My father, a psychiatrist whose practice focused on the severely mentally ill, used to say, "Well, schizophrenia is better than no phrenia," and, "In poker, a paranoid always beats one of a noid." He also pioneered the subspecialty of forensic psychiatry, before it had a name, in that he was often asked as an expert witness to evaluate psychopaths and the competency of criminals to stand trial.
Not all criminals are psychopaths, and certainly not all psychopaths have violated the law. Serious mental illnesses are family tragedies not to be trivialized. But in ruminating about a post-election America, I've been struck by how large portions of the country are mired in schizophrenic distortions of reality and how prominent business leaders and politicians overtly display personality traits common to psychopaths. Vestiges of widespread mental illness abound.
Anti-fracking activists delayed the start of the Boulder County commissioners' Tuesday afternoon meeting on oil and gas regulations for nearly half an hour, chanting their opposition to that drilling technique and demanding the commissioners resign if they won't ban hydraulic fracturing in unincorporated Boulder County.
The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your emails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena.
Senator Dianne Feinstein recently commissioned a Government Accountability Office report identifying prison facilities in the continental United States suitable for detainees currently held in Guantánamo Bay. After Fox News reported about this document, her office released a statement saying that the GAO's study "demonstrates that if the political will exists, we could finally close Guantánamo without imperiling our national security."
The Obama administration has ordered significant cutbacks in initial plans for a robust U.S. civilian presence in Afghanistan after U.S. combat troops withdraw two years from now, according to U.S. officials.
An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
Richard H. Perkins and Larry Criscione are precise and formal men with more than 20 years of combined government and military service. Perkins held posts at the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration before joining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Division of Risk Analysis in 2008. Criscione landed at the agency a year later, after five years aboard the USS Georgia as a submarine warfare officer.
n October, I blogged about an incident in Afghanistan in which three small children were killed in a US airstrike.
