The Sociopathic Movement That Is The American Society

December 14, 2011 at 13:02:21

The Sociopathic Movement That Is Poisoning The American Society

By michael payne (about the author)

Poisonous by poisonbilliards.com

This American society is comprised of individuals with widely divergent thoughts and opinions about the issues facing this nation; but there are two groups, in particular, that stand out because they are so diametrically opposed in their thinking. On the one hand there are those people who care deeply about their country, about justice, fairness and equity for all people, and are sincerely concerned about the welfare of others less fortunate than themselves. On the other there are those that, by all indications, have none of those concerns but use manipulation, control and suppression of others to achieve power and personal gain.

This latter element is comprised of individuals who, in psychological terms, are referred to as sociopaths; those who have a difficult time relating to and interacting with others, who lack a social conscience, have a distorted sense of morality and associated values, are adept at lying and manipulation, lack empathy, are remorseless, merciless and have an egocentric, "me" complex.

This is the Sociopathic Movement; the darker side of America that, while it has always been present in this society, in recent times it has been growing at an alarming rate. Those in the Occupy Movement might say that the 1% of Americans who control the wealth of America and have no intention of sharing any part of it with others represents the majority of this movement; that may be a harsh indictment but, then again, it may be largely justifiable by observed behavior and actions.

If we're looking for the best real life examples of this movement we need look no further than the U.S. Congress. We might call this the hotbed, the center of this movement, a perfect illustration of sociopathic behavior. Congress is where "self" is paramount and the needs and interests of the vast majority of Americans have become irrelevant. Not only is this a place where nothing of substance gets done to solve this nation's problems, it is also where these political misfits, primarily the Republican brand, are hard at work promoting the interests of Wall Street and Corporate America.

While not published and distributed in writing, this sociopathic movement has very clear objectives; at the top of its list is the objective to take complete control of this society and how it functions. Now that's a tall order to say the least so, if that is their intent, then how in the world could they go about achieving it? Simple; since the government is the vehicle by which the needs of the people and the problems of the nation must be addressed, their aim is to create gridlock, havoc and render the political process dysfunctional. And by the evidence at hand, their plan is working quite well.

Does anyone think that these supposed representatives of the people and this democracy spend sleepless nights agonizing over the plight of their fellow Americans, the anguish of those who cannot find jobs or have given up on the prospects of ever finding one? No, of course not, because they are concerned only about "numero uno", aka themselves, and how they can secure more and bigger campaign contributions from their corporate masters.

For those who feel that calling this breed of politicians sociopaths is unfair and unjustifiable, consider this: these are the people who are fully aware that up to 25 million of Americans remain unemployed, underemployed or have given up on trying to find jobs. The fabricated government unemployment rate of 8.6% is, in reality, 18%.

So what do these sociopaths do to help these Americans in their time of great need? Do they burn the midnight oil to come up with legislation to create a government/business climate that would create good jobs? Are they trying to find ways to reinvigorate America's dying manufacturing sector? Are they enacting laws that would help those threatened with home foreclosure -- using the same procedures as they did with the bank bailouts? They clearly see what is happening in America and it bothers them not.

No, they are doing none of these things. They have made it very clear that they have no sympathy, empathy and no feelings for the suffering of many of those who elected them. Thoughts of job creation never enter their minds. In fact, as bizarre as it may seem, they are brazenly blocking every attempt at government assistance of any kind to people in need. That could not be more clear than their refusal to extend the payroll tax cuts and the unemployment benefits. What kind of human beings behave in this manner?

But let's not think that just because Republicans are members of this dark movement, that Democrats are entirely innocent, because they're not. Too often, especially in the Senate, a certain group of Democrats have exhibited their sociopathic tendencies and have sided with the GOP obstructionists to disregard the wishes and interests of the people.

A great danger lies in the fact that we the people still do not comprehend the breadth and depth of their plan to take control of this society. These political slaves of Corporate America are entirely comfortable allowing 1% of Americans to control the wealth of this nation. They view those "other" Americans who are not a part of their social strata as mere pawns to be used and manipulated. Justice and equality are not a part of their philosophy; the great disparity of wealth and income within America is something that they believe has been ordained and must be preserved.

This Sociopathic Movement, headquartered in the U.S. Congress and fueled by the money and power of corporations and their many thousands of lobbyists, has branches all over this nation; these branches are located in those states that are controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. We've seen the governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan go after teachers, public sector workers and unions with a vengeance while, at the same time, they brazenly reduce corporate taxes.

But their worst crime against this democracy and its people can be found in what they are doing to limit or eliminate the voting rights of the American people. Nothing could be more undemocratic and un-American than this sinister plan designed to destroy voting rights. And yet, that is exactly what is happening in many states as Republican controlled legislatures are enacting measures that would only allow voters with specific identification, primarily drivers' licenses, to cast their ballots. These agents of voter suppression are well aware that millions of voting age Americans do not have drivers' licenses.

The GOP presidential candidates; with the possible exception of John Huntsman and Ron Paul, this is the worst assemblage of politicians that America may ever have seen; a collection of people who have no regard for those they consider "lower class" Americans; their ignorance and misinterpretation of American history is astounding. They have no understanding of diplomacy or foreign policy. We should all be praying with all our might that none of them ever becomes president because America would never recover from such a deadly blow.

In this same vein what about those many giant, heartless transnational corporations who have ruthlessly and mercilessly laid off many millions of workers and show no remorse for shipping their jobs to workers in China and other overseas nations? Can corporations actually be called sociopathic? Yes, of course they can, since the Supreme Court ruled that they have the right of free speech under the Constitution, then they must be people. Not only had that, but Mitt Romney, the noted Constitutional scholar, also stated that they were people.

This Sociopathic Movement is currently winning the battle since they have most of the weaponry, i.e., money, power, and influence. However the people are fighting back with a fury as evidenced by the growing power of the Occupy Movement across America. And in the coming November, 2012 elections the American people will have the opportunity to put an electoral dagger into the belly of the beast.

Michael Payne

Michael Payne is an independent progressive activist who writes articles about social, economic and political matters as well as American foreign policy. He is a U.S. Army veteran. His major goal is to convince Americans that our perpetual wars must (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

November 29, 2011 at 21:52:25

The Grand Jury Report: Part two of "What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it?"

By Walter Uhler (about the author)

The Pennsylvania State University is linked to the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal because: (1) it employed him as an assistant coach of Penn State's football team during the period when some of his alleged sexual molestations occurred, (2) it employed him when a specific allegation of sexual misconduct was investigated (but not prosecuted) in 1998, (3) a janitor at the university witnessed, but never reported a specific alleged molestation by the now retired Sandusky in 2000, (4) another alleged molestation by Sandusky, which took place on 1 March 2002 in a university shower, was witnessed by a graduate assistant on the football team, (5) Coach Joe Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz and President Graham Spanier received some kind of notice about that 2002 incident and (6) Jerry Sandusky was allowed continued access to Penn State facilities, even after the 2002 alleged incident.

However, when it comes to the potential legal and moral culpability of Penn State officials, such as Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier, only two events come into play: (1) the allegation that prompted the investigation by university police in 1998 and (2) the allegation made by the graduate assistant (subsequently revealed to be Mike McQueary) to Joe Paterno on 2 March 2002.

Part one of this article addressed the events of 1998, where one plausibly might suspect that officials at Penn State, including Paterno, had such knowledge. As I've concluded in Part One (see http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/paterno1.html), there exists no evidence -- at this time -- that would allow anyone to responsibly, and thus ethically, assert that Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State had a clue about Sandusky's alleged dark side until 1998. I repeat, notwithstanding the sexual molestations that Sandusky allegedly committed up through 1997, there is no evidence that officials at Penn State, including Paterno, knew about them.

In 1998, however -- as I've written in Part One -- "an 11-year old boy (identified as Victim 6 in the November 2011 grand jury report) came home with wet hair and told his puzzled mother that he had showered with Sandusky at Penn State's athletic complex. The mother immediately reported the incident to the university police. The university police conducted an investigation and compiled a report running almost 100 pages, which convinced some subsequent investigators -- according to The New York Times, -- that "campus police officers truly wanted to make a case against Sandusky.'"

