Attempts at secession has been a regular occurence in the US..even before the Civil War, and it's only in Obama's term that there has been a website to post petitions to the government, which explains the volume of petitions to do so.

A Map of the 124 United States of America That Could Have Been http://gizmodo.com/a-map-of...

But, all in all, a good article.

"Republicans control the US House of Representatives, there is no hope
any legislation will be passed to address the climate crisis. Inability
to discern reality is the hallmark of schizophrenia."

And thus is the Republican strategy: obstruct all national business with crazyness. Let Democrats diagnose the entire House as crazy, what will that get em?

Well the insanity is rubbing off on the Democrats, and all these folks need to be locked up and replaced with sane people in possession of a clear grasp of right and wrong. Wasn't that what the recent election was supposed to do? The only conclusion one can come to is that we're living in a nation of political numbskulls. Happy New Year!

Conversation I once had with a recruiter for the Defense Mapping Agency:

"As a geographer I'm interested in your group. The only thing is, I disagree with some things the US government does. Can I be assigned only to certain projects?"

"What do you care? You're not the one dropping the bombs."

Which is on par with what a CIA recruiter looking for analysts told me:

"We can't use you. You think too much for yourself."

Or a Foreign Service officer responding when I mentioned also being in Iran in '73. And that I easily saw that the revolution coming. Yet Carter was caught flat footed when it did:

"Of course we knew that it was going to happen. But we learned from the Chinese Revolution not to give bad news or we'd be blamed for it. So we told Washington nothing was wrong. Heck, in Vietnam I made up the data Johnson wanted to hear."

Except for the first one, I'm not sure if these are examples of psychopathic organizations, or simply the way most governments/corporations think. (it certainly is indicative of Romney's people.) But they obviously show psychological disconnects from dealing with reality. Not good in any case,

i beg a further teasing out of the Chinese Revolution reference. 1) 'the one with Mao in it'? 2) who was the bad-news-giver from the officer's perspective? the imperials? chiang kai shek?

To use legitimate issue as the opening to another cheats BOTH.

YES, we do have an Elite class (so called) who believe that it is more prudent to allow the collapse of the planet before forcing the true culprits of erosion of the ozone layer to cease and desist. It logically is 'mentis' to suggest that human flatulence, cow, dung, and other animal offal is more damaging to the ozone layer than the Billions of tons of coal fumes, Nuclear heated water, auto emissions ( personal cars in most states are tested yearly, while trucks are nearly immune under NAFTA) , and fly-dumped waste from factories all over the world.

But, only a fool would think that the culprits are truly schizoid. They are Not. They simply continue to pay the dolts on the "hill" (fools if you like the more poetic form of this licentiousness) to let them keep dumping it into the atmosphere and tell us that we are the cause of it.

The elitists form of pissing on us and blaming us for the change in the weather.

Being weak in that are myself, I'm no sure if this was simply bad writing or hiding a hard-hitting piece BEHIND the bad writing so as not to be forced to do a more pointed and biting piece.

Just wondering.

This article might be worth something to me if it didn't appear to equate schizophrenics with psychopaths. They are two completely different diagnoses. Thank you, Truthout, for making everyone even more afraid of me.

I know they didn't explicitly equate the two, but a careless reader could easily fall into that assumption, and there is no dearth of careless readers.

Bravo. Your views are identical, in essence. I am a healed psychopath. Both my parents were psychopaths. Both had psychopaths as mothers. There was an inner presence in me, and my mother, that led me out of that spell. Psychosis is like a SPELL. And you have expressed its charm perfectly. The solution we have against them in VIP places is simple. Two tools. MRI scans now show clearly that the FEELING aspect of BRAIN is shut down in psychos. So pass laws at every level, that anyone seeking or holding public positions of responsibility, have an MRI scan. Second, CIVIL FRAUD, especially Class Action suits, can be brought against people in positions who violate their feduciary responsibility, and their salarys can be captured and awarded to the Plaintiff.

Otherwise, they are as the Hitler game, which has not changed. Adolf was a classic psycho, and Dr. ALICE MILLER shows us in painful detail the details of same. The NAZI agenda, which you detail so lavishly in your report, is PSYCHOTIC. Another word for NAZI is CORPORATION HIVE MIND CONTROL of all good things, and removal of all unwanted others. THAT is their m.o. The psycho always needs an OTHER who is able to be scorned, condemned, excluded, harmed, destroyed. This is the signature of the inner wound in the psycho, projected out onto the other.

