The Raw Story

Monday, 18 May 2015

Mega-Psycho; When the most successful, smartest psychopaths go bigger-- think pyramids

In the world of psychopaths there are different levels of functioning. The lowest functioning psychopaths have weak impulse control. They get caught when they lose control and have rage episodes, often violently assaulting others.

Better functioning psychopaths don't lose control of their temper but they're not that smart in their predatory behavior. They get caught ripping people off, lying, manipulating.

Then there are the smartest psychopaths. They almost never get caught, and when they do, they are often so ensconced behind the barriers of wealth, power and influence that they are untouchable-- too big for jail. Perhaps they are so big that their actions are not even seen as psychopathic.They are often rewarded and honored, their ruses are so effective.

The book and movie, , describes how corporations fit the profile of psychopaths in many ways. Corporations get away every day with psychopathic behavior. I would argue that most billionaires also engage in what must be defined as psychopathic behavior.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac

Balzac nails it. Look close enough at EVERY billionaire and there is crime, certainly not caught and convicted crime, but crime nonetheless. Billionaires have become, like bankers, too big to prosecute. But it's not just criminality that is the problem with billionaires. They have so much power that they engage in manipulation at massive levels. Remember, small time psychopaths and narcissists routinely rip people off. Women are often victims of charismatic psychopaths who empty their bank accounts, sell their homes out from under them and put them into massive credit card debt. That's small time.

The scale of destruction for billionaires and the corporations they run is so, so much bigger it's hard to get your head around it. Think about the pyramids-- massive edifices that cost thousands of lives of slaves. Built for psychopaths. Today's billionaires and corporate heads can be just as bad, but less overt in the megalomaniacal predations.

Sure, they steal from the commons, but they do it with teams of lawyers, spending millions to make hundreds of millions or billions, while they're at it doing things like making it illegal in Wyoming to take photographs of or document pollution.

They deform the nature of education, spending millions on state education programs and funding chairs and departments in universities so their Libertarian, Ayn Randian pathological values are institutionalized and made a part of the education system. This is massive scale predatory perpetration of abominations upon society. This is the scale of the abuses of power by billionaires and the corporations they run. Take a look at this link to the hundreds of universities the Koch Family Foundation "funds." And keep in mind that this represents them corrupting the minds of tens of thousands of university students. They are worse than a disease. They are a plague upon humanity.

And keep in mind that any mega-corporation or any billionaire worth his or her or its salt will own scores if not hundreds of shell corporations, as I document in this article: The power and danger of complexity and secrecy.

Bloomberg News is now reporting e-mails that reveal how Oklahoma billionaire Harold Hamm, the CEO of Continental Resources, attempted to have researchers who were studying ties between fracking and earthquakes removed from their jobs. Bloomberg obtained emails, using a public records request, which led to this report:

"Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed," wrote Larry Grillot, the dean of the university's Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, in a July 16, 2014, e-mail to colleagues at the university. Hamm also expressed an interest in joining a search committee charged with finding a new director for the geological survey, according to Grillot's e-mail."

This is one example of how a billionaire attempts to influence scientific research. It is reasonable to assume that Hamm, was so ham-handed in his predations upon the light of truth, that he got sloppy or was not smart and charismatic enough to make his intentions become reality. He spent $20 million supporting diabetes research at the university of Oklahoma. This is how it works. Give a shitload of money to one part of the university and then ask for changes elsewhere. I believe that there are hundreds of billionaires doing things like this. Most do not get caught.

Did Hamm actually fail? That's hard to tell. Bloomberg reveals that "University President David Boren, a former U.S. senator, sits on the board of directors of Hamm's Continental Resources." Oklahoma has a co-dependent relationship with psychopaths. One of its senators, Jim Inhofe, the number one climate change denier in congress, has proclaimed Hamm to be a friend, and has introduced legislation on his behalf.

named Hamm one of the most influential people in 2012. James Inhofe wrote the pean on the wonderfulness of Hamm for . He says Hamm's created hundreds of jobs. Let's do the math. Say he pays $70,000 a year for 300 people. That's only $21 million-- and the guy has a multi-billion dollar business. Wikipedia puts his net worth at around $10 billion. His wife received a divorce settlement of just shy of $1 billion. $21 million in jobs for such a big billionaire is shameful. It's just another argument disputing the positive aspects of billionaires.

Bottom-line-- when the smartest billionaires exert their wealth and power they demonstrate some of the biggest, most psychopathic acts. Just as the Egyptians built pyramids, at the costs of thousands of slaves lives, Billionaires are engaging in massive projects that are corrupting the future of humanity. Call me crazy, but attempting to corrupt science, corrupt university education-- these are malignant predations upon the core of human society. These billionaires are a threat to the future of the planet and humanity.

