, I would suggest it is that: conscience.

We are tolerant of others, in spite of the most horrible crimes, because we project our own inner states on them, assuming that when they go through the motions of expressing remorse, they are remorseful. But for these deviants, there is no remorse, there is only play-acting, a bit of theatre designed to fool us into thinking they are 'like us'.

Sylvia: The only thing to do, then, is to continue to speak the truth. And to tell ourselves that even if those who lie always win against the truth, that in the long run, when more and more people are saying the same thing, little by little this truth may be able to get people to think?

Henry: The truth is the only thing worth working towards. What separates us from the psychopath is our conscience, and our conscience must become the voice of truth. True conscience - if we listen to it - raises us above the example of animal behaviour set by the pathocrats. ... If the voice of conscience could be heard by the billions of people who have one, there would be no moe war. Other means would be found to resolve differences. If we listened to our conscience, there would be no hunger because we would feel the pain and suffering of those dying without food and we would be unable to not do something about it. And we need to think in our own lives of the ways we kill our own conscience and begin to make painful choices to listen to it before it goes out forever.

If we could really understand the difference between someone with conscience and someone without, we could see how our world has been infected with this pathology throughout its history. With this knowledge, and an application of this knowledge in full conscience of what we are doing, a new world could truly be born.

Sylvia: In conclusion, there are manipulators everywhere. They form a part of society that is structured according to this model, a structure that permits them to behave according to this perverse psychological functioning anywhere they intervene. They are twisted people, held by no moral code, ready to do anything to defend their interests. They are more and more numerous. They are not necessarily linked to any specific ideology. And at the moment when we begin to suspect that someone is part of this percentage of twisted people, do we need to take a different attitude?

Henry: Yes. We need to learn how to say no to the manipulations. That means we need to learn the ways we are manipulated and refuse to do the dance.

Laura: On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn't seem feasible to out-compete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or out-bred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or out-bred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common. And the psychopathic manipulations are designed to make psychopaths of us all.

Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing freedom and altruism in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.

In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

This means that if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future - which it is doing - then it can be only be dealt with by widespread refusal to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis. Preserving freedom for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves freedom for others. Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all. If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger, then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.

And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play.

Notes (see Laura's blog for the notes on this stunning interview)

America Should Learn from Israel

by Ira Sharkansky

The drama of Barack Obama's personality and his campaign of 'Change' have come under assault on several fronts. Reality is at least as tough as rhetoric. The skills that get a politician to office may not be those that enhance government. On the other hand, they might be. The man is smart, and he has good advisers. The test is ongoing. The jury will not decide for a while.

Americans elected Obama, but he must lead the world. On his plate are not only existing commitments to bad wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the pirates of Somalia as well as the lingering issue of conventional troublemaking and nuclear weapons in Iran. Closer to home, the stock market has shown some promise that it may be coming back from its bottom, but there are other signs that the economic crisis has a way to go.

Afghanistan strikes me as the most worrying issue on the president's agenda. It is a sink hole that cost the British dearly in the 19th century, and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet empire in the 20th century. Its problems reflect a place that is not really a country governed by the people who claim to be in charge, and Islamic extremism that produces hatred of the West as well as the cruel repression of freedom. There is also a neighboring area of Pakistan not controlled by any government that shares the cultures of Afghanistan and serves as a staging ground and refuge for its fighters. Afghanistan is world class in its production of opium and all that means for financing the bad stuff. A recent article in the New York Times provides ample stories of the corruption in high and low places almost certain to frustrate American efforts to do good.

What to do?
Alas, it is far easier to criticize Obama's decision to increase America's military presence in Afghanistan than to propose something better.

Yet from my parochial perspective, it appears that there are some lessons in what Israel has learned the hard way.

It may not be easy for American officials to see the lessons, or admit that they are useful. It might be especially difficult for a Democratic administration to follow the road of a country accused of war crimes, but here goes:

Notice what Israel has done in recent years with respect to Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. It does not occupy, but goes in after specific targets, stays a short time (often only hours) and then leaves.

In the case of Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2009 it created considerable destruction, but did not remain to occupy. It does not aspire to reform those places, but only to warn them of the costs associated with violence against Israel.

The Lebanon operation was widely considered to have been too long. It lasted two months. Most of the damage was done early, and many of the Israeli casualties came later without further accomplishments. The Gaza operation lasted only three weeks, and had very few Israeli casualties.

The policy does not produce victory, but it imposes a severe cost that may leave a lasting lesson. Its advantage is that it greatly reduces one's own casualties.

It is clearly easier for Israel, being right up against the relatively small Lebanon and even smaller Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq are much larger, and much further from the United States. However, the United States has bases, as well as an enormous logistic capability that allows prolonged attack from some distance.

No less troublesome are those primitive pirates of Somalia.

Again the Israeli model offers some suggestions. The pirates have a naval infrastructure that allows them to operate hundreds of miles from shore, and they have built what some call palatial homes in their villages.

What the politically correct see as appropriate venues for negotiations, others see as targets.

It may take awhile for Americans and others to make the switch. It took Israel eight years to respond forcefully to the rockets coming out of Gaza.

SOURCE

Help Get Rid of 'Senator Slasher'

From THE NEW AGENDA:

by Sheryl Robinson, Editrix

Indicted last week on six counts of felony assault, and prohibited from having any contact with his alleged victim until December 2009, NY State Senator Hiram Monserrate has inexplicably not been forced to relinquish his senate seat as he goes to trial.


He’s a state legislator charged with a serious felony, and until that issue is resolved, he cannot be trusted to serve the public good.

Every time this story gets some traction in the press, Monseratte’s PR firm contacts the publication and attempts to intimidate them, as they did with The New Agenda and NY NOW.

Don’t allow this story to sink below the surface while an accused violent felon remains comfortably ensconced in his office, collecting his substantial salary as a senator.

This is a travesty, and the message it sends is that violence against women is no big deal.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

If you live in New York State, call or write your legislators at one of the links below and ask them to insist that Monserrate step down until his case is resolved.

Click this link for a list of all NY State senators, including contact information

Click this link for a quick list of NY State senators’ email addresses

If you live in or outside of NY, write letters to the editor to Albany, Troy, Queens, and other NYC, NY papers. You can also identify reporters and ask them why this isn’t a bigger story. Call or write television networks and ask why the story hasn’t received more national coverage.

