We're the Dark Matter...

“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” –  a U.S. Navy SEAL, describing the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known as JSOC.

This is a quote from the Washington Post, Friday September 2 edition. The article refers to a book

"‘Top Secret America’: A look at the military’s Joint Special Operations Command", which describes the activities of a secret arm of the American government that increased in size 10-fold following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC.  This secret group is 10 times larger than the CIA, and has extraordinary power and authority directly from the Office of the President. It has its own aircraft, its own intelligence resources, and even its own satellites. 

The JSOC also has its own Cyberwarriors, who, on Sept. 11, 2008, shut down every jihadist Web site that existed at the time.  

Only one or two commanders have ever been in the Public's eye - mainly General Stanley McCrystal, whose operational HQ in Balad Airfield northwest of Baghdad had a sign on it: "17  5  2"  This cryptic note stood for working 17 hours a day for work, 5 hours for sleep, and two hours for eating and exercising. 

Obscurity has been a key hallmark of this unusual unit. When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or US embassies abroad, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their brother military attaches. In combat they wear no name or rank identifiers. 

When 9/11 took place, the expression "asymmetric warfare" mainly circulated among the military colleges and military strategy writers: if you can't confront a large and well-funded army, then try guerrilla warfare - something unexpected, using far less resources. 9/11 was one of the best examples of asymmetric warfare in the history of man: 19 men and a half a million dollars brought about the deaths of over 3,000 Americans - and caused over $1 Trillion in damages and collateral expense.

The JSOC was America's way of taking back the asymmetric advantage. These are the guys who found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the psychopathic al-Qaeda leader of Iraq, in 2006. These are the guys who surgically took out Osama bin Laden in May, 2011. The book describes a host of additional successes - and some failures, such as the obliteration of most of an Afghani wedding party that had been celebrating during the night by firing guns into the air... when a Spectre gunship was orbiting above.  

Because of its deliberate obscurity and lack of ego, many more successes are either poorly understood or not documented at all in the public media.  An Air Force CIO once said "You can accomplish truly amazing things if you don't care who gets credit for them," and the JSOC seems to have understood this from the get-go.

~~~~~

Most Americans were shocked by 9/11 - they couldn't understand how anyone could bear such animosity towards their country. We are the ones always helping others, after all - including saving the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from butchery by "christians" (little "c"). 

Having lived in the Middle East for many years, I was aware of the terrible, cumulative resentment held by virtually all Arabs: (a) that Israel had robbed the Palestinians of lands held for 20 generations or more with western European aid, and (b) that the continued land-grabs and apartheid in Israel/Palestine were supported unquestioningly with bottomless resources and assistance by the United States.  I was aware that virtually all Arabs can recall the gruesome details of the Crusades. My staff could recite to me in detail the terrible horrors inflicted in the name of Christ starting 900 years ago... a history virtually unknown to people living in the United States. Having had hundreds of conversations with Arab people, both Christian and Muslim, I knew that there was a deep well of resentment there. 

An integral part of al-Qaeda's message was to be as public as possible, so as to draw more recruits - and to make a case for Osama bin Laden to become a new, 20th Century Caliph.

However, killing innocent civilians is forbidden by both the Bible and the Qu'ran - under any circumstances. This requires some convoluted logic by Salafist "scholars" - the people who wrote the religious justifications for killing so many people, most of whom ultimately were Muslims. To this end, al-Qaeda deliberately recruited soldiers who were largely illiterate, with just enough education to fly (if not land) an aircraft.

Don't kill innocents. Tell that to the uneducated Crusaders who looted and butchered whole populations as they marched from the Danube to Jerusalem. Tell that to the christian Falange militia that butchered every living being in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. Tell that to the indoctrinated hijackers who flew aircraft into buildings on September 11, 2001.  

When I became a Mormon, it surprised my Jewish roommate at Berkeley. I suggested he give it some thought himself, and was surprised by his reply: "Do you have any idea how many of my ancestors were killed in the name of Christ?!??"

The world will always have its self-anointed and self-righteous murderers.  For me, well, I understand both sides' feelings of outrage and helplessness. But ultimately I'm an American, and want my children to grow up without fear of murder by fanatics, whether christian or moslem.  

I therefore take great pride, both as an American and as an admirer of anonymous personal sacrifice for the greater good, in the existence of the JSOC. Who would you rather have on your side?