When you see reference to a billionaire, remember Balzac's words.

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac

The pyramids are one lasting example of a powerful psychopaths megalomania at work. Cheney's lies that drove the US into the Iraq war, concentration camps with gas ovens for the "final solution," giving plague infested blankets to Native Americans-- Can you cite other examples? and let's not forget that many of these mega- psychopath projects are not just megalomanic. They also kill or lead to unnecessary deaths.

Anna Reusch, a doctoral student at ETH's Geological Institute, was utterly amazed one morning: during a routine measuring run with her research vessel on Lake Neuchâtel, she suddenly saw an unusual shape on the control panel screen. Beneath the boat, at a depth of over 100 metres, had to be something no one had ever seen before. She immediately informed her professor, Michael Strasser: "We've found something that you absolutely have to see."

An initial rough data analysis on board indicated that Reusch and her colleagues were looking at a scientific sensation: an enormous crater, measuring 10 metres deep and 160 metres in diameter. "I'll remember this day for a long time -- I never expected anything like this," recalls Reusch, adding: "It just goes to show that even in the 21st century, there are still thrilling and exciting discoveries to be made in Switzerland!"

Searching for signs of earthquakes

Reusch made this discovery as part of "Dynamite," a project sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The objective of her subproject is to investigate the sediment in the lakes on the western Swiss Plateau for traces of past earthquakes. Her work involves taking high-resolution measurements of the floor of Lake Neuchâtel to find evidence of tectonically active zones that could trigger major earthquakes. The period Reusch is looking at is geologically speaking very recent: sometime in the past 12,000 years.

But the discovery of the enormous crater and subsequently of other similar structures has turned her doctoral dissertation almost completely upside down. "The craters were so interesting that we simply had to take a closer look at this phenomenon," she explained.

Four lake craters

All in all, the research team located four craters on the lake bed. All are off the northwest shore at a depth of over 100 metres, with most of them in an area extending from known tectonic fault zones. The researchers have described the four craters in a paper that was recently published in .

The craters measure 80 to 160 metres in diameter and between 5.5 and 30 metres in depth. Researchers nicknamed the largest of them "Crazy Crater," not just because of its uncommonly generous proportions, but also because of its unusual shape: whereas comparable structures on the ocean floor usually lose their shape through the action of currents, this one is perfectly round.

Filled with mud

At the foot of the 10-metre-deep Crazy Crater, the researchers were able to make out a mud covering. Beneath it lies a 60-metre-deep vent, filled with a thick suspension of water and sediment. The team was unable to take core samples because the material was too fluid, due to water welling up into the vent from below. This keeps the sediments in the vent in motion, ensuring that they can't settle into a solid state as normal lake sediment does.

By measuring the isotope fingerprint plus the temperature of the water, suspension and sediment, the scientists were able to show that it was water flowing up into these craters as opposed to, say, gas. Whilst the suspension had a temperature of 8.4 degrees Celsius, both the deep water and the sediment surrounding the crater measured just 5.8 degrees. This corresponds to the normal temperature of the water at that depth in these lakes. By contrast, the temperature of the suspension is comparable to that of the surface water in the bordering karst area.

The suspension inside the vent also contains a smaller proportion of the heavy oxygen-18 isotope than does the surrounding lake water. "The difference in these oxygen signals indicates that we're talking about two distinct bodies of water here," says Reusch.

Gigantic spring

For this reason, Reusch believes it is most likely that the craters are linked to the karst systems of the neighbouring Jura Mountains. Water there seeps underground, flows beneath the bed of Lake Neuchâtel and seeks out the path of least resistance up to the surface. That takes the water up through sediment layers over several tens of metres thick that have been deposited on the lake bed over the millennia. "In other words, these craters are in fact springs," explains Reusch.

Furthermore, the researchers were able to use sediment core samples taken from the area directly surrounding the craters to show that the suspension spills over the lip of the crater from time to time, similar to a volcanic eruption. This has happened at least four times over the past 12,000 years -- and yet despite today's active water flow, it has been more than 1,600 years since Crazy Crater discharged any sediment on the crater levee. Exactly what triggers these eruptions still needs to be investigated. "Researching the dynamics of the craters requires long-term monitoring to keep an eye on the water level of the suspension in the crater," says Reusch.