"Nevertheless, the district attorney (who subsequently disappeared) found insufficient reason to take the case to trial. As the Times reports: "According to people with knowledge of the current Sandusky case, the district attorney's decision in 1998 was a close call, even with the evidence the campus police had.'"

My examination of the few facts available led me to conclude that Joe Paterno either did not know about the 1998 police investigation -- or that he did, indeed, know about the investigation, but also knew that the DA found insufficient evidence to indict.

(Please note: Since the publication of Part One, The Altoona Mirror has written an opinion piece, "Offering Sandusky to PSU Altoona Troubling," which notes that, between late 1998 and early 1999, Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky met with President Spanier and Allen Meadows, then the CEO of Penn State's Altoona campus, to discuss the possibility of starting a football program there, with Sandusky as its head coach. Given the suspicions now swirling around Sandusky and the fact that university police investigated him in 1998, the author of the Mirror article finds the Altoona connection troubling.

Actually, had the author done his homework, he would have found a1982 Sports Illustrated column about Jerry Sandusky in which Joe Paterno expressed concerns about Sandusky not being able to become a head coach because of his commitment to The Second Mile. Paterno asserted that, "many people have talked to me about hiring him"but Jerry's been reluctant to talk to them because of all the commitments he has in the area." Thus, by working as a head coach at PSU Altoona Sandusky would have been able to pursue both objectives.

More surprising is the fact that, in 2000, Sandusky applied for the job of head football coach at the University of Virginia and ultimately was offered the job, only to lose it after contract negotiations became stalemated.

Nevertheless, after giving the Mirror's opinion piece considerable thought, I've concluded that there are as many innocent reasons to have Sandusky move to PSU Altoona or the University of Virginia as there are suspicious reasons. Thus, there is no reason to change the conclusions I reached in Part One.)

Consequently, based upon the evidence available to us thus far, we can stipulate that the events of 1998 -- the allegation, the police investigation and the DA's decision not to indict Sandusky -- constitute the only instance in Sandusky's entire career as a coach at Penn State, when he came under a cloud of suspicion. In other words, if Coach Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley, Vice President Gary Schultz (who had administrative responsibilities for the University police), Penn State's general counsel, Wendell Courtney, and President Graham Spanier learned anything about Sandusky's alleged dark side while he was still coaching at Penn State, they would have learned about it, thanks to the events of 1998.

Although we can't say with certainty what Joe Paterno knew about the 1998 police investigation of Jerry Sandusky and the DA's subsequent decision not to indict him, we can reasonably assume that such knowledge or lack of knowledge would have influenced how he handled the information given to him by then graduate assistant Mike McQueary on 2 March 2002.

Nevertheless, according to the November 2011 grand jury report devoted to "Victim 2," on the evening of March 1, 2002, McQueary witnessed Sandusky anally raping a young boy in a Penn State shower. According to the grand jury report: "The graduate assistant was shocked, but noticed that both Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught."

"The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno, head coach at Penn State. The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno's home, where he reported what he had seen."

Thus, any person possessing the reading comprehension skills of a fifth-grader would be hard pressed to read that specific part of the grand jury report and not conclude that McQueary told Paterno that he witnessed Sandusky anally raping a young boy. But that is not what Paterno told the grand jury. Instead, he testified that McQueary told him that he "had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building shower fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy."

Moreover, after publication of the grand jury report, Paterno took pains to assert: "It was obvious that the witness [McQueary] was distraught over what he saw, but he at no time related to me the very specific actions contained in the grand jury report."

On November 11, 2011, Sara Ganim further sharpened the apparent contradiction separating the testimony of McQueary and Paterno, when she reported: "Paterno said this week that he had stopped the conversation before it got too graphic. Instead, he told McQueary he would need to speak with his superior, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and with Schultz." [Harrisburg Patriot-News] (When I questioned her about the source behind her reporting, Ms. Ganim responded by saying it came from a public statement made by Scott Paterno, Joe's son.)

An even stronger reason to believe Joe Paterno can be found on page ten of the grand jury report. It reads: "Schultz did not ask the graduate assistant [McQueary] for specifics. No one ever did."

But, if we believe Paterno and the grand jury report on this point, we must then ask ourselves, "How do we reconcile such information with that part of the grand jury report that claims McQueary "went to Paterno's home and told him what he saw?'" If Paterno did stop McQueary's conversation "before it got too graphic," how could McQueary have "told him what he saw?"

That very question suggests that we don't really know what McQueary actually told Paterno in 2002. Moreover, given the fact that McQueary didn't testify to the grand jury until December 2010 and Paterno didn't testify until early 2011, one can be almost absolute certain that both McQueary and Paterno have creatively reconstructed what they saw and heard almost nine years earlier.

In Chapter 4 of his book, The Birth of Christianity, John Dominic Crossan attempted to answer the question: "Does Memory Remember?" Crossan examined the scholarly literature devoted to memory, including a very persuasive study conducted at Emory University, where psychology students were asked to complete a questionnaire about the Challenger spacecraft explosion (in January 1986), a mere day after it exploded. When representatives from Emory asked those same students the same questions three years later, they found their answers to be significantly different. These students had "constructed" different memories during those three years without realizing it -- leading Crossan to conclude: "Memory is as much or more creative construction as accurate recollection."

Like the stark fact of the Challenger explosion, it's unlikely that McQueary would creatively construct an anal rape, but surrounding details might have succumbed to creative construction. The same holds true, perhaps more so, for Paterno, who never had his mind riveted by the anal rape.

The possibility of creative construction -- as well as the possibility of intentional deception -- must be kept in mind, not only when examining the conflicting testimony of McQueary and Paterno, but also when examining the testimony of Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz (who was in charge of campus police). They also testified in 2011 about an event that occurred in 2002.

Nevertheless, regardless of the "specifics" related in that conversation between McQueary and Paterno, they proved to be sufficient to persuade Paterno that allegations of sexual misbehavior by Sandusky were being made by McQueary and that such allegations needed to be reported up the administrative hierarchy.

Thus, according to the grand jury report, Paterno testified that he "called Tim Curley"Penn State Athletic Director and Paterno's immediate superior, to his home the very next day, a Sunday, and reported to him that the graduate assistant had seen Jerry Sandusky in the Lasch Building showers fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to the boy." (p. 7)

By reporting to Curley, who, administratively speaking, was a direct report to President Spanier, Paterno fulfilled the requirements of Pennsylvania's mandatory reporting law (23 Pa. Cons. Stat"6311), which requires that reports go to "the person in charge of the institution." Those people who rushed to castigate Paterno for not doing more might want to reconsider, given that the same law "does not require more than one report from any such institution, school, facility or agency."

According to Wendy Murphy -- a leading victim's rights advocate and nationally recognized television legal analyst -- in Pennsylvania "the law is explicit that employees need not report directly to outside authorities and can satisfy their reporting obligations by reporting only to a supervisor." But she adds, in "chain of command" states, employees who report directly to outside law enforcement and child protection service agencies face employment sanctions, including termination, for reporting outside the chain of command." [Wendy J. Murphy: "Prosecute Penn State for "chain of command' cover-up," The Patriot Ledger Nov. 14, 2011] Although it is hard to believe that Penn State might sanction someone for reporting outside the chain of command, the very same law that requires reporting also contains provisions for redress in the event an institution sanctions someone for issuing an unauthorized report.

Moreover, Wes Oliver, an associate professor at Widener School of Law in Harrisburg, has noted the unintended consequences that could occur if every report was filed directly with law enforcement.

"Law enforcement may get bombarded with false (information) from people who have axes to grind, want to make trouble and are seeking whistle blower status," said Oliver.