~~~~~

Godan

Godan is the Japanese word for 5th Dan - that is, 5th degree blackbelt. I earned mine this past weekend during a three-day "Summer Camp" for Jujitsu blackbelts in Los Angeles. 

Ever wonder what black belts study during annual re-tread training?

Here's the list of seminars, spread out over three days in Santa Clarita:

1. Flashlight techniques - Because police and prison guards use a flashlight as both a tool and a self-defense weapon. Used correctly, it beats the heck out of a knife as a weapon in a confrontation.

2. Ki for the Western Mind - what IS The Force, really?

3. Reviewing Big Book Techniques Part III - There are some 830 different Jujitsu Kata (discrete techniques) listed in the notes of George Kirby, the 10th Dan head of Budoshin Jujitsu.  We worked through about 10 of these in two hours, repairing things like "...place left foot under the attacker's throat..." where it should be "right foot" in the written descriptions.

4. The Science of Throwing, Part I - Why do some Judo throws magically work while others appear clumsy and ineffectual?  Hint: the key (Ki) is the axis of where the feet are pointing.

5. What to Do When Things Head South (I taught this session) - When does Jujitsu change from a defensive martial art to a survival martial art? An interesting statistic: 75% or more of 4-on-1 fights end up in death or permanent injury... usually from the head-stomping at the end. The Giants fan attacked in Dodger Stadium a few months ago is a case in point. Knowing that statistic, how would you adjust your handling of a developing assault? One of my sons (Cory) is alive today because in a dicey evening situation in Blacksburg, VA, he happened to be carrying his ASP baton... that was a 6-on-1 attack, and the six were Rugby players who had been experimenting with massive doses of steroids.

6. Momentum and its Application in Jujitsu - This is the Art (Jutsu), after all... so dealing with a frontal attack should involve the smallest use of muscle power possible. Linear attack? Circular response, and vice versa.

7. Reviewing Big Book Techniques Part IV - Know six different ways to take down someone grabbing your lapel (or chest hair)? Here are two more. So you've dropped your attacker on the ground? How do you keep him there (three more)?

8. The Science of Throwing Part II - The throw still isn't working right? The attacker is resisting your efforts to flatten him? Several things you can do to physically (and mentally) unbalance him.

9. Black Belt Testing - A young guy earns his first black belt during an hour of ferocious testing. Two old guys add a stripe each to their belts. It takes typically 3 - 5 years of continuous study and practice to earn the Shodan (1st Degree blackbelt). It takes a minimum of 4 years to go from Yodan (4th Dan) to Godan (5th Dan). These are really earned.

10. Reaction Time Drills - How do you teach your students to deal with the unexpected? These clever (and increasingly dangerous) drills will give them confidence. For the Senseis taking this training: how do you make sure that no one is injured in what is easily the most dangerous non-weapon martial art?

The good news: I made it from Santa Clarita to pass TSA security at the Burbank airport in 50 minutes.

