Happy Valentine's Day!

"Love is ....

.... Friendship on fire" -- Anonymous

Interview with Cupid

Happy Valentines Day?

Inside The Mind Of The Sociopath

"Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members.  Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.  And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.  Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs.  Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.  You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness.  The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.  You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?  What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?  The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same.  Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same.  Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions.  Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between.  There are violent people and non-violent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites.

Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ.  You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed.  You choose business, politics, the law, banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal encumbrances.  When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless.  And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever.

You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful.  Why not?  With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all.

Or no - let us say you are not quite such a person.  You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual.  Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart.  But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dreams about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you.

As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people.  These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more.  It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voices that inhibit others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself.  Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.

But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable.  You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach.  Or maybe you are a consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services director.  Or maybe you do not have a paid position and are instead the president of your condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker, or a parent.  Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting fired or held accountable.  You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to give you a thrill.  Making people jump means you have power - or this is the way you see it - and bullying provides you with an adrenaline rush.  It is fun.

Maybe you cannot be a CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or steal from them, or - maybe, best of all - create situations that cause them to feel bad about themselves.  And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way.  Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable.  This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance.  And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do.  You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project, or gaslight a patient (or child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you.

Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for violence or for seeing violence done.  You simply murder your coworker, or have her murdered - or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lover's spouse, or anyone else who bothers you.  You have to be careful, because if you slip up, you may be caught and punished by the system.  But you will never be confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience.  If you decide to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones.  Nothing inside you will ever protest.

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.  If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people.  With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction.  In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make a whole nation jump.  And if that is not power, what is?

Or let us imagine the opposite extreme:  You have no interest in power.  To the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of anything.  Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by.  You do not want to work like everyone else does.  Without a conscience, you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day long.  Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely.  People may whisper to one another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case, or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy.  When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum.  But it will never occur to them that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way, your very mind is not the same as theirs.

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the night.  Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do.  For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel.  This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job.

You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be "depressed" or "troubled."  As a matter of fact, to you further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person.  If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person - who does not suspect what you are really like - may feel particularly obligated.  And since all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially rich, just relatively conscience-bound.

I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you, because such people are insane, dangerously so.  Insane but real - they even have a label.  Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as "anti-social personality disorder," a non-correctable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population - that is to say, one in twenty-five people.  This condition of missing conscience is called by other names, too, most often "sociopathy," or the somewhat more familiar term psychopathy.  Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century include manie sans délire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity, and moral imbecility."

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. Introduction. pp.1-6

Excerpt from above:
"Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.  If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people [and/or organize stalking, harassment, abuse, persecutaion, and hate campaigns against them. KH. Note].  With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction.  In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make a whole nation jump.  And if that is not power, what is?"

A real Sociopath in action:   Organized Stalking

What is a Sociopath?

And what is the difference between a Sociopath and a Psychopath?

Pity Party

What do Sociopaths really want?

What do they hope to gain by all their machinations and manipulations?

According to Ms. Stout, author of The Sociopath Next Door ... Pity.

"The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.

I first learned this when I was still a graduate student in psychology and had the opportunity to interview a court-referred patient the system had already identified as a "psychopath".

***

I asked, "What is important to you in your life? What do you want more than anything else?" I thought he might say "getting money" or "staying out of jail" which were the activities to which he devoted most of his time.

Instead, without a moments hesitation, he replied, "Oh, that's easy. What I like better than anything else is when people feel sorry for me. The thing I really want more than anything else out of life is peoples pity."

The Sociopath Next Door by M. Stout. Chapter 6. pp.107.

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout

"His parents had a great deal of money, were "mega-rich" as the other kids put it.

***

Still, Skip had a problem. He was bored most of the time. The amusements he pursued, even the girls, even fooling the teachers, even thinking about his money, did not keep him energized for longer than half an hour or so.

The family wealth held the most promise as an entertainment, but it was not under his control yet - he was still a child.

No, the only real relief from boredom was the fun he could have in Virginia. Vacations were a very good time.