According to the most recent 2010 Child Abuse report by the state Department of Public Welfare, which investigates child abuse reports, 3,656 of the 24,615 reports investigated qualified as child abuse. ChildLine, the state's child abuse hotline, received 121,868 calls in total. [Caleb Taylor, the Pocono Record16 November 2011]

Did Joe Paterno go beyond the state's minimum requirements for reporting up the chain of command? Yes, if you believe that part of page 8 of the grand jury report where "Schultz testified that he was called to a meeting with Joe Paterno and Tim Curley, in which Paterno reported "disturbing' and "inappropriate' conduct in the shower by Sandusky upon a young boy, as reported by a student or graduate student."

Was Schultz lying? Or did the author(s) of the grand jury report edit out any mention by Paterno or Curley of Schultz's participation? Unfortunately, we lack sufficient information to answer either question.

What we do know -- and what this writer considers to be astounding, given all the media attention devoted to him -- is that Joe Paterno's testimony consumes but one small paragraph among the 18 paragraphs that address Victim 2, and but one small paragraph in the 23 pages summarizing the case against Sandusky, Curley and Schultz.

One the one hand, it's hard to believe that the grand jury would omit that part of Paterno's testimony that mentioned Schultz's participation in his meeting with Curley. One the other hand, unless Joe Paterno only spoke to the grand jury for 10 seconds, the grand jury report appears to have omitted most of Paterno's testimony.

If Shultz did participate in the meeting with Paterno and Curley, it would be in accord with the reporting of Sara Ganim, who wrote that Paterno "told McQueary he would need to speak with his superior, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and with Schultz." But what's critical, is the fact that McQueary was eventually able to make his allegations about Sandusky to the official who was administratively responsible for the university's police.

If Paterno was merely concerned with "covering his ass" -- now the consensus opinion among the thoughtless mob in America -- why would Paterno tell McQueary that he not only needed to talk to the Athletic Director, but also the Vice President in charge of University police? Both Curley and Schultz directly report to Spanier, so either one can "notify the person in charge of the institution." Thus, the insistence that Schultz be involved gains Paterno nothing in that realm. But, by including Schultz -- by insisting that McQueary meet with Schultz, as well as Curley -- Paterno guarantees that McQueary will be able to make his allegations to the person charged with administering the University police.

And if McQueary actually met with Curley and Schultz some ten days after the meeting between Paterno and Curley, didn't Paterno have sufficient reason to believe that he fulfilled his obligation to report sexual abuse AND put McQueary in touch with the person who could launch a police investigation?

None of the above definitively puts to rest the widespread suspicion that Paterno, Curley, Schultz and President Spanier participated in a cover-up, which assured that the police never would be brought into an investigation. Plans to cover up might best explain why it took approximately ten days before Curley and Schultz met with McQueary. State law, after all, requires reporting of such sexual assaults within 48 hours of notification. McQueary and Paterno performed their legal responsibilities to report immediately, Curley and Schultz did not. Plans to cover it up also might explain why Schultz never notified his immediate subordinate, the Chief of the University police.

Nevertheless, the fact that Paterno told McQueary to meet with Curley AND Schultz, that Paterno subsequently met with Curley, if not Schultz, to report something of a sexual nature between Sandusky and a young boy to within the 48 hours required by law, and the fact that McQueary subsequently met with Curley and Schultz -- without Paterno in the room -- all strongly suggest that Paterno not only did his part to foster an investigation, but also was willing to let the chips fall where they may.

These actions fully support Paterno's subsequent assertion: "As coach Sandusky was retired from our coaching staff at that time, I referred the matter to university administrators." The grand jury report, which looked for and found that Curley and Schultz engaged in a cover-up, concluded that Paterno performed his legal obligation, which is why he will be a witness, rather than a defendant in the trials against Sandusky, Curley and Schultz.

Even Pennsylvania state police Commissioner Frank Noonan acknowledged that Paterno fulfilled his legal obligation when he forwarded McQueary's allegations to university administrators. Finally, in early November 2011, the Harrisburg Patriot-News reported praise for Paterno: "sources said the deputy state prosecutor handling the case said that Paterno did the right thing, and handled himself appropriately in 2002 and during the three-year investigation that ended Friday."

Consequently, the evidence available to us thus far not only clears Paterno of any suspicion that he engaged in a cover-up -- an extremely far-fetched suspicion, in the first place -- but also that Paterno earned praise for performing his legal duty. Arguably, by insisting that Schultz be brought in, Paterno went beyond his legal obligation.

Unfortunately, such evidence proved worthless as jackals in the news media seized upon the hysteria surrounding the news of despicable sexual molestation of young boys by Jerry Sandusky to transform a "Jerry Sandusky scandal" into a "Penn State scandal" and then a "Joe Paterno scandal." Now, there's no questioning why the "Jerry Sandusky scandal" emerged. Moreover, given that Sandusky was once employed by Penn State (and maintained close ties with Penn State), and given the grand jury report and the subsequent indictments of Penn State's Athletic Director, Tim Curley, and the Vice President responsible for overseeing the University police, Gary Schultz, one understands how the "Sandusky scandal" became the "Penn State scandal." But, how the "Sandusky scandal" and the "Penn State scandal" became the "Joe Paterno scandal" is much less easy to understand.

This is the question that I will address in Part Three of this article.

Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.

Monday, November 21, 2011
What did Joe Paterno know and when did he know it? Part One
This article examines what Joe Paterno knew about Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual molestations of young boys during the period from the mid-1970s to 1998.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Lynching Joe Paterno in the Court of Public Opinion
(17 comments) Thoughtless public opinion and reckless journalism has set the stage for Joe Paterno's lynching by Penn State's Trustees

Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds

Will testing the brain, even before birth, separate the good seeds from the bad?

by Josh Fischman, from The Chronicle Review
November-December 2011



David Gothard / www.davidgothard.com

When he was in his late 20s and living in his native England, Adrian Raine spent a lot of time locked in a van with violent criminals.

Raine worked at a maximum security prison in Hull, where his job involved attaching polygraph-type sensors to the prisoners’ skin to measure their agitation as he bothered them with loud sounds and flashes of light. His lab was in the back of a van, he says, “and the guards were very concerned these men would commandeer the vehicle and escape.”

Their solution? “Take my keys away and lock the doors from the outside.”

“So there I was, in this very tiny space,” recalls Raine, who is now in his 50s and is the chair of the criminology department at the University of Pennsylvania. “And I kept watching the needles these sensors were connected to, for I imagined that the first sign these men were about to rush me would be the needles starting to swing wildly as the men got excited and prepared to attack.”

They never did. And since then, Raine has never strayed far from the company of killers, wife batterers, and psychopaths—searching for clues to bad behavior or even criminal intent. Along with several other researchers, he has pioneered the science of neurodevelopmental criminology, which has established that among adult offenders, juvenile delinquents, and even younger children there are features in the brain that seem to reduce fear, impair decision making, and blunt emotional reactions to others’ distress.

While Raine was attending Oxford, he vacillated between wanting to be an experimental psychologist and wanting to teach primary school. As a result, he did some student teaching, which showed him that “there were some kids who were just bullies, very extreme, and I wondered, Why? Where did the behavior come from? Why were some kids angels and some devils?”

He made the topic into his doctoral research at the University of York, where he began using the lie detector–like sensors to measure heart rates and changes in the way the skin conducts electricity in teenagers with varying degrees of aggression.

After graduating, Raine began his work at Hull, where he did time with murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. “The main thing I learned was that I really can’t change these people,” he says. “It brought me back to kids, to earlier stages, thinking we’ve got to look at the earlier, predisposing factors, when maybe we can do something.”

Raine eventually broke out of jail and into academe, first at the University of Nottingham and then at the University of Southern California. One of his major lines of research was long-term studies of children, measuring physiological reactivity at young ages to see if any pattern related to bad behavior decades later.

Raine lucked into a major source of data. In the late 1960s, the World Health Organization had started to follow about 1,800 children on Mauritius, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean.

Over the years, Raine and several colleagues have shown that children from Mauritius who have slower heart rates and reduced skin responses when they are exposed to loud tones or challenging questions tend to run afoul of the law when they get older. In 1996 the researchers learned that 15-year-olds with this pattern tended to have criminal records by age 29. In 2010 the age was pushed back further: 3-year-olds who had similar physical responses were rated by teachers as more aggressive than other children five years later.

