Although contained, this is a marvelous example of stupid computers programmed by stupid humans with stupid algorithms doing damage before smarter humans can intervene. There is also no proof whatsoever this was done by anyone connected to Syria. The plot thickens.
A short-lived hoax on Twitter briefly erased $200 billion of value from U.S. stock markets on Tuesday, underscoring the vulnerability of financial markets to computerized trading programs that buy and sell shares without human intervention.
A tweet purportedly from the Associated Press just before 1:08 p.m. reported two explosions in the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured. The posting sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling roughly 145 points in an instant.
Essays by the renowned psychiatrist on that most central unit: the family. Focus on the breakdowns within families and between families and larger social networks.
As we listen to him describe his relations with the prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, and critics of his day, his recounting of his emotional and spiritual development, and of his dashed hopes and unrealized dreams, we begin to get a sense of what it might have been like to be around Laing when he was alive.
Abnormalcy bias is an excellent term for describing the dynamic of society gone mad. Psychiatrist R.D. Laing also believed that human society has gone mad. It's hard to find good ways to explain it, but in the first paragraph of the following article, Aldous Huxley explained it very well:
The first paragraph is what I'm most interested in. The rest of the article, by JimQ, is more political in nature and I only skimmed it, but it looks like an excellent article. And R.D. Laing also described the madness as having political roots, which is why he titled the book in which he described these things, The Politics of Experience, which is a collection of excerpts from a number of his books. But he was looking at it more from the perspective of a social psychologist and from the perspective of deep human history. And he believed the madness has even corrupted the family, to the point where the family structure was both the consequence of the madness and the institution that perpetuated it. The madness he describes has been common for thousands of years. It's so common that the roots of it stretch back into prehistory. And that's why we tend to see it as normal when it's not. Or that's the theory. This is the first paragraph of the article:
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited
The Boston bomber official “narrative” just keeps on keeping on falling apart, and virtually on a daily basis. After the full article below, I have put a commentary from someone else drawing parallels between 9/11 and the Boston bombing.
Here's what may be called “Police State TV” – a new but an increasingly popular TV genre, brought to you by Youtube and a house owner in Boston during the bombings:
WATERTOWN, MA — On Friday, April 19, 2013, during a manhunt for a bombing suspect, police and federal agents spent the day storming people's homes and performing illegal searches. While it was unclear initially if the home searches were voluntary, it is now crystal clear that they were absolutely NOT voluntary. Police were filmed ripping people from their homes at gunpoint, marching the residents out with their hands raised in submission, and then storming the homes to perform their illegal searches.”
Michael Brenner
Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh
Huffington Post, 22 April 2013
The errant actions of the C.I.A. are by now so evident that they are a staple of Washington conversation. Like the weather, though, it is the topic everybody talks about, but does nothing about. The drone revelations, and the administration's stonewalling, that coincided with John Brennan's confirmation hearings created a stir. That incident struck a nerve because the White House looked ready to extend its claim to a right to kill Americans abroad to the domestic scene. The prospect of moves to bring the Agency to heal quickly died down once he made a vague promise to downsize the drone program. Moreover, no elected official voiced concern about the implications of killing lots of foreigners — even innocent civilians — as we are doing routinely in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
That may change. Now we have the graphic account of a maverick C.I.A. conducting its own clandestine war against the government of Pakistan without a stipulated authorization. And doing so in a ham-handed manner that helped to ruin whatever small chance remained of extricating ourselves from Afghanistan and neighboring frontier areas of Pakistan without leaving behind a dangerous chaos on both sides of the Durand Line. The detailed picture painted by two authoritative accounts of the notorious Raymond Davis affair, and its clamorous aftermath, provides us with a fine-grained view of studied ignorance and appalling incompetence among C.I.A. leaders in Langley and Islamabad (Mark Mazzetti, Jeremy Scahill). It also describes National Security Council sessions for which ‘dysfunctional' would be a generous term. The slanging matches among cabinet members on matters of sensitivity and importance took place with an absent commander in chief failing to exercise the policy guidance and operational oversight that are his mandate as president.
TEL AVIV – Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst said Tuesday there was evidence the Syrian government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the last month, and he criticized the international community for failing to respond, intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to intervene.
