Donald Trump is a “textbook” narcissist.
In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George
Simon told Vanity Fair, “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips
of him to use in workshops.”
Illustration by Ronald David Jackson (Adapted from Timothy A. Clary)
By Bobby Azarian
According to a number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardener, Donald Trump is a “textbook” narcissist. In fact, he fits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops.” This puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. And although there are narcissists out there who entertain us, innovate, or create great art, when a narcissist is given immense power over people’s lives, they can behave much differently. As the 2016 presidential election grows nearer we must ask ourselves, if elected president would Donald Trump act on the behalf of the will of the people, or would he behave more like a dictator—silencing any dissenting voices, perpetually refusing to compromise, and being oppressive to certain groups? To answer that, we should ask a little bit more about what makes a narcissist tick, and how they tend to behave when given free rein.
What is it exactly that makes someone a certifiable narcissist and not simply a person who has a healthy amount of confidence and a burning desire to achieve great goals? According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder is “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.”
Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered.
But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.
"Being white makes you a winner. Dark skin makes you a loser." (Screen capture from Thai skin lightening ad)
'Being white makes you a winner': Thai beauty
campaign 'showing dark skinned people as losers' is pulled after
sparking outrage on social media
The ad Featured Thai actress attributing professional success to pale skin
By
Siofra Brennan
A Thai company has pulled an advert for skin-lightening pills following an outcry on social media over a product sold with the tagline 'white makes you a winner'.
The advertisement for Seoul Secret's supplement called Snowz featured a veteran Thai actress Cris Horwang, 35, attributing her professional success to her pale complexion.
'It's not easy to stay at this point for a long time,' she says in the video. 'If I stopped taking care of my body and white complexion, all that I have invested will be gone.'
As she speaks, a smiling, younger woman enters the picture and Cris' own image darkens to charcoal black.
She's seen casting an envious look at the other woman who stands by her side.
'A newcomer will replace me and turn me into a dark star,' she says in the video, using a Thai idiom to refer to her fame fading.
A male voice says, 'You just need to be white to win.'
Whitening creams and pills are wildly popular in Thailand, where pale skin is upheld as the standard of beauty in the media and among many Thais, and is associated with a higher social status.
Advertisements for the products are standard fare on billboards and TV spots, but some companies have faced a backlash in recent years for going too far.
Dr. Frances Cress Welsing receives the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Award
during 10th Annual National Black L.U.V. Festival in Washington D.C.,
Sept. 21, 2008.
Elvert Xavier Barnes Photography
By Angela Bronner Helm Renowned black psychiatrist Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, author of the seminal 1991 work, The Isis (Yssis) Papers: The Keys To The Colors (Third World Press) has died. She was 80 years old. “Media Assassin” Harry Allen reports via Twitter that Dr. Welsing died at 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning from a stroke she suffered earlier in the week.
Dr. Welsing was born on March 18, 1935, in Chicago. Both her father and grandfather were medical doctors, and her mother was a teacher. She received her bachelor’s degree from Antioch College, and her M.D. from the Howard University College of Medicine. In 1974, Dr. Welsing became famous for her paper, the “Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation” which she published while an assistant professor of pediatrics at Howard’s medical school.
According to Welsing, the work caused such a stir that her tenure at the university was not renewed in 1975. Dr. Welsing then spent more than 20 years as a staff physician for the Department of Human Services in Washington, D.C., and was a specialist in both child and general psychiatry, gaining particular acclaim for her work with young people.
Additionally, she was a celebrated scholar who studied the origins of white supremacy from a psychological and biological perspective, and was a proponent of the “Melanin Theory,” which espouses black superiority due to a higher concentration of melanin in people of African descent.
As a psychiatrist, Welsing used Freudian symbolism to explain white supremacy, including the interpretation of guns, money, the cross and gold. She has faced some controversy regarding her stance on homosexuality, which she said was imposed on black men by whites who wanted to reduce the African population.
Dr. Welsing is perhaps best known for her 1991 book, The Isis Papers, which reportedly came about after 20 years of research and analysis from her private practice. It is considered required reading for those interested in the psychological origins and manifestations of white supremacy. Read More
New Jersey Psychology Practice Revealed Patients' Mental Disorders in Debt Lawsuits
The exterior of the Springfield, New Jersey, building that houses Short
Hills Associates in Clinical Psychology. “My clients deny and will be
vigorously defending against all allegations of wrongdoing here,” the
practice’s lawyer said. (Richard Perry/The New York Times)
When a New Jersey lawyer named Philip received legal papers last year informing him that his former psychologist's practice was suing him over an unpaid bill, he was initially upset they could not work out a payment arrangement outside of court.
It was only later, Philip said in an interview, that he scanned the papers again and realized something else: The psychology group to which he'd confided his innermost feelings had included his mental health diagnosis and treatments he received in publicly filed court documents.
The greatest fear of many patients receiving therapy services is that somehow the details of their private struggles will be revealed publicly. Philip, who requested his last name not be used to protect his privacy, said he felt "betrayed" by his psychologist. He worried that his legal adversaries would find the information and try to use it against him in court.
In cases in which the patients were minors, the practice sued their parents and included the children's names and diagnoses.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, allows health providers to sue patients over unpaid debts, but requires that they disclose only the minimum information necessary to pursue them.
Still, the law has many loopholes, which ProPublica has been exploring in a series of articles this year. One is that HIPAA covers only providers who submit data electronically 2014 and apparently Short Hills Associates does not.
Between 2010 and 2014, Short Hills Associates filed 24 collections cases in which patients' diagnoses were listed, New Jersey court records show. The defendants included lawyers, business people and a nonprofit official.
The suits identified diagnoses by unique codes listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the reference work on mental illness published by the American Psychiatric Association. An online search of the codes quickly provides their meaning.
