People with pronounced psychopathy and sadism are harder to startle
…“We conclude that individuals with high levels of sadism show a diminished startle reflex that is relatively immune to potentiation by negative environmental stimuli,” the study authors wrote. “These findings provide further insight into the biological markers of the Dark Tetrad traits and their unique facets. Our findings may also have implications for fields beyond psychology, like business and economics, where managerial effectiveness (e.g., navigating workplace crises) and financial decision-making (e.g., loss aversion and risk-taking) may depend on the personality of a single individual with socially aversive tendencies.”
The study makes an important contribution to the scientific understanding of biological markers of dark traits. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, most of the study participants were students. Although the second study included participants with very high levels of sadism, it is still unlikely that it included many individuals with truly high levels of this malevolent trait.
The study: “Blunted startle reactivity in everyday sadism and psychopathy”, was authored by Erin E. Buckels, Douglas A. Williams, Paul D.Trapnell, Siavash Kermani Koosheh, Owen M. Javra , and Sasha C. Svenne.
Today’s leaders of the Western world, including Israel, clearly exhibit extreme Dark Tetrad personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. This study relies on student subjects (a limitation) but corroborates physical markers of the startle reflex convincingly enough to provide decent evidence for the hypothesis. I singled out Western leaders above but am sure that almost all major political leaders throughout history have had Dark Tetrad traits. Human social instincts lean heavily toward hierarchical submission and it takes outliers to climb that ladder. Nice guys finish last is one way to say it. Given humanity as it is today biologically, I see no hope in changing this. Given the promise of gene selection through selective breeding of non-coerced willing parents, I see a lot of hope that human societies will improve enough to remove our most vulgar, violent, destructive traits. I hope readers of this site have cast off the negative shroud surrounding the word eugenics. Done properly, without force or humiliation, eugenics would be a very good thing for our species. As it is, people do it all the time on their own anyway through partner selection, birth-control, abortion, in vitro gamete and zygote selection, and so on. ABN
Janus custom motorcycles
‘Doom for the Israelis if they launch this attack on Gaza. It’s an unwinnable fight’ — Col Douglas Macgregor
Get to the border NOW! US Embassy tells foreign nationals to get to the Rafah crossing on Gaza-Egypt border to leave as Israeli tanks are lined up and ready to plough into besieged Palestinian enclave
The US Embassy has told foreign nationals to make their way to the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border to evacuate as Israeli tanks prepare to plough into the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The Israeli military has continued to punish Gaza with airstrikes. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are readying themselves for battle as an invasion appears imminent.
In an urgent security alert this morning, the US Embassy said it had received information that the critical Rafah border crossing would open at 10am local time (8am BST).
Authorities have told trapped US nationals to expect a ‘potentially chaotic and disorderly environment on both sides of the crossing’. There are an estimated 600 Americans in the enclave.
Urging foreign nationals to escape Gaza if they can, the embassy warned: ‘If the border is opened, we do not know how long it will remain open for foreign citizens to depart Gaza.’
They added: ‘The situation remains dynamic and fluid and the security environment is unpredictable. You should assess your personal safety and security before choosing to move toward the border or trying to cross.’
EU seeks to speed up expulsion of unwanted migrants after terror attacks
Interior and justice ministers met in Luxembourg to discuss what steps to take following a stabbing in France and a shooting in Belgium, at a time of heightened security concerns linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Speaking after the meeting, migration commissioner Ylva Johansson said she had called emergency talks on Friday with the EU’s returns coordinator, who is responsible for establishing a shared strategy to repatriate non-European nationals who don’t have the right to stay in the EU.
Speeding up the return of people considered a security risk is a priority in the wake of the latest attacks, she said.
“It is absolutely a necessity that we make sure that the European Union is safe from terrorist threats,” she told a press conference.
“People who pose a security risk to the European Union need to be much, much more quickly returned to the country of origin.”
Newly developed ‘superlens’ allows 4X increase magnification of light microscopy
…“We have now developed a practical way to implement superlensing without a super lens,” said Dr. Alessandro Tuniz from the School of Physics and University of Sydney Nano Institute and the study’s lead author, in a press release announcing the achievement.
To accomplish this feat, the researchers placed their light probe a distance from the sample they wanted to image and collected high-resolution and low-resolution information. According to the release, the probe gathered light “at terahertz frequency at millimetre wavelength, in the region of the spectrum between visible and microwave.”
Next, that information is entered into a computer and run through processes that effectively “select” the most valuable light and remove the unwanted light. The result is an image that peers through the seemingly unbreakable diffraction limit by a factor of four times, something previous efforts have failed to get past.
