BBC—Children growing up alongside the rise of social networking websites may have a “potentially dangerous” view of the world, says a leading psychiatrist. Dr Himanshu Tyagi said sites such as Facebook and MySpace may be harmful. He told the Royal College of Psychiatrists annual meeting people with active online identities might place less value on their real lives. And the West London Mental Health NHS Trust expert added this could raise the risk of impulsive acts or even suicide.
“It’s a world where everything moves fast and changes all the time, where relationships are quickly disposed at the click of a mouse, where you can delete your profile if you don’t like it, and swap an unacceptable identity in the blink of an eye for one that is more acceptable.” He said: “People used to the quick pace of online social networking may soon find the real world boring and unstimulating. More
Dr. Kevin Barrett/Silvia Cattori
I make the effort to share this information because it gives me, at last, a plausible answer to a long-unanswered question: Why, no matter how much intelligent goodwill exists in the world, is there so much war, suffering and injustice? It doesn’t seem to matter what creative plan, ideology, religion, or philosophy great minds come up with, nothing seems to improve our lot. Since the dawn of civilization, this pattern repeats itself over and over again.
The answer is that civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination. The inventor of civilization, “the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers,” was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.
Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as their power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld — the overlapping criminal syndicates that lurk above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. More
What kind of world is this that we live in? Killing another human in an outburst of uncontrollable anger is bad enough. This act is so far removed from anything human it’s like we’re living in the film Night of The Living Dead.
A 12-year-old girl testified Wednesday that she saw her father kill her mother and then he forced her to help him dismember the body with a circular saw. The testimony came during a preliminary hearing for James Hawkins, 30, who is charged with killing and dismembering his girlfriend, Charlene Gaither, on Feb. 9 in their apartment.
Hawkins’ attorneys argued that the girl originally told police she didn’t know what had happened to her mom, WMC-TV in Memphis reported on its Web site Wednesday night. The defense attorneys said she only told police her story when they handcuffed her and threatened to charge her in her mother’s death. The girl testified Wednesday that her father “told me to help cut my mom’s head off. He told me I’ve got to help him or he’ll kill me too,” The Commercial Appeal newspaper reported on its Web site. More
Hollye Blades
Radical Islam is threatening to fill a “moral vacuum” in Britain as a result of a decline of Christian values, a senior Church of England bishop has said.
He quoted an academic who blamed the 1960s cultural revolution for bringing Christianity’s role in society to an abrupt end. It was said that, instead of resisting the social and sexual revolution, church leaders had capitulated. The Bishop said: “It is a situation which has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we find ourselves. Whilst the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps endless self-indulgence, was put in its place.” More
Sunny Dhillon Globe and Mail
The parents of a seven-day old Vancouver girl were arrested after allegedly trying to sell her on Craigslist. “This certainly in my 27 years is one that I thought I would never see,” said Constable Tim Fanning of the Vancouver Police Department.
The bizarre incident began Friday afternoon when Maple Ridge, B.C., grandmother Marilyn Bateman clicked on to Craigslist, a popular classifieds website, in search of home furnishings. What Mrs. Bateman instead found was an ad offering an infant for $10,000. “I was shaking,” she said. “I opened it up and I was literally shaking and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. This can’t be.’ I mean, even as a practical joke or a hoax … you can’t do that.”
The ad, titled, “MUST HAVE!!!!!! - $10,000,” described the child for sale as “a new baby girl, 7 days old, healthy and very cute.” More
Also see: German parents post baby on eBay for 1 euro
This is how insane the world’s become. It’s mass insanity. I don’t know how anyone could write this story with a straight face. It’s Newspeak and right of of Orwell’s 1984.
Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience.com
To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do. Tiny bombs were made from two promising tetrazoles with the alphabet-soup names of HBT and G2ZT.
These materials proved less apt to explode accidentally than conventional explosives. After the bombs were detonated in the laboratory, G2ZT also proved as powerful than TNT, and HBT more powerful than TNT and comparable to RDX, said researcher Thomas Klapötke, a chemist at the University of Munich in Germany. More
Treating the Unseen Wounds of War PAULINE JELINEK Associated Press
Thousands of private counselors are offering free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, jumping in to help because the military is short on therapists. On this Memorial Day, America’s armed forces and its veterans are coping with depression, suicide, family, marital and job problems on a scale not seen since Vietnam.