Click this link to find contact info for newspapers in NYC
Contact CNN
Contact FOX
Contact NBC/MSNBC
Contact ABC

Exodus & the Aftermath of Personal Trauma

TRAUMA SUVIVORS PLEADING FOR THEIR 'EXODUS'

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
I have sworn, and have confirmed it, to observe Thy righteous ordinances.
I am afflicted very much; quicken me, O HaShem, according unto Thy word.
Accept, I beseech Thee, the freewill-offerings of my mouth, O HaShem, and teach me Thine ordinances.
My soul is continually in my hand; yet have I not forgotten Thy law.
The wicked have laid a snare for me; yet went I not astray from Thy precepts.
Thy testimonies have I taken as a heritage for ever; for they are the rejoicing of my heart.
I have inclined my heart to perform Thy statutes, for ever, at every step.
Psalms 119: 105-112

In reading this week's news across the globe, I am always struck by the resiliency of trauma survivors. Victims of political hypocrisy, victims of Palestinian & Islamic terror and even crime victims here in New York. I am also sickened by the majority who turn the other way - think it's not going to or couldn't happen to them - and blame the victims.

It's her fault, she let him take advantage of her;
he asked for it;
they knew what they were doing;
she should have gone to another job if she had problems;
Israel is provoking these attacks;
you elected him/ them

- on & on & on.

For survivors - just hearing this stuff is enough to set us off. For me, it all blurs together.

I wonder if we understand the sort of courage it takes to stand up again in the face of this sort of mass invalidation and personal smear campaigns.

And most of all, as a PTSD sufferer for many many years - I doubt anyone who doesn't have this disorder 'gets it.'

Yes, perhaps I am projecting my own pain onto other situations in an attempt to understand it. But don't we all project our own experience on to situations and people in attempts to make sense of it? Isn't that what the sages did in their attempts to unravel the mysteries of Torah?

Passover's just a short time away and I have been giving a lot of thought to the trauma of the Jewish people who fled Egypt with barely the clothes on their back and then wandered the desert. The psychological injury done to their self esteem that caused them to make a Golden Calf to focus on rather than wait for Moishe Rabineau to come down from Sinai. The real "shock and awe" of watching the Reed Sea part before them and later close in on Pharoah's warriors. The courage it took to settle in Israel and how, even today - thousands of years later - the self-esteem of the Jews is battered by Islamic extremism and the media!

Depression and PTSD is something I have to consciously fight every single day. Until about 4 years ago I was letting it have its way with me. I wasn't even fighting it because I was in denial that it was affecting me and had serious suicidal ideation.

Years of abuse, marital or relationship entrapment, verbal and emotional battering and then physical illness turned me into a shell. I then fell victim to someone I thought I could trust who I really cared about, who callously polished off my trust in myself. I even was manipulated to fall victim to the Yetzer Hara... who like all predators - moved in when I was vulnerable, brainwashed and really had no fight left in me.

In the last few years I have started to come back to myself. A good thing for my children who really need a mother with some spine. My friends still believe in me but I struggle to believe in myself. All survivors do.

What trauma survivors and victims want is not 'Blame the Victim' platitudes, they don't want pity, they don't want to be told to 'get over it' or 'move on,' they don't want "here's a dollar for your cause now go away..." What we want is for people to GET IT. To try and understand. And most most importantly - to VALIDATE us.

Isn't that what Moishe Rabineau wanted? For God's Chosen People to GET IT?

Understanding Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:
Myths, Misconceptions and Treatments
By Elizabeth Farrell

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is a severe anxiety disorder that is very often misunderstood. PTSD can however affect people of any age from all walks of life. PTSD affects people who have been through a severe traumatic event or events such as childhood abuse, sexual assault, a violent crime, car accident, domestic abuse or a natural disaster. Not everyone who has been through a traumatic event will develop PTSD, but those who do can experience frightening and sometimes disabling symptoms.
Everyone has a built-in defensive mechanism that tells their bodies and minds when to respond to threatening situations. Often referred to as "fight or flight", this mechanism helps us respond to and resolve anything that feels dangerous to us. But for those with PTSD this mechanism works on overtime, the trauma remains unresolved and the person may end up feeling isolated and helpless. Symptoms of PTSD range from mild to severe and much of it depends on the length and severity of the traumatic event or events, how soon after the trauma they were diagnosed and treated and the person's support system of family and friends. However this outline is not written in stone for PTSD is a very complex disorder and even if two of the same people were exposed to the same trauma, they can both have completely different levels of reaction.

One of the most common symptoms of PTSD is flashbacks. A flashback is when the person feels as if traumatic event was recurring and includes a sense of re-living the event. The terrifying sensation of being back in the event can be so strong that the person may mistakenly believe that they are losing their mind. Recurrent, intrusive thoughts, images and perceptions that are similar to flashbacks but shorter in duration are also a common symptom of PTSD. Other symptoms include:

Avoidance of any situation, activities, thoughts or feelings that may trigger memories of the trauma

Inability to recall certain aspects of the trauma

Feelings of detachment from others

Inability to foresee into the future, such as planning career goals, marriage, normal life plans, etc.

Irritability and angry outbursts

Hypervigilance (a feeling of being on guard for danger)

Exaggerated startle response

Difficulty in concentrating

Difficulty sleeping

There are also a myriad of consequences associated with PTSD such as depression, suicidal ideation or suicide attempts, addictions, low self-esteem, interpersonal problems and physical manifestations such as headaches, stomach problems, low immunity and chronic pain.

Many people delay seeking treatment out of shame, guilt or even fear of having to re-visit the traumatic memories in therapy. Common myths and misconceptions can also hold people back from seeking treatment. These myths include:

People who have experienced a trauma should just learn to move on; if they seek treatment they are somehow weak.
There are people who can return to a normal life after experiencing a traumatic event. However the stress of this trauma can affect many aspects of a person's life including their emotional and physical well-being. Research even shows that prolonged trauma can alter and disrupt brain chemistry. If the stress caused by a trauma isn't addressed and treated, then it can possibly develop into PTSD. Seeking help is a wise and prudent choice to make.

If a person doesn't have symptoms right after the trauma, they won't get PTSD.
PTSD symptoms commonly develop within the three months following the trauma, but they may not appear until months or years after the trauma has happened. Symptoms of PTSD have also been known to subside and then reoccur later in life.

PTSD isn't a real disorder
PTSD is recognized as a well-characterized psychiatric disorder, listed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV)

It is a very real disorder and can be treated successfully by a mental health professional.
As mentioned earlier, it has been researched to show that the affects of stress caused by the trauma can alter the chemistry of the brain and how it responds to stress. This is particularly true with people who have experienced chronic and severe trauma.

Because of its complex affect on the brain, treatment for PTSD can often be more prolonged than with other types of anxiety disorders.