Normally, a startling noise races the heart and sends the body into a high state of alert, which is what the skin electrodes pick up. But there’s evidence that children who are not alarmed don’t react to the threat of punishment when they mis­behave. Nor do they react to other people’s distress.

At Southern California, Raine was part of a team studying 605 families of twins. Some of the twins were identical, sharing 100 percent of their genes, and some were nonidentical, sharing 50 percent. When the children were ages 9 and 10, researchers gave them a battery of psychological tests to assess aggression and antisocial behavior. They also asked parents, teachers, and other children to rate the subjects’ antisocial tendencies. The results showed that these traits were more consistent in the identical pairs. “I think at least 50 percent of this can be attributed to genetics,” Raine says.

Raine then began wondering what blunted the senses. Was there something actually in the brains of these people that tied into this lack of fear, lack of sensitivity, and abundance of mayhem?

Others had wondered the same thing.

During the 1990s, Antonio R. Damasio, then a pioneering professor of neuroscience at the University of Iowa, focused on the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped area in the middle of the brain known to help process emotions. In patients with lesions in the region, he observed a repeated pattern of bad decisions, like making risky bets while they were gambling. Cut off from emotional reactions, these people lacked an alarm bell that signaled a poor choice. They could see many courses of action but, shorn of feedback from the amygdala, couldn’t tell good from bad. This extended to reading other people’s emotions, as well.

Damasio also found that damage to the prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in decision making, could turn mild-mannered patients into rash, destructive individuals, seeming to rob them of a brake on their impulses. This led him to propose that the two regions normally link up to prevent people from harming others by generating emotional alarm (the amygdala) and acting on it (the prefrontal cortex). When either part of the chain is damaged, antisocial actions result. Damasio called this “acquired sociopathy.”

In 1997 Raine and several colleagues put the theory to the test on real killers. They compared the functioning of the brains of 41 convicted murderers with that of 41 normal people. Using positron emission tomography, or PET, a type of scan that measures the activity in areas of the brain, they saw lower activity in both the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala of the murderers’ brains.

When they further divided murderers into those who came from “good” homes and those who came from “bad” homes—those filled with neglect, abuse, and poverty—the first group showed lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, in particular an area called the orbitofrontal cortex. Raine’s interpretation: Genetics and anatomy were more influential on their development than was the way they grew up.

What’s more, a series of studies using magnetic resonance imaging, which reveals structures and shapes, showed that criminals and people who scored high on tests of antisocial disorders had a smaller than normal orbitofrontal region and amygdala. And the corpus callosum, the communications bridge between the brain’s two hemispheres, was abnormally large.

But those findings raised a chicken-and-egg-type question: Did the brain features produce the behavior, or did the behavior change the brain? Violent criminals are known to bang their heads into walls and abuse drugs, and both of those things damage the brain, possibly producing the shrinkage Raine was seeing on the brain scans. He needed to go back even further and look for a defect that begins before birth and can still be detected in adults. Raine found it in a hole in the head. More precisely, a thin wall of brain tissue that separates a hole—all brains have these spaces—into two. The hole appears during the 12th week of a fetus’s development, and the wall—pushed forward by a normally developing amygdala and other brain areas—divides it by the 20th week. When the wall doesn’t form completely, a condition known by the jawbreaking name of cavum septum pellucidum, it’s usually a sign of abnormal development in the amygdala and other structures. Years later, in adults, the failed wall can be spotted in a brain scan.

In a 2010 paper, Raine and his colleagues compared people with and without the feature on several fronts. The groups were tested for antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and aggression. Their records were searched for criminal arrests and convictions. In every single one of those areas, there were a lot more men and women with the wall defect. Here, finally, was evidence tracing criminality back to the womb, before any head-banging could occur.

“I think there’s no longer any question, scientifically, that there’s an association between the brain and criminal behavior. We’re beyond the point of debating that,” says Raine. “Every study can be criticized on methodology. But when you look at the whole, at all the different designs, it’s just hard to deny there is something going on with biology.”

So what do we do now?

One thing we don’t do, says Nathalie M.G. Fontaine, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana University at Bloomington, is mark children as future criminals. “I would never put a risk number on a specific child,” says Fontaine, who has studied callousness among children as a predictor of bad behavior. “We are talking about groups, not individuals. We don’t know what will happen with any one child, because there are also protective factors.” A strongly supportive family, or an influential schoolteacher, or religion could blunt the effects of a hole in the head on the plastic, changeable brain.

Raine is a big believer in protective factors. “You can’t make a lesion to the prefrontal cortex and, hey presto, you get a criminal. It’s not like that,” he says. “Of course social factors are critically important.” In his current study of Philadelphia children with the slow physical reactivity that has been linked to trouble, some are getting a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids and calcium to see if they protect brain cells, some are getting cognitive-behavioral therapy, and some are getting both to see if trouble can be staved off.

Still, the time is coming, Raine believes, when putting numbers on children will be tempting. If a 75 percent chance of a bad seed isn’t high enough, he wonders, what about 80 percent? Or 95? “Look, I have two children, 9-year-old nonidentical twin boys,” he says. “And I’d definitely want to know, especially if there was a treatment that has a chance of success. But I realize not every parent will. We have to start having this conversation now, though, so we understand the risks and the benefits. It’s easy to get on your moral high horse about stigma and civil liberties, but are you going to have blood on your hands in the future because you’ve blocked an approach that could lead to lives being saved?”

Josh Fischman is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. Excerpted from The Chronicle Review, an award-winning weekly newspaper for college and university faculty members, administrators, and students. www.chronicle.com

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Science-Technology/Neurodevelopmental-Criminology-Acquired-Sociopathy-Predict-Criminals.aspx?page=4#ixzz1f1Wu7ZiM

The American Paternalistic Culture of Rape

AlterNet.org

AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer

The New York Times Uses its Op-Ed Pages to Make Fun Of Sexual Harassment

Why is the Times running an op-ed from professional antifeminist Katie Roiphe declaring that sexual harassment isn't serious?

November 14, 2011 |

Photo Credit: CSPAN

Herman Cain's campaign has raked in donations from loyal GOP supporters even after a handful of damning sexual harassment (and worse) allegations have surfaced.

Penn State students rallied and rioted on behalf of their coach even after it was revealed that he failed to report a witnessed child rape to the police.

Our rape culture, our misunderstanding of the way assault and harassment demean and hurt victims, is worse than ever. Denial is running rampant.

You'd think our national op-ed pages would rush to publish some feminist-minded pieces by professional victim's advocates pushing back against this pervasive culture, arguing that we take sexual assault and harassment more seriously, that we update our attitudes to reflect our laws and update those laws, too, if needed.

What we got instead, in the New York Times, was a column by professional antifeminist Katie Roiphe, sounding a lot like Don Draper, with the essential message that sexual harassment is just ladies who can't take a joke.

The headline is, "In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks" and the URL spells out "Sexual Harassment? What on Earth is That?"

There's nothing as fresh, cutting-edge and original as calling harassment victims humorless! I knew that '90s nostalgia was in style again, but I didn't expect this type of Anita Hill-era retread.

Now, as much as it would be lovely for all of the world's many humor-loving feminists to ignore this high-placed concern trolling and go back to making jokes in environments where it's actually appropriate and simultaneously maintaining the fight for respectful and safe public and workplaces (a distinction most normal, socially well-attuned people can make) we do have to stop and address her charges.

Because unfortunately, these kinds of contrarian arguments--so popular at the New York Times and like publications--are dangerous. They get swallowed up and absorbed by the mainstream culture and become used as weapons, allowing people who should know better to dismiss those who raise legitimate concerns about rape and harassment and abuse of power as "no fun," "man-hating" and "anti-sex." This stereotype as anyone who has seen or heard about a SlutWalk (or talked to most self-identified feminists in the last 50 years) can tell you, is simply not true.