The best news: I returned home with no significant injuries.

~~~~~

Gragga

That was the name by which my mother and uncle called their maternal grandmother. Her real name was Mamie Ross, and she married Frank Charles Smith. Sometime around the turn of the 20th Century, they were living with their two toddlers in Kernville, CA, where Frank had found work in a mine. As my mother tells the story, Frank came home one night and, quite drunk, said "Mamie, we have to move out of the house. I gambled it away tonight."

Mamie (Gragga to most everyone) said to him what at that time was a pretty bad word: "Frank, you are an old piss-ant."

With that she grabbed the two toddlers, what clothing she could, and dragged them all the way down to the Kern River. With rope she tied the two children so they wouldn't wander into the river (which to this day drowns up to 7 people a year). She returned to the now-forsaken house and dragged everything she thought she would need: pots and pans, blankets, etc. With that crucial step completed, she built a lean-to for shelter, all before the Sun rose in the east.

For the next several months, Mamie would feed the children in the morning, tie them with ropes to a tree, and walk into Kernville. There she would load her arms with the dirty clothes of the miners and return to the river, where she would wash them in the shallows with stones and sand, and lay them out to dry on rocks. With her meager earnings from this labor, she carefully saved up a nickle at a time and kept it in an old coffee-can buried in the dirt floor of the lean-to. Such was life for my great-grandmother at the turn of the 20th Century.

One day a mine owner approached her and said that he had noticed her industrious character, and had a deal for her: if she would cook and run a boarding house for miners that he had just built, she could have free room and board and a small profit after that. She agreed.

Several months later a delegation of the righteous ladies of Kernville approached the boarding house on a Sunday morning and knocked at the door. Mamie answered. The leading lady told her that they had decided, as upright ladies of the town, that the circumstances of Mamie's two children were unacceptable: that their mother was unmarried and living in a boarding house with miners - an unacceptably immoral life. They were there to take the two toddlers and raise them in a God-fearing manner.

"Is that so," said Mamie? "Just a moment, I'll be right back."

She returned with the largest meat-cleaver in her kitchen and said, "The last one of you ladies to get out of this yard will have the back of her bodice chopped open."

She reported years later, with some amusement, that you would never believe that women in full hoop skirts could clear a picket fence so fast.

Long after that Mamie married a man I vaguely remember as "Uncle Joe." Frank Smith by this time was a cowboy working on the huge Walker Ranch east of Kernville. He came down with cancer, and Mamie and Joe took him into their home in Bakersfield and cared for him until he died. That says even more about her than the experience surviving beside the Kern River.

In my genealogy I count Conan Prince of Wales, Humphrey de Bohun who signed the Magna Carta, and Charlemagne, among others.

I'm proudest, however, of Gragga, and have made sure that all my kids know her story.

~~~~~

Evolving Paradigms

500 years ago, everyone thought the world was flat. One could go outside, and look at the sea or a wind-swept plain and say "of course - it looks flat, it must BE flat." A Greek scientist traveling to southern Egypt almost 1,800 years earlier had shown that the Sun was at a different angle at noon there than at Athens on the same day. He was convinced that this fact proved that the Earth was round, but the idea didn't take off, to use modern language. When Magellan's lone caraval finally made it back to Lisbon after circumnavigating the Earth east-to-west, the ship's log was inexplicably one day behind Lisbon. Everyone was certain that they had made multiple entries every day in the correct order. Hmmm.

I once flew in a Concorde from London to Dulles airport in Virginia, and from 20 miles up I can tell you that the sky is dead black at mid-day, and the horizon is noticeably curved. I BELIEVE!

That is called a paradigm-shift: everyone's idea of reality changes. Usually it means that the new explanation, or paradigm, better explains what we can observe. (But not always.)

People during the Medieval period also thought the Earth was the center of everything; the Sun and Moon rotated around it, and Man was the most important thing on the Earth. Sure looked like Earth was the center. There was a problem explaining the jinking paths of the planets, however, until Kepler and others made the convincing argument that those paths could be explained rather nicely if you just gave up the Earth-centered paradigm. Kepler and Galileo had Hell to pay as they got cross-wise with the Catholic church over this, however.

Another sloooooowwwww paradigm-shift.

In the early 20th Century, Einstein proposed first his Special Theory of Relativity, and later his General Theory of Relativity. He did this by means of a gedanken experiment - a thinking experiment. It took a long time for physicists to accept that time could slow, that light could bend in empty space, and that no frame was anchored: there was no point in the universe that you could call "fixed": or the "center" - everything was relative and just the speed of light was left fixed. Well, at least you could count on something being countable-on. When things get tough to comprehend, physicists tend to "revert" to mathematical formalisms. I can explain relativity much easier with just a few equations... much easier than trying to explain how my evil twin Jason ended up being younger than me.


This paradigm-shift in peoples' minds was quite a bit more rapid than previous shifts. Again, humankind had a new, improved version of "reality," which I'm now going to start putting in quotes.

Note to self: during a solar eclipse, light from a distant star was shown to bend. That even made the front page of the New York Times. Also, precise clocks on GPS satellites have to be carefully adjusted for the "frame drag" of relativity because of their velocity relative to the hand-held GPS device I am using to find out where I left the danged car.