The government has been in beg-borrow-and-steal mode, trying to hire psychiatrists and other professionals, recruit them with incentives or borrow them from other agencies. There are only 1,431 mental health professionals among the nation’s 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, said Terry Jones, a Pentagon spokesman on health issues. Read more
Also see: US veterans face increased suicide risk
Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about “homos,” Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George Bush talks to Larry King about halcyon — all presuming they’re off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, Spin is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality.
Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan reports on the increasing number of US veterans that are committing suicide and how one family in particular are dealing with their son’s decision to take his own life. New reports suggest that veterans of US wars are committing suicide at a stunning rate.
A growing number of those are recent veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of US troops are returning from the war zones with ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ and in the most extreme cases the mental scars leads to the ultimate anguish for their family
Caroline McCarthy CNET
According to a briefing detailed by The New York Times’ Brad Stone, the Wiesenthal Center flagged about 8,000 “problematic” sites on the Web pertaining to terrorism and hate, a 30 percent increase from last year.
In addition to religious terror groups, the sites identified also pertain to anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and various anti-religion and anti-government sentiments. And social media is a particular concern, with games, Facebook groups, and Second Life having been identified as potential communication and event-planning tools for terrorist and hate groups.
“Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the ‘Enemy,’ to raise funds, and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists,” the report detailed.
Read more
Ian Daly Men.Style.com
For Lawrence, 35, a real-estate investor from New Jersey, it was Hannah. Hannah (her name has been changed) was a publicist in New York City—tall, model-thin, with a bad eBay habit when it came to mod vintage dresses and a near-fanatic obsession with Friedrich Nietzsche and Britney Spears, in equal parts. She was stunning and brilliant.
She also had a dark side.
Hannah was paranoid—convinced that strangers were plotting her demise—and a chronic liar obsessed with men in positions of authority. She was also prone to random fits of crying. Lawrence remembers pulling into the parking lot of a CVS to buy a toothbrush one day. He returned to find her in his car with the radio set to maximum volume, blasting My Chemical Romance and sobbing in great, heaving spasms for no particular reason. None of this made Lawrence think that he should be investigating easier romantic prospects. On the contrary, he was hooked. Read more
AP/MITCH STACY freep.com
Working suicide patrol on the towering Sunshine Skyway Bridge, Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Leif Cardwell rolled up to find the 58-year-old woman with one leg already draped over the short concrete barrier wall. The license plate on the Ford minivan she drove there said: “HPPY NOW.” Cardwell kept his distance, imploring her to talk to him about her problems and not go through with it. He had thwarted a bridge suicide attempt two months before.
“It’s too late,” she kept saying. She threw down her driver’s license and cell phone and swung her other leg over. Then she was gone, just like that. Despondent souls keep stopping at the peak of the majestic Florida Gulf Coast landmark to kill themselves every year, adding to its reputation as one of the country’s most notorious bridges for jumpers. Read more
Footage from the May 10th Anonymous raid on the Church of Scientology in San Diego, California. Protesters demonstrated against what they call “Fair Game”, a term used to describe various aggressive policies and practices carried out by the Church of Scientology towards people and groups it perceives as its enemies.
According to Wikipedia:
As early as the mid-1950s, Hubbard advocated taking a punitive line towards the perceived enemies of Scientology. In 1955, Hubbard (COS founder) told Scientologists that “the law can be used very easily to harass … The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage, rather than to win – if possible, of course, ruin [the target] utterly”. Read more on “Fair Game” here.
Philly.com
Parents of a third-grade student at Chatham Park Elementary School approached the administration on April 16 to ask for help in making a “social transition” for their child.
The Haverford School District consulted experts on transgender children, then sent letters to parents advising them that the guidance counselor would meet with the school’s 100 third-grade students to explain why their classmate would now wear girls’ clothes and be called by a girl’s name. Some parents objected. Eight called the principal to ask that their child not attend the session, and some posted angry messages on the Haverford Township blog. Read more
Hanna Rosin
One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?
Read more
Photo Sir Mildred Pierce
Members of Mr Packer’s inner circle have confirmed that the billionaire, who had ranked as Scientology’s wealthiest member in the world, was no longer undertaking Scientology courses and had slowly moved away from the religion, telling his closest friends he no longer “needs it”. The religion entered Mr Packer’s realm at one of the lowest points in his personal and business life.
