The Thunderbolt 250101 - The Main Problem Underlying Most if Not All of Our Other Problems
Dana Walker
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250101
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The Top and Bottom 10 Jobs That Are the Most Likely or the Least Likely to Attract Psychopaths
Hey, People!
So – would you like to limit how much time you spend associating with psychopaths? Would you prefer that such people devastate other people’s lives?
It would seem to me that one quick and easy way to do that would be to avoid working at the types of job that tend to attract psychopaths!
In the book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, Kevin Dutton explains that there are jobs that tend to attract psychopaths - and other jobs that seem far less appealing to them.
It's important to note that a psychopathic person isn't necessarily someone who goes around murdering people — and in fact the vast majority of psychopaths live seemingly ‘normal’ lives and at most they tend to make life hell for those unfortunate enough to love them and/or those unfortunate enough to work with them. In reality, psychopaths merely and typically lack emotions and empathy, or the ability to identify with other humans. Dutton has said that “A number of psychopathic attributes [are] actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals — attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus.”
So what jobs are most attractive to psychopaths? Here's the list, originally published online by Eric Barker:
1. CEO
2. Lawyer
3. Media (Television/Radio)
4. Salesperson
5. Surgeon
6. Journalist
7. Police officer
8. Clergy person
9. Chef
10. Civil servant
Uh oh! Since I have been both a journalist and a media person, I qualify in two categories! However, I’ve gotten to know myself pretty well over the years, and as those who know me personally and/or as those who have followed my work can attest, I am no psychopath. The only real surprise I saw here was chefs. I was not at all surprised that psychopaths love becoming clergy.
For those looking to potentially avoid working with psychopaths, here's the list of occupations with the lowest rates of psychopathy:
1. Care aide
2. Nurse
3. Therapist
4. Craftsperson
5. Beautician/Stylist
6. Charity worker
7. Teacher
8. Creative artist
9. Doctor
10. Accountant
This is funny because for the vast bulk of my life I was a wandering musician, so one of my trades is also on this list. Since regular doctors are in the bottom 10, I was surprised to see surgeons in the top 10 – but if you think about it, a surgeon is basically a nuts and bolts kind person and especially if something goes wrong during an operation, it is probably best if your surgeon doesn’t experience an emotional breakdown at that point…
I was also surprised see accountants in the bottom 10. I guess being soulless doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re also a psycho.
People are funny.
Defund Go Fund Me
It has been documented that Fedbook, Twatter, Goggle, and other social media platforms have government agents telling them who to censor.
This is, of course, illegal as hell – but who pays any attention to that anymore?
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/02/09/uk-national-security-act-wikileaks/
Well – Go Fund Me is evidently taking marching orders from the same folks, as they have cut off two of my favourite media sources, the Grey Zone and Mint Press.
I am about to contact Go Fund Me and thank them for doing that since as a result of their censorship I have learned from the Grey Zone that there is an alternative to Go Fund Me called “Spot Fund” that I will use from now on.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/08/28/gofundme-freezes-grayzone-fundraiser/
The Main Problem Underlying Most if Not All of Our Other Problems
What a presumptuous thing to say, eh? This lifelong traveling vagabond claims to understand the Main Problem Underlying Most if not All of Our Other Problems?
Possibly. Possibly even probably.
But when has that ever stopped me before?
Anyway, here it is: More and more information about the often-problematic effects of trauma in general and of childhood trauma in particular are coming to light.
It sounds cliché by this point – but the fact remains that hurt people hurt people who then go on to hurt other people – and so forth.
And we are learning more and more about the fact that removing a child from their primary care giver is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to that child, especially if that removal is done violently and/or with lots of drama – and this is true even when dealing with highly abusive care givers.
No, you cannot just leave a child with a highly abusive care giver – but when you remove that child you must be aware of the trauma that you are inflicting upon that child and you must be hyper-mindful of doing everything possible to mitigate that trauma. If you don’t do that then society will very likely pay the price a few years down the road – yet that is virtually never how they do things. They evidently prefer drama and violence.
In my ‘opinion’, the most important and most under-covered story in our nation – at least in the context of our societal health in general and our mental health in particular – is the fact that this country’s foster care system is a torture chamber for tens of thousands of children and it has been for decades. This is in addition to the tens of thousands of children who are traumatized by their own families and/or by life events.