Before we deconstruct the argument, let's take note of its arguer's history. Katie Roiphe has been described by Rebecca Traister as the "enfant terrible" of the feminist movement, dogging women's advocates ever since 1991 when she published The Morning After, a book that tried to discredit the notion of acquaintance rape on campus. (Parodying the content of that book, the Awl's Choire Sicha once memorably introduced her thus: "Katie Roiphe—whose first book, You're Actually Just a Whore: Raping Doesn't Happen at College, was so ridiculous that she should never have been published again.")

The monikers go on, but you get the idea. Insert feminist idea, expect a knee-jerk Roiphe retort, one filled with allusions to her own delightful rapport with the male gender, unlike those other feminists who are always killing the buzz with complaints like "rape is bad."

Anyway, on to her argument this weekend in the classic Roiphe vein, denouncing the fuss over the Herman Cain harassment allegations. She writes, essentially, that sexual harassment laws mean that dirty jokes have been criminalized, no one can have any fun at work, and the long arm of the law now prohibits flirty, bold women (presumably like herself!) from parrying innuendo for innuendo. Instead, in a world as bleak as 1984's dystopia, all would-be wits must become silent desk-drones lest they and their repartee-partners be hauled off in chains and booked at their local precinct.

Except that's not what sexual harassment is, and most people know that. It's not about conversation, but about abuse of authority or privilege.

Ask nearly any woman who worked in an office environment before those laws Roiphe decries came into effect and they will tell you that it wasn't very much fun, and it wasn't mutual--each day was a gauntlet, in fact.

At the Daily Beast, Leslie Bennetts explains why what Herman Cain is accused of doing was wrong, and why it should be taken seriously:

"Sexual harassment is about the lust for sexual gratification, obviously, but it’s also about power. When a man in a position of authority pressures a woman to service him sexually even if she doesn’t want to, and her ability to refuse is compromised by ...her dependent status, the man is committing an egregious abuse of power. For him, that’s a large part of the point: he’s demonstrating his dominance and demanding that the woman acknowledge her subservience."

Beyond the sort of quid pro quo (or implied quid pro quo) behavior Bennetts describes, there's the notion of a hostile environment. Roiphe makes the ignorant assumption that all ribald or sexual chatter in the office is an actionable offense (it also assumes that most people are dying to talk dirty at work, but that is another story) and that office environments are dominated by prudes who yell "see you in court!" when they hear any reference they deem impure.

In reality, though, a hostile environment is described as a repeated and protracted problem that is ignored or not addressed: "a pattern of exposure to unwanted sexual behavior from persons other than an employee's direct supervisor where supervisors or managers take no steps to discourage or discontinue such behavior."

Amanda Marcotte wrote a rebuttal of Roiphe noting her utter misunderstanding of this basic legal and workplace concept:

Roiphe is, without a shred of evidence, claiming that sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits are generally about a single comment or quickly dispatched advance. In reality, for something to rise to the level of sexual harassment, it has to be a "hostile work environment", aka persistent abuse. No one is getting it for one day saying something a little off-color, and it's intellectually dishonest for her to suggest otherwise.

Marcotte also notes that the vagueness of words like "hostile" and "uncomfortable" are there not to be able to qualify everything off-color as sexual harassment, but to allow people to discern the difference:

As the Clarence Thomas situation showed, sexual harassers are endlessly inventive with their euphemisms or gestures. If anything, they deliberately act as weird as possible in an act that is so common that psychologists have a name for it: gaslighting, i.e. acting strange to disorient the victim so that she doubts herself ... Thus, the language of 'uncomfortable' and 'hostlie' is good language, since a reasonable person can see that putting a pubic hair on a Coke can is a hostile gesture designed to make the victim uncomfortable.

At Slate, Roiphe's colleague KJ Dell'Antonia also has a response, taking on Roiphe's assertion that no smart and competent woman would be "derailed" by an unwanted advance. This is true, she writes, noting that harassment laws and protocols have helped those smart and competent women:

Real sexual harassment happens. That it happens less than it once did is because as a society, we've legislated against it, actively discussed it, and attempted, however ambiguously, to define it. That gives smart, competent young women the ability to whack their colleagues upside the head (harassment!) and say, as I once did to a friend: Dude, you just cannot forward that joke to everyone on your team.

Indeed, the existence of those laws and discussions has empowered women to be able to speak up when they feel a colleague is nudging a line--and often in a friendly way, without resorting to suing.

One advantage of this column is that it's brought out Roiphe's opponents' wit. A column this absurd needs an absurdist rejoinder. Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan mocks Roiphe by taking her rhetoric to the extreme, "If we simply laughed and acted charmed when men did stuff like speculate on our cup sizes in front of each other, there would be so many more female CEOs right now," she writes. "It is truly an outrage that so many men have been put to death for telling women in the elevator that they're pretty." Exactly. The idea that there's some sort of office-to-courtroom pipeline for everyday encounters is risible.

Again: most women who were in the workplace before sexual harassment laws have some stories to tell, and they aren't about occasional ribald remarks or being asked out once by a colleague.

Sexual harassment is a genuine bar to equality, and the onslaught of denial in both the Herman Cain situation and even worse, the Penn State rape coverup scandal, shows that we need to talk about these dynamics in the places we work and play seriously.

In the Nation, Dave Zirin has a chilling series of anecdotes about the denial of rape culture that took place under Penn State's Joe Paterno.

"In 2003, less than one year after Paterno was told that Sandusky was raping children, he allowed a player accused of rape to suit up and play in a bowl game. Widespread criticism of this move was ignored. In 2006, Penn State’s Orange Bowl opponent Florida State, sent home linebacker A.J. Nicholson, after accusations of sexual assault. Paterno’s response, in light of recent events, is jaw-dropping. He said, “There’s so many people gravitating to these kids. He may not have even known what he was getting into, Nicholson. They knock on the door; somebody may knock on the door; a cute girl knocks on the door. What do you do? Geez. I hope—thank God they don’t knock on my door because I’d refer them to a couple of other rooms.” [The local branch of NOW] called for Paterno’s resignation and short of that, asked to dialogue with Paterno and the team. Neither Paterno nor anyone in the power at Penn State accepted the invitation."

Paterno's comments are the kind of flip, obnoxious victim-blaming that oils the wheels of a much more insidious rape culture--as the trajectory of the Penn State story shows.

And so while it's necessary to make fun of Roiphe's reactionary writing, it's also important to remember that the culture she aids and abets with her prominent hair-tossing is neither witty, ribald nor clever. It's tragic.

Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at AlterNet, a staff writer at RH Reality Check and a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published in Jezebel.com and on the websites of the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. Find her at sarahmseltzer.com.

Social Psychosis and Collective Insanity

Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Social Psychosis and Collective Sanity

by Winslow Myers

We know from the sad experience of Nazi Germany or Khmer Rouge Cambodia that it is possible for whole nations to become mentally ill, with horrendous consequences. At the time, however, the Nazis or the Khmers had no idea that they were deeply out of touch with the reality that all people are equally worthy of respect and care.

The population of the earth recently surpassed 7 billion. As we move further into the condition of global villagehood, it becomes more important than ever to assess our shared mental health. Collectively we can less and less afford the distortions that afflict the psyches of individual persons, such as denial, regression into infantile rage, fantasy ideation, or blind projection outward onto “enemies” of our unresolved inner tensions. Everyone is aware of the potential horror, for example, of a nuclear weapon falling into the hands of someone not in the clearest of minds.

The social psychosis of denial is one of the greatest of our temptations. As I write I’m sitting outdoors on my back porch in Boston. It is November 8. The “expected” temperature for an average day at this time of year might be around 40. Today it is 70. News stories in the last week have once again sounded the alarm of the amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere being much greater than previously estimated. The displacement of millions of people by climate instability has the potential to be the primary cause of future conflict.

No upstanding citizen from whatever country will find it congenial to be lumped together with the coldly murderous Nazis or the ruthless Khmer Rouge—or even with the notion of the “good German” who professed not to know what was happening to the Jews around him. It is painful enough merely to think of ourselves as people who, because we did not do enough, accelerated untenable conditions with which our children and grandchildren will have to cope down the time-stream. No previous generation has had to make prospective judgments about what they needed to change or sacrifice to ensure the distant future for the entire human species.