Explorer fever

All of the craters explored so far lie 100 metres or more beneath the lake's surface. Reusch cannot say whether or not there are similar "pockmarks" in the shallows, as she has used sonar to sound only the deep parts of Lake Neuchâtel (30 metres and deeper). The shallow zones have not yet been mapped.

When taking measurements in the lakes, the researchers use a sophisticated multibeam echo sounder, a device used primarily for surveying the ocean floor. Depending on the water depth and the angle of the beams, the device achieves a resolution of up to 20x20 centimetres. At the moment, the sounder has plenty to do: the floor of Switzerland's lakes remains relatively poorly researched in comparison to the terrain on land. Researchers began examining the bottom of many Swiss lakes with high-resolution methods only a few years ago, and have discovered phenomena in their depths that no one suspected even existed.

Three people died from lightning strikes in mainland China's Guangxi area and an unknown number of others were missing in floods as heavy rain hit the autonomous region, state media reported.

More than 60,000 people in 11 counties were affected by the storms, Xinhua reported.

The "six horses" statue - an attraction in the Li River - has been almost completely submerged by floods, according to reports.

Local governments had evacuated more than 2,400 people, Xinhua reported. At least 152 houses collapsed and nearly 700 were damaged, it said. Twelve rivers had high water levels and traffic was blocked in remote regions

[embedded content]

Five Mexican teenagers aged 11-15 have been accused of the brutal torture and murder of a six-year old boy during a "kidnap game."

According to the Chihuahua state prosecutors' office, the adolescents admitted to the killing.

The boy, Christopher Raymundo Marquez, was invited by a group of adolescents that were his neighbors and friends to play and collect firewood in a wasteland not far from his home in Chihuahua on Thursday, says a statement from the prosecutor's office.

Once they reached a stream in the wasteland, the children told Christopher they were going to feign a kidnapping. They then turned on him, tied his hands and feet together and beat him with a spiked stick. They followed this by stoning Christopher and finally choked him to death.

The eldest of the teenagers was only 15. Among the others were another 15-year-old boy, two 13-year-old girls and a boy aged 11.

The youngsters decided to bury the body in order to conceal their crime. They covered the hand-dug grave with weeds and a dead animal so as

The body was found buried face-down in a shallow grave in the northern Mexican city of Chihuahua early on Saturday afternoon - two days after he went missing.

According to Christopher's mother, Tania, her son's alleged killers together with their families took part in the search, as quoted by the Mexican Tiempo News.

However, the body was only found after the mother of one of the 15-year-old boys called the police and told them she had discovered her son had participated in the murder.

State Prosecutor Sergio Almaraz said: "While they were playing, one of the 15-year-olds suggested to the others that they should kill Christopher. It wasn't planned. It was a condition of the game they played."

Two 15-year-old boys now face criminal charges. However, the three younger children can't be tried as they are under the age of criminal responsibility in Mexico (set at 14). a spokesman for the local prosecution service said, commenting on the authorities' decision.

All five children will undergo psychological evaluation," the spokesman added.

The mother of the murdered boy is demanding justice: she said on Sunday, as quoted by the Proceso news website.

Comment: Although the origins of this despicable 'game' have yet to be determined, studies have shown that violent programs and video games increase aggressiveness and hinder the development of empathy in children. The simple reason is that such programming is profitable, and sociopaths running corporations have no concern with the developmental consequences on young minds.

It is horribly sick to realize that young minds are being warped for corporate profitability. However this becomes understandable when you consider the effects on society when psychopathic individuals finally gain control. At that point they are able to spread their immoral precepts throughout society to the point where people begin to accept these values as normal. This describes what Andrew Lobaczewski called the process of ponerization in his book Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes :

The actions of [pathocracy] affect an entire society, starting with the leaders and infiltrating every town, business, and institution. The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country creating a "new class" within that nation. This privileged class [of pathocrats] feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.

They only begin to lose their grip on society when sufficient numbers of people educate themselves and are then able to inoculate themselves against further deterioration, while taking positive steps to reorganize society and forge new societal links.

See also:

Ponerology 101: Snakes in Suits

Ponerology 101: The Psychopath's Mask of Sanity

The US has signed a $1 billion loan guarantee deal with Ukraine, and is prepared to consider giving additional loan guarantees of up to $1 billion at the end of 2015 if Ukraine continues implementing economic reforms and cooperating with the Congress.

A US-born Finance Minister Natalie Yaresko signed the agreement on behalf of Ukraine, while the US government was represented by US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt and USAID's Ukraine director Jed Barton.

