If you’re a sick, warped pedophile, that is.The news is not good this morning.
Did you know that if you work for the CIA, or are even a contractor doing work for the CIA, that “the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets”? So you can get away with all kinds of evil acts if you work there (which, I guess, shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that it is the CIA).
Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.
Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.
It’s all rather horrifying, especially given that these secret agencies have been blacklisting homosexuals for decades and acting aghast at the very idea of a gay person acquiring a sensitive position. They might be blackmailed, don’t you know. But pedophiles…just a slap on the wrist and a dismissal.
Speaking of pedophiles, there’s new news about dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. New records, flight logs, have been unearthed that reveal hundreds of additional flights we hadn’t known about. Epstein was just happily flitting about the globe for years, doing…what? I don’t know. Maybe the CIA does, but they’re not telling. This jumped out at me, though.
Epstein owned a Gulfstream II (sold in November 2013), a Gulfstream IV (sold before his arrest), a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 (nicknamed the “Lolita Express”) that notoriously ferried notable passengers and girls around the globe. According to flight manifests unsealed in a defamation case against Maxwell, travelers on Epstein’s planes included public figures from Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the astronaut John Glenn.
Why? How? How does a guy without any kind of college degree, who started out as a math teacher at a private school (he wasn’t even very good at that), and then drifted into banking and finance, get such ridiculous sums of money that they can afford their very own 727? What did he do to earn that kind of money?
Don’t ever try to tell me that the wealthy worked hard and deserve all that money.
It never ceases to amaze me that anyone takes anything the ‘intelligence services’ say as having anything to do with the truth.
One would think that known CIA perpetrators could at least face charges of insubordination, subject to firing or reduced pay. But might they in turn threaten to reveal CIA secrets as a form of self protection?
As for me, I’d have these guys “disappeared.” CIA secrets would then be kept hidden, for better or for worse.
SIgh… You see, this is why bullshit like Q Anon becomes so popular. We know that some of the most powerful groups and individuals in the world have a proclivity with child sexual abuse, either committing it themselves or looking the other way. The trouble is that the loons also like to fold in nonsense about satanic cults, and withholding of free-energy and cancer cures, JKF Jr. returning from the grave, and–most insane of all–that a man known for his lust for VERY young women is somehow going to stop “The Cabal.”
Imagine what we can accomplish if we could focus all the anger and fanatic devotion we see for Q Anon to ACTUAL problems.
Any time an organization is allowed to police itself, you’re going to find predators.
This article seems like it does a good job of explaining where Epstein’s money came from:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client
Short answer: he conned one of the richest people in the US into giving him power of attorney over his finances.
One of the secrets of being rich is that you never pay for anything with your own money.
with weylguy, if the cia wanted to reduce their potential harm to secrecy, they should just kill them. not like the creeps are accountable for anything ever, at the end of the day.
I”m somewhat surprised the Ghislaine Maxwell even made it to trial. I’m not quite a big enough conspiracy theorist to think she’d have been bumped off (though I suppose it wouldn’t have surprised me), but I’d have thought someone would have dropped a message to her to the effect of “If you plead guilty we’ll see to it that you get locked up for a handful of years, but if you go through a public trial and name certain names, we will make sure you never see the sun again.” The beauty of it is that such a threat needn’t have even been true to work.
Also, when they were searching Epstein’s mansion, I heard rumors of a safe with DVDs in it. What are the chances of our ever hearing of those again?
There’s a (6-episode) British TV miniseries I remember seeing on
Masterpiece Theater some 30-odd years ago that I stumbled across
on YouTube the other day:
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The Charmer Episode 1
Dec 19, 2015
Daisy Mason
“Gorse, the Tempter”. Part 1 of 6 of “The Charmer”, based on
Patrick Hamilton’s “Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse”. Starring Nigel Havers
as the psychopathic gigolo Ralph Gorse, Bernard Hepton, Rosemary Leach,
and Fiona Fullerton. A London Weekend Television production.
Gorse, down to his last few quid and one good suit, meets Joan Plumleigh-Bruce
a colonel’s widow and crashing snob, in a local roadhouse in Reading.
+++++
You’re the top!