Short Hills Associates' managing partner, Barry Helfmann, has been a leader in New Jersey psychology circles. He is a past president of the New Jersey Psychological Association and serves as its director of professional affairs. He has also served on the board of the American Group Psychotherapy Association.
In other contexts, Helfmann has been a champion of patient privacy. In 2010, he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against two insurance companies and a New Jersey state commission, accusing them of requiring psychologists to turn over their treatment notes in order to get paid.
Philip is now countersuing Helfmann and his partners, the psychology group and the practice's debt collection lawyers for invasion of privacy, breach of the psychologist-patient privilege, fraud and misrepresentation and other claims. He is seeking the court's permission to represent other patients as part of a class action.
Jon, another person being sued by Short Hills Associates for unpaid bills, said he was surprised to learn from a reporter last week that his son's name and diagnosis was included in court papers. He hadn't noticed at the time.
"Our kids learn in school and we're tasked to drive home to them that everything they do online will remain online forever. And don't do stupid stuff online," said Jon, who requested his last name not be published to protect his family's privacy. "And now to find out that adults aren't following that practice on their behalf is borderline devastating."
In a deposition taken in November, Audrey Muratore, billing manager for Short Hills Associates, maintained that "it is within my right" to send a bill for debt collection and that once a suit was filed, she did not see the legal papers. "Once they file a suit, it's out of my hands," she said.
She added that the firm had not filed any additional debt lawsuits since Philip filed his countersuit against them and currently did not have a collection agency working on its behalf.
ProPublica reviewed the billing lawsuits filed by another psychology group against patients in New Jersey and found that they redacted diagnosis and treatment codes.
John Mullahy, a lawyer for Helfmann and Short Hills Associates, issued a statement in response to questions for this article: "My clients deny and will be vigorously defending against all allegations of wrongdoing here. We cannot and will not comment further given that litigation is pending."
Jeffrey Rothbard, a partner at Rothbard, Rothbard, Kohn & Kellar, the firm that filed the collections lawsuits on behalf of Short Hills Associates, also declined to comment. "I don't want to start trying this case in the press," Rothbard said.
Some mental health practitioners expressed outrage that Short Hills Associates had revealed patients' private information as part of suing them for payment.
"That's just horrendous," said Deborah Peel, a Texas psychiatrist who is founder and chair of Patient Privacy Rights, a group that advocates for patient privacy. "I have never heard of anything that bad and I've been practicing for like 40 years."
Alan Nessman, the senior special counsel of the American Psychological Association, said in a statement that he could not comment on the legal fight in New Jersey. But he said the organization would typically recommend against including patients' diagnoses and a list of procedures as part of collection suits because it "may be more than the minimum disclosure necessary to obtain payment" under HIPAA and the group's ethics code.
The inclusion of patients' diagnoses in lawsuits is rare, experts say, but not unheard-of. An Indiana man won a $1.25 million jury verdict in 2010 against his physician group for including his H.I.V. status in a collections lawsuit. Another Indiana resident secured a settlement in 2013 after his HIV status was included in a billing suit filed by his dentist. (In bold, capital letters, his record said, "MEDICAL ALERTS: H.I.V. AIDS.")
The man, who asked that he be identified only by his first name, Fred, to protect his privacy, said in an interview that the dentist's disclosure upended his life. He was given a diagnosis of major depression and takes medications to treat it. "It affects the very essence of who I am," he said. "It would be tantamount to walking down the street with a sign pointing at me saying, 2018Here it is.'"
When Short Hills Associates filed suit against Philip in September 2014, it said he owed $4,400 for meetings from 2012 to February 2014.
Philip asserted in legal documents that he confronted Helfmann in a phone call the following month and the psychologist told him it was his fault his information was disclosed because he had not paid his bill.
In November 2014, Philip's lawyer obtained a judge's order directing that the bill detailing his diagnosis and treatment codes be replaced with a document in which that information was redacted.
Several months later, Andrew Thomasson, Philip's lawyer, sent an email to Mullahy, his counterpart representing Short Hills Associates, listing all the collection cases in which the practice had disclosed patients' diagnoses. As of Monday, though, the records were still publicly available.
Thomasson said he was particularly concerned about minors whose patient information was exposed.
"When they're grown up, want to get a job with the FBI or the U.S. attorney's office, they conduct very thorough background checks and they may come across it," he said in an interview. "It could be used to prevent someone from getting a job one day."
Nevertheless, a spokesman for the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs said the inclusion of diagnostic codes in lawsuits did not violate any regulations or statutes for the State Board of Psychological Examiners.
Philip filed a complaint in March with the Office for Civil Rights of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that enforces HIPAA. It included details on his case and others. In August, the agency wrote back to say it was "closing this complaint with no further action."
In an email, Rachel Seeger, a spokeswoman for the office, said the agency "closed this case because we determined that Short Hills Associates in Clinical Psychology is not a HIPAA-covered entity, and therefore we have no jurisdiction to investigate or take any action on the complaint."
The privacy law's language specifies that it covers only health providers who "electronically transmit any health information in connection with transactions for which HHS has adopted standards." Doctors who still rely on paper records and paper bills 2014 or clients who pay cash 2014 are not subject to the law.
In legal papers, Short Hills Associates has not argued that it falls outside privacy law's reach. In fact, on its website it offers patients forms and information that specifically mentions their rights under the law.
This story is part of a yearlong examination into how secure medical privacy is. Has your medical privacy been compromised? Help ProPublica investigate by filling out a short questionnaire. You can also read other stories in our Policing Patient Privacy series.
18 Stories on the Killing and Brutalization of the Mentally Ill by Law Enforcement
Compiled by Ronald David Jackson
- - - - - - -
Chicago police kill emotionally disturbed college student and 55-year-old mother
Family and friends of Bettie Jones and
Quintonio LeGrier, who were both shot and killed by Chicago police
yesterday held a press conference on Sunday, Dec. 27 (Screen capture from video)
By Peter Holley
A Chicago police officer arriving at the scene of a domestic disturbance fatally shot two people on Saturday, including a 55-year-old mother of five who authorities said was “accidentally struck and tragically killed.”
