With the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri and subsequent fallout, there is a lot of second guessing going on. For myself, I am quick to forgive individual failings, and look to institutional biases to explain gross injustice, as the Brown shooting appears to be.

In this case, I look at a white police force in a black community, and hatred between the police and the people they are charged to serve and protect. Blacks are not innocent victims, as they are just people. Nor are the police free of guilt, as their culture supports violence. So when there is a naked confrontation, the officer has a choice: Shoot, knowing that he’ll likely get off, or back down, not knowing what will happen. Seeing a large angry man coming at me, and having only the basics of training in handling weapons, I assume I too would have shot and then hoped that my brother police officers would have my back.

For the black community, it is hard to watch one of their own gunned down, but more so knowing that it can be done with impunity; that the only justice will likely come from mob violence. They come from a culture that has endured untold indignity. This was best expressed in a Wayans Brothers movie I saw where, trying to get police to respond to a crime the only thing the black guy could think to do was to call 911 and say “White girl in trouble!” Numerous police cars responded instantly.

Being black in a society dominated by whites is hard to endure, which is why they have developed their own means of communicating. This is reflected especially in their music. They can dog whistle one another while we whites assume it’s just a tribal beat. But it is a bubbling cauldron, and it only takes one flagrant abuse of white power for the community to erupt. When that happens, the cops drop the public service masks and go on the offensive. Pictures of cops brandishing weapons at innocent civilians are disgusting, but the rage is mutual.
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I didn’t sit down to write all of that. I was only curious about the fact that the Officer Daren Wilson, the man who shot Michael Brown, emptied his weapon. I was reminded of a shooting in Billings, Montana where the assailant’s weapon was a motor vehicle. There too the officer emptied his weapon into the driver. He was immediately suspended pending investigation, and a spokesperson at that time said that officers were trained to empty weapons in potentially fatal confrontations.

Why, I thought? The answer is obvious, but not if we are TV drama viewers. There, when people get shot they immediately drop, and are dead unless they have more than an extra role in the presentation. I put up the picture of Reagan above because, contrary to the official story, he has already been shot and does not know it. People do not drop when they are shot, and usually don’t even realize it for a period of time. The head shot is the best way to disable a victim, but cops are not that well trained in firearms. Anyway, who can say where to shoot when an officer is in panic mode? A large man presents a good target, and the torso is the best sure hit, the head a little more iffy. But it takes quite a few shots to disable an assailant, more so a large man.

If that is what happened.

So officers are trained to empty their weapons, create as many wounds as possible so that the victim will bleed out and lose consciousness as soon as possible. One shot will not do. In the meantime even if already hit, he is still a threat. The officer is in survival mode, and training allows him, even instructs him, to shoot, shoot shoot until out of bullets.

State Department admits that there might be “dozens” of Americans fighting in Syria and Iraq, and that they are “disaffected,” possibly posing a ” threat to national security” when they return home. This is in response to an American turning up dead fighting for “ISIS” in Syria.

As American news goes, this one is easy to unravel. “Dozens” means hundreds, and as fighting intensifies, more of them will be killed, captured or otherwise exposed. They are not expatriates, they are not fighting for the other side. Their histories are wiped clean, they seem to randomly up and leave and go fight in strange lands. They are American agents, provocateurs, part of ISIS and under US control, and subject to the following dictum, taken from a popular TV show back in the sixties:

If killed or captured, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your activity.

…the same individuals were to be presented as allies yesterday and must be as enemies today, even if they are still on orders from Washington.

It is difficult have an understanding of international terrorism as sponsored by the United States, and at the same time watch the U.S. state-controlled media twist that same information into a fairy tale. ISIS is nothing more than a terrorist organization, and when it was doing Washington’s work in Libya and Syria, was presented as a pro-democratic force.

Defeated in Syria, armed to the teeth by the U.S., Turkey, France and Saudi Arabia (acting as a conduit for Ukrainian weapons), ISIS is now presented as a scourge that is forcing Washington’s hand, perhaps triggering another intervention in Iraq.

What changed? Words changed. That’s all. Al Qaeda, Syrian Emergency Task Force, Al-Nosra, Northern Storm Brigade … ISIS. All Washington employees, all the time. Sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy, always on the payroll. Terrorists, saboteurs, beheaders, eaters of intestines, human scourge … these are our guys. They are drenched in American weapons and money.

I have long regarded John McCain as a terrorist. Sent on a mission to bomb a light bulb factory in north Vietnam, he was shot down, could have been left to drown but was instead rescued and imprisoned for five years. He was tortured, and broke. He’s not a sane man now, but I had no idea that he is, as Thierry Meyssan claims, an agent behind so much illegal U.S. activity these last decades, from the ouster of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, the attempt to overthrow President Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, the attempted overthrow of president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and most recently, the ousting of the constitutional president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. These are all democratically elected governments, and the U.S. attacked them, probably for that reason.

Who knew? Such a man, rightly imprisoned in Vietnam, is behind international terrorism. He is presented as a hero here in the Empire of Lies. That’s why I said at the outset here that it is difficult to watch U.S. state-controlled media twist all of this around, lying about everything everywhere all the time and taking a man like McCain, a deranged terrorist, and making him seem something better than that.

I call that putting lipstick on a pig.

My last 26 years have been a quest to understand our world, and to a small degree I think I have succeeded. There are two key features of our existence that cast a dark shadow over every human affair.

Psychopaths: It’s as if the planet was seeded with two species, regular humans, and psychopaths. Whether they are two or five or ten percent of the population, they live among us posing as regular humans. They have enormous advantage, as they understand us (while we are only beginning to get a grip on them). They imitate us. They appear to have a breeding advantage as they can bring tremendous sexual energy to the mating game. Even as they live among us, appear to be part of us, they are really just stalking us. They have no great ideas, do not dedicate their lives to any cause other than gaming, accumulating wealth. They rarely excel in professions, and so rely on recruitment of regular people to run their organizations, build their weapons, man their armies.

You’ve met them. They have befriended you, taken advantage of you. You helped them on their tests in school as they just can’t knuckle down. They have engaged you in a love affair and then walked out on you. They have tried to empty your bank account, and undermined you at work. Their biggest thrill in life is the trap, to set it up, capture some one, snap it shut. They do not have much else going on, so that gaming is very important to them. They are disproportionately represented in the prison population, but more importantly, in the corporate world. The higher up one travels in an organization, the more common is the psychopath. They have infested Washington and every state capital.

Power: Regular people do not crave power. We don’t seek to rule others, take no special advantage in being in a position where we control the lives of others.

Psychopaths do. Consequently, by default, power cedes to psychopaths.

Ergo, the world as we know it.

I read, and I do not remember where, that it is very rare that two psychopaths marry. That made me change my perception of the Clinton’s. Bill is a brilliant man, can project empathy and charm and brings tremendous sexual energy to his game. Hillary appears cold and calculating, even menacing. Are they that rare couple, or is it one and not the other? I do not know. I only know with Hillary that the hair on my neck stands on end when I see her on TV. I had that same reaction years ago to George H.W. Bush. These are not nice people.

We all instinctively know when we are in the presence of a predator. We only need to refine that sensibility, and pay attention to it. We are learning more about psychopaths, talking openly about it. There’s even a TV series dedicated to them now. It’s called True Blood.