While writing this, I came across a very interesting site that included some quotes from sexual abuse survivors. No matter what sort of abuse you survived - I believe that you may see yourself in some of them. I know I saw myself, painfully, in the majority of them. It made me think about the Torah portions we will be reading this next week... and how Exodus speaks so clearly to each of us.

Maybe by taking this in, and praying for us - you can help us achieve our own Exodus! I offer excerpts here, to further help others understand:

Sexual and Emotional Exploitation...
Victim/Survivors: "What We Need"

Victims of sexual and emotional exploitation are frequently deeply harmed by this abuse. We sometimes struggle with a deep sense of isolation, and no one around us understands what we have been through. Spouses, significant others, and close friends also sometimes don't understand, and they must deal with their own complex emotional injuries as a result.

This is a form of abuse, where we can't point to the wound because the wound is on the inside. It violated us at a deep emotional / psychological / spiritual level. Just as each person is unique, each situation is unique and each person's response is unique.

WHAT WE WANT
* we want the world to understand
* how we feel
* what this has done to us
* what would help us
* what our spouses/significant others/friends need
* what angers us
* what is not helpful
* we need you to believe us and validate us

Our messages to the world (excerpts):
As I sit here alone and dream and hope, hope for someone or something to set me free set me free of the burden the secret I carry the aloneness that strikes in my heart like lighting wanting to find a path to the truth for in the end the truth will always set you free. - Trent