In a statement released Saturday offering scant detail, Chicago police said they “were confronted by a combative subject”that resulted in “the discharging of the officer’s weapon.”
But the families of Bettie Jones, who had just hosted relatives for Christmas, and Quintonio LeGrier, 19, a college student home for holiday break, say police violently overreacted to a controllable situation, according to CBS-affiliate WBBM-TV.
“He wasn’t just a thug on the street, he was an honor student in college and high school,” LeGrier’s mother, Janet Cooksey, told WBBM-TV. “Seven bullets were put in my son. Seven.”
“Eight shots were fired,” she added tearfully. “One hit an innocent lady who was just opening her door. Something is wrong with this picture.”
The deaths arrive while the Chicago Police Department is being scrutinized by the Justice Department, which has opened a wide-ranging investigation into whether the department’s practices contribute to civil rights violations. The investigation was launched after the release of video last month showing white officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan Macdonald, who was black. The footage led to murder charges for Van Dyke and the resignation of the city’s police chief.
Read More
_________________
Cop Who Murdered Mentally Ill Man In Front of His Mother for Fiddling With a Screwdriver Won't Even Face a Trial
A grand jury is yet again manipulated by a racist prosecutor and decides that a murderer cop will not even get indicted for murdering a mentally ill man. The mother of the victim called cops for help getting her son to the hospital -- Her son was shot within five seconds of coming to the door while fiddling with a screwdriver
The mother who called cops to help her take her mentally ill son (left) to the hospital appears relieved when the cops
knocked on her door. Several seconds later her son was dead after getting shot by the cops who were supposed to be
there to help. (Screen capture from video)
By Josie Wales
A grand jury has decided not to indict two officers who fatally shot a mentally ill man after his mother called the police for help getting her schizophrenic son, 39-year old Jason Harrison, to the hospital.
Officers John Rogers and Andrew Hutchins responded to the call placed last June, arriving to find the mother calmly greet them at the door. Body cam footage from one of the officers shows her explain to the officers that her son was schizophrenic and rambling, at which point he appears behind her in the doorway, playing with a screwdriver.
Upon seeing the man, one officer yells for him to drop the screwdriver, giving him only 5 seconds to reply before the cops opened fire. Harrison was shot five times, taking two of the bullets in his back as he collapsed into the garage door. He died only a few feet away from his mother as she yelled, “Oh, they killed my son! Oh, they killed my son!”
At the Time Jim Jones Was Calling Dan Mitrione His "Close Friend" Mitrione Was Teaching Latin American Dictatorships Torture Techniques. Mitrione is depicted by an actor in the classic film, "State of Siege." He was eventually kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro Guerrillas.
_____________
Jonestown "Death Tape"
(FBI File No. Q042)
Recorded November 18, 1978
Source: Internet Archive
_______________
LT. COL. JAMES “BO” GRITZ AND JONESTOWN: "All The Niggers Are Dead" (Excerpt)
By "Gunny G"
The officer in charge of all U.S. Army Special Forces
for Latin America at the time of the Jonestown holocaust was Lt. Col.
James “Bo” Gritz. Gritz was the original soldier after which the movie
character “Rambo” was patterned. Gritz was the most decorated soldier to
come out of the Vietnam war.
The Guyana massacre was carried out by Bo Gritz’ men (along with British SAS troops). *Flatland* (#10) magazine, in an interview with Gritz, asked him:
Question: You trained Special Forces that went into Jonestown? What was the precise nature of the operation?
“I
don’t know precisely because it was a compartmentalized operation. The
only thing that I do know for certain is what the Sergeant I quote
coming out of Jonestown, he was insistent because he was disgusted, on
writing this book. He was, without compromise, going to call it *All the
Niggers Are Dead.* I asked him, ‘Why would you want to entitle anything
such an offensive way?’ ‘It doesn’t make a difference what your color,
your creed, your sex,’ he said, ‘when you are treated the way they were,
that’s what you are; you’re a nigger, you’re nothing else.’ I think
that those soldiers saw things that affected them and made them very
angry. I’ve seen other things like that in combat where there have been
abuses. I wrote about one of them in my book where the Captain tortured
the young severely and the young Sergeant put on a swastika and said,
“If I’m going to act like a Nazi I’m going to look like one.’ I think
that the same kind of negative impact occurred in Jonestown.”
Gritz
has more about Jonestown in his autobiography, *Called to Serve.*
Perhaps you simply cannot believe what I am telling you. Will you
believe it if told to you by the Green Beret officer in charge of the
men who did the killing? He admits that the information was
“compartmentalized” and it was not until later that he learned what his
men were actually doing. The following information is from pages 584-587
of his book:
“The true story of the Jonestown camp in
Guyana has been brought to light through an extensive investigation
conducted by John Judge, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and
other dedicated researchers and investigators. The truth, which was
thoroughly suppressed by the American media, is that it was actually a
slave-labor camp run by Jones with the assistance of the CIA.
Most of the information which follows is from John Judge’s summary of
the investigation, supplemented with information provided by Special
Forces teams I had earlier trained and commanded, who were sent in to
‘clean up the remains of Jonestown.’
“Most of the
black and Hispanic poor people and social activists who became the
inmates of the camp were brought there either by force or coercion, or
lured under false pretenses, where extensive experiments of drug-induced
mind control were performed on them. Even before they were moved to
Guyana, reports of beatings, kidnappings, sexual abuse and mysterious
deaths had leaked out to the press about the earlier Peoples’ Temple in Ukiah, California.
“Jim Jones had a very interesting past which was overlooked by the media: During the time his friend Dan Mitrione
was teaching torture techniques to the Brazilian and Argentineans,
Jones was also sent to Brazil where his house, transportation and
groceries were provided to him by the U.S. Embassy, and he frequently
traveled to Belo Horizonte, the CIA headquarters in Brazil.