Numberous studies show that psychos gravitate to government, police, corporation VIP slots, and military jobs for the very reasons you express, where they outnumber their true percentages in society (4% to 8%) and are in the DOUBLE-DIGIT level in those four: government, corporations, cop shops, and millitary groups.

My experience is that PSYCHOS respond to AUTHENTIC love. But resist and even attack a "show of affection," so don't fake it! In my long life (71 this time, years!) I spoke with four serial killers, over a span of two decades, who did NOT KILL ME., but initially were determined to do so. In Australia I had five minutes of fame when a local psychotic became normal. Cops would release psychos to me for cures, even though I said there was no guaranetee, the COPS insisted! This is not the place to go into what caused the change, but one fact: I SPOKE WITH THEM AS ANOTHER HUMAN each time, without condemning them, but clearly made a point of objecting to their choice of behavior, which in each case, they would discuss at length, until being bored, then switch the topic.

As for Mr. OBAMA, I recently read his background, and was shocked to see he clearly doles not seem to be native born. HIs mother was a CIA agent. His father was a CIA agent. His step father was a CIA agent. And his grandfather was a CIA agent. My uncle, Lt. Col. R.W.R. created the CIA originally, with his O.S.S. commander, General "Wild Bill" Donovan. One time I beat my uncle at chess, which I had not played for 25 years. He was pissed! "Nobody ever beats me at chess," he fumed, and slunk away.

That is the KEY to a psycho: "nobody every beats me." Yet inside, something was beat so hard, it broke. And they know it. But as they are also cowards at heart, and want to be lovers, in scrret they all crave being loved and being able to love, their fight is often sly, abrupt, brutal, deadly, then forgotten until next time. They seem to snap. Not all dangerous people "snap." And not all psychos snap. My mother was a famed artist, for example. Hers was a world famous musicial star.

MRI laws seem essential now. And FRAUD trials. But the average man in the public, the typical woman in the public, just can't be bothered to be bothered to be a citizen, it seems.

Well done!

There is a big difference between a person sick with schizophrenia and a person who is a psychopath, the author's cute little puns and lame attempts at metaphor just muddy the waters.

I like and agree with many of the ideas in this article, I just have to argue that the author himself is affected by these conditions as well. It is not purely the right that is affected by these conditions, but the left as well, and this is why our country is failing. Both sides are delusional. Good points besides the bias.

The climate is changing, always has, always will. The earth has been much warmer and much colder tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago. 40 years ago the majority of scientists thought the earth was going through human activity caused catastrophic cooling , guess what (gasp!) they were wrong.

The "science" is based on computer models, not actual experiments, by people who are politically and financially motivated to perpetuate the orthodoxy of anthropogenic climate change.

Why not analyse the psychology and motivations of the psychopathic elite as they attempt to set up a global system of control that parasitically taxes and regulates every facet of human society (transportation,energy,agriculture,housing,private property) back into serfdom controlled by government and the select banks and corporations that run the scam.

There are the sociopaths who rise to power and the kept-ignorant masses whom they can manipulate with disinformation and propaganda to keep them in power and transfer wealth uphill. And then there are those who diligently study the anthropogenic conspiracy myths and stupidly contribute to the rising paranoia of the know-nothings by conflating discreet issues into ONE GREAT THREAT. These once belonged to the John Birch Society, and today they are the autonomous AGENDA 21 ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY nutcases.

Like the Creationists who deliberately mix up Christian myth with evolution to come up with a plausible sounding intelligent design, these modern perverse mythopeotic idiots confuse (relatively objective) science with government policy and intergovernmental policy proposals (like Agenda 21), and routinely cast aspersions on both the scientific community and the science itself to sow seeds of doubt among the credulous populace.

Of course, among actual scientists, there is precious little doubt about the reality and danger of anthropogenic global warming. There were, in fact, very real concerns about anthropogenic (dust and aerosols) and natural (volcanoes) global cooling when climate science was in its infancy in the 1970s (there was a cooling trend since the 1940s, and evidence suggests that we were heading into the next ice age before human industrial activity turned the planet's normal cycle around). As expected, much of the uncertainty was misreported or exaggerated by the media.

Since then, climate science has evolved into a very sophisticated endeavor which has resulted in a global consensus of the import of experimental data from air and sea temperature measurements and ice core samples. From that extensive data, computer models were created to better track and predict the effect of the myriad causal factors.