My abuser knew that his control was in the secrecy and he counted on me always living and then dieing with the shame and hiding his horrendous secret. - Anonymous
~~~~~~~~~

I am a victim/survivor. It happened 12 years ago but I'm just in therapy now dealing with it. There is so much guilt and shame and self-blame, like I should have stopped it and not given in, but I felt I had no power.

He was someone whom I looked to for advice. I had been emotionally and physically abused at my house and he was my refuge. I tried to push off his advances and pull away, but he continued them and finally I gave in.

I later found out that he did the same thing with some other of my (friends). I couldn't believe it.

I can't be touched in any sexual way at all. Then I feel bad about that too. I hope that I can find healing soon. - Anonymous
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh and say to him, 'Thus says the LORD: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. - Exodus 8:1-2

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I will promise you to remove my mask, to not pretend I'm all right, to not hide my pain... If you will promise me not to turn away, not to make light of my wounds or dress them too quickly, so you don't have to look them... I won't ask you to feel everything I feel...you cannot. Just please let me FEEL it while you are here with me. Don't say "just leave it in the past", say "I'm sorry it hurts so much". Don't say "worse things could have happened," say "my heart aches for what you suffered". Don't say "God will make it better" say "how could He have allowed it?". And when I say "I can't face it. It's too horrible. It's unspeakable" say "please -- tell me"... Cindy B.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What was important for me and still is, is that people understand how damaging this exploitation is! That they understand the emotional pain. It would be very helpful if we could tell the general public, friends, family, partners, that when we were involved with the person who abused us, we were at our most vulnerable. We trusted this person to be... moral and ethical.

We opened up our deepest secrets, revealed long denied pain, felt we were finally in a place where we could re-experience our traumas. We were then manipulated, seduced and exploited! Because of the loyalty inherent in professional relationships, we took the responsibility upon ourselves and the abuse continued because we could not believe that our perpetrator could really be feeling the things they either spoke or intimated through covert behaviors and deniable conversations with us. We wanted them to be clean, clear with their boundaries and safe!

Why didn't we see what was going on, or why did we misinterpret their behaviors and words. We become the perpetrator, not our abusers, much like the way rape victims have been attacked in court, we are left looking as if we were the seducers. [Emotional seducers] receive the sympathy of friends & investigator and evidently the entire board because they are rarely reprimanded. - Anon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU:
I can never hear "It's not your fault" too many times.

I can not hear "I believe you" too many times. The abuser used his position [and charm] to convince me that no one would ever believe me or help me.

Help me understand and work through the traumatic bond that I have with the abuser. It is similar to the bond a child has with an abusive parent.

Help me figure out what factors within me contributed to my dependency on the abuser. This can be tricky. It needs to be done in a way that emphasizes that the abuser alone was responsible for the abuse.

Confronting, reporting, or suing the abuser are intensely individual issues. These actions can be empowering but they can also be overwhelming and re victimizing. Help me explore my own strengths and vulnerabilities in making such decisions. It's my life and I live with the consequences of legal action. Please support whatever decision I make.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Say to him, 'The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, "Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness." But until now you have not listened.
-- Exodus 7:17
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you are squeamish or fearful about speaking to people who were abused or who have taken legal or political action against the abuse, say so. [Don't spin or santize it] I was already objectified by the abuser - treating me like "[a problem]" only furthers that objectification and is a re-enactment of the trauma. This is a difficult area because I am highly sensitive to abandonment.

I may have difficulty hearing positive feedback from you. In the past I was terribly manipulated by an abuser's positive remarks [grooming, schmoozing or peaceful negotiation] about me. I may not show that I heard your kind words (fearing you would use my reaction to take advantage of me), but I did.

Encourage me to cut down on my isolation via support groups, social gatherings, etc. The abuser was able to do what he did by isolating me and making me dependent.

I will TEST TEST TEST you. Please don't take it personally. My relationship with the abuser started out warm and friendly. I worry that kindness is a trap. Validate that testing is natural and necessary.

Help me explain the dynamics of the abuse to my loved ones. They may be blaming me and I am already filled with guilt. My family has also been victimized and needs support. - A survivor at ChaletRey1@XXX.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[My trauma] left me confused about reality and shamefully burdened by the frightening belief imposed upon me that I was the one who had seduced the counselor. It kept me quiet for 21 years until I could no longer carry the burden of secrecy. I collapsed at my worksite and was unable to walk for fear of having to live on - the emotional pain was more than any one person could endure. I was in bed for 2 months with severe agoraphobia and panic attacks and a deepest depression that dared me to end it once and for all by reminding me that I could no longer live another day with the pain. It felt like a large black hole - no good place to be and no good place where which I could go. - Anon

One thing I would like the general public and the professional community to understand or at least receive information about is the emotional abuse that creates the environment for the other abuses to grow and thrive. Without the emotional set up, without the most covert and vicious of abuses, because no one sees the scars (at least not immediately) the other forms of exploitation and abuse might not have occurred!

It is this courage, this inability to see that something is indeed wrong, that makes it easier for the perpetrator to get away with the abuses. I believe we need to know, as the general public and the consumers, that emotional abuse (in childhood) does indeed set us up for any other exploitations. Once we have been overwhelmed by the power and control of the abuser, once our hearts accept them as the ultimate authority on how we feel, we are set up for the rest of it. - Anon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Don't tell us that the real problem is our difficulty in forgiving the perpetrators of our abuse, that we just need to "let go". I have been told that I will not be able to heal until I forgive. I feel PRESSURED to forgive. This just makes me feel even worse, that I am not forgiving as quickly as friends wish me to. It makes me feel like, "What's wrong with me, that this has hurt me so bad, and that I find it so hard to just forgive and forget?"

I'm not sure I can ever forgive him for what he has taken away from me. He has taken away my life. I feel as if my soul has been ripped out of me. It will be a long time before I'll be able to forgive. Forgiveness is a process, not just a decision. It is a painful long struggle, not to be trivialized. - Anon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I realize now that my state of mind was symptomatic of anyone having experienced being raped -- I was dissociated from myself emotionally and from my significant relationships.

The emotional problems of low self-esteem, significant lack of self-identity and awareness of personal boundaries, and chronic feelings of guilt and depression were real needs I had at the time...

In conclusion I can only say to any victims of this experience -- I know that my vulnerability was not the cause of my experience, but it was the target of the violator--he used my vulnerability and my trust to give himself permission to act out his own obsessive compulsive behavior, and that decision makes him a deliberate rapist. He not only violated me personally in every possible way, but he also violated my children and our future as a loving family. - Kathryn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My victimization... was harmful enough, but what happened to me afterwards was even more intrusive. Because of his own agenda, the exploitation I had experienced... was exploited even more when I was to be the model for appropriate "... discipline".

The anger I have for the sexual abuse ...is deep but doesn't come anywhere near the anger and hatred I have for those who took my literal cries for help and justice and threw them in my face. The damage is deep, I feel I have no one and have only recently begun to realize that the healing process is going to take a very very long time.

God's path for you never changes. There are many snakes you will meet along the way. Some will tempt you, others bite you to the bone. My prayers are with you. - A fellow survivor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was "kicked out" of a [temple] because the man who abused me belonged to the [temple] as well. They were extremely supportive of me for months as I told my story to them (keeping the name of the person anonymous).

However, as soon as they realized he was a powerful, rich member of their [temple] (his identity did not come from me). I was forced to leave "for my own good.". I refused at first, so the rabbis "froze" me out - each of them ignoring me until I left. This abuse itself was extremely devastating. To this day I have to remind myself it was not God, but people, who turned on me. - Anon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My abuser... gained my trust because he represented [someone he knew that I would associate] with compassion. Because I was overwhelmed by serious illness, he exploited my trust and invaded my privacy. He asked many personal questions, asked about my relationship with my man, and gained very privileged information about me, which he then used to abuse me sexually. I thought he was a friend. He shared his feelings and worries with me .

The sexual relationship was maintained until he became aware people knew about it. Little can describe the severe repercussions of this abusive relationship in my personal life.

I am now in therapy, and am just beginning to speak out! He has threatened me, and I believe he is capable of violence against me. I have frequent nightmares about this person. - Anon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But this is why I have let you live: to show you my power, and to make my name resound through all the earth. Exodus 9:16
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have fought to be heard and believed. When you are mentally [damaged] no one wants to believe you, they feel they have the right to not believe you.