That first summer, when he was eight, he had simply stabbed the bullfrogs with a scissor, for want of another method.

***

With a little bribe from Skip, his friend Tim would buy him some fireworks there and smuggle them home in the bottom of his suitcase.

Tim would be scared to do it, but with a pep talk from Skip, and enough money, he would.

Next summer, Skip would have not scissors but fireworks."

The Sociopath Next Door by M. Stout, Chapter 2. Ice People: The Sociopaths, page 37-38.

Conscience is the window of the spirit, evil is the curtain -- Doug Horton.

Unfortunatly Sociopaths exist in far too great numbers in both real life and the cyberworld and while the numbers are small percentage-wise they wreak a lot of havoc.

Test

8R2FQY99W7VZ

9/11 : A Commemoration

From a Canadian, To my American friends and family, with Love

My older brother died a year ago today. Other than my father's death, this has been and continues to be the most painful experience of my life. We had our issues but he was a genuinely good person who gave of himself to everyone he knew.

Merry ChristMyth ;-)

John Derringer's 13 Days Of Christmas

Well, the 13 Days Of Christmas Campaign Against Child Abuse has started.

It's Week 2, and over $200,000 has been collected. John's show is on between 5:30AM and 9:00AM EST.

John raises funds and gifts to give the children and families who have been the victims of abuse a better Christmas.

Derringer is a philanthropic Radio Station Talk Show Host here in Toronto and is on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Center for Abuse Awareness.

This is an issue that I hope atheists and theists can unite on and support the cause together.

Here are some more videos from YouTube on the topic. 

They are painful to watch, but the children they depict have been through a lot more than you will go through by watching them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vbClNamISU

This one is for the theists because it has religious overtones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh3Iab4ziO0

Child Abuse of all kinds is a terrible crime.

It's up to us as a society to help. Look deep into the eyes of these children, be aware that there are other children out there suffering, and make these children, as well as adult survivors of Child Abuse the priority.

Preventing Child Abuse is everyone's responsibility.

His Campaign will continue for the next 12 days (usually 13 but Dec 13 is on a Saturday this year) and on the last day he will be holding a Marathon all day.

Don't forget to visit the online auction which includes rock memorabilia at http://www.q107.com and runs until Dec. 13.

Support his campaign by calling (1-800-379-8858) (Canada) and contribute! The phones lines are open between 6:00AM and 7:PM EST daily.

Go to http://www.q107.com , listen to the show on streaming audio and contribute there.

Or contribute directly by going to the following link: http://www.ccfaa.com/ :)"

Or contribute to your own charity in your own country which is fighting child abuse!

Thanks and Merry Christmas!

Lest We Forget

Atheists In Foxholes

Happy Halloween!

Witchy Woman by the Eagles

April Wine - Sign of a Gypsy Queen

Fleetwood Mac-Dreams

A favorite song

Today's Mix :)

Night Moves by Bob Seger

for johnnyangel, an angel with leather wings - the sexiest voice on the planet :)

Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen

Behind Blue Eyes by The Who

for my own personal psychopath/stalker/terrorist - the Weasel and his various and sundry skankwhores - 35th anniversary

It's All Over Now Baby Blue by Bob Dylan

The Future by Leonard Cohen

An American Prayer - Long Version by The Doors

San Francisco Nights by The Animals

for thedeviliam - one very cool, bright guy :)

Memories

I'll be adding to this album as I get more photographs

Rick Hundal. Obituary. Vancouver Sun

Guest Book. Vancouver Sun

Dear Rick

I know you won't be reading this letter, but it's more just a vehicle for me to express my feelings about you than anything else.

Kanval will be reading this letter at your funeral tomorrow.

Rick, I'm so sorry, but I just can't bring myself to go. I spoke to Rosemary yesterday, and she understands why.

Devinder, Jerry, Ashley and Graham are representing me and the kids tomorrow. They have been such a great support to me.

I want everyone to know that not attending your funeral has nothing to do with the separation that has existed between us for so long and our inability to find our way back to each other.