If it were only true, as the idiotic or deliberately deceptive conspiracy buffs claim, that government policy followed the science, we would not be facing the prospect of an unlivable planet. Since the major industrial nations, with the US in the lead, refuse to act on the science (while half of our pols deny it), we will have no choice but to dramatically alter our entire way of life if our grandchildren are to have a life on an overheating planet (the earth will continue to warm for centuries from past pollution no matter what we do). Whether it's along the lines of the Agenda 21 top-down or of the Transition Town bottom-up movement (or likely some combination of the two), dramatic change will be either chosen or forced upon us by Mother Nature.

That Agenda 21 suggests that land and its resources should be more equitably and sustainably utilized, with "mechanisms to facilitate the active involvement and participation of all concerned, particularly communities and people at the local level, in decision-making on land use and management" (Section II, Chapter 10, Objective 10.5), is somehow twisted into a conspiracy to eliminate private property rights - which extreme Ayn Randians would not relinquish any more than they would their precious guns and sociopathic philosophy.

Ah, I sense you cleverly hint at the Trilateral Agenda 21 Bilderburgian U.N. Police Forces invasion from Canada (soon to arrive in a theater near you) when you write "global system of control".

And you must be right about all those "politically and financially motivated to perpetuate the orthodoxy" dithery scientists who can't make up their minds, not to mention the fact that they use (gasp!) "computer models, not actual experiments". Certainly, if those scientists had been sincere, they would have been experimenting with creating hurricanes on Venus long ago. Plus, as though more evidence were needed, the article's author openly admits that some of those "scientists" are "international". Why, some of them may even be French!

Thank you, Joe. Your comment was very enlightening.

"People who believe others are reading their minds, controlling their
thoughts, or plotting to harm them are usually medicated to make them
safe to live among us." Statistically, schizophrenics are less violent than "normal" people. When they are medicated it is to reduce the pain and suffering of their condition, not to "make us safe" from them.

i was going to point out that 'safe' and 'peaceful' are not synonyms, but then noticed that it took you less than two sentences after a direct quote to completely flip the phrasing you had quoted. perhaps a lost cause?

definitely a lost cause

Why not just say they are criminals? What is so problematic about making a radical statement like that? Implicit in codifying their behavior as psychopathic is the legal defense for such behavior; does leftist apologism run that deeply?

pigeonholing the powerful sure is invigorating...

I disagree with your notion that Democrats are less psychopathic/sociopathic than Republicans simply on the basis that Republican pathology wouldn't exist if they didn't have a stockpile of "centrist" or "pragmatic" rewarding enablers within the Democrats to rely on. It's the "switch-hitting" phenomenon that Sam Vaknin explained that is part and parcel of NPD and the "folie a deux" aspect of the relationship between a classical intellectual narcissist and an inverted somatic narcissist.

In fact, after reading his descriptions and analysis of inverted somatic narcissists, one would be hard pressed not to accurately conclude they absolutely permeate the Democratic Party, and have permeated it since the mid 1970s when they codified Nixon's crime, corruption, malfeasance, and Ford's pardoning of Nixon as "the new normal" and telling their base to just suck it up, move forward, and stop re-litigating the past. They have been hocking and pawning Democratic Party values ever since.

Sad thing is most of the prominent liberal bloggers continue to make excuses for this write-on-the-calender predictable pattern of behavior. One can't read Atrios, Digby, or DailyKOS without somebody among them foisting the idea that Democrats show all the signs of Battered Wifey syndrome, Stockholm Syndrome, and Learned Helplessness only to then turn around and argue that they actually SUFFER from it, and that voters are obligated to feel sorry for them indefinitely (sans the Glen Beck tears and Vapor Rub) and keep enabling and rewarding them via "go along to get along/gotta hold your noses and vote" emotional blackmail and guilt-tripping.

Such liberal bloggers are full of beans. In no way, shape, or form, does the Democratic Party suffer from it. Quite the opposite: they literally CRAVE it. Absolutely and totally CRAVE the sick twisted and masochistic "bipartisan" relationship with their classical narcissist Republican stalkers and scapegoats, and ONLY them. And the very idea of having a close intimate relationship with their progressive, liberal, communitarian, and Socialist/Marxist base voters fills them with so much revulsion and contempt that they smear, malign, and castigate them with the same rightwing talking points, slogans, and insults that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly traffic in.

