Amsterdam Researchers Reveal US President Obama's Secret

US President Obama burst on the international scene as a political wunderkind, while still in his 40s. Having already written two autobiographies by the age of 45, Mr. Obama has clearly been on the fast track to power from the time he was elected to the Illinois Senate. And yet Mr. Obama had never actually accomplished anything substantial in his entire life -- certainly nothing worthy of two autobiographies nor warranting being elected to the most powerful political position in the world. What is his secret?

Narcissists rise to the top. That's because other people think their qualities -- confidence, dominance, authority, and self-esteem -- make them good leaders.

..."Our research shows that the opposite seems to be true," says Barbora Nevicka, a PhD candidate in organizational psychology, describing a new study she undertook with University of Amsterdam colleagues Femke Ten Velden, Annebel De Hoogh, and Annelies Van Vianen. The study found that the narcissists' preoccupation with their own brilliance inhibits a crucial element of successful group decision-making and performance: the free and creative exchange of information and ideas. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

... "The narcissistic leaders had a very negative effect on their performance. They inhibited the communication because of self-centeredness and authoritarianism." _SD

US President Obama is the narcissist's narcissist. Among all the world's narcissists, Mr. Obama would surely rank at the top. So in a perverse sense of logic, it is fitting that Obama has reached the world's top political ranking.

But for the people who must suffer from Obama's arrogant incompetence, the news is not so good.

The question is, are there enough Americans left with above average intelligence, awareness, and wisdom, to remove this narcissist among naricssists from a position of world power? If not, the doom we experience could rightly be dubbed, "The Revenge of the Narcissists."

9-11 Conspiracy Theories--A Haven for the Rabid and the Incompetent

Rosie O'Donnell is not the only nitwit to espouse 9-11 conspiracy theories publicly. In fact, there are apparently more than 800,000 web pages devoted to the deluded imaginings and wishful thinking of the lunatic left mainstream.

Increasingly, such beliefs are migrating from the fringes and into the mainstream. French author Thierry Meyssan’s The Big Lie, which argues that the U.S. military used one of its own guided missiles to attack the Pentagon, was a bestseller in France, and his claims have been widely repeated in European and Middle Eastern media. When Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote to President George W. Bush in May 2006, his rambling missive included broad hints that the American government was involved in organizing the attacks. Allegations of American complicity in 9/11 have become standard fare on talk radio, and among both radical left- and radical right-wing groups. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a Democrat from Georgia, has held a Capitol Hill hearing on the topic. Celebrities have gotten into the act as well. “Why did Bush knock down the towers?” rapper Jadakiss asked in his 2004 hit “Why?” And, in an interview with conspiracy-oriented talk-show host Alex Jones, actor Charlie Sheen embraced a variety of popular conspiracy theories.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was fond of saying. “He is not entitled to his own facts.” Sooner or later, even the wildest 9/11 theories rely on factual claims. And facts can be checked.

Popular Mechanics became involved in investigating 9/11 conspiracy theories in the fall of 2004, after an advertisement ran in the New York Times for the book Painful Questions by Eric Hufschmid, demanding that the 9/11 investigation be reopened. Hufschmid’s book includes a number of tangible claims regarding 9/11. It states, for example, that because jet fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel, the fires in the World Trade Center towers could not have caused their collapse. And it claims ample evidence exists to show that demolition-style explosives were prepositioned in the buildings.

As editors of a magazine devoted to science and technology, we saw these claims as significant. Was there hard evidence to support them? And, if so, what would be the implications for our understanding of 9/11? At the very least, we thought, someone should look into these allegations. If there were even a hint of truth to these or similar claims, then the conspiracy theorists had a point: There should be a deeper investigation.

....The magazine assembled a team of reporters and researchers and methodically began to analyze the most common factual claims made by conspiracy theorists--assertions that are at the root of the majority of 9/11 alternative scenarios. We interviewed scores of engineers, aviation experts, military officials, eyewitnesses, and members of the investigative teams--more than 300 sources in all. We pored over photography, maps, blueprints, aviation logs, and transcripts. The results of our research appeared in the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics. That cover story, “9/11: Debunking the Myths,” provoked a strong reaction on the internet and in the mainstream media. The online version of the article remains the most frequently read story on www.popularmechanics.com and has been printed out more than 850,000 times.

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As someone with limited time to waste, I have not spent very much time looking at theories that were clearly dreamed up by people several cards short of a full deck. Nevertheless, since the leftist mainstream is composed largely of academically lobotomised, psychological neotenates with pathological narcissism, such theories find a ready audience there.

When a person's personal and political ideology is comprised largely of hate and anger, he becomes an easy target for such poorly reasoned treatises which try to deny a worldwide problem of surplus jihad-aged muslim males trained to kill for religion, and lay all the world's problems at the feet of the hated US government.

No wonder Al Gore is doing so well with his little propaganda film. It all fits, if you focus your hatred clearly enough on the chosen scapegoat.

Riding a Tsunami of Narcissism and Psychological Neoteny All The Way to the White House!

A good politician in the US knows how to gear his pitch to his audience. If you're speaking to a college group, you had better be good dealing with narcissism and psychological neoteny.

from a town-hall meeting John and Elizabeth Edwards held at the University of New Hampshire Monday. They were questioned by an undergraduate named Jenny Ballantine, who had this to say:

I need to be able to look to my leader and see words of encouragement, words of hope. I need to be able to trust that person. I need to be able to know that I'm going to be grow [sic in transcript] in a world that's not going to be full of hate and prejudice and racism and to know that I matter, that I wasn't just dumped in this world for no particular reason whatsoever.

I'm busting my ass in school, I work 25 to 30 hours a week, and it's just me and my dog. So what can you do for the people that are in my situation, that are trying their damnedest in school, wanting to go to grad school, is going to be hit with the loans--and, uh, I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know what I want to be when I'm an adult. But I'm 22 right now, so people are like, "Honey, you are an adult." You know what? It's about me. It's about me voting for you or supporting somebody who's going to be the next president. So it's all about me right now. Just give me something.

Here is how the Edwardses responded:

Mr. Edwards: God bless you. If I were choosing a president, uh, that's what I'd be doing. I'd be looking for the specifics of what they want to do, because that matters, but I would also be judging them personally, because we need to trust our president.

Mrs. Edwards: I want to say something, too. I was really impressed with you, Jenny Ballantine, and I think probably everybody in this room was, and I want everybody in this room who believes that Jenny Ballantine is going to be able to do it to give her a round of applause.

According to Foster's Daily Democrat of Dover, N.H., the audience gave Miss Ballantine not only a round of applause but a standing ovation.

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