It has everything to do with the deep pain I feel from losing you.

Rick, I'm afraid I'm just going to break down there in front of everybody.

I'm having trouble grasping the fact that you're gone and I'll never see you again.

The pain I feel now is the same deep and excruciating pain I felt when Dad died. I never thought I'd feel this way again with anyone else.

I spoke to Rick Green tonight. He called and we reminisced. I've been able to give brief facts about you to strangers, but talking to Rick tonight was the first time that I've been able to really talk about you without breaking down.

Rick Green asked me if I remembered ... and listed off a bunch of your friends.

I laughed, and said I remembered each as clearly as if it was yesterday.

We laughed about the rope swing you guys had that you used to swing over the creek behind Rick Green's house, and the times you guys used to tease us, that friendly, brotherly teasing of all the little sisters, some of whom were my friends.

Poor Kim and her braces. The nickname "tin grin" just seemed to stick. And for a while, anyone who called the house asking for me got a chuckling response, "Sorry, she broke a leg, and we had to shoot her." My nickname went from Medusa to Mungie depending on the mood.

Talking to Rick Green, your childhood friend, and a member of your group of close childhood friends brought back a flood of pleasant, warm memories like the ones I've already mentioned.

There are a lot of them. Way too many to go into in this letter to you.

Lois, one of my childhood friends, sent me an email the other day and talked about how you used to come to her work place and talk and how she enjoyed the conversations she shared with you.

Her email reminded me of the times that you stepped up and looked after me, protected me, when we were kids.

Like the time that Lois, me and a group of our friends were hanging around at the local gas station, bored on a Friday night. Some of the guys in our group were riding around in shopping carts "borrowed" from the local Mall, while we girls were just gabbing, giggling, flirting, and watching.

Just generally being silly.

Your friend was working at the gas station at the time. He knew I was your sister, and other than keeping a watchful brotherly eye out on all of us, didn't interfere with our idiotic pranks.

Until, that is, a group of very drunk guys, stopped their car beside the gas station, jumped out and tried to grab me and another friend of mine, Kelly, and drag us into the car.

They were so drunk that Kelly and I fought them off easily and all of us scattered. I ran into the gas station where your friend was, and he went out and sent them on their way.

He also told you what happened. You tracked those guys down, and told them they better not mess with your little sister or they'd be dealing with you.

From that point on, they not only never messed with me again, but were amazingly respectful when we ran into each other ;-).

Rick, whatever our differences, whatever harsh words passed between us over the years, especially recently, I know you were a good person, who cared deeply about people and about me.

I also know, that you know, I cared deeply about you.

You showed your concern by making the effort to build a relationship with my children despite everything and maintained close contact. They both love and respect you and tried very hard to make arrangements to come but unfortunately weren't able to.

You left me so suddenly, Rick, just like Dad did.

Your heart went, you're gone, and now my heart has broken into a thousand little pieces and the pain is unbearable.

Rick, I'm sorry we were never able to close that chasm that came between us as adults, and the whys and wherefores don't matter anymore.

It was what it was and that's all that can really be said about it.

However, talking to Rick Green helped me so much.

We laughed together about the silly little things and acknowledged the more important things, your kindness and compassion, your honesty and sincerity, the way you cared about everyone, the joy you brought to everyone ... all of the things that made you, you, and are permanently woven into the fabric of our memories.

You were loved Rick, by me, and everyone whose lives you touched on a personal level, and you will be missed.

Always your little sister,

Kitty

Rick Hundal's Funeral

I've noticed a lot of hits on this blog as a result of searches for Rick Hundal since he passed away last week, so have decided to publish the funeral details here for those who wish to attend:

Family visitations:

Boal Funeral Chapel.
address below
Wednesday, June 4, 2008. 7:00 PM on.

Funeral:

Boal Funeral Chapel.
1505 Lillooet Road,
North Vancouver, B.C.

Thursday, June 5, 2008. 10:00 AM.

Further information can be obtained by posting a request using the Comments feature below.

All comments are moderated and will not published if you request privacy.