You’re the Colosseum.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You’re a Ascot bonnet,
A Shakespeare sonnet,
You’re Mickey Mouse.
You’re the Nile,
You’re the Tower of Pisa,
You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa.
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!
You’re the top!
You’re Mahatma Gandhi.
You’re the top!
You’re Napoleon brandy.
You’re the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You’re the National Gallery
You’re Garbo’s salary,
You’re cellophane.
You’re sublime,
You’re turkey dinner,
You’re the time of a Derby winner.
I’m a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop,
But if baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if baby, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top!
Our levers of oversight in the U.S. have been entirely compromised by the all-encompassing excuse of “state secrets”. Maybe the pedo angle will get people to wake up and demand reform, but the Christian right has strained the credibility of sensational reporting on sex trafficking, and these agencies are above the law. It doesn’t help that the rampant overuse of state secrets enjoys broad bipartisan support, especially since Democrats have spooked up during the Trump years and cozied up to the Justice Department.
I don’t see any way out of this as long as the national security industry vets every candidate for national office we’re allowed to vote for.
Honestly the 727 was cheaper (there are a ton of them on the used market, because it was possibly the most common midsized airline passenger aircraft for a couple decades until the 737 reached production status. good condition examples are ~15-20 million per Wikipedia, the Gulfstream is $42 million) than the Gulfstreams, but they’re expensive to refit and fly.
As to how he got his money? His adroit skill at
running a hedge fundblackmail.There’s been something of an eruption into popular awareness over
the past couple decades of the existence, and destructive potential,
of so-called Cluster B personality-disordered folks and psychopaths.
Nevertheless, this is a highly controversial topic, and there’s
also been pushback against this sort of discourse. Some of this
pushback comes from so-called “enablers” — either people who stand
to benefit from the less-than-savory behavior of others, or people
whose “toxic positivity” cannot abide the idea that not everybody
is “good at heart”. (Mrs. Joan Plumleigh-Bruce in “The Charmer”
is certainly an enabler, as well as a victim.)
At least two YouTube channels I follow have suggested that awareness
of “human predators” (not just “strangers with candy”, presumably)
should be something that children learn
about. Your Mileage May Vary, of course. ;->
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Narcissism and the Goldwater Rule
Apr 16, 2021
DoctorRamani
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++++
The problem with leaders who don’t understand narcissism
Apr 3, 2021
DoctorRamani
++++
++++
How toxically positive people enable narcissism
Sep 7, 2021
DoctorRamani
++++
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do we make a difference?
Jan 6, 2020
jon atack, family & friends
Jon talks with his good friend Chris Shelton about whether our work
makes a difference. As ever, we touch on many topics, including recovery
from authoritarian groups and relationships, and the need to prepare
the next generation so that they will not be so easily exploited by gurus,
spin-doctors and other malignant narcissists.
++++
++++
human predators
Nov 19, 2020
jon atack, family & friends
Human predators can wreck our lives. Every schoolchild should learn about them;
failure to identify human predators leads to catastrophe in our private lives
and in society. How can we spot them, and how should we deal with them?
Here is the complete list:
o Human predators are mean.
o Predators are utterly selfish.
o Predators pretend friendship and love but they feel absolutely nothing for others.
o Predators are charming and good at flattery, but they don’t mean a single word of it.
o Predators brag and boast and make up outrageous lies. When challenged, they blame others.
o Predators don’t feel anxiety or fear.
o Predators are impulsive and easily bored. They demand thrills and take dangerous risks.
They enjoy pushing others into taking dangerous risks, too.
o Predators are bullies with explosive tempers.
o Predators enjoy humiliating people.
o Predators hate it if anyone else has power or is praised. For the predator,
life is a competition and they want to win.
o Predators weaken people with insults and putdowns.
o Predators are cunning and manipulative.
o Predators lie easily and think nothing of breaking a promise.
o Predators are without conscience: they do not feel remorse or guilt.
o Predators often boast about the harm they’ve done to other people.
o Predators are parasites. They are lazy and live off others,
giving as little as possible in return.
o Predators are control freaks, stopping others from taking control
of anything if they can
o Predators force petty rules on others – rules that are impossible to follow.
o Predators boast about tricking other people.
o Predators boast about breaking the law.