Few of our national figures are leading on such issues. Instead, the value-ideal of consumerist economic prosperity built upon models of endless growth continues to dominate the marketplace of ideas and determine the criteria for political success.

This growth model has a momentum of its own, not necessarily connected to our best interests. Take nuclear weapons. Almost 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States is still planning to spend 700 billion dollars on new and upgraded nuclear arms, including building 12 new ballistic missile submarines. But the U.S. is not alone. Russia, China, India, Israel, France and Pakistan are all setting aside vast sums for nuclear missile delivery systems of various sizes. Each nation rationalizes its actions on the basis of what its supposed rivals are doing. The net result will not be the intended increase in security, but a gross diminishment of collective security potentially ending in disaster.

If this is not a form of social madness, of collective insanity, what is? If the weapons are ever used there will be no victory, and the money spent on these useless weapons becomes unavailable for meeting challenges like global climate change and basic budget balancing. Perhaps most importantly of all, there are new models and processes that humans can use to diminish the original tensions that motivate the proliferation of such weapons. We know more than ever about how to overcome the fear within our own psyches that drives the engine of international hostility. At the same time there are enormous new opportunities for people to meet either virtually or face-to-face and learn how much they have in common—in short, to change from imaging others as enemies to interacting as friends, because survival and the greater good demands it.

The hope of reconciliation has its roots deep in a past that we tend to forget. Few among us recall the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war. Written by the great diplomat and poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960, St. John Perse, enthusiastically endorsed by hundreds of thousands of citizen-activists around the world, the pact was signed in 1928 by the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, Weimar Germany, and many other nations. It is still the law of the land in the U.S. today—clearly honored more in the breach than the observance. It may be as Keats asserted, that poets really are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Carol Daniel KasbariThe fate of peace lies more now with ordinary people than with the Gandhis and Nobel Prize winners. Carol Daniel Kasbari is an activist-citizen in the Middle East—a Palestinian scholar, writer, wife, and mother. This accomplished facilitator of change suggests a number of actions to help end potential or actual war:

• Cross borders to successfully engage perceived adversaries in authentic, face-to-face, ongoing dialogue; tell your story to the world.
  
• Invite news professionals to document what you experience and what progress you create with others; expand the circle to include vastly more interested citizens and, yes, also the skeptics and the unconvinced—all the voices.
  
• Strengthen your own support system at home by involving people who matter most to you, so they also experience how easily the ice of alienation can be broken.

Here is the URL of a 20 minute talk by Ms. Kasbari: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxJaffa-Carol-Daniel-Kasbari

Both the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement are at least potentially geared in the direction of this understanding of interdependence and relationship. There are thousands of non-governmental organizations that are working to build friendships and break down barriers of alienation and misunderstanding. These too could benefit from an infusion of funds presently delegated to the insanely wasteful upgrading of nuclear weapons systems. If we are going to have a growth model, let it be growth in breaking down artificial barriers of tribe, race and religion, growth in the deep realization that all seven billion of us are in this together. That way lies collective sanity.

Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Board of Beyond War, a non-profit educational foundation whose mission is to explore, model and promote the means for humanity to live without war.

PSU has no way out of this mess

Wednesday, 09 November 2011 00:30

Written by Bob Smizik

Penn State, by most indications, is hunkered down in damage control and, presumably, mapping some sort of strategy out of what is a catastrophic situation.

This proud school, which has forged ahead by leaps and bounds academically over the past few decades, is buckling at the knees.

The man who has been the public face of the university for some 40 years is likely to be forced out of his job within days or weeks. The athletic director has taken a leave of absence to prepare for criminal charges and it is highly unlikely he‘ll ever return. The president could -- and should -- be gone before the football coach.

Faced with covering up multiple sexual abuse charges against a former assistant football coach, Penn State is the focus of the nation’s ire and contempt. And the first shoe had barely drooped.

Up next, will be the ugly firings and dismissals to be followed by an epidemic of lawsuits that will have near-universal public support and which will likely cost the university or its insurance carrier hundreds of millions of dollars.

A giant of a university is staggering beneath an avalanche of horrific publicity.

And here’s what is amazing. Penn State knew this was coming. It had six months to prepare and it was totally unprepared. It was a known and published fact that Jerry Sandusky was under investigation and it was pretty well known that the news would not be good -- although no one expected the depth of the charges against Sandusky.

Penn State was so unprepared for what it should have been prepared that president Graham Spanier continues to call the situation ``troubling.’’

Troubling is a tooth ache or losing a football game. The situation Penn State is in is about 500 times greater than ``troubling.’’

As for the Paterno angle to this story, it makes no difference what he heard or did not hear from Mike McQueary. If McQueary said nothing more than he saw Sandusky in the shower with a 10-year-old boy -- and I doubt he said that little -- Paterno had to be aggressive in finding out exactly what happened and taking action against it.

But the New York Times is now reporting Paterno’s public stance that McQueary did not make him fully aware of the nature of Sandusky’s 2002 assault on the boy might not hold up.

The paper said, ``A person with knowledge of Mr. McQueary’s version of events called Mr. Paterno’s claim into question. The person said Mr. McQueary had told those in authority the explicit details of what he saw, including in his face-to-face meeting with Mr. Paterno the day after the incident.’’

There's no happy ending to this story. It should not be drawn out. Spanier needs to go the way of Curley and as a soon as possible.

Paterno needs to step down no later than the last game of the season.

Finding a successor will not be easy. Does anyone think Urban Meyer wants any part of this mess? He can have his pick of jobs. Why would he want one so tainted by a horrific scandal.

There is no PR solution to this. It cannot be finessed.

Penn State has made a gigantic blunder at the highest levels of the school. It has no choice but to take it’s medicine and hope to rebuild from the rubble.

The Forced Right to the Right Life: Beating Babies in the Name of Jesus

AlterNet.org

BELIEF

AlterNet / By Frank Schaeffer

Beating Babies in the Name of Jesus? The Shady World of Right-Wing 'Discipline' Guides

There is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God.

November 8, 2011 |

There is a brutal movement in America that legitimizes child abuse in the name of God. Two stories recently converged to make us pay attention. Last week, a video went viral of a Texas judge brutally whipping his disabled daughter. And on Monday, the New York Times published a story about child deaths in homes that have embraced the teachings of To Train Up a Child, a book by Christian preacher Michael Pearl that advocates using a switch on children as young as six months old.

What many people may not realize is that in the evangelical alternative universe of the home school movement, tightly knit church communities and the following of a number of big-time leaders and authors, physical punishment of children has been glorified for years.

As the Times illustrates -- "Preaching Virtue of Spanking, Even as Deaths Fuel Debate" -- the books of Michael Pearl and his wife Debi have been found in the homes where several children were killed.

They're not the only right-wing Christians who advocate these methods. Some of the most respected evangelical discipline gurus have made beating children not just "respectable" in conservative religious circles, but even turned it into a godly activity.

In 1977 James Dobson founder of the "Focus on the Family" religious empire and radio program, wrote a book called Dare To Discipline, whose purpose was, essentially, to get parents to beat their children.

In his book Dobson glorified a sadomasochistic/spiritual ritual of "discipline." He said he wanted to stop a "liberal" trend in America that was moving away from the godly thrashing of infants. He wanted to help "restore" America to God and the good old days of child hitting. This fit in well with the notion of God as retribution-in-chief that evangelicals endorse.

Dobson isn't alone. There's also the work of evangelical "family values" guru Bill Gothard, with a following of millions. As reported by the Cincinnati Beacon, Matthew Murray, the young shooter who killed a bunch of churchgoers in 2007, had been raised according to the teachings of evangelist Bill Gothard.

"I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard rules and then trancing out," he wrote Dec. 1 under the monicker "nghtmrchld26" on a Web forum for former Pentecostal Christians.