Foster children often have numerous additional challenges as well, though. Foster children are highly disproportionately raped and abused and as ‘wards of the state’ they have highly limited legal rights. Some states are worse than others, but they’re all very bad. I’ve reported upon this issue in the Thunderbolt a few times, but the understanding that this is the Main Problem Underlying Most if Not All of Our Other Problems only came to me relatively late in my career and I wish now I had Thunderbolted the foster care system much more often than I did.
I've posted links to all the information I'm about to share in past issues and I don't feel like looking them up now, but this information is not that hard to find should you wish to do some research.
Often the foster care system is run like a personal little fiefdom by some local magistrate of one kind or another, usually but not always a judge, who has almost godlike powers to determine the fate of the children who come before him or her. Many of their procedures are opaque due to the fact they are dealing with children and hardly anyone pays any attention to what they’re doing anyway so all kinds of nefarious badness can and does go on.
If a foster child displays any of the normal symptoms or reactions to trauma then that child is immediately drugged and then that child is kept drugged for the remainder of their childhood.
Finally, when they ‘age out’, usually at 18, though I believe that in some states it extends into their early 20’s – they are simply cut loose into the world. Often they have no money, no job, no home, no family, no prospects, no hope, no dreams – and in fact about the only thing they do have is a government-induced drug habit that the government is no longer paying for.
Gee? What could go wrong?
These are America’s ‘throw away’ children. We put these kids through an emotional and psychological meat grinder and then we blame them and we demonized and we dehumanize them when they come out of that process all ground up. These are the kids who go on to populate our prisons or end up spending their lives vomiting upon themselves in some alley.
And when I see politicians using the power of the government to target the most helpless and vulnerable members of our communities it reminds me of an entire varsity football team all lining up to kick a crippled 12-year old girl who is already down – and it frankly disgusts me.
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So – that’s the disease on the social level. This disease is also part of the larger infection of diseased minds that are running our politics…
Fasten Your Seatbelt
So — we had an election, didn't we?
I am absolutely horrified that Donald Trump won and I am absolutely delighted that Kamala Harris lost. Had it gone the other way, I would have felt exactly the same except the other way around.
Continuing with our relentless march toward normalizing insanity, we now have the richest man in the world – a man who appears already to have our incoming president in his pocket – telling the rest of us that we are going to have to “tighten our belts” and experience some serious austerity measures even as he himself is set to vastly increase his already obscenely monstrous fortune, largely by milking the government teat for literally hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts every year.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/laborandpolitics/posts/9473052836043871/
This makes Elon Musk the all-time champion government teat-sucker of all time!
It cost Elon Musk only $277 million to purchase our next president – a figure that to him is literally the equivalent of pocket change to the rest of us.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-277-million-trump-republican-candidates-donations/
Who elected Elon Musk for anything?
That is insane – but it is now normal.
And our relentless march toward normalizing insanity continues unabated: Including myself, only 2.13% of Americans voted third party, meaning that just under 98% of American voters voted for either a candidate who has expressed enthusiastic support for genocide or a candidate who is actively funding and arming a genocide.
So now even genocide has been ‘normalized’.
That fact makes my head explode.
Concerning the aforementioned election results, many on the left are rending their clothes and tearing their hair.
I take a contrary view. In fact, I believe this to be the best outcome we could have hoped for. Now that the brakes have been completely removed from the Republican Clown Car then the only question remaining is whether they are going to drive it into a wall or over a cliff? While the Rump is likely to significantly speed things along I suspect that some serious feces is about to strike a very large fan sometime in the very near future regardless of anything else and now the Republicans are going to get all the blame for everything that's about to happen.
However, the Rump's victory does mean that everyone needs to quickly hire an undocumented alien, have their sex-change operation scheduled, and get that abortion you've been putting off for so long.
Voters considered the Rump to be the lesser evil compared to the Democrats. They saw Kamala Harris as being an elitist snob who constantly insulted and patronized them even as she helped the elites rip them off.
Tellingly, though, the Rump actually got fewer votes this time than he did in 2020. It’s just that the Democrats got a lot less.
Still, the fact remains that there are tens of millions of people who absolutely love Donald Trump. To them he is their champion bravely standing up to the Democratic Party and the elitist snobs who constantly insult and patronize them even as they are ripping them off.
I understand that children are no longer being taught civics in our public schools. Therefore, I suspect most Americans do not even know what a narcissistic demagogue even is much less how to identify one. Most Trump voters therefore don't understand that rather than "draining the swamp" Donald Trump merely wishes to repopulate the swamp with his own swamp creatures.
Not all Trump voters felt this way though: Many exit polls indicated that a large number of Trump voters actually detested the man himself but figured that their own economic interests would be better served by His Rumpiness.