"If Ukraine continues to make concrete steps to implement economic reforms and will also meet certain conditions of cooperation with the Congress, we will consider the possibility of providing additional loan guarantees of up to $1 billion at the end of 2015," Pyatt said in Kiev Monday after the signing ceremony.

In April, US Vice President Joe Biden promised Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to extend $1 billion in loan guarantees and provide additional non-lethal military assistance to Kiev.

In January, Yaresko and US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew signed a $2 billion loan guarantee deal in Kiev.

Ukraine's economy has been in a deep crisis since the Maidan protests at the end of 2013.

Germany, France and Italy have agreed to start a European drone program aimed at reducing reliance on US and Israeli technology. The first EU-tailored drone is expected to be operating by 2025.
"It's a very important step for European cooperation, a critical cooperation which we must have at our disposal in many theaters of operation," French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said at a joint signing ceremony alongside his German and Italian counterparts.

The three EU states decided to cooperate on a joint project to build an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in 2013. On Monday, they agreed to a two-year technical assessment to lay the basis for a European drone, which is scheduled to be operating in 10 years.

According to German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, this EU drone project "makes us, the Europeans, independent."

"The goal of the Euro-drone is that we can decide by ourselves in Europe on where we deploy the Euro-drone and how we use it," she said.

Poland and Spain have also expressed interest in the plan, officials said.

The aim of the joint project between Paris, Berlin and Rome is to create a medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) drone, which can fly at an altitude of up to 9,000 meters for as long as 24 hours. It will be able to carry a "variety of payloads," said a statement that appeared after the signing, as cited by .

The vehicle may be used for both civilian requirements like border control, fire-fighting and disaster monitoring, and for military purposes.

The drones will probably be developed by Airbus, France-based Dassault and Italian Alenia Aermacchi. The aerospace companies welcomed the agreement of three countries.

"This important step by industry and government clearly recognizes that sovereignty in the development of new systems, and specifically in military reconnaissance and unmanned aviation is of strategic importance for European security," Bernhard Gerwert, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space, said.

According to Eric Trappier, CEO of Dassault Aviation: "European countries must develop a sovereign, Next-Generation MALE UAS solution, for both military and security missions, which is required by our armed forces."

"The next generation MALE UAS represents a step change for the European defense and security agenda. This initiative is a unique opportunity to pursue a joint technological path built on proven industrial leaderships all contributing to a single objective," Mauro Moretti, Finmeccanica CEO, said.

European armed forces now mostly operate large drones based on foreign technology. The UK, Italy and France use US-built Reaper drones, designed for long-endurance, high-altitude surveillance. Germany and France use Israeli-made aircraft.

© Reuters / Mike Stone
A cowboy hat lies among the debris of destroyed homes after a tornado swept through the area the previous night in Van, Texas May 11, 2015.

At least 19 tornadoes have struck the mid-US this weekend damaging homes and causing blackouts, according to weather channels. The worst affected states are Oklahoma and Texas, which were hit by hail and destructive storms.

Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Iowa and Louisiana have all witnessed the wayward and harsh whims of May's weather.

A tornado touched down near the town of Ogden in Iowa, on Sunday.

On Saturday, a "multi-vortex" tornado hit southwest of the towns of Murdock and Rosen in Minnesota on Saturday. Broken Arrow in the northeastern part of Oklahoma also reported a twister, which caused structural damage and power outages in the area. A separate and large tornado struck southwestern Oklahoma.

the Weather Channel said.

Homes and power lines have been damaged following the severe weather in Oklahoma. The Department of Emergency Management reported over 3,000 power outages there.

spokeswoman Keli Cain said.

Bill Bunting, chief of operations for the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, also told AP.

[embedded content]

US Highway 283 in the town of Elmer had to be shut down due to a fallen power line, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol reported.

Texas was not only again struck by tornadoes as in the previous week, but also received a battering from some "baseball-sized" hail. Heavy rains and winds are still whipping across parts of the Lone Star State, as well as drenching and buffeting Kansas, Nebraska and Minnesota, who may see some more tornadoes on Sunday.

The Raw Story

Focused on providing independent journalism.

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Monday, 18 May 2015

Mega-Psycho; When the most successful, smartest psychopaths go bigger-- think pyramids

Enormous craters discovered on bottom of Lake Neuchâtel

3 people killed by lightning as heavy rains flood Guangxi, China

Sick society: Mexican teenagers tortured boy to death during 'kidnap game'

US and Ukraine sign $1 billion loan guarantee

Drone wars: Germany, France and Italy sign EU drone program to challenge US, Israeli alternatives

Twisted weather: 19 tornadoes wreak havoc, down power in central US states (images)

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