“Jones
had been contacted in Ukiah by ‘Christian missionaries’ from World
Vision (World Vision is a CIA controlled front operation), an
evangelical order which had performed espionage work for the CIA in
Southeast Asia. Most of Jones’ top lieutenants were from wealthy,
educated backgrounds, many with connections to the military or
intelligence agencies. These were the people who were involved in
setting up the bank accounts, complex legal transactions and financial
agreements which put people under the control of the Peoples’ Temple.
“Some of Jones’ Lieutenants were: Dr. Lawrence Layton was chief of Chemical and Biological Warfare Research at Dugway Proving Grounds
in Utah for many years and later worked as Director of Missile and
Satellite Development at the Navy Propellant Division at Indian Head,
Maryland. His wife, Lisa, was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, who had
represented the huge Nazi manufacturing cartel, I.G. Farben, as a
stockbroker. Their daughter, Debbie, met and married George Philip
Blakey, whose parents had extensive stock holdings in Solve Drugs, a
division of I.G. Farben.
“Blakey was reputed to be
training mercenaries in Jonestown who were sent to work with CIA-backed
UNITA forces in Angola. Terri Buford’s father, Admiral Charles T.
Buford, worked with Naval Intelligence. Marie Katsaris’ father was
minister with the Greek Orthodox Church, thought to be a conduit of CIA
funding, and she claimed she had proof he was a CIA agent. The ‘official
survivors’ were represented upon their return to the U.S. by Joseph
Blatchford, an attorney who had been named in a prior scandal involving
CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
“The people who
were taken from San Francisco to begin their ‘new life’ in Guyana were
bussed to Florida and arrived in Guyana bound and gagged, where they
were forced to work 16 hours or more daily, and were fed on minimum
rations. As more and more rumors began to filter back to the United
States of druggings, beatings, torture, sexual humiliations and coercion
at the Guyana site, Congressman Leo Ryan decided to go to Guyana and
verify the situation for himself.
“Ryan had challenged
the CIA’s overseas operations before, as a member of the House
Committee responsible for oversight on intelligence. He was co-author of
the controversial Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have required
advance CIA disclosure to the congressional committees of all planned
covert operations. The amendment would be defeated shortly after his
death in Jonestown.
“With Ryan on the way to
Jonestown, the secrecy surrounding the camp would be broken and
desperate measures would need to be taken to keep the truth from
escaping, much less the inmates. In a futile attempt to test their
conditioning methods, the leaders at Jonestown apparently tried to
implement an actual suicide drill, but it was obviously ignored.
Official stories first numbered the victims at 408, but later revised
the toll upward to 913. It was claimed that some 505 bodies had been
covered by those of the first 408 who had fallen directly on top of
them, confusing those who had been counting from aerial photographs. – a
blatant and ridiculous attempt at cover-up.
“However,
the first reports were true – 408 had died, and 700 fled to the jungle
where British Black Watch troops and American Special Forces were
conducting ‘training exercises.’ Of the 700, 505 who had been
deliberately shot in the jungle were added to the count of those who had
supposedly committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid.
Was There A CIA Conspiracy to Destroy Jonestown? (Excerpt)
By Laurie Efrein-Kahalas, San Diego State University
The last person to leave the scene alive, Stanley Clayton, told the coroner’s jury in Matthews Ridge (an adjoining town) that when he left, only 100-200 people were still alive, and that although the scene was gruesome, it was peaceful, with Marceline Jones hugging people saying "I’ll see you in your next life." Indeed, there was an explicit final letter left at Jonestown (see FINAL WITNESS), which is specific about people passing on in a peaceful, if grief-laden procession.
So who was it who desecrated the bodies at Jonestown in such a gruesome manner? First, what might be the motive? One motive is clear: Make Jim Jones look like a brutal murderer of his own people, to bolster the claim that he had "ordered" the assassination of the Congressman. That would deflect investigation of the facts, much less consideration of a frame. Surely Jim Jones was responsible for everything. Case closed.
Who was responsible for the desecration? Who arrived at Jonestown before the coroner; before, indeed, anyone else arrived "officially"? Had forces arrived clandestinely, and if so, who were they, and how much time did they have to make the scene appear as they wanted?
The answer to these two questions appears to be, respectively, "Yes" and "A lot of time." First, the tragedy happened the night of Saturday, November 18th. The first team brought in "officially" was the Guyanese Defense Force, along with survivors from Jonestown brought back to identify bodies. That did not happen until Monday morning, November 20th. For the entire day of Sunday, November 19th, presumably no one was at Jonestown at all.
Yet two completely separate sources confirm that U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) were in Jonestown within five or six hours. The first was a source from within the U.S. military, one Charles Huff from the U.S. Army Special Forces in Panama. According to FREEDOM Magazine, he was "one of the Green Berets who were the first American troops on the scene following the massacre." He said they were into Jonestown within about five hours. Indeed, Clayton told the coroner’s jury of the community falling completely silent following the deaths for 45 minutes, and that then, suddenly, there was a chorus of shouts, as well as gunfire. The source of the sounds and the gunfire, has never been identified.
Huff elaborated that "’We saw many bullet wounds as well as wounds from crossbow bolts." Huff noted that those with fatal bullet or bolt wounds appeared to have been running towards the jungle that surrounded Jonestown. Huff said that the adults who had not been shot had been killed by injections between the shoulder blades." Then enigmatically, "The killers escaped before the arrival of Huff and his team." Huff also claims that of the troops early into Jonestown, sixteen of them later "committed suicide." Given that only two Peoples Temple survivors committed suicide in the wake of the tragedy, sixteen "suicides" amongst trained combat personnel defies believability. But sixteen "suspicious deaths" is indeed a high figure, which compels investigation.
Who desecrated the bodies? Nearly no one "escaped" from Jonestown except for the tiny handful of people who ran into the jungle, and who were surely not responsible for any carnage. How could one not suspect that it was the Green Beret force itself who inflicted the purported damage?