He was overweight and depressed, his marriage to his first wife, Jodhi Meares, had ended and he was reeling from the humiliating and very public collapse of One.Tel, losing $350 million from the family business on the way. Read more
See Inside “The Church of Scientology”
An interesting look at the recruiting practices of the Church of Scientology
Scientology defined by Wikipedia: a body of beliefs and related practices initially created by American speculative fiction author L. Ron Hubbard. The major organization promoting Scientology is the Church of Scientology, a hierarchical organization founded by Hubbard, while independent groups using Hubbard’s materials are collectively referred to as the Free Zone.
Hubbard developed Scientology teachings in 1952 as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics. Hubbard later characterized Scientology as an “applied religious philosophy” and the basis for a new religion. Scientology encompasses “auditing”, a spiritual rehabilitation philosophy and techniques, and covers topics such as morals, ethics, Purification (a type of detoxification), education and management.
Scientology and the organizations that promote it have remained highly controversial since their inception. Former members, journalists, courts and the governing bodies of several countries have described the Church of Scientology as a cult and an unscrupulous commercial enterprise, accusing it of harassing its critics and abusing the trust of its members. Scientology officials argue that most of the negative press is motivated by interest groups and that most of the controversy is in the past. Read more
Amy Berg talks about her award-winning documentary “Deliver Us From Evil.”
About the film.
Moving from one parish to another in Northern California during the 1970s, Father Oliver O’Grady quickly won each congregation’s trust and respect while being an active pedophile that the Catholic Church hierarchy, aware of his predilection, had harbored for over 30 years, allowing him to abuse countless children. Juxtaposing an extended, deeply unsettling interview with O’Grady himself with the tragic stories of his victims, filmmaker Amy Berg bravely exposes the deep corruption of the Catholic Church and the troubled mind of the man they sheltered.
The Boston Globe Richard Florida
WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States - the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland. But what about the country’s psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York? It’s time to learn. Read more
After a one-year relationship with a difficult boyfriend, my client had to face the facts: “I’ve spent so much time and energy on this guy, I just can’t believe it’s not going to work.” Amid her tears she also realized that she didn’t even like the guy, who had kept her at arm’s length and endlessly proclaimed his inability to commit. She was gripped by what she always feels when she realizes a relationship is troubled—a grim determination to make it work no matter what.
The next client to enter my office wasn’t crying, but he was grief-stricken about a relationship that just didn’t get off the ground. He couldn’t understand why a woman he pursued with elaborate overtures (and cold hard cash) never really responded. He ruminated for hours about why nothing worked.
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In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. “The
Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, ” says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Research project. At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers.
“We can’t possibly expect the learner of today to be engrossed by someone who speaks in a monotone voice with a piece of chalk in their hand,” one school principal says. “We almost have to be entertainers,” social studies teacher Steve Maher tells FRONTLINE. “They consume so much media. We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media, and capture their attention.
Watch the FRONTLINE program
In fact, the more beautiful a woman is, the higher her standards. But, perhaps surprisingly, the study did not find that to be the case when it comes to men. It takes more than being a hunk for a man to want everything. He must also have status and the potential to be a good provider before he is likely to demand the best. On the surface it sounds like just another study showing that men are different from women, as if we didn’t already know that. But this is a serious effort to delve into an area that has been largely ignored by scientists: How a woman’s own attractiveness influences her preferences when she picks a mate.
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“There’s a saying among negotiators that whoever talks the most during a negotiation loses.” Brenda Goodman
By a factor of 2.5, more women than men feel a “great deal of apprehension” about negotiating, reports economist Linda Babcock, of Carnegie Mellon. Women go to great lengths to avoid the bargaining process—paying almost $1,400 more to avoid negotiating the price of a car. (That may explain why 63 percent of those who buy cars made by Saturn, a company that promises a no-haggle price, are women.) But “failing to negotiate her salary just once will cost a woman $500,000 over the course of her career,” she says.
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Photo by Yemeni Microtargeting: what we eat reveals how we vote and politicians know it
If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too. And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out. If what we eat says a lot about who we are, it also says something about how we might vote.
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