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Ah, just like in Three Days of the Condor .
;->
“I suspect he was about to become an embarrassment.
As you are.”
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Joubert
Jun 15, 2013
Paul Walton
Joubert from 3 Days of the Condor.
+++++
Furthering the stigma against mental illness and cluster B disorders is not a good look
Do they have a “License to Kill”?
It is possible that some of the Q wackitude around pedophilia was deliberately introduced by the pedophiles themselves, as a way to discredit attention to them.
Yes, that is a classic response (from the Left) to the people who
are attempting to publicize this stuff.
As I said, Your Mileage May Vary. ;->
By the way, the case that Ramani Durvasula was dancing around
in that first video was that of Bandy Lee,
the psychiatrist who was trumpeting her profession’s “duty to warn”
the world about the dangers of having a “malignant narcissist”
like Donald Trump as the president of the United States, and who
finally lost her job at Yale over that stuff. She’s sued the university,
but in light of the facts that 1. Yale is a private employer,
2. she wasn’t a tenured professor, 3. the “Goldwater Rule” is
a half-century-old ethical standard adhered to by most members
of her profession and 3. she was putting Yale in a bad light,
I imagine she has an uphill battle. On the other hand, maybe
they’ll just hand her some money, make her promise not to
talk about it, and hope she’ll go away (doesn’t seem to have
happened yet).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandy_X._Lee
It was one thing for her to be “diagnosing” Donald Trump —
lots of people were doing so at the time, even on TV ;-> —
but she was bringing other public figures into the circle
of fire. Alan Dershowitz, in particular, who in turn
complained about her to Yale. I can’t imagine what she
was thinking — didn’t she realize she was headed down a
path with no clear destination when she started widening
the circle? I can well believe that Yale considered her
a loose cannon. Anyway. . .
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/nyregion/alan-dershowitz-yale.html
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A Yale Psychiatrist’s Tweet About Dershowitz, Her Dismissal, and a Lawsuit
The psychiatrist, Bandy X. Lee, said she was let go after the lawyer
Alan M. Dershowitz complained to the university. Yale said she violated
ethics rules against diagnosing public figures, her lawsuit claims.
By Mihir Zaveri
March 26, 2021
In July 2019, Alan M. Dershowitz. . . said in an interview that he
had a “perfect sex life” with his wife. . .
In January 2020, [Bandy X. Lee, then a psychiatrist at Yale University]
compared Mr. Dershowitz’s wording with Mr. Trump’s own prominent use
of the word “perfect,” suggesting in a tweet that it could reflect a
“shared psychosis” through which Mr. Dershowitz had taken on what she
said was Mr. Trump’s “grandiosity and delusional-level impunity.”
Days later, Mr. Dershowitz complained in an email to Yale, saying
that Dr. Lee had violated ethics rules by offering a public diagnosis
without examining him. Shortly after, Dr. Lee says, the head of
Yale’s psychiatry department warned her about her behavior.
Dr. Lee eventually lost her position at the school. . .
She contended that the tweet was not a formal diagnosis, and that
Yale’s move violated her First Amendment rights and impinged on her
academic freedom.
“My goal currently is to ensure that professionals and intellectuals
are not silenced,” Dr. Lee said in an interview.
But to Mr. Dershowitz and others, Dr. Lee’s comments displayed a
dangerous intermingling of medical opinions with politics. . .
“The idea that you can diagnose me, without ever having even met me,
is unprofessional, irresponsible and unacademic,” he said.
The case touches on an intense debate over free speech and decades-old
guidelines that govern what psychiatrists like Dr. Lee should be
allowed to say in public. . .
In the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association adopted a rule
saying it was unethical for psychiatrists to issue a professional opinion
about a public figure’s condition “unless he or she has conducted an
examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
It was called the Goldwater Rule because it was inspired by a survey
of psychiatrists who had weighed in on Barry Goldwater’s fitness for
office when he was the Republican candidate for president in 1964.
Mr. Goldwater successfully sued the magazine that published the survey.