In the 1920's the idea of Quantum Mechanics arose to explain "non-classical" behavior of elementary particles and light. "Non Classical" means you can't easily wrap your head around the concepts that arose: particles had characteristics of waves and vice-versa, and Heisenberg said you couldn't pin down BOTH location and momentum of a particle at the same time. An electron was not a charged particle, but instead it was actually a probability cloud wrapped around a proton - to make a hydrogen atom.


After 1945, everyone started idolizing physicists - these guys could make that mumbo-jumbo actually DO something (kill ~220,000 human beings with two bombs). Most people could easily wrap their heads around killing a lot of people and ending a protracted war. I guess we can believe the physicists from now on, eh?

But don't be in too much of a hurry here. Einstein really, really, really didn't like quantum mechanics. Sure, he could understand the math of Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Fermi and others, but it just didn't... feel right to him. Einstein resisted quantum mechanics til the day he died.

Some paradigm-shifting here, but more for some, less for others.

~~~~~

Let's Quick Jump to the 21st Century: the paradigm-shifts are coming fast and furious the last 40 years:
- Black Holes exist.
- Continents Drift is happening - and causes volcanoes!
- Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) describes hadrons (including protons and neutrons) and how they behave and interact.
- Cigarettes are not good for your after-dinner digestion, but instead destroy your lungs and kill your heart and prove that you are stupid.
- Fuzzy Black Holes. Monster, Galaxy-Scale Black Holes. Black Holes that can decrease and go away over trillions of years.
- Cancer is really caused by a few stem-cells inside a tumor, not most of the cells we call "cancer."
- Complementarity - the idea that you can describe what's inside the Black Hole's Event Horizon (where you can't see anything because nothing, including light, can escape it) or you can describe the Event Horizon itself... but not both. Because they are the same thing. Got that?

Physicists are moving away from proving things with tests and experiments and back to promoting ideas like 17th Century philosophers, none of which we can ever know to be true because they can't be tested.

So, what IS "reality"? On the face of it, something we understand by organic chemistry and electrical signals in nerves and axons between our retinas, our fingers, our nose, and our brains. I'm talking about the whole inseparable nerve-brain ensemble here. Some physicists are swinging back to that old philosophical concept that we can never really know what "reality" is because of the primitive organic means we have of touching, tasting, and feeling it.

The take-away here:
First, treat anything that physicists tell you to be the truth with a 200 mg dose of healthy suspicion... because what any physicist hangs his hat on will be thrown out for a new paradigm just as sure as you and I breathe. For starts, don't take the Multiple universes ("Multiverse") idea seriously. Same holds for the fundamentally un-falsiable String Theory.

Second, don't take any ridicule for being a believer seriously. I mean come on! WHO'S doing the believing here?!??

~~~~~

The Color of the Door

I've just been reading an issue of Scientific American, paying closest attention to those things I find most interesting: an article about how 10,000 years ago humans began to domesticate plants - and thus it became possible to live longer. The down-range consequence? GRANDPARENTS, with all the cultural survival memories - and increased survival for the grandchildren - that this entails.

Families again.

Another article discusses the Multiverse concept: that we live in just one of an infinite number of universes, and this one just happens to have the physical constants all perfectly aligned to support life. Given enough time - and enough food - mankind can come up with a lot of great ideas. Art. Science. Ways to waste time playing games or blogging. In another earlier blog, I pointed out that concepts like a Multiverse - or for that matter String Theory - are absolutely unprovable. This particular cosmology article (August 2011 issue of Scientific American) took the time to actually point out why they are unprovable: they are concepts, ideas - not theories. They start and end with circular logic. A scientific theory is a fully-developed and self-consistent concept that is also consistent with observed physical facts. It already works. It goes beyond a theory when, like evolution, it can be shown to predict into the future, or explain things that someone hasn't yet reported. The Theory of Evolution isn't really a theory anymore - it's just Evolution. It has been repeatedly tested at widely different scales of size and time, and found to be consistent with observed facts. I've actually personally watched evolution in Venezuelan rats, and in mice left by a Spanish ship anchored in southeast Alaska over 400 years ago. Interestingly, in Wikipedia you can find just Evolution, not the "theory of Evolution."

Evolution doesn't threaten my faith, it augments it. Like Harry Reid said, "I'm a Democrat because I'm a Mormon."