I wonder how many other women he has abused that either were to fragile to pursue, afraid they were the one responsible or have taken their lives because it was too much. If I give up pursuing this I have given up on life - the last chance I have to maintain some self-respect. - RLM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am the victim/survivor of emotional abuse and I want to understand how the ...distorted comments managed to have that effect on me. I felt I had to literally believe every piece of verbal garbage. - Estelle
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was... trusting and vulnerable. In the end he broke his boundaries without thought of what it would do to me. Eventually he betrayed me and I destroyed my life. It is hard enough to endure the emotion much less find somebody who has the capacity to understand the handle the depth of your pain.

I am dismayed by the cowardice of the legal system and the narrow minded mentality that ...I "should have known " the ethical implications into crossing a boundary.

There are days I give up and hope it will go away but this is followed by my tears. I saw an analyst regarding this and she wanted to blame me for the situation. It is bad enough to feel the confusion much less be frequently encountered by ignorance when you reach out. - Doc
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I, too, am a victim/survivor of abuse that lasted many years. I sued him in civil court which was almost as excruciatingly painful as the abuse itself - to had to look into his eyes and hear him lie about what he told me, how he felt, etc.. I did not think I could make it through it!

But for me, all the pain, tears, sleepless nights, were worth it in order to have him come face to face with me. He counted on my keeping "the secret" - I did not! I still suffer from memories triggered by something as simple as a model of automobile. But I do know that I broke the silence and am taking the next step to freedom so understanding the abuse I suffered may make a difference in someone else's life. - Anon

I would like for [people] to stop using silence as a solution to the problem. You freeze us out and pretend we no longer exist...just before I [spoke out], I was welcomed at your dinner table in your community... But when this came up, the doors of communication slammed shut.

You can't treat people like this. You can't cross lines and then shut them out as if they were trash, without giving proper explanation as to the reason for your actions.

We need COMMUNICATION, not SILENCE. - Lillian N, IN
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I would love to openly confront and expose my abuser. I went to him with my troubles and came out with more troubles than I started with. The abuse lasted four years. If I open up now I will be regarded as a whore. People don't understand. I want them to know that it was not my fault. I am a decent woman who was abused by a predator. -
Anonymous
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One thing is abundantly clear — the emotional, physical, sexual, financial, and spiritual aftermath of a psychopath is comparable to the devastation done by Hurricane Katrina. Much like the victims of Katrina, years later, many victimized women are still walking around stunned and internally disheveled.

There is no “Disaster Relief” or FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) program to come pick up the pieces of the lives that have been shattered by the gale force winds of pathology. There are no grants or loans to help women financially start again. No free counseling to treat their Post Traumatic Stress Disorders or evaluations for children. No free medical care for the ongoing medical issues generated by extreme stress. There are only the free clinics for pro-bono STD treatment, which means standing in the lines with sex workers.

She looks for help in women’s groups and counselors. She’s told she’s 'codependent,' 'sexually addicted', a 'relationship addict', or 'just another domestic violence statistic'. She’s given relationship books about “Finding Love” again in other relationships — none of which examines what life with a psychopath has been like. Or, what scars from a psychopath are like.

Other women say, “Oh yeah, I had a bad boyfriend too. I got over it and moved on.” There are so few people who really understand what it is like to be targeted, lured, conned, mind controlled, and then live through the dichotomous belief systems of the psychopath.

Who will understand this fall from success she has experienced? Who really knows what it is like to go from a doctor to a patient, from a CPA to a welfare recipient, from a female clergy to an unbeliever?

The universe is strangely tilted to the benefit of the psychopaths. For twenty years, Sandra L. Brown, M.A. has watched psychopaths dodge jail, get custody of children, skirt warrants, talk judges into believing them, have women’s attorneys switch sides and represent them, and walk free... We have seen women labeled 'sick', 'crazy', 'bad mothers', 'scorned' and 'overly reactive'.

Women are violated by the psychopath, violated by the lack of trained professionals to help them, violated by the legal system, and left scarred and numb to wander through life.

All of this amounts to a death sentence for those who made a mistake; the mistake of loving and trusting a psychopath. This is a rather harsh sentence for a woman whose only crime was wanting love and family.

excerpt from WOMEN WHO LOVE PSYCHOPATHS

The enemy said, 'I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.
I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.'

You blew with your wind, the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

"Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendor, doing wonders?

Exodus

101 Fun Things to do with Matzah

In undergrad school, the last 2 years there I lived off campus in my own apartment. I loved it. I loved the autonomy and I got a chance to really study and do my own thing.

I was adopted by a local feral cat whom I named 'Matzah Ball.' He moved in and stayed. He slept with me every night and was oddly protective of me, always waiting in my front window or at my steps for me to come home. He was a VERY fat, black cat with white paws and chest and a white spot on his face.

My children laugh to tears when I tell them that Matzah was sooooo fat I had to push him off the couch to sit down and even then he would just "THUD" to the floor. Once he tried to sleep on my legs and I lost so much feeling I woke up and pushed him off.

Matzah was very vocal and would voice his displeasure at me putting him on a diet by not allowing me to sleep. I voiced mine by locking him outside. Matzah would then kill some hapless bird and bring the still twitching prey to me in the morning as a token of his love for me. How... um... touching. But a lot more than I can say for some of the boys I knew.

Matzah was always at the window waiting for me to come back from class, the library or a rehearsal. No matter what time. My roommate used to tease me about it, too. He was picky about which of my friends he liked and didn't like. And he was 99.9% right. Most of all - he was an unconditional friend. Matzah Ball.

And with Passoverhere, I offer, along with my dusty ole' Matzah Ball stories - a few shining moments in Matzah history:

At Sculpture Contest, a Matzo Piece of Modern Art
by LENORE SKENAZY

James Donovan celebrates his first place victory yesterday in the first ever Matzo Sculpture Competition at the Bronfman Center at New York University. The sophomore art student won the $1,000 prize for his replica of Washington Square Arch.

In the 3,000 years since the Jews fled Egypt with their unleavened dough, no one has come up with anything better to do with it than eat it. And even that's not such a good idea.

That is why it was such a joy to attend the world's first Matzo Sculpture Competition on Monday night at New York University's Bronfman Center. The sponsor — big surprise — was Manischewitz, the country's foremost matzo maker (which, by the way, is now owned by the same holding company that also owns Horowitz Margareten and Goodman's matzo. So much for competition in the kosher aisle).

Matzo, fyi, is the flat, hard "bread of affliction" Jews are commanded to eat on Passover to remind them of the Exodus, when there wasn't time to let the dough rise (or, apparently, acquire any taste).

What can one fashion out of oversize crackers? The finalists in Monday's contest came forth with matzo candlesticks, a matzo Wailing Wall, even a matzo video game, complete with mini matzo Mario. "Super Mario Brothers is a game of conquest but more notably of oppression," the artist's statement read. "You thought it was a game about pizza-eating plumbers? How could you be so naïve?"

Uh, easy. Anyway, as a large crowd milled around, examining the sculptures (and, truth be told, also a far more normal art opening going on at the same time), the artists were only too happy to discuss their inspiration.

The official theme was "Home," contestant Eric Goldberg said, and his three little matzo dioramas were meant to represent his parents' home, his grandparents' home, and now (the one with the matzo futon), his own home, as an NYU student.

"They gave me a foundation," he said of his family, and you just know that somewhere out there, there are two generations of Goldbergs very proud that their boy is spending his $39,000 education gluing matzos together.

Erica Dobin had glued her matzos together to make two living rooms representing the homes she had helped salvage as a volunteer in New Orleans. Her work was hauntingly lovely. For his part, art student James Donovan had made an impressive Washington Square Arch — his home away from home — which ended up winning the $1,000 prize.

The idea was "to bring matzo back to people and let them really interact with it on a personal level," a Manischewitz assistant brand manager, Arye Weigensberg, said. But if the folks visiting the exhibit were any indication (and who's to say they were?), matzo is already very personal, as laden with memories as Passover itself.

"One time," business student Israel Aboud recalled, "we hid the afikomen under my grandfather's mattress." The afikomen is a piece of matzo that is traditionally hidden for the children to find, and whoever does gets a prize. But sometimes, as in Mr. Aboud's family, the children hide it from the adults.

The problem was that Mr. Aboud's grandfather fell asleep on the mattress, unaware of the matzo beneath him. "We didn't want to wake him up," Mr. Aboud said. "So we sat there and felt really bad. We kept on making noises — banging and stuff — to wake him, and once he sat up, we said, ‘We've got to get the matzo from under you!'" The afikomen is supposed to be the last morsel eaten at the Passover meal. "But my parents didn't want to use it after that," he said.

A student in Jewish history, Andrew Scheer, recalled another problematic matzo: "My father always tries to be more Jewish every year, and one year he got shmurah matzo" — handmade matzo that's as expensive as it is hard. "My grandmother tasted it and she went off on him: ‘What is this? Cardboard?' And then, when she found out what it cost, she went off on my mom: ‘This is what you spend your money on?' We had a whole fight at the table."

Other visitors had happier matzo memories, chiefly focused on the joy of eating it with butter, or — in the case of student Paula Pulizzi — with olive oil and Parmesan. "I'm Italian from Queens and I was always curious about it," she said. Once she finally bought a box, "I wound up having it every day after school. My parents were like, ‘Are you okay? You sure you don't want Italian bread?'"

Scrumptious, crusty Italian bread? Who'd want that when you can have the bread of affliction?

Besides, Italian bread would make a really lousy Washington Square Arch.
ORIGINAL
~~~~~~~~~~~