If anybody is suffering from their "situation-acquired" Stockholm Syndrome and Learned Helpless, it's their base voters. For the better part of 40 years, they've been sick and tired of being cowed into submission and beaten over the head with the centrist-extremist inverted narcissist DLC/Third Way majority of the DNC who outright demands total fealty and loyalty as they resort to more and more emotional brinkmanship and guilt tripping in order to get their sadomasochistic "fix" from their Republican abusers. The very existence of the Occupy movement made it clear that enough of the DNC's voter base have progressed through the various stages of grief. They have moved on from "sick and tired of suffering" to "sick and tired of being sick and tired" to be considered a pregnant warning and threat to the DNC and the choking and stifling elite power structure. Hence Obama's expansion of executive power, their security/surveillance industrial complex, and right along with claiming the right to unitarily execute American citizens. The latter is the same powers that Ceasar, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Mao claimed. The so-called divine rights of a narcissistic "above the fray/saved by the Lord" King over the life and death of his serfs and peasants.

What a great choice we have - neoliberal/neocon right wing Democrats or neoliberal/neocon far right wing Republicans. Empire or Empire?

Any such psychologizing of politics risks generalizing a complex phenomenon. While it's certainly true that the Democratic Party has been the co-dependent enabler of the right/corporate assault on democracy, and doesn't deserve the support they so cleverly engineer from the masses, there is a fundamental difference between sociopathy and co-dependency.

I don't know - I've seen co-dependents do things that would make Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy say, "Why didn't I think of that?!?" As one co-dependent said to me, "We're like the BASF of sociopathology: we didn't invent the tools or methods sociopaths use; we've only made the methods and tools they use better."

delicious, would eat again.

There are fundamental errors to the argument. There is not a whit of difference between the public trough-feeding by private industry between left and right, and this state of fascism is destroying the country. Further, there is another element of American political life that is nowhere acknowledged, and which is yet tacitly smeared - the anti-war, civil liberties flank; many of those can be counted among those now signing on to petitions to secede from the union, the furthest thing possible from racism and the rest, that the so-called 'virtuous' left smears the [faux] right with.

While both right and left feed from the same trough, there is a fundamental difference in the manner of that feeding. The left hopes to keep the dysfunctional system alive by mitigating its worst effects, while the right wants to use the dysfunction to maximize opportunity before the whole house of cards collapses in on itself.

Refractory, what a fine term for stress manipulation, the "impurity" of distributive mismanagement through some form of bastardization of stress. Welcome to the current miasma or lost game of hopscotch. Stress, nevertheless, is distributive w/r our species. Redistribution is where this historical chasm is stretched open to contaminate one and all, particularly where catastrophe becomes fodder.

Stress distribution is not a reincarnate measure, or a 'habit' that applies laws of redistribution, taking from Peter to pay Paul. It is human when it adheres to distributive laws, mainly, at least in hindsight. Productivity should be rewarded for its participation, it history, especially, and thought recognized for its origin and originality in context, particularly w/r time. Rather than across the screw-plyer psychology of management intent on widgets in place of a difference that made a difference, division is a monkey wrench of cockeyed bullying from those who think an opposing thumb is just another finger, symmetric no different from asymmetric. Homogeneous connections abound so that all may go through the gates together toward the delusion, to a better place through an Old Guard's turnstile of usury and power confined to a worship based on sentimental ooze, and reliant on exchange like Money Changers polluting all the interstices of human communication in commerce.

See Gregory Bateson for the angle on psychology and epistemology not divorced from a psyche-realization of potential, not completely removed from the cultural horizon for the damage intended from the start with this parlaying of power.

thanks for not doing all the heavy lifting, i guess.

Well, at least I can agree to call a criminal a criminal without immediately coming to his defense with a medical diagnosis.

Regressing to a Manichean mindset is no solution to our cultural crisis. In fact, it's the sociopathic leadership class which often sees the world through the narrow bifurcated lens of good vs. evil ("You're either with us or against us" - Bush).

The real world is far more nuanced than that, and resorting to naming all adversaries as "evil" leaves no option but destroying the evil-doers (just as we are doing with the endless war on Terror). Such thinking cannot envision that the "evil" is a fundamental part of our collective paradigm, and the only way out is to re-invent our cultural paradigm.

mere 'medieval' religiosity wouldn't be much of a threat these days; let's see ratzinger call a crusade. the true bible-belaboring-belt threats are multiplying medieval by puritanical and throwing down multiple dollops of scriptural literalist fundament on top.

(it's not like i can know whether pre-vatican-II is going to make a comeback, mind you.)