An unexpected confirmation of U.S. troops clandestinely on site just showed up recently in a Russian book called "The Jonestown Carnage: A CIA Crime" printed by Progress Press in Moscow. Their claim was that "At about 18.00 [that’s 6 p.m. on November 18th], several S-141 military transport planes took off from military bases in Panama and Dover [Delaware] and headed for Guyana. The estimated time of flight was 3 hours 40 minutes. … Two hours later, without notifying the local authorities in the area of Venezuela where the Americans had their private missions (which served as a front for C.I.A. secret operations), three helicopters took off in the direction of Jonestown, which was 1 hour 10 minutes away."
What is startling in the Russian account, is that both their account and the American account of the arrival of Green Berets, designate the country of origin as Panama. The two independent reports tally with each other perfectly.
Equally ominous, the A & E special this past November, called "Jonestown: Mystery of a Massacre" revealed that the deaths at Jonestown were originally confirmed via a CIA radio channel, NOIWON, at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, November 19th. The producer speculated that Richard Dwyer, the alleged C.I.A. plant in the State Department who had accompanied the Congressman to Jonestown, was the only one on site who could have made this call. But now we can see that it could have just as easily been made by U.S. Green Berets already on site, and undoubtedly under the control of the C.I.A.
What were Green Berets doing at Jonestown in the middle of the night? The C-141 MEDEVAC plane to assist the survivors of the airport shooting, according to official State Department records, did not even arrive at Georgetown from Charleston, SC until 7:55 a.m.! The Green Berets, meanwhile, were flown in immediately, before the situation at Jonestown had even been officially ascertained. They arrived in the middle of the night, but not to assist medically – rather for secret, classified work specifically at Jonestown, leaving the injured at an airstrip only seven miles away, completely unattended. Meanwhile, the MEDEVAC plane shows up on the official State Department log, but the Green Berets do not.
Was there any real concern for the people of Jonestown – their deaths, rapid evacuation of the bodies, possible survivors? Medical personnel such as the Guyanese coroner, were not sent into Jonestown for two more days! This bizarre reversal of priorities, involving moreover clandestine forces under separate command, is unsettling if not appalling, and requires investigation. Even the fact that confirmation of the suicides was received at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of the 19th, yet the incoming MEDEVAC personnel were not sent to investigate the death of over 900 people a mere seven miles away, implies not just lack of coordination between open and secret military commands, but utter disregard for human life.
Lastly, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (also uncovered by Freedom Magazine), claimed that "The Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared air shipments of hundreds of body bags. … Within hours, they began to shuttle them down to Georgetown, the main city. They couldn’t possibly have done that without prior knowledge that it was going to happen. It shows that there was prior planning."
China's creepy new social engineering system will measure how obediently citizens follow the "party line." It works like a credit score and citizens will get "points" for posting positive messages about the government, buying Chinese products, etc. Citizens will also get demerits for things like posting links about problems with the economy or government corruption. High scores will get you special treatment from the government, banks and retail outlets; low scores may leave you in slum housing. China has "partnered" with the nation's largest social networks and retail sites so it can track and manipulate the behavior of everyone. Americans should expect all the personal info gathered by the National Security Agency will one day be used in the same way.—Ronald David Jackson
China To Use Big Data To Rate Citizens In New 'Social Credit System'
By Michelle FlorCruz
How good a citizen are you? China hopes to answer that question for every one of its citizens with a numerical rating system based on their financial standing, criminal record and social media behavior. A new translation of the government’s plans for a so-called social credit system sheds light on how China aims to utilize "Big Data" to hold all citizens accountable for financial decisions as well as moral choices.
____________
This is How China's "Sesame Credit" System Will Hammer it's Citizens into Compliance
____________
China’s plans to roll out a citizen rating system has been in the works for years. Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University, recently published a translation of a document circulated through various levels of government detailing the six-year rollout of the program. According to a State Council notice, the central government hopes to have every adult in China assigned a credit code in addition to a government-issued identity card by 2020.
“Accelerating the construction of a social credit system is an important basis for comprehensively implementing the scientific development view and building a harmonious Socialist society,” the memo reads, adding that it has “important significance for strengthening the sincerity consciousness of the members of society.” The "guiding ideology," the name of a subsection in the memo, states that a key principle of the system is "government promotion."
While using financial, Internet and other data to evaluate individuals is not a new phenomenon, China will likely be the first nation to do it publicly and have the systematization and rationalization for doing so down to a numerical index. In an interview with Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, Creemers draws similarities to the former East German system but says the Chinese are taking it even further.
“The German aim was limited to avoiding a revolt against the regime. The Chinese aim is far more ambitious: It is clearly an attempt to create a new citizen,” Creemers said in the interview, explaining that the program will incentivize specific behavior. “This is a deliberate effort by the Chinese government to promote among citizens ‘socialist core values’ such as patriotism, respecting the elderly, working hard and avoiding extravagant consumption.”
In a more modern context, a closer comparison could be made with the U.S. National Security Agency's alleged data-mining project PRISM, which former CIA contractor Edward Snowden revealed as government access to user data at the country’s biggest tech firms like Google, Apple and Facebook. Whereas Silicon Valley execs denied knowledge of the data-mining scheme and said that if user information was being collected, it was without the companies’ knowledge, China wants its citizens to know they are being watched and that their standing in society will be affected by their behavior.
Unlike in the West, in China, cooperation between tech firms and the government is “symbiotic,” according to Creemer, and will likely continue when it comes to implementing the Social Credit System. “Government and big Internet companies in China can exploit ‘Big Data’ together in a way that is unimaginable in the West,” he said.