Ben & Jerry's is marketing a matzah-flavored ice cream in Israel. "Matzah Crunch" was developed exclusively for the Jewish state, Avi Singer, the general manager of Ben & Jerry's in Israel, was quoted as saying in Israel's Maariv newspaper on Sunday.

The French vanilla-flavored ice cream contains chips of chocolate-covered matzah. It must be bought directly from the Ben & Jerry's factory in Yavne and costs about $4.50 a pound. Maariv said the new flavor could be sold in Israeli supermarkets next year.

ORIGINAL

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, third world county, and Adam's Blog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2007/04/beltway_traffic_jam-457/trackback/
http://perrinelson.com/track.aspx?postid=574
http://www.thirdworldcounty.us/wp-trackback.php?p=2955

6 Things You Didn't Know About Passover!

by David Weiner

For most Americans, Passover is that time once a year when their Jewish friends can't eat pizza. But there's actually a lot more to the holiday than what Jews can and cannot eat, and whose firstborn was killed or not killed (sorry Pharaoh!). For a good overview of the actual holiday, I suggest checking out these two sites. But if you want to impress your Jewish friends with some cool Passover facts, or if you need some good lines to break the ice with at your Seder, read on:

1. The World's Largest Passover Seder Takes Place in Nepal, of All Places. Each year members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement hold their "Seder on Top of the World" in Kathmandu for Jewish locals and travelers alike (I'm gonna guess more the latter than the former). Last year they had around 2,000 people attend the festivities, and you can bet your tuchus that between the flowing wine and the thin air, it was quite the party.

2. Abraham Lincoln Was Assassinated During Passover. According to the American Jewish Historical Society, many Jews were in synagogue for the holiday when news of Lincoln's assassination broke. Altars in temples "were quickly draped in black and, instead of Passover melodies, the congregations chanted Yom Kippur hymns. Rabbis set aside their sermons and wept openly at their pulpits, as did their congregants." Sadly, a time that was supposed to be full of celebration became one of mourning.

3. Coca-Cola Makes a Special Batch of Kosher Coke for Passover. While Coke is generally a kosher product, the dietary laws tighten during the Passover holiday making high-fructose corn syrup a no-no for observant Jews (it really should be a no-no for everybody all the time, but that's neither here nor there). In response, Coca-Cola pumps out a batch of limited edition Coke that uses (gasp) real sugar instead of the kitniyot -- corn. Look for bottles with yellow caps on them to be sure you're getting the right one, baby! (I know, that was Pepsi's old jingle, but close enough.)

4. The First American Edition of the Haggadah Was Published in 1837. The Haggadah is the book or text Jews read from during Passover. It tells the origins of the holiday and explains how the Seder is supposed to proceed. Solomon Henry Jackson, an English-born American Jew, published the first American edition of the Haggadah in 1837 in New York. Jackson had moved to the city in the 1820s to establish the first Hebrew printing press, and The Jew, a monthly newspaper and the first Jewish periodical in the United States. One could say Jackson was the original member of the Jewish media elite.

5. Gefilte Fish is Really Good, I Swear. I know, I know, a bottle of gefilte fish looks more like something you'd find in science class than in a supermarket, but trust me when I say this: it tastes great. Some are even calling it "the new bacon." Explaining the ingredients or the process of making it would probably only hurt my case, so I'm just going to say that if you haven't tried it, you're missing out. Just think of it as a fish hot dog, and as you can tell from Hebrew National dogs, we Jews know how to do mushy meat!

6. Manischewitz is a Brand, Not the Hebrew Word for Kosher Wine. Just as a Kleenex is really a "facial tissue," and Q-Tips are actually "cotton swabs," Manischewitz is a proprietary eponym. Founded in 1927 by Leo Star, the Manischewitz winery has basically cornered the kosher wine market here in the US with their sweet concord grape wine. Yet like Coca-Cola, Manischewitz uses corn syrup to sweeten things up a bit, so surprisingly not all Manischewitz is actually kosher for Passover.

SOURCE

AND WATCH STEPHEN COLBERT FREE THE JEWS:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Birkat Hachama - Stephen Frees His Jews
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ABOVE VIDEO IF YOU'RE ON AN AGGREGATOR

Obama - Stupid is as Stupid Does.

We all have our bad habits. I have one that I have never been able to shake.

Me? I don't suffer fools gladly.

Stupidity really makes my teeth hurt. And stupidity combined with arrogance? Well, just be sure you're not close to the curb when speeding bus comes by and I am behind you. Closer, Barry -- just get closer to the curb.

From the great DEADENDERS:

Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t Know Much About….

In Obama’s never ending quest to trash America telling the rest of the world you’re right were wrong, HE just keeps getting it wrong.

Speaking in Turkey he said this:

Compared to Turkey and how old this civilization is, America is still very new.

Turkey was founded in 1923 just after America saved Europe’s ass in WWI.

Barry should have spent more time in History class.

CLICK HERE FOR ONE MORE OF DE'S 'GOTCHAS' ON OyBAMA's STOOPIDITY

Crippling Pain? Try... Strenuous Exercise!

No more so than with an 'invisible disability' like mine, that causes chronic, relentless, breathtaking pain every second I'm awake - do you find out how incredibly rude and downright stupid some people in the medical profession are.

I am blessed but it took time and patience to find doctors willing to listen and help me. I was accused of doctor-shopping and put through the ringer by disability, but truth will out and I held my ground. I have a wonderful team now, though the loss of my therapist in February 2008 is irreplaceable.

My PCOS has been very bad since I gave birth almost 11 years ago. It's not getting any better and now I am having surgery sometime soon - again. Unfortunately the surgeries, medications and PCOS caused me to gain weight as well as look distended. I have lost some but I am more interested in sticking to a healthy diet I can live with.

But one thing I have always had a problem with: I don't do stupid. Stupidity really grates on me like nothing else. And as I get older, people around me seem to be getting stupider by leaps and bounds.