This means that, as with Trump himself, those are the voters who placed their own personal interests above the overall good – which has become a very American thing these days. It would seem the fact that Donald Trump is a misogynistic rapist and lifelong con artist with thirty-four felony convictions nor the fact that he is the very definition of a narcissistic demagogue nor the fact that he unleashed a violent armed attack upon the US capitol nor the fact that he separated and destroyed hundreds of thousands of immigrant families by stealing their children from them nor the fact that he completely botched the COVID response resulting in literally millions of unnecessary American deaths nor the fact that he has the emotional maturity of a schoolyard bully — none of that enough to overcome the fully earned distrust and detestation of the Democrats that was so widely displayed in this election.
So, what does all of this tell you about the Democrats?
As they always do, the Democrats blame everyone but themselves even though they have absolutely no one but themselves to blame. As millions could not afford to pay their bills and as tent cities were sprouting up like mushrooms in every available space, the Democrats responded by lecturing everyone upon how great the economy was doing. They ignored the fact that their great economy was benefitting no one but rich people and instead continued talking down to voters as if they were idiots who did not understand their own situation and did not understand what the Democrats were doing to them and did not understand what the Democrats have been doing to them for decades now. In the closing days of the election our new führer was palling it up with Muslims in Michigan, openly meeting with Palestinian rights organizations, and winning endorsements from several prominent Muslim clerics even as the Harris campaign was forbidding hijabs at their convention and aggressively shutting down any and all anti-genocide rhetoric within their ranks. As Donald Trump was out on the streets talking to working people and racial minorities Kamala Harris was talking to billionaires and Republicans. The Democrats refused to allow even a single Palestinian speaker at their convention yet they gave speaking slots to a lengthy parade of billionaires and even Liz freaking Cheney — a woman who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to torture America's enemies and who has never met an interventionist war that she didn't like. She'll fit right in with the Democrats.
In 2020 Joe Biden won the Michigan Muslim vote by 81% to Trump's 17%.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-arabs-and-muslims-helped-biden-win-michigan-and-white-house
According to exit polls, this time Jill Stein won Michigan's Muslim vote by a near super majority of 59% whilst the Orange One came in second with 22% and the Genocide Party candidate finished an anemic third with only 16%.
And I can guarantee you that Michigan Muslims weren't the only ones who couldn't stomach the fact that a vote for Harris — or a vote for Trump for that matter — was a vote for genocide.
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For the last three election cycles the one single message voters have been pounding more than any other is that business as usual is no longer an option — yet the Democrats just don't get it. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 giving the nod instead to the very face of business as usual thus losing a big chunk of their base thus leading directly to the first iteration of the Rump's misadministration. And while Biden barely eked out a victory in 2020, that was more a vote against Trump than excitement over Biden as Trump is just as good at attracting detractors as he is at attracting supporters.
So this time more voters held their noses to vote for the Rump than did for Harris.
Ultimately, it doesn't really make all that much difference. The lesser of two evils is still evil, and the lesser evil generally serves only as an enabler for the greater evil. This is especially so when you're pitting fascists against genocidists. Which evil is greater?
A pox on all their houses.
Any Hope At All?
If we have any hope at all it is with the kids. Once people are grown they think they already know everything. Adults can still learn things and change their minds about things and grow and accept new things – but their minds become far less open and far less resilient. Basic attitudes and instinctual reactions to certain stimuli are usually baked into the cake by that point – and additional trauma on top of all that merely puts a hand grenade into the middle of that cake.
When a respected adult says something to a child, on the other hand, that something often sinks in on a foundational level into that child’s core reality.
I have always thought that the central job of parents and educators is to help children figure out who they are and then to help them to become whatever that turns out to be. Everybody is good at something. Everyone has something they can do better than most other people can and people generally enjoy doing things that they are good at.
People who have interesting and rewarding lives generally have no interest in crime or rebellion or shooting up schools.
However, many parents and educators seem to feel their job is to force children to be whatever the adults think they should be – which in my experience often does not end well.
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Upon meeting new people, I will sometimes ask them if they were granted one wish for anything they wanted then what they would wish for? (I have found this to be a good way to get to know someone on a below-surface level…)
Here is what I would wish for if I had one wish for anything I wanted: I would wish for a society where every child has the support and the resources they need to accomplish whatever they are capable of accomplishing.
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It’s time to get to work…
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Bonus Tip of the Day:
Don’t accept the status quo.
Peace.
Dana
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