Bill Gothard is the founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles in Illinois, which promotes a Christian home "education" program. As quoted in the Beacon article Murray said "I remember how it was, like every day was Mission Impossible trying to keep the rules or not get caught and just ...survive every single (expletive) day,"

In The Strong Willed Child (Living Books 1992), Dobson makes a parallel between beating children and beating dogs:

"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud.

"What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!

"But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO." [Emphasis Dobson's]

"[I]t is possible to create a fussy, demanding baby by rushing to pick him up every time he utters a whimper or sigh. Infants are fully capable of learning to manipulate their parents through a process called reinforcement, whereby any behavior that produces a pleasant result will tend to recur. Thus, a healthy baby can keep his mother hopping around his nursery twelve hours a day (or night) by simply forcing air past his sandpaper larynx.

"Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of 'original sin' which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster."

Dobson is mild compared to the popular evangelical authors Michael and Debi Pearl. In their book To Train Up a Child (1994) they advocate beating babies.

In the book they recommend "switching" a 7-month-old on the bare bottom or leg seven to eight times as a punishment for getting angry. If the baby is still angry, the urge parents to repeat the punishment until the child gives in to the pain. The "switch" they recommend for an under 1-year-old is from a willow tree and/or a 12-inch ruler.

The leadership of the evangelical world, from Billy Graham to the editors of Christianity Today magazine or the megachurch pastors like Rick Warren, have not called for the banishment of abusers like the Pearls, Dobson or Gothard. These people remain in good standing.

In the Pearls' case, actual criminal complaints have been brought against some parents who have killed their children and who have been following the "methods" in To Train Up a Child. This book can be nevertheless be found in thousands of "respectable" evangelical bookstores. Here's what the evangelicals approve by their silence and complicity, as noted in the Examiner and many other media sources:

A California couple has been charged with murder and torture after their discipline methods caused the death of one of their children and critical injuries for another.

Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz of Paradise, California, are accused of murdering their 7-year-old adopted daughter during a "discipline session." The couple is also charged with the torture of their 11-year-old adopted daughter and cruelty to a child for signs of bruising discovered on their 10-year-old biological son.

The parents allegedly used a 15-inch length of plastic tubing used for plumbing to beat the children, a practice recommended in the book "To Train Up a Child" by Michael and Debi Pearl of "No Greater Joy Ministries."

The same plumbing supply tools were linked to a North Carolina child's death in 2006, when a devotee of the Pearls accidentally killed her 4-year-old son by suffocating him in tightly wrapped blankets.

Police later found out about the Pearls' recommendations to beat children with this type of plumbing supply tubing from a Salon Magazine article, "Spare the quarter-inch plumbing supply line, spoil the child."

Mr. Pearl, who has no degree or training in child development, writes in his book that he and his wife used "the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules" -- namely, "switches."

On their web site, the Pearls write that "switching" or giving "licks" with a plumbing supply line is a "real attention getter."

And it is not just individuals who are abused. Whole "Christian" organizations are involved. According to a report by Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis (and many other media sources over the years),

"At first glance, the Bill Gothard-founded and run Indianapolis Training Center looks like an ordinary conference hotel. But some say there are dark secrets inside. "They're not here to play," Mark Cavanaugh, an ITC staffer tells a mother on hidden-camera video. 'They're here because they've been disobedient, they've been disrespectful.'"

He's talking about young offenders who are sent to the center by the Marion County Juvenile Court. Critics of the program here, however, have another view. "This is sort of a shadow world where these kids almost disappear," said John Krull, executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. The pitch for the centers says that they were founded by Gothard because: "At the age of 15, Bill Gothard noticed some of his high school classmates making unwise decisions. Realizing that they would have to live with the consequences of these decisions, he was motivated to dedicate his life to helping young people make wise choices."

The WTHR report goes on to detail how they help these young people make "wise choices":

"But Eyewitness News has learned of disturbing allegations about the center, including routine corporal punishment -- sometimes without parental consent -- and solitary confinement that can last for months.

And just last week, Child Protective Services began investigating the center. That investigation involves Teresa Landis, whose 10-year-old daughter spent nearly a year at the center -- sent there, according to Judge Payne, after she attacked a teacher and a school bus driver. What happened next outrages her family and critics of the ITC. The girl allegedly was confined in a so-called "quiet room" for five days at a time; restrained by teenage "leaders" who would sit on her; and hit her with a wooden paddle 14 times. At least once, the family contends, she was prevented from going to the bathroom and then forced to sit in her own urine."

Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard both have a big followings in Rick Perry's hang-em'-high "Christian" Texas. And Texas is where evangelical leader Gary North is based as he writes and preaches his Reconstructionist/Dominionist theology about applying literal Old Testament law -- including the execution of "incorrigible youths" -- as mandated by the Bible. So even Dobson is "mild" by comparison to the Reconstructionists who did so much to influence the far-right "Christian" politics -- the likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

Here is how evangelical "man of God" Dobson describes how to beat a child using his own life as a guide. He writes in The New Dare To Discipline:

"The day I learned the importance of staying out of reach shines like a neon light in my mind. I made the costly mistake of sassing her when I was about four feet away. I knew I had crossed the line and wondered what she would do about it. It didn't take long to find out. Mom wheeled around to grab something with which to express her displeasure, and her hand landed on a girdle.

"Those were the days when a girdle was lined with rivets and mysterious panels. She drew back and swung the abominable garment in my direction, and I can still hear it whistling through the air. The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles, wrapping themselves around my midsection. She gave me an entire thrashing with one blow! But from that day forward, I measured my words carefully when addressing my mother. I never spoke disrespectfully to her again, even when she was seventy-five years old."

Meanwhile the evangelical leaders who embrace Dobson, the Pearls and Gothard will continue to tell the rest of us how to live "moral" lives while children are beaten in the name of Jesus.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

The evolution of deceit

Farnam Street posts the best articles from around the internet on psychology, behavioral economics, human misjudgment, persuasion, and other subjects of intellectual interest.

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The evolution of deceit

November 6, 2011

Fibs and self-deception are central to our evolutionary strategy.

The following excerpt is from an interview with Robert Trivers, author of The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life:

You do have some really fascinating information about the power of the placebo effect in medicine. What does the placebo effect tell us about the power of self-deception?

Like hypnosis, there needs to be a third party involved. It’s very hard to talk yourself into a placebo effect. You’ve got to have someone with a stethoscope and a white coat and acting like a doctor to get the placebo effect going. There’s something very important that’s not emphasized in the literature on placebo effect — there’s a lot of variability. About a third of us don’t show placebo effect, a third of us show a really strong one, and a third of us are kind of intermediate. The same thing is true of hypnosis.

I recently saw a guy in Jamaica to whom I gave some pills to calm him down because he’d just gone through a minor breakdown. I gave him a particular pill by the recommendation of a psychiatrist. They were pink pills — and they had a positive effect. When I came back to give him his refill, I had my own version of the pill that was identical, but was a white pill. I called him two days later and he openly sounded depressed. He says, “The other pill works better.” He was so happy when I showed up with a bunch of pink pills and took back the five remaining white ones.

Read the entire interview

The The Folly of Fools covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the mechanics and meaning of deception. This book will utterly change the way you think about lying. Commenting on the book, Richard Dawkins said “This is a remarkable book, by a uniquely brilliant scientist.”

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Topic

Neuroscience

Saturday, Nov 5, 2011 5:00 PM EST

The evolution of deceit

New discoveries show that fibs and self-deception are central to our evolutionary strategy. An expert explains

By Thomas Rogers

(Credit: Antony McAulay via Shutterstock)

Topics: Neuroscience

Not long ago, a young man drove onto Robert Trivers’ Jamaica property. Suspicious of the man’s sudden appearance, and convinced he was intent on either extorting money from him or robbing him, Trivers, a Rutgers professor, confronted him about his identity. His first name, the man said, was Steve. “What’s your last name?” Trivers asked. Trivers, one of the world’s leading evolutionary theorists and an expert on deceit, was checking for a behavioral sign that the man was lying, like an absence of hand gestures or longer pauses between words, which indicate “higher cognitive load.” The man paused. And Trivers knew immediately he was right: As it turns out, the man’s real name was Omar.

Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences, probably knows more about the mechanics and meaning of deception than almost anybody else in the world, and his new book, “The Folly of Fools,” covers pretty much anything you’d want to know about the topic. The book is an attempt to connect the mechanics of deceit to evolutionary science, and takes a broad survey of the areas in which the two overlap, including animal predation, parenting and people’s sex lives. High parasite load, he discovers, for example, is correlated with heightened levels of self-deception, and high levels of deceit, he finds, are closely tied to bad health. Expansive, smart and deep, the book — a relentlessly fascinating and entertaining read — will utterly change the way you think about lying.

Salon spoke to Trivers over the phone about Arnold Schwarzenegger, “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the connection between staying in the closet and HIV.

When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?

Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.

So what does that have to do with evolution?

If you take a relationship between a man and a woman, the man can be carrying on an affair on the side and it can produce a child. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not tell his wife that that cute little boy that he loved so much was actually his own, by the maid. Maria discovered it when the child was 12 years old. So you can get a reproductive benefit by deception as long as you’re not detected.

Self-deception, by contrast, has been a long problem in human thought. You find it in religion. Minds like Marx and Freud have each claimed to have a theory of self-deception, none of which have stood up. Adam Smith, the economist, wrote a whole book called “Self Deception.” George Orwell obviously had deep insight into certain kinds of self-deception, but nobody has had anything approaching a coherent scientific theory as to why on earth we would lie to ourselves. Working on parent-offspring conflict, I suddenly had this flash of insight: “Ah! If self-deception improves your ability to deceive others, then you would have a strong selective force to get it into your consciousness.”

So we are evolutionarily predisposed to lie to others and ourselves. How does deception play itself out in the animal kingdom?

Let me give you an example. If you’re trying to pick out a moth against the bark of a tree and it has evolved to resemble the bark of the tree more and more precisely, then it becomes a more and more difficult cognitive problem for you to solve. So your cognitive powers of detection, of seeing things, of being able to discriminate very minor differences, those are all being improved. I deliberately use that example because the deceiver is using morphology, not behavior.

Right, so by developing a more deceptive body, the moth is creating an incentive for you to become smarter — and therefore you’re more likely to evolve a more sophisticated brain.

Nobody has worked out a general principle of deception in creatures. Deception, however, seems to be a file against which mental intellectual powers have been sharpened. When it comes to behavior, there is a strong correlation in primates — monkeys and apes — between the relative size of their neocortex and how often they are seen to deceive in nature. The brighter you are, the more complex and devious your deceptions can be.

In children, for example, there’s a strong positive correlation between having higher intelligence at age 4 and more deception. Smart children lie more than slow children. A child that is disabled to the point of lacking verbiage, for example, may deceive you by lunging in one direction and then grabbing something on the other side of you. But they are not going to show sophisticated verbal deceptions.

At what point do babies start deceiving their parents?

Fake crying, where the child is able to turn it off and turn it right back on depending on if the audience is there, starts at 6 months. I have a video I use in my lecture where this child is rolling on the ground bawling in front of his mom and their dogs and your heart goes out to him. Then the mother and the dogs leave the room and the child stops crying, gets back up on his feet, walks toward them. As soon as he sees them, he immediately flings himself on the ground and starts bawling again. He’s just trying to manipulate Mom.

And, as you point out in the book, children get better at deceiving the older they get.

They start telling so-called white lies at about age 5 and at age 2 or younger they can start pretending that a punishment is not something they care about, when they clearly do. The more cognitively talented the child becomes in general, the more subtle and sophisticated its deception becomes.

You do have some really fascinating information about the power of the placebo effect in medicine. What does the placebo effect tell us about the power of self-deception?

Like hypnosis, there needs to be a third party involved. It’s very hard to talk yourself into a placebo effect. You’ve got to have someone with a stethoscope and a white coat and acting like a doctor to get the placebo effect going. There’s something very important that’s not emphasized in the literature on placebo effect — there’s a lot of variability. About a third of us don’t show placebo effect, a third of us show a really strong one, and a third of us are kind of intermediate. The same thing is true of hypnosis.

I recently saw a guy in Jamaica to whom I gave some pills to calm him down because he’d just gone through a minor breakdown. I gave him a particular pill by the recommendation of a psychiatrist. They were pink pills — and they had a positive effect. When I came back to give him his refill, I had my own version of the pill that was identical, but was a white pill. I called him two days later and he openly sounded depressed. He says, “The other pill works better.” He was so happy when I showed up with a bunch of pink pills and took back the five remaining white ones.

You point out that women think very differently about sexual deceit depending on where they are in their cycle of ovulation. How so?

If a woman isn’t on the pill, you get all of these differences showing up right around the time of ovulation, which relate to the fact that that’s her time to get “different genes.” There are things, for example, called major histocompatability loci [on your genes] that are involved in the fights against parasites. They are highly variable. Most partners [in sexual partnerships] don’t match but some match on one [locus], some match on two, and in some cases they match on all three. Since women don’t want children who have [the same alleles or genetic code at the same locus] the more the woman matches with you the less she is going to want your genes for her children.

What they’ve shown is, at the time of ovulation, if you match in one or more of these there’s more verbally coerced sex — “Come on, you had a headache last week” — and there’s a greater tendency for her to employ fantasy to get off. She thinks about a past lover or somebody she’s attracted to while you are having sex.

Right. So during that period of ovulation, she’s less attracted to her husband or boyfriend, and more likely to think about having sex with someone else.

There’s an irony because we have pretty good evidence that women are at their most attractive at the time of ovulation. Their waist-to-hip ratios are slightly smaller, so they are more curvaceous. They are somewhat more symmetrical and the coloration of their face is better. The time at which she is most attractive to you is the time at which she’s least attracted to you. And the men are impervious to this.

I know a joke, although women in this country don’t like it. If women are so good at multitasking, how come they can’t have sex and a headache at the same time? I told this story to a Jamaican woman and she starts explaining to me, “No, we’re using the headache to avoid sex.” And I say, “That’s the whole joke!”

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that problem between gay men.

How old are you, Thomas?

I’m 27.

Oh fuck. You’re in heaven!

Ha! Thanks, but speaking of gayness, you make some fascinating connections between being in the closet and the strength of your immune system in the book.

Homosexual men have been very intensively studied in the U.S. for a number of years in connection with HIV and AIDS. You suffer more from cancer if you are in the closet. Bronchitis ain’t deadly, but it’s certainly annoying — and once more you suffer more from it if you’re in the closet. It’s a graded phenomenon — so for every extra degree of outness there’s an improvement [in health]. It also shows up when you measure immune parameters in saliva that generally correlates with immune strength.

And they had a study showing the same thing I just mentioned for HIV positive men. What is your guess, Thomas? Do you think people are more likely to engage in unprotected sex if you are in the closet or if you’re out of the closet.

When they’re in the closet.

And why’s that?

Because I think a lot of closeted men think that “only gay men” have protected sex and that if they’re not gay, they don’t need to.

You’re right, men in the closet practice more unprotected sex. Pretend that you and I are both gay men but I’m in the closet and you’re out. Now you’ve got three condoms in your pocket and one more in your boot in case there’s an orgy. Now, me, I’m going out to a heterosexual party and I’m not intending to do anything homosexual that night. But after four drinks and at 12:30 at night my car turns left instead of right and I ain’t got no condom.

Now the reason that’s relevant to HIV is this: If you’ve got two strains of HIV inside you, the two parasites compete for dominance. They each want to be the one replicating and passed on in your sperm. That means faster, in theory, progression into AIDS and 20 percent earlier death. So there’s an overwhelming relationship between being in the closet and having a compromised immune system.

Which, as you point out in the book, is a very strong argument against “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was an immunological disaster. But that’s typical of Bill Clinton. He always went in for verbalistic solutions.

Thomas Rogers is Salon's Deputy Arts Editor.More Thomas Rogers