By Bobby Azarian
The militant Islamist group known as ISIS is more than just an organization with an ideology that is different from our own. This is a group that has regularly carried out or inspired attacks that have massacred large numbers of innocent civilians in places like France, Turkey, Mali, and now, the United States. Additionally, ISIS has released a number of videos that clearly show members beheading people in the most gruesome and barbaric manner thinkable. As such, it has become increasingly apparent that we are dealing with a group of homicidal and suicidal maniacs with a severely warped moral and ethical code. One essentially has to be a murderous psychopath to willingly commit such acts, as a psychopath is generally defined as an unstable or aggressive person with abnormal or violent social behavior.
Since counter-terrorism strategies rely heavily on understanding what makes these individuals tick, and how the process of radicalization works, it is crucial that we understand the minds and brains of the perpetrators, as well as those they aim to recruit. One main question of interest should be, “Does ISIS turn people into psychopaths, or do psychopaths join ISIS?” Fortunately, studies from the fields of neuroscience and psychology offer some very illuminating insights into the subject.
Our brains are essentially biological computers. Brain cells, called neurons, communicate by sending electrical signals to one another, and whole brain regions are responsible for carrying out different functions. One area of the brain that is specifically involved in good decision making, impulse control, and regulating one’s emotions is known as the prefrontal cortex, and is located at the front of the brain, just behind one’s forehead. Little kids have brains that haven’t fully developed, and therefore have a prefrontal cortex with electrical circuitry that lacks proper ‘wiring’. This is why children have emotional outbursts, are impulsive, and often make unwise decisions.
According to a number of peer-reviewed studies, psychopaths have a dysfunctional prefrontal cortex as well. As such, they too have difficulty controlling impulses, regulating emotions, and making logical decisions. Furthermore, a specific area of this brain region, known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, has been shown to mediate a number of important social and emotional decision-making functions. Since activity in this area is disrupted in psychopaths, they are prone to impulsive, aggressive, socially destructive behavior.
This certainly explains a great deal about why psychopaths make good members of ISIS, but what is it about ISIS that actually lures them in? In other words, what is it about psychopaths’ brains that make them vulnerable to ISIS recruiters compared to normal individuals, other than the fact that it provides a way for them to exercise their violent, sadistic urges?
Science has an answer that makes a lot of sense: Prefrontal cortex dysfunction also produces an impaired ability to doubt things, or a “doubt deficit”. This hinders one’s ability to be skeptical of new information, especially beliefs or ideas that are being imposed on them. Just as children—with their underdeveloped prefrontal cortex—easily believe in supernatural beings like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, psychopaths are highly vulnerable to brainwashing and radicalization by those pushing violent, virulent ideologies.
Walter Scott after he was executed with a barrage of bullets to his back. The cop lied and said he was under attack.
The Neuroscience Behind Why White Cops Kill Black Men
Studies from neuroscience and psychology may shed some light on why white police officers that aren’t consciously racist are quick to pull the trigger on black men.
By Bobby Azarian
If you’ve paid any attention at all to the news during the past year, or simply are on social media, then chances are you’ve seen real life videos of white cops shooting and killing black males when the situation did not warrant it. The most recent video to have surfaced captured the shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, for which he has been charged with first-degree murder. Earlier this year, a similar video was released of a white South Carolina cop shooting a 50-year-old unarmed black man in the back as he was running away. Although in these cases it was clear that the officers were not presented with any lethal threat while they fired their weapons multiple times, there are also countless cases where police officers have discharged their firearms when the level of threat was more ambiguous.
A classic example of this occurred in 2014 when another South Carolina policeman shot an unarmed African American who he had stopped in a parking lot for a seatbelt violation. The cop asked for an ID from the young man, who subsequently reached under the seat for his wallet, but was shot in the leg before he could even take it out. Upon inspection of the body-cam video, it becomes evident that the jumpy, trigger-happy cop probably did fear for his life. At the same time, it is also clear that he shouldn’t have, as the behavior of the driver involved nothing out of the ordinary. One could reasonably argue, and many did, that if the driver had been white, the cop wouldn’t have reacted the way he did.
Does this mean that the officer was a racist, and that he fired his gun purely out of hate? Without actually being inside the cop’s mind, there is no way to know for sure, but we can know for certain that many similar situations have transpired where white officers acted on gut instinct, and not out of animosity towards African Americans.
What needs to be understood by the prosecutors of such cases, and by the public at large, is the distinction between explicit and implicit racism. Where explicit racism is intentional and conscious, implicit racism involves a subconscious bias that causes one to treat members of other races unequally. Implicit racism likely plays a significant role in many of the cases involving white cops shooting black males, and it is also likely that these cops genuinely believe they hold no prejudice at all. In other words, white police officers may perceive black males to be a threat for behaving in ways that wouldn’t seem suspicious for white males. In fact, an overwhelming number of studies from the fields of neuroscience and psychology provide evidence to support this notion.
For example, studies have shown that while some white individuals answer survey questions with responses that reflect positive attitudes toward blacks, their behavioral responses on certain psychological tests reveal a different story. In one particular type of classic experiment, white participants are asked to quickly categorize words that pop up on a computer screen as either positive (like “happy”) or negative (like “fear”). However, just before each word is displayed, either a black or a white face quickly appears on the screen. What scientists have found time and time again, is that on average, white individuals categorize negative words much faster when they follow black faces, and positive words faster when they follow white faces. What these studies show is that many of us, despite what we believe about ourselves, have split-second negative reactions towards members of certain other races. And unfortunately, these subconscious racist tendencies may affect behavior in the real world, especially when police officers need to make blink-of-an-eye decisions about how to respond to a perceived threat.