So why worry about these sorts of things? Our ancestors millennia ago didn't have the luxury to do so - they were too busy farming or hunting down the next meal. WE have the luxury of thinking about these things (and getting some minor, temporary fame by writing articles in Scientific American) because we have plenty of food and comfortable housing. Unfortunately, a majority of our brothers and sisters in the United States (and a supermajority beyond its frontiers) don't have that luxury. They struggle to pay their mortgages and put food on the table for their children.

And to what end do they struggle so?

Well, perhaps they love their children and don't want to feed them stones.

And for the thinkers out here who have the luxury of eating toast and a Klondike as they read SciAm and type out the words of their blog? To what end do they do this?

Well, perhaps they want to think that they are more important than a temporary blip on a cosmic wave-function. They don't want to admit their mortality: to admit that they will die and be slowly forgotten with time.

That they aren't important. Not even a little bit.

You're probably wondering: the color of what door? That's a metaphor that I started using in my own mind years ago. A dear friend died when I was 26 and he was 30. Another friend I met and grew to know at the Cascades Volcano Observatory was a photographer on the side, and his life work had quite a number of doors from all over the world. Each door seemed to be a different color, have its own unique character.

Like each of us.

Buck Birdeau died of raging diabetes that first blinded him and then destroyed his kidneys. Dave Wieprecht survived a horrific experience in Vietnam - but not the exposure to Agent Orange - and died of the most virulent of the four known versions of thyroid cancer out there. Both ended their lives as what I would call great people - they had reconciled themselves with who they were in this great universe. They had gotten to the point in life when the most important thing they did was what they did for other people.

THAT's What is important.  NOT the brand of my dress or the existence of a Multiverse.

So. What will be the color of MY door? Lung cancer? It took my Dad and his Mom, but I've avoided tobacco like the plague since I was 20. Stroke? It took my Mom and apparently her Dad, but I've exercised and eaten carefully since I was in my 30's.

One thing for sure: my door will have a color. As Jim Morrison (the wasted minstrel of my generation) once said, "No One gets out of here alive."

He also said "People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend."


I'm just interested in what the color of MY door will be, and will I have time to leave messages of love - and admonition - for the kids and grandkids I love so much... and who must follow? 