Jeffrey Lieberman, a Columbia University professor who chairs the
psychiatry department, said Dr. Lee’s comments about Mr. Dershowitz were
“problematic for the profession, because it means the profession is using
terms too loosely and too glibly.”
“It’s just kind of using a word, a term, that has a clinical meaning
and also conveys or connotes a certain level of severity of mental disturbance
in a way that’s really inappropriate,” he said.
Others have questioned the relevance of the Goldwater rule. Jonathan Moreno,
a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said he had not
heard of anyone being disciplined by the American Psychiatric Association
for violating the rule, even though people repeatedly broke it.
He also said professionals in other medical fields routinely comment in
the press about the health of public figures.
During Mr. Trump’s campaign and presidency, his sometimes rambling and
incendiary statements led many psychiatrists to publicly suggest that
he exhibited a range of personality problems, such as a lack of empathy
and “malignant narcissism.” . . .
Dr. Lee said she had studied gang leaders and other violent offenders
in prison for more than 20 years and noticed similarities between them
and what she said was Mr. Trump’s “violent psychology.”
She said she was initially reluctant to speak out publicly, instead
raising her concerns privately to members of Congress from both parties.
But they told her that mental health professionals needed to educate
the public, so she and other psychiatrists began speaking to the news media.
In March 2017, amid a continuing conversation about Mr. Trump’s fitness
for office, the association’s president issued a statement reaffirming
its commitment to the Goldwater Rule.
In January 2018, the association released another statement saying that
“armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is
the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.”
Dr. Lee, who said she was not a member of the association, agreed that
she could not diagnose anyone without access to their full medical records.
But she said she had never made formal diagnoses of Mr. Trump or
Mr. Dershowitz and that the association’s position was akin to a
“gag order.”
“I have never diagnosed the former president,” she said. “But I have
tried to fulfill my societal duty, which is to call out signs of danger,
and signs of unfitness. These are of interest to public heath, not
to Donald Trump’s personal health, but to the public health.”
The association declined to comment on Dr. Lee’s case. The group would
not say whether anyone had been disciplined for breaking the rule,
saying violations by a member could result in an ethics investigation
and possible punishment, but that those investigations were confidential.
Yale had requested in 2017 that Dr. Lee make clear that her opinions
about Mr. Trump were not endorsed by the university, according to
the lawsuit. But she said she continued to speak out, including about
the danger of “shared psychosis.”
Days after Mr. Dershowitz wrote to the school in January 2020, John Krystal,
chairman of Yale’s psychiatry department, sent an email to Dr. Lee,
saying that the university would be “compelled” to terminate her
teaching role at Yale if she did not change her behavior, according
to the lawsuit.
“You are putting me in a position where I have to ask, ‘Is this the
sort of person that I can trust to teach medical students, residents,
and forensic psychiatry fellows?’” Dr. Krystal wrote in the email,
according to the lawsuit.
He soon met with Dr. Lee and said she had breached psychiatric ethics
by “diagnosing” Mr. Dershowitz, according to her lawsuit. It’s not
clear what other hearings or investigations Yale may have conducted.
In May, Yale told Dr. Lee that it was terminating her relationship
with the university, according to the lawsuit.
A September letter from Dr. Krystal to Dr. Lee excerpted in the lawsuit
indicates that she was let go after a committee determined that her
public statements called into question her “clinical judgment and
professionalism” to teach trainees. The letter states that her
“diagnostic impressions” of Mr. Trump and other public figures played
a role in the school’s decisions.
“You did not make these statements as a layperson offering a political
judgment; you made them explicitly in your professional capacity as
a psychiatrist and on the basis of your psychiatric knowledge and judgment,”
Dr. Krystal wrote, according to the lawsuit. “For that reason, the
committee decided it was appropriate to consider how these statements
reflected your ability to teach trainees.”
The letter then says, “We recognize that without formal teaching responsibilities
your appointment could not be reinstated.”
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¯_(ツ)_/¯
Even though, BTW, I have a psych minor from NYU (my major
was computer science, completed in 1989), the bulk of my
psych courses occurred in the early 1970s at the University
of Delaware. So I took Social Psych and Personality and
even a course in Abnormal Psychology. But I never found
out anything about what are now called the “Axis II”
personality disorders. Though I did learn about psychopathy.