Another type of experiment has provided further evidence that white individuals tend to subconsciously perceive black males as threatening. All individuals, regardless of race, show something that scientists call an “attention bias” for threat. For example, hundreds of studies have shown that humans tend to move their attention more quickly towards threatening aspects of the environment. In something called a “visual search task,” participants are instructed to locate one specific object in a clutter of objects on a computer screen while their eye movements are tracked. The data has shown that people are able to locate threatening objects, like spiders, or angry faces, much faster than they can find non-threatening ones, like ladybugs or happy faces. This makes sense in terms of evolution. Being able to rapidly locate threats in the environment allowed our ancestors to survive in an unpredictable and dangerous natural world. Interestingly, scientists have also found that white individuals have a similar attention bias for black faces, even when those faces have non-threatening expressions. Specifically, white participants tend to orient their attention towards black faces more quickly than same-race faces. These findings clearly show that on average, whites tend to subconsciously perceive blacks as threats, no matter how opposed to stereotypes or racial discrimination they may be.
You can be absolutely sure that his ditching of right ideology will not get the same amount of publicity as his attack on president Obama and his support of Ted Cruz. —Ronald David Jackson
CJ Pearson: The 13-year-old social media phenom apparently grew tired of being pimped by right-wing manipulators
in the wake of the ongoing killings of black people by police.
(Screen capture from YouTube video)
By Tal Kopan
The 13-year-old Internet phenom who gained national attention criticizing President Barack Obama and briefly was a part of the Ted Cruz campaign is renouncing conservatism, saying he's looking to be a voice unbound by party ideology.
CJ Pearson told CNN on Friday that concerns about the Republican Party's viewpoints on racial and gender disparity as well as youth issues convinced him he could no longer be a mouthpiece for conservatism.
President Obama: Do you really love America?
"I was tired of being a champion of a party that turned a blind eye to racial discrimination. Tired of being a champion of any cause that denies equal rights to every American. Tired of being a champion of a party that doesn't care about the issues important to young people," Pearson wrote in an email.
The 13-year-old, African-American YouTube star from Georgia said in an interview that he began considering the change after a conversation with another teen friend, who asked why he doesn't speak out on racial discrimination -- to which he replied he was concerned his followers wouldn't be pleased.
"Over the past few days, I thought about essentially how I don't want people to follow me because I'm that anti-Obama kid, or who called out Hillary Clinton or who took Bernie Sanders to task," Pearson said. "I don't want to be the conservative wonder kid that people follow because I make them feel good and like young people are part of their movement. I want to be followed because I'm the voice of a generation that doesn't have a voice at the table."
He said the video of Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a police officer in Chicago helped open his eyes to the systemic problems of racial discrimination in America and the need to look at the issues objectively.
Pearson was also the chairman of Teens for Ted and part of the presidential campaign for the Republican Texas senator, but separated with the Cruz campaign at the beginning of the month. Pearson said Cruz wasn't doing enough for issues affecting young people.The teen also was accused September of faking a screenshot that Obama's account had blocked him on Twitter. Pearson admits he made a mistake and says he has moved on.
"Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: 'false flag operations' (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting 'negative information' on various forums."—Glenn Greenwald
Joshua Goldberg: Father says he suffered from depression and was on Prosac.
By Associated Press
A judge on Tuesday ordered a mental evaluation for a young Florida man accused by the FBI of sending bomb-making plans to an informant for an attack at a 9/11 anniversary event in Missouri.
Joshua Goldberg, 20, appeared in federal court in Jacksonville for a hearing about his detention, but the judge sent him to a mental health facility in North Carolina for 30 days.
Goldberg, who lives with his parents in a Jacksonville suburb, was arrested last week after catching authorities' attention earlier this year in online posts under the moniker "Australi Witness," and others.
The FBI said Goldberg called for an attack on a contest for drawings of the Prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas, and boasted about helping plan attacks on synagogues in Australia.
The FBI says Goldberg sent instructions to an informant showing how to make a pressure cooker bomb. He also suggested to the informant that a 9/11 anniversary event in Kansas City would be a good place to carry out the attack, authorities said.
She made the mistake of saying Obama follows her on Twitter: she was telling the truth. Psych "doctors" insisted she rescind her 'followed by Obama' claim before she was released.
Kamilah Brock says the New York City police sent her to a mental hospital for a hellish eight days, where she was forcefully injected with powerful drugs, essentially because they couldn't believe a black woman owned a BMW.
In her first on-camera interview about her ordeal, which aired Thursday, the 32-year-old told PIX11 that it was all a "nightmare."
It's a nightmare, Brock's lawyer told The Huffington Post, that never would have happened if she weren't African-American.
Brock sued the city earlier this year in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She contends that her constitutional rights under the Fourth and 14th Amendments were violated and that she suffered "unwanted and unwarranted intrusion of her personal integrity, loss of liberty [and] mental anguish."
he suit details how Brock pulled up to a traffic light in Harlem on Sept. 12, 2014, the music on her car stereo playing loudly. An NYPD officer approached her and asked why she was driving without her hands on the steering wheel, according to the suit.
"I said I was dancing, I am at a light," Brock told PIX11. "He asked me to get out of the car."
For unclear reason, Brock contends, she was taken into custody and transported to the NYPD's 30th Precinct, where she was held for a few hours before being released without being charged with any crime. She said she was told to come back the next day to pick up her car, a 2003 BMW 325Ci.
When she showed up at a police substation to get the car the next day, Brock said, "I just felt like from the moment I said I owned a BMW, I was looked at as a liar. They put me in handcuffs and said they just need to put me in handcuffs to take me to my car. And I said OK, whatever it's gonna take to get to my car."
"Then EMS approached me," she continued. "And they said we're gonna take you to your car. And I'm like, in an ambulance? I'm going to my car in an ambulance? I'm going to my car in an ambulance? I was just so confused."
Brock was taken instead to Harlem Hospital, where medical records obtained by her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, show she was injected with powerful sedatives and forced to take doses of lithium.
By Kanya D'Almeida
They called it the "shoe leather treatment" because that was exactly what it was: 10 or 11 guards, sometimes more, would form a circle around the patient and kick him unconscious. Then they'd drag him across the room, strip him naked and throw him in a tiny room with just one window to allow in the snow, and leave him there to freeze.