I look forward to stepping through that door and going home finally.

~~~~~

Evil? or Broken? -- Part 2 (An Example of Bad Science)

I have just finished reading an article in Atlantic magazine - actually, I read it twice - called The Brain on Trial. I will not link to it, because I believe (for several reasons) that it represents bad science, and don't wish to give it added weight. It took a second reading to find the reasons for the nagging discomfort I had after the first reading. The article has a lot of substantive content about new discoveries related to the functioning of the human brain, and the effects of chemistry (and brain tumors) on it.  It's concluding premise is that there really is no such thing as free will - that we and all our behavior are simply the mechanical play-out of our genes, perhaps with some environmental influences thrown in (abuse as a child is treated as a mitigating circumstance for crimes committed later as an adult). 

The article begins with the story of Charles Whitman, the University of Texas Tower Sniper, who killed 13 people (his first victim a pregnant woman) and wounded 32 others. In his suicide note Whitman asked that an autopsy be done on his brain, to find out what had made him do this, because he recognized that something was wrong in his own mind. The autopsy found a glioblastoma 1.5 cm in diameter, pressing against the amygdala. The amygdala lies hear the hypothalamus, and is involved in the regulation of emotions, especially aggression and fear.

This was a sensational starting example, and not unexpected; all writers try to draw you into their writing with something interesting. I should have taken warning from it, however.  The author is an academic; the attribution says he is a neuroscientist at an southeastern university. After reading this exculpatory article I'm reminded of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters saying "Back off, man - I'm a scientist!"

However, in the article the scientist-author does not directly reference any single scientific study, though he does pick and choose - allude really - to certain conclusions here and there. One of these is that a psychiatrist who works with criminals is a poor predictor of future behavior. Instead, statistics ("science") is/are better, because these show that sexual interest in children and "prior sexual offenses" are better predictors of recidivism. 

Excuse me, but "Duh!"

The author gives other examples - a pedophile who also had a brain tumor, and when it was removed his "problem" went away. He discusses how teenagers do not have a fully-developed pre-frontal cortex, the moderator of impulsive behavior. Most state legal systems recognize this (as do car insurance actuaries), and people below the arbitrary age of 18 (17 in some states) are treated very differently, with an implicit assumption that they will grow a mature pre-frontal cortex and be different as adults. This age cut-off is very artificial, and requires extra hoop-jumping by judges and prosecutors. 

I once visited a 17-year-old in a juvenile detention facility in Fairfax County, Virginia; I went as the counselor to an LDS branch president. The young man was imprisoned because he had been part of a robbery gang, and during one robbery had been confronted by a screaming old woman who owned a little vegetable store. He shot her in the eye and killed her. He showed no remorse, simply snarled when we asked him about it that the "old bitch got in my face." His next sentence was revealing: "get me out of here," he demanded. "You guys are authorities, you can get me out of here."

Somehow, I don't think that growing a final lobe on his pre-frontal cortex would qualify him to be released into the general population anytime soon. I know more than one adult with a poorly-developed pre-frontal cortex.

The red flag in the Atlantic article, however, was this cluster of sentences, spread over a paragraph: "If you are the carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes... <you are> 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes." and "By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you've probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you are a carrier, we call you a male."

Wow. All men are sociopaths?  Really?  I find it really hard to believe that the author is unaware of female prisons and female serial killers.

Later on the author states unambiguously that depression, schizophrenia, and mania are all "controlled" by drugs. Mixing schizophrenia with the other two is an example of an apples and oranges association - but it appears to be deliberately done to advance an agenda.  

That agenda is this: there is no such thing as free will. All humans are broken to varying degrees, we all fit somewhere in a continuous spectrum of disfunction, and therefore no one should be judged as being "blameworthy". The author is quick to point out that he is not advocating turning sociopaths loose on society - but instead advocates that judges follow the "science" - to make statistical judgments of who should be locked up forever (pedophiles and serial killers have an extremely high recidivism rate) and who should be put into a vastly-expanded public system of rehabilitation. His characterizes his preferred solution is "customized sentencing."

I have no issue with rehabilitation, and know of several cases where it seemed to have helped. I have no issue either with not treating the schizophrenic who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords as being criminally culpable. What I DO take issue with is lumping schizophrenia with depression, and by association removing all human beings from being "blameworthy." The subtlest part of this slight-of-hand is to draw the conclusion from these examples that all humans fit into a broad spectrum of bad-to-good socialization, and that no one can be considered blameworthy of anything - just treated as broken, and either fixed or quarantined forever. 

From this he concludes that there is no such thing as free will. In other words, we never have really been given our agency, the greatest gift of all.

As bad science goes, this is a bit more subtle than the homeopathic advertisements I see in the back of Discover magazine. But only a bit. 

~~~~~

Evil? Or Broken?

What, exactly, is an evil person?  A Philosopher's Talk segment on NPR equated evil with lack of empathy. Most people attach the word "evil" to someone who does something they consider terrible: the Holocaust, 9/11, the Killing Fields of Cambodia. It could be used by someone angry that another person poisoned his barking dog. I've heard the word attached to someone who was an inveterate punster.

But make no mistake - there is real evil out there. At least two different kinds.

In the King James Bible there are two words for taking life: slay and kill. In 21st Century English these words have mapped to different meanings: kill and murder. In both cases, the former is state-sanctioned: what a soldier does in battle, or a butcher does to feed his family. In both cases the latter meaning (the 1604 meaning of kill, or 2011 meaning of murder) is morally reprehensible. (That's short for "bad.") So when the King James Bible says "Thou Shalt Not Kill" - it means you must not murder. This distinction was important during the reign of James I, and for some people it remains important today.

Martha Stout's book "The Sociopath Next Door" posits that about 1 in 25 people around you is born without the capacity to love or empathize. As she puts it: what do the con man, the impostor, and the serial killer have in common?  They are all missing something essential: a conscience.

I would put it this way: there is a tiny fraction of the human population with an imperfect - or missing - moral spine.