And even about what Barbara Oakley (in Evil Genes — Why Rome Fell,
Hitler Rose, Enron Fell, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend )
calls “Machiavellianism”. Oakley mentions that Richard Christie —
who invented the concept — had a collaborator named Florence Geis,
and by golly if that name didn’t ring a bell. Geis was either
teaching at, or visiting, the University of Delaware while
I was taking my psych classes, and she lectured to us once,
and tested all the undergrad students on her Mach Scale
(no I never found out my score ;-> ).
But I didn’t find out about what the APA’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual calls “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”
until 2002, when I ran into a copy of Theodore Millon’s
Personality Disorders in Modern Life — a hefty and expensive
tome! — at the local Barnes & Noble. Using the Millon as a point
of departure for further poking around on the Web led me to a
book by an Israeli named Shmuel (“Sam”) Vaknin,
a self-professed sufferer of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder — a diagnosis which has
only existed since 1980 (in DSM-III) — who wrote a book
a couple of decades ago called Malignant Self Love: Narcissism
Revisited .
Since then, as I mentioned, there has been something of an explosion
of interest in the subject. But it wasn’t until Donald Trump was
running for president that TV pundits started comparing him
with the DSM checklist for NPD.
I had the following exchange with an acquaintance back in 2016,
before Trump was elected:
++++
[Said my interlocutor]
“Madman”, (like “crazy”, “batshit crazy”, or “crazytown”) is rhetorical fluff
and, as you say, adds little to a conversation beyond “color”.
It may be possible to adduce (and refute) evidence for any or all of “deceitful”,
“reckless”, “bigoted” and “uninformed” on an issue-by-issue basis —
this is standard journalism.
The value (and the danger) of trotting out a clinical label like Narcissistic
Personality Disorder (something which mainstream journalists have — until
Trump came along — been quite reluctant to do!) is that it annexes a
very deep and rich literature and paints (“stereotypes”, indeed!)
a whole interlocking pattern of behaviors, some of which (in the case of
a public figure) are visible, and some only inferred.
Yes, this has its dangers. For one thing, the primary, scholarly,
literature on the subject tends (1) to be impenetrable to a layman
and (2) not readily available (like much primary scientific literature,
it tends not to be freely available on the Web). This means that
the “literature” accessible to the general public is going to be
secondary works of interpretation by self-appointed experts like
Sam Vaknin. (There was a huge controversy some years ago — a
decade maybe — over whether or not he should even be mentioned as
a legitimate source in the Wikipedia article on NPD. There were
folks bound and determined to expunge all mention of him.)
And much of the “support group” stuff on the Web and on YouTube
is basically “tertiary” literature — recycling Sam Vaknin
(and each other), with a standard vocabulary (some clearly derived from
Vaknin, some derived from anonymous later sources who probably
started out as acolytes of Vaknin) like “narcissistic supply” and “devaluation phase”
and “flying monkeys” and “hoovering”. Nevertheless, the DSM criteria
(at least the DSM IV criteria) are readily available on the Web.
This sounds hopelessly naive to me.
I should elaborate on this. It very much behooves one to know, it
seems to me, when “good manners” and (especially!) a “professional
HR department” (or a professional marriage counsellor!)
are not going to be any help at all .
In those cases (when one has a well-founded suspicion that a personality
disorder is involved), one either needs to carefully plan one’s exit strategy
(from a romantic relationship, marriage, or job)
or tailor one’s interactions in ways that go well beyond “good
manners”.
The (“secondary” or “tertiary” — primary wouldn’t even be of much
use here) literature on personality disorders to be found now
on the Web or on YouTube is extremely useful in this regard.
That’s on the personal level, where the stakes are most
immediate for the individual (and his or her family).
On the geopolitical level, given the far greater (even if seemingly
more distant, from a personal perspective) stakes, it seems
to me that one should harness all the information available.
And that includes, these days — though it didn’t as recently
as 20 years ago — information about personality disorders.
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Well, chacun à sa conte de fées.