I believe in global warming, and I also believe that this article speaks the truth. But I also believe, having thought deeply about the issue, that environmentalism and extreme liberalism is equally deluded. In college, as an extreme example, I was taught about "deep ecology." I was taught things like that there is a water crisis and sooooo.... should we a) stop raising so many cows b) stop farming cotton and other water-loving crops in the desert c) install water saving toilets and showers and try to wash with as little as possible? Well, I was taught c). However I quickly learned that 90% of water usage is by industry and agriculture and began to challenge the environmentalist party line. But every time I have challenged environmentalists, what I say passes straight through their brains and out the other side. I believe people on both the Left and the Right are equally delusional, and we must hope that their two forces balance each other out in politics without overbalancing either way. Psychopaths may be risk takers, but environmentalists/leftists are risk-averse, and we need strike a balance.

You obviously didn't learn much about environmentalism, but a great deal about bias and shallow thinking.

Environmentalism is a conservative perspective, not a liberal one. To lump environmentalists with liberals displays a stunning ignorance of both, and confusing science with policy further muddies your vision (science: there is a water crisis - policy: how to respond to it).

True conservatives don't contest environmentalism, only corporatists and Randians.

It is worse than this guy says. Study Operation Northwoods or Gladio. Look at US support for drug trafficking proxies in Laos (Hmong & KMT), Nicaragua (the Contras), Afghanistan (the ISI and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and even Wali Karzai), and Kosovo (the KLA). Look at the sanctions that killed over 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990's under a Democratic President who the author of this piece probably supported.

The psychos are at the top of the US National Security State and at the top of the corporate pyramid. To mix metaphors, the dog and pony show of partisan politics is just bread & circuses for the proles and the bourgeois liberals like this author.

so Bill Hicks nailed it, then? (bit on every newly-elected Prez's 'initiation')

Yes

a shame that you never spent time with the author's father.

Every thing that I wrote in the first paragraph is historical fact. Do you always lash out at the messenger when experiencing cognitive dissonance?

There was nothing in dubinsky's statement that amounted to an attack.

Do you always lash out at the messenger when experiencing cognitive dissonance?

You are being silly. Re-read the comment and figure out what is being said there. I will not take the time to explain it to you if you do not understand.

I don't need to re-read the comment (or yours) to see clearly what's going on here. You are an egotist who cannot tolerate even a suggestion of criticism and are in complete denial of your own knee-jerk reactions.

(Sigh) I will now deign to spell it out for you: I write a comment citing evidence that even the author's critical essay does not grasp the depravity of the ruling powers. The troll in question responds by suggesting that I need to see a psychiatrist (refer to the article if do not understand the reference).

There is no other plausible interpretation for his comment. This is just an idiotic ad hominem attack and I basically identified it as such. I am guessing that you did not get the reference made in his initial trolling, because I do not think that you would classify such a comment as any kind of valid "suggestion of criticism."

You may be right. I see by his comments on other threads that he has a tendency to belittle others, but it wasn't clear from his words, and you just returned more of the same, escalating what might have been simply ignored. You also began the name calling with your imputation of the author as a "bourgeois liberal".

To assert that a scathing condemnation of the power elite does not go far enough, smacks of a "more radical than thou" attitude.

I see what you are saying. What I meant to convey with "bourgeois liberal" was that I have met so many middle-class liberals who fail to grasp the near total corruption of the ruling power structure and instead are taken in to some extent by partisan politics. I can't help but think that their material comfort somehow affects the extent to which they can recognize the evil that animates the entire Establishment political spectrum. I actually care less about being the alpha-radical, but am instead just sort of apoplectic about the criminality of the Establishment and the denial of so many people. It is a shame that expecting our leaders not to act like gangsters is so radical.

Dubinsky is just a right-wing troll as far as I can tell. I do not like trolls and it is a shame that the internet is such a useful vehicle for their anti-social tendencies. You are probably right that there is no reason to even respond the trolling because the guy's essential dickishness is conveyed even when he writes but a single sentence.

Eric, old stick, there are endless facts. what matters is how you stack 'em.

best wishes for your good health.

Do you ever write anything of substance or is it all troll all the time?

yes

This is just an eco-freako's propaganda piece. Not well reasoned, not well written, just a non-contribution to understanding - waste of print. Its hard to believe someone with a PhD could produce
such a poorly reasoned Op-Ed piece. Just shows you how easy it is
to get an advanced degree in the social 'sciences'.