That was in 1961 in Pennsylvania's Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Twenty years later, the routine abuse that took place there became the subject of a memoir by Bill Thomas who survived 10 years in that institution before breaking out and eventually testifying before a Special State Senate Committee Inquiry on the practices of administrators, guards and even doctors at Farview State Hospital.
The facility has since been closed down, as were thousands of others like it during the wave of "deinstitutionalization" in the 1960s and '70s. Some state mental hospitals remain, but they are much less prevalent than they once were.
However, the shoe leather treatment lives on in jails and prisons around the country, which have become surrogate institutions for people with mental illnesses and where violence, neglect and abuse of prisoners labeled with psychiatric disabilities is on the rise.
Callous and Cruel
There is no hard data nationwide on the use of force against people diagnosed with mental illness, but a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released at the end of May documents, for the first time, the extent of the problem across the approximately 5,100 jails and prisons in the United States.
"We have no data to make any kind of statistical assertion on the issue," Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the US program at HRW and author of the report, explained to Truthout, "but it is fair to assume that it happens in every state, and that it exists in small and large jails, and in small and large prison systems."
Entitled "Callous and Cruel," the research confirms what news items, court cases and personal anecdotes have been suggesting for years: that corrections officers nationwide systematically assault prisoners living with psychiatric disabilities with chemical sprays, strap them down for days on end, shock them with electric stun devices, fling them into isolation and leave them with burned skin, broken bones or damaged organs from beatings.
__________
Callous and Cruel Use of Force Against Inmates With Mental Disabilities in US Jails and Prisons
__________
In their very architecture, prisons are highly regimented places; the inability of prisoners with psychiatric disorders to immediately and unquestioningly respond to the endless orders and routines that dictate prison life means they are frequently at the receiving end of excessive force.
HRW estimates that 58 percent of state prisoners nationwide with a diagnosed mental illness have been charged with rule violations, compared to 43 percent of prisoners who were not diagnosed with mental disabilities.
These "violations" usually involve issues related to their disabilities or altered states of consciousness: paranoia, self-harm, hallucinations or delusions. Prison records document mentally ill prisoners screaming incessantly to drown out the voices in their heads, inserting sharp objects into their penises and smearing feces on the walls. A serious dearth of comprehensive policies guiding the use of force in thousands of institutions that comprise the US prison archipelago means that guards with no psychiatric experience are free to exert extreme punishment for even the most minor offense.
A perpetually unemployed, ninth grade dropout with a criminal
background that includes drug possession, and there you have it—an
uneducated, unemployed, criminal drug addict who, along the way, was
somehow conditioned to believe that he was superior to all African
Americans
This third-rate loser was convinced he was superior to all African Americans by Fox News, right-wing radio personalities
and neo-Nazi websites.
By Shelby Jefferson
At the conclusion of the historic voting rights marches in Selma, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “How Long, Not Long” speech from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. During the address, King analyzed the systemic origins of the racial divide existing between poor whites and Blacks in the American south.
“If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” he declared. “And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the Black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”
These words, delivered in the midst of peaking racial violence and a massive quest towards desegregation, ring ever true today as Jim Crow’s descendants spring forward to carry on a haunting southern legacy. These words sustain in the wake of last week’s massacre at the historic Emanuel A.M.E Church, where a self-professed white supremacist gunned down nine Black parishioners as they attended a Bible study session in Charleston, S.C. These words linger as details emerge about the 21-year-old shooter, Dylann Roof, a racist zealot who harbored such intense hatred for African Americans that he commenced upon waging a “race war” against those who, in his words, “rape our women” and “take over our country.” For that, he told his victims, “you have to go.”
Anyone with an ounce of common sense will acknowledge that Roof’s deeply ingrained delusions, drenched in the falsehoods of white supremacy and an afflicted legacy of racial southern pride, fall within a wider historical context profoundly embedded within the fabric of the American social structure. The shooter’s very assertion that “our” white heteropatriarchal nation and its foundational principles stand breached by the prospect of African American progress, reflect age old ideologies surrounding the dynamics of race—in this case, most explicitly relating to the era following Emancipation and the epoch known as Jim Crow.
During Reconstruction, many poor whites, stifled by the residuals of a former plantation economy, found themselves excluded by wealthy elites also dwelling in the southern states. Intent on keeping Blacks at the bottom of the hierarchal ladder, while also ensuring that a clear separation existed between the lowest entities in the south, rich whites brainwashed their poor, uneducated, disenfranchised brethren into believing that they were naturally superior to even the most distinguished Black citizens. In return, these poor whites, convinced that a newly liberated people would steal their land, take their jobs and rape their women, launched a violent lynch fest across the southern terrain in an effort to stifle social, political and economic progress, while also protecting the sanctity of white womanhood presumably endangered by emancipated Black male bodies.
Continuing in this legacy throughout the 50s and 60s, their minions emerged from the back woods of the American south to resist desegregation, toting the Confederate flag as a badge of honor, forming White Citizens Councils and committing sadistic and often murderous acts of violence to neutralize the Civil Rights Movement. In the end, these predecessors laid the foundation for the advent of a new millennial terrorist like Dylann Roof, a feeble coward who feared that an evolving America would strip him of the only significant quality he possessed—the virtue of whiteness.
In a sense, these historical points placed against the backdrop of the Charleston shooting may perhaps bring into perspective a very American problem personified through a racist extremist like Dylann Roof. Primarily, while this gunman views himself as an intrinsically supreme being, one look at his unsophisticated, disheveled appearance suggests that in the presence of many modern elites, Roof would be diminished to the rankings of lower social status—very much like his predecessors.
Pair that with the fact that he’s a perpetually unemployed, ninth grade dropout with a criminal background that includes drug possession, and there you have it—an uneducated, unemployed, criminal drug addict who, along the way, was somehow conditioned to believe that he was superior to all African Americans, including a renowned United States Senator and eight other citizens who led productive lives geared towards bettering our society.