In reading one of my FAVORITE blogs, Shapely Prose - I came across a link to this blog: First, Do No Harm. I have it on my RSS Reader now. This post is spot-on about the absolute dumb things people like me have to deal with on an ongoing basis from the medical community.


~~~~~~~~
5 years ago, at 230 pounds, I decided to go on a diet. It started off typically: planned meals, calorie journal, joining the gym. Before long, I was restricting myself to no more than 500 calories a day, and exercising upwards of 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. I was biking, running, lifting, doing yoga. I dropped 70 lbs in 5 months. Down to 160 lbs and a size 12 from a 20.

At about the 6 month point, I started having all these aches and pains. First in my wrists, then my shoulders, then my hips. Pretty soon, I was in horrible pain all the time, all over my body.

I went to the doctor to check out what was wrong. I got around 10 seconds to describe my pain. Her response? “That’s what happens to people your size. You’re putting too much pressure on your joints. Try eating less, and start exercising.” We hadn’t talked at all about my food intake or exercise routine. She handed me a flier for an Overeaters Anonymous group that met at the hospital and showed me out of the room.

Flash forward 4 years.

By this time, I was in such pain, so stiff, so tired, I couldn’t exercise anymore. Many days I couldn’t even bathe myself, do basic household chores or go to work. The weight all came back, plus 30 lbs. I had to move home with my parents to have them care for me.

I’d seen dozens of doctors, had MRIs, CT Scans, XRays, every blood test available. Nothing ever showed up, so the only treatment I got was the suggestion to lose weight. And some mentions of gastric bypass.

I finally found a great nurse who realized that what was wrong was that I had fibromyalgia. The first step in the treatment plan was to see a physical therapist.

I showed up for the first appointment, and before asking me any questions about my health, the therapist said, “You know, 30 isn’t too young to have a heart attack. As big as you are, you really need to worry about that.” Without knowing any of my vital statistics, or asking me why I was there, she started laying out a plan that had me exercising 2+ hours a day, with the goal of dropping at least 100 pounds that year.

When I explained that I had FMS, and that light exercise was good, but too much exercise would actually cause a flare and make my symptoms worse, her response was:

“Well, you’re just going to have to deal with the pain until you get down to a normal size. The fibromyalgia will probably just go away then, anyway. I think most people who get diagnosed with that condition really just are too fat and too sedentary and want an excuse.”

Fortunately, at this point, I’d suffered enough, and knew my body well enough to know not to listen to her and find a new therapist. But if I hadn’t been as informed and willing to stand up to her, I can only imagine what damage she would have caused on my body.

SOURCE

Miriam's Cup

Several new Passover seder rituals are being adopted by Jewish familes to honor the role of Miriam, Moses's sister and the Prophetess in the Exodus, and to highlight the contributions of women to Jewish culture, both past and present.

A second cup, called Miriam's Cup, is being added to the Passover dinner table along with Elijah's Cup. Miriam's Cup is filled with water and symbolizes the miracle of Miriam's well, which sustained the Israelites during their long journey in the desert.

Their Ability to Become a Different Person

by Kathy Krajco

It was about this time of year when a narcissist went away to college as a freshman at the colossal University of Wisconsin in Madison. The next thing her family knew, she was a different person.

She had always been your good, clean-cut, all-American kid in high school. Got good grades. Went to Mass with her parents every Sunday. Was a cheerleader. Took part in athletics. Never touched drugs. Had a steady boyfriend who was himself a clean-cut all-American kid.

But in Madison, with no parents around to see what she did, she went wild. You name it – drugs, sex, riots – she was into it. Didn’t go to class. Partied all the time. Hopped into bed with anyone. As for Sunday Mass – she never went once. When her sister came to visit and expected to go, she announced that she didn’t believe in it.

She didn’t offer any explanation or relate her thoughts and reasoning on this. She just bit off the matter glibly by saying that she didn’t believe in it, period.

All within less than six weeks of coming out from under her parents’ roof.

Get it?

A typical narcissist’s transfiguration (see the eBook for more). It was like she suddenly was a different person. And The people at school who knew her now wouldn’t have recognized the person she had been just a few weeks earlier.

Anyone not born yesterday knows what happened. Since she could get away with bad behavior now, she did. Instantly she went wild. There was no gradual degeneration of her moral standards. Instead, they simply proved to be nonexistent. She thus proved that she had been a total phony before.

This equates with the frequent report that a narcissist goes wild after the death of a parent who exerted some control over them.

And there’s a warning in it. It means that the only rein on a narcissist is what they think they can get away with. That can and does change with circumstances over the course of life.

And when it does, you may get a nasty surprise. You may suddenly see your narcissist doing abhorrent things you never dreamed him or her capable of.

Simply because the only rein on a narcissist is what they think they can get away with. They have no moral restraint whatsoever. So, when external constraints are removed, look out.

This may explain why powerful narcissists seem worse. They may not be worse: it may be only that they can get away with worse, so they do.

This particular narcissist felt so uninhibited that she took a psychotic break when one of her roommates tried to talk some sense into her. Older students from elsewhere on the floor came running and literally held her down in what they later described in terms that remind one of an exorcism. They then took her to see her older sister in another town the next day, warning the sister that something was wrong with her.

Glibly the narcissist explained it all away to her family by saying that one of the girls’ cousins had slipped her LSD.

What she didn’t tell them is that she had begun a campaign of telling everyone in Madison horrible lies about them to make people feel sorry for her, in an effort to get some rich people who owned a bar on campus to adopt her.

So don’t assume that your narcissist’s assault-weapon mouth won’t be turned on you. Pay attention to what he or she tells you about others and know that he or she is going around saying as bad or worse about you, no matter who you are.

SOURCE

When Dealing With Punks, There's No Time to be a Liberal

by David Warren

In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)

Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.

But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. "I've got bad news for you punks," he declared, loudly. "I am not a liberal." Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver's declaration than by the punks' behaviour.

In my humble opinion -- shared with all those with some elementary understanding of the art of policing -- the leading cause of anti-social behaviour is permission. People, and young punks especially, will do things that even they know are malicious because no one will stop them.

The worst possible conditions exist, as today, when the surrounding society is befogged with idiotic, decadent notions, such as the idea that the punks are themselves "victims" of some material deprivation, when what they have in fact been deprived of is the iron fist of the law.

We see this phenomenon writ large in Gaza, where the punks are organized into a terrorist militia called Hamas. It is unnecessary to consider their Islamist ideological credentials, only to witness their deeds. These are people who were under the impression that "society" -- by analogy "the world community," and the diplomatic draughtsmen of innumerable "roadmaps to peace" -- had granted them permission to wing thousands of rockets gratuitously into Israel.

And that world community is now the more astounded when Israel replies, in effect, "I am not a liberal," than it ever was by the incessant pounding of the Qassams. We have the spectacle of the suits at the United Nations running about declaring truces that both Hamas and Israel will ignore. Hamas is still winging rockets; Israel has declared no intention of stopping until the rockets stop.