I believe I've encountered a few individuals in my life experience who might qualify. In each case they had a crippled idea of a life philosophy, and had a deep devotion to Number One: themselves. They tortured others - both animals and humans.  There is a degree to everything, and in one case the individual was profoundly unhappy - an extremely intelligent atheist who knew he was different, knew he had no real hope except to climb an academic ladder - and was deeply frustrated.  There are some individuals at the extreme end of this spectrum who apparently never had any particular sense of unhappiness - John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. Killing for them was just a business - a way to satisfy a need.

The difference between most sociopaths and a serial killer may simply be narcissism. The former retain a concern for what people think of them, and it holds them in check, more or less. Historically, these broken individuals have tended not to propagate their genes unless they had this additional trait. Unless they somehow became a leader of men (I'm thinking about Genghis Khan and Josef Stalin here). Fear of execution held some of these crippled individuals in check up until the mid-20th Century. Most simpler societies, which have not had the luxury of lawyers and elaborate jails, dealt with this sort of person quickly and permanently: slay/kill them.

Ever hear of Tollund Man? A mummified corpse found in 1950 in a Danish bog... with a rope around his neck. There was initial speculation that he was a human sacrifice... but he was more likely a murderer or pedophile, dealt with quickly and efficiently by a local community where he was captured (a second autopsy verified that he had been hanged).

So. Are serial killers, pedophiles, and Islamic Khotila* evil? Or do they just have a broken wire in their brains somewhere? There is a rather high correlation between children that torture animals and sociopaths, just as there is a high correlation between mathematicians and musicians. Another way of looking at this is: we are all built differently, and some are born missing the empathy socket.

But there are also apparently normal people who commit murder. They were sent over the edge by something - infidelity, an attack on their children, something that brought them to a point where they were - at least temporarily - able to kill another human being. The courts even distinguish between "aggravated murder" and "murder." The latter is judged to be not quite as bad as premeditated murder. All too often I see on TV or in the newspaper a story of a spurned husband (it almost never seems to be the wife) who kills his estranged wife and perhaps their children - and then kills himself. Neighbors, fellow church-goers all seem surprised by this: he seemed like such a nice man and such a good father...

Can good people turn bad? Clearly, yes. Do we all have weaknesses - various broken wires in our brains - that can be taken advantage of? I think that, too, is a very real likelihood. I'll bet anyone reading this can think of at least one example. From terrifying personal experience, I am certain that there is an Adversary out there.

That's where the "aggravation" comes from, where people get tipped over the edge.

What can you - or society for that matter - do about this?

Avoidance isn't always possible. The Oregon Supreme Court ruled on a teacher asking to carry a pistol into her elementary school classroom: she had an estranged husband who had repeatedly stalked her, threatened to kill her, and had already violated a court restraining order. How would you decide this one?

We are told clearly that Charity is the greatest of all characteristics required of us by God. We can be charitable, try to understand, and when possible perhaps even try to help. Being charitable does NOT mean that we have to give free rein to the agency of the evil person - the Title of Liberty comes to mind. This sort of evil is what courts are designed to deal with - to quantify, evaluate, assess, and if possible to correct. If correction is not possible, then quarantine. We do this for viruses, both organic and digital - we isolate these dangerous things until they are no longer dangerous.

Finally, I believe we have the luxury in our modern society to do no more than this - no more than to quarantine. From a practical standpoint (court-time and lawyer's fees), capital punishment is far more expensive than life imprisonment. More importantly, I think a follower of Christ must step beyond the Mosaic Law and forgo societally-sanctioned executions. Because execution, whether by hanging (Tollund), gas chamber, or lethal injection - is still killing another human being.

Kill, slay, or murder - it doesn't matter what you call it, another human being still dies. We don't have to hold the cloaks of the executioners.

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* An Afghani Islamic militant group hanged an 8-year-old boy they kidnapped, because his policeman father would not surrender a police vehicle (news reports on 24 July 2011). There are several Salafist organizations that openly sanction murders of innocent men, women, and children simply because they are Christian or Shi'a. To call these Islamists "Jihadis" is to compliment him. Jihad means to fight evil, and the Qu'ran makes it pretty clear that this means to root out evil in your own soul. 

Instead, I much prefer the words "Khotila" (قاتل) - murderer - or Jazari (جزار) - butcher.

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