“We overcome this (diffraction limit) by performing the superlens operation as a post-processing step on a computer, after the measurement itself,” Tuniz explained. “This produces a ‘truthful’ image of the object through the selective amplification of evanescent, or vanishing, light waves.”
Israel’s long war on Gaza w/Norman Finkelstein | The Chris Hedges Report
Israel’s Culture of Deceit — Chris Hedges
Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.
Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.
Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.
I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian Hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.
The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to come from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall toward their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.
The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.
Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.
Report – Peter Thiel Is FBI Confidential Human Source
I have no idea whether this report is accurate, but given the nature of events and revelations in the past several years – this seems plausible, possibly likely.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election outcome, several people on the more libertarian/conservative side of the political spectrum, were concerned about being targeted by an Obama third term. As the rather revelatory story is told today, that provided the motive for Peter Thiel to cozy up to the FBI and avoid being a target.
Business Insider is reporting that Billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel became a “confidential human source” for the FBI in 2021. The outline claims that known FBI informant Charles Johnson brought Thiel into the relationship. The exact specifics of what Thiel did for the FBI are unknown.
[READ FULL STORY HERE]
Overstock founder Patrick Byrne was/is also an FBI asset, using his money in conservative circles to support entities of interest to the government. Byrne provided the seed money for Dave Rubin’s Locals platform. Robert Mercer did the same with Breitbart, and Rebekkah Mercer did the same thing with Parler. Billionaire Paul Singer did the same thing with The Washington Free Beacon.
Interestingly, Peter Thiel has a networked relationship with several people of “conservative” influence – including Tucker Carlson. It is strongly suspected that Thiel is one of the financial backers of Tucker Carlson’s new media venture. {Go Deep}
People often ask me why CTH viciously protects our independence, enjoys staying small and refuses to take lucrative offers for platform expansion. The reality is, The Truth Has No Agenda – but the majority of the characters you run into within the information space generally do. lol.
It is important to understand that the Big Money-espionage-Big Media-Big Government-mind-control complex is a subculture. It has its own rules, jargon, mores and semiotics. Players within this subculture know each other or can recognize each other through mutual associations and any number of subcultural cues. This subculture is deeply entwined with and within the parasitic cabal that governs all politics (including war policies) in the West. The Western cabal is vying for control of the entire world. I, for one, can accept that humans will be living within some sort of hierarchy for some time. If our cabal were even halfway decent and showed even a modicum of intelligence and kindness, I would not be terribly bother by it. But, by their deeds ye shall know them. The general view we the people have of our cabal is they are selfish, nasty, parasitic, little demons who also seem to be grossly incompetent, even stupid. This does not mean Thiel, Patrick Byrne, or Tucker Carlson are bad guys; they may be good guys trapped on the edge of the cabal system. ABN
US Goes ‘All In’ On China Chip Controls
New US export control rules aim to close loopholes that Chinese firms used to buy and make advanced AI chips. They add dozens of items to a list of restricted chip-making equipment and blacklist 13 Chinese companies, including China’s AI leaders.
The message is clear: the Biden Administration prioritizes security over sales. Yet unanswered questions abound. Will reinforced export controls cause a rift with allies? Will they hold back US innovation? And will they even prevent China from developing cutting-edge technology?
Start with the impact on US companies. California-based NVIDIA took an immediate hit. Its high-flying shares dropped almost 8%. Overall, 30 chip stocks, including Intel, AMD, Applied Materials, and ASML, the Dutch lithography machine maker, lost a combined $73 billion in market value. US semiconductor companies warn that cutting sales to China will boomerang in the long term, hurting their competitiveness.
…As Western supplies shrink, China is redoubling its own efforts to develop high-performance chips. Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro smartphone contains a domestically produced seven-nanometer chip, showing that China can produce cutting-edge hardware despite American export restrictions. In a pointed shot, the phone was launched at the same time as US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited Beijing, surprising the US government.
Abby Martin on Israel and Gaza
I have not had time to listen to this yet but am posting for readers who may be interested. ABN
Scott Ritter on Ukraine and Israel
Ritter starts at 32:30
US State Department Sends Out ‘Worldwide Caution’ Alert to Americans
The U.S. State Department on Thursday issued a worldwide alert to Americans overseas due to the potential for terrorist attacks, coming in the midst of heightened tensions in the Middle Ease due to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“Due to increased tensions in various locations around the world, the potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests, the Department of State advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution,” the alert said.
It then advised U.S. citizens to remain alert in locations frequented by tourists, enroll in the agency’s travel program, and follow the agency on social media to receive alerts and updates. Other details were not provided.
American Buddhist Net 