As Claudia Rosett, the leading journalistic investigator of UN perfidy, has been documenting for some years now (in her weekly Forbes.com column and elsewhere), the punks of Palestine have benefited from a level of permission that amounts to direct encouragement.

Since the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (that was supposed to bring an enduring peace), Hamas has been able to consolidate its political power over the enclave, while consolidating Gaza's economy around just two industries: terrorism and foreign aid. There is no other economy in Gaza, and there has been no credible attempt to build one.

The UN Relief and Works Agency has acted as the great enabler. Set up in 1949 as a temporary agency to house, feed and resettle fewer than one million Arab refugees (Israel received an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees from around the Arab world), UNRWA has grown by bureaucratic persistence into a vast, permanent welfare organization for the 4.6-million descendants of its original "client base" -- and for their descendants, into the indefinite future. It provides for them with a staff and budget several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet.

That UNRWA does not operate in a vacuum, but has instead woven itself into the regional matrix, is evident from the history. The agency's camps, which have grown into permanent settlements, are distributed not only through Gaza and the West Bank, but around Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Arab governments in each of these jurisdictions absolutely refuse to naturalize these permanent residents, almost all of whom were born on their soil, on the claim that they must rightfully be "returned" to the territory Israel now "occupies." Thus UNRWA facilitates the use of these so-called "refugees" as a dagger pointed at Israel's throat.

Moreover, almost all of UNRWA's staff is locally recruited Palestinian, and thus the entire operation is open to subversion to the ends that they decree. For instance, this week, as the Israelis have alleged, the use of a UN school as an arms cache, use of the building as a defensive fortification by Hamas gunmen, use of its inmates as "human shields."

There are root causes of the current conflict, going, as all agree, right back to the foundation of Israel (by the UN) in the late 1940s. The continued existence of UNRWA is the principal one, creating the conditions for Islamist terrorism to flourish, and it is time that root cause was addressed.

David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. in The Ottawa Citizen.

SOURCE

Hat Tip to Think-Israel.org

Scary Court Cases

by Tom McLaughlin

Two recent court cases on two continents make me very nervous. That they're even being tried is outrageous. That either may succeed is ominous, and few people know anything about either one.

First is the case of Roger Barnett - an Arizona rancher who has been under siege by illegal immigrants and drug dealers. In the Washington Times, Barnett claims illegals "tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home." Now sixteen illegals are suing him in federal court for $32 million, accusing him of "conspiring to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch next to the US-Mexico border." The sixteen illegals claim Barnett caused them emotional distress by holding them at gunpoint and they want $2 million each.

Chief among our federal government's responsibilities is to protect American citizens from foreign invasion, but it's done little or nothing to help Barnett. Rather than protecting him, our government instead enables foreign invaders to sue him. That's how bad it's gotten.

The US Department of Homeland Security acknowledges virtual anarchy on the border and warns that Mexico itself is on the verge of collapse. That would come as no surprise to Barnett, who must wonder about his own country as well if it cannot, or will not control its borders. The DHS report states: "[Mexico's] government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. . . . Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."

Drug cartel power depends on moving drugs across our border. We are their market. I'd say an American response is overdue already, wouldn't you? USA Today reported in 2005 that: "First [New Mexico Governor] Richardson, then [Arizona Governor] Napolitano, declared a state of emergency this month in portions of their states along the border with Mexico."

THE SECOND CASE IS THAT OF GEERT WILDERS in Holland: A Member of Parliament, Wilders has been charged with hurting Muslim immigrant feelings in Holland by "inciting racial hatred." He made a film called "Fitna" comparing the Koran to Hitler's "Mein Kampf." As Dr. Sami Alrabaa reports in Canadian Free Press: "Wilders' comparison of the Koran to Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and describing it as a fascist book is not inappropriate. Hitler referred to the Jews as "rats and vermin" and the Koran and fascist Muslims call the Jews "The descendants of apes and pigs."

When radical Muslims incite racial hatred in Holland, it's okay. When a member of Holland's government points it out, it's a crime.

Dr. Alrabaa also writes that "Muhammad Sayyid Al Tantawi, president of Al Azhar University [established 975 AD in Cairo] also approves of killing and maiming Christians, Jews, and other infidels. He added, 'This is not my personal view. This what the Shari'a Law says, the law of Allah, the only valid law on the earth.'"

There. I've pointed it out. I'm a criminal too.

Geert Wilders was invited by a member of the British House of Lords to show his film there. When he landed in London last Friday, he was promptly deported. The London Daily Telegraph reported: "Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary refused Mr. Wilders entry because his opinions 'would threaten community security and therefore public security' in the UK."

So, when Muslim clerics in the UK preach hatred and violent jihad against the British government, it's all right. But when Wilders expresses a negative opinion about that preaching, he's the threat, not them.

This is what Europe, seat of western civilization and democracy, has come to.

Back here, groups like MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) use the US Constitution to bring suit against Americans like Roger Barnett when he tries to defend his property. MALDEF doesn't recognize the US border. Similar radical Mexican groups like MEChA deny the legitimacy of state governments all across the southwestern United States, calling the area "Aztlan" and claiming themselves as indigenous people not subject to US law. MEChA has chapters in most colleges across the American southwest. If you check out their web site here, you'll see their symbol: an eagle gripping an Aztec war club in one talon and a stick of dynamite with its fuse lit in the other. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante are former members.

MEChA receives funding from La Raza ("The Race"). Politicians across America go out of their way to pay homage to "The Race." President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain addressed the organization during the 2008 campaign, where both virtually promised amnesty for illegals. Two out of three voted for Obama.

Barnett and Wilders are brave men defending western civilization on the front lines. If they go down, watch out.


Tom McClaughlin is a teacher and columnist who lives in Lovell, Maine. His column is published in Maine and New Hampshire newspapers.

SOURCE

Hat-Tip to Think-Israel.org

Domestic Violence Bloggers Risk Their Lives Reporting on Abuse

Myself, I have been defamed, cyberstalked, harassed, called "fat, desperate, pathetic, scorned, a loser, a nutjob" and names I can't repeat here. Sometimes by people who 'supposedly' know me and attempt to hurt me. Sometimes by people I don't know and have never met, and hope I never will.

But I will continue to speak out for myself and for others. Because I have children I love and friends I care about.


From RANDI JAMES' TERRIFIC BLOG:

In creating domestic violence/ sexual assault blogs, we women bloggers are reclaiming some of the power we lost when we were assaulted and/or are reclaiming our power as an oppressed group.

However, this journey out of silence does not come without risks. In exposing the corruption of the family court system and the criminal "justice" system, we are risking our lives so that others may benefit from our courage.

I have been noting a few of the deaths that have occurred [recently]. Any one of those deaths could have potentially been one of us because some have fled violent relationships and some have the threat of violence on a continuous basis as the court forces us to maintain relationships with our abusers.

I want to take this opportunity to point out that a fellow blogger has had her life threatened as of last week. Go on over to Behind the Blue Wall and lend some support.

There are a lot of angry people that want us to STFU. We refuse.

This will be a public affair.