Click the link below the picture

.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told the bureau workforce Wednesday that he plans to resign at the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January, an announcement that came a week and a half after President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate loyalist Kash Patel for the job.

Wray said at a town hall meeting that he would be stepping down “after weeks of careful thought,” three years short of the completion of a 10-year term marked by high-profile and politically charged investigations, including that led to two separate indictments of Trump last year.

Wray’s intended resignation is not unexpected considering that Trump had settled on Patel to be director and had repeatedly aired his ire at Wray, including in a television interview broadcast Sunday. By stepping down rather than waiting to be fired, Wray is trying to avert a collision with the new Trump administration that he said would have further entangled the FBI “deeper into the fray.”

“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told agency employees. “In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”

Wray was put in the job by Trump and began the 10-year term — a length meant to insulate the agency from the political influence of changing administrations — in 2017, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey amid an investigation into ties between Russia and the Republican president’s campaign.

Trump had telegraphed his anger with Wray on multiple occasions. Trump said in the recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I can’t say I’m thrilled with him. He invaded my home,” a reference to the FBI search of his Florida property, Mar-a-Lago, two years ago for classified documents from Trump’s first term as president.

But the soft-spoken director rarely seemed to go out of his way to publicly confront the White House.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article and slideshow:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

SimomSays

Click the link below the picture

.

Sycophant was once a rare word, reserved for high-brow literature and nonfiction. However, in these politically tumultuous times, the word has regained popularity.  “I said to the President this morning, I can’t afford to be a sycophant to you,” Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House Communications Director, said in a July CNN interview. It was an interesting word choice, not because of its elegance or complexity, but due to its origins.

Merriam-Webster defines sycophant as  “a servile self-seeking flatterer”. In layman’s terms, a sycophant is a brownnoser, a flunky, or a suck-up. Even if you haven’t adopted the word into your everyday vocabulary, you’ve most certainly used one of its synonyms before.

Sykophant∆í ÔøΩs, the ancient Greek spelling of the word, was derived from the words sykon ( “fig”) and phanein ( “to reveal”). Thus, the literal translation would be  “fig revealer”. But how did fig revealers become brownnosers? The association is not as improbable as it seems. In those times, Greek farmers were forced to pay a hefty tax on figs they sold at public markets. Some farmers hid their figs to avoid paying the tax. However, some citizens would squeal, leading to financial punishment for the farmers and putting the fig revealers in good standing with local authorities. To the farmers, the fig revealers were just suck-ups to the police and not truly interested in doing the right thing.

Over time, sycophants developed an even stronger bond with the government. They became overly litigious private citizens who were hired to prosecute fig smugglers and writers, despite having no law experience or personal stake in the cases. Their primary objective was profit and staying in the good graces of government officials. Thus, they quickly earned a bad reputation throughout Greece. Statutes of limitation were introduced to reduce their power in the courts. And Greek playwright Aristophanes satirized sycophants in much of his work including The Birds and The Acharnians.

In the 1530s, the Latin word sycophanta was adopted. It was defined as  “Informer, talebearer, and slanderer” then.

Today, sycophant doesn’t carry as much weight as it did in ancient Greek times, but its meaning is still potent, combining the definitions from both its Greek and Latin origins. And quite often, it’s used in relation to politics on both a national and local scale.

“Steven Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history,” American economist Larry Summers tweeted, after Mnuchin objected to NFL protests during the National Anthem. Though some politicians have used the word with a tinge of humor.  “I don’t think I’ve been accused of being a Mike Bloomberg sycophant,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked, as he praised the former NYC mayor during a September Cornell Tech meeting. Sycophants are even present in office politics. An Economic Times article argued against being the  “Chief Sycophant” when trying to impress a new boss in the workplace.

Though sycophant is most certainly applicable to other industries and situations beyond politics, it hasn’t escaped its political beginnings. And judging by the context of its modern use, it’s a trend that will continue.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Many of us might think that we know what a narcissist looks like. There are plenty of tell-tale signs, like self-importance, a lack of empathy, a demanding personality, and an excessive need for admiration.

But when we’re in the early stages of a relationship – be it romantic, familial, or platonic – with a narcissist, their traits can often be more covert and nearly impossible to detect.

Sudden changes in a person’s demeanor often make us wonder if we did something wrong to lose their affection, or if we’re just being overly sensitive about their behavior.

This is particularly true for emotionally intelligent and empathetic people who are typically more self-aware and attuned to the feelings of others, and therefore sadly become magnets for those with narcissistic tendencies.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Could one of our ex-presidents be a Malignant Narcissist? Hmmmm…

Click the link below the picture

.

A malignant narcissist is an abusive person who finds pleasure in lying, manipulating, and using other people in order to get the things that they want.

Narcissism is a personality trait recognized throughout history, but awareness of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and narcissistic personality in popular culture has grown. As a result, people may wonder whether they are dealing with someone who is selfish, thoughtless, or overly power-seeking—or if they are dealing with someone with a true disorder.

This article discusses what it means to be a malignant narcissist and how to spot the signs. It also explores what causes this type of behavior and what you can do to protect yourself from a malignant narcissist.

Types of Narcissism

Malignant narcissism is one of several different types of narcissism. The five main types are:

1. Overt narcissism
2. Covert narcissism
3. Communal narcissism
4. Antagonistic narcissism
5. Malignant narcissism

Malignant narcissism is considered by many to be the most severe type. That’s why it helps to recognize when you have someone with this condition in your life and what to expect from interactions with them. This knowledge can also provide insight into how to deal with them in the healthiest way possible.

.

Verywell / Theresa Chiechi

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A few years ago I was hired to help revise a psychology textbook to make it more engaging for Gen Z. I’m a millennial, but my younger brother is Gen Z (“digital natives” born between 1997 and 2012), and our perceptions of American life differ—sometimes significantly.

To help with my revisions, I read iGen by psychologist Jean Twenge. The book’s central hypothesis is that Gen Z is uniquely and acutely concerned with tolerance, diversity, and social justice, more so than any American generation before.

But as with every generation, there are outliers. And these outliers can surprise us and teach us what makes the subgroups of a generation tick.

As a social psychologist who studies the interplay between societal structures and individual psychology, I have seen that relationship come into focus during this presidential election. I’ve followed exit polls closely, watching for psychological “surprises” in policy trends—places where behavioral expectations for individuals and groups (based on their psychology, history, and sociodemographic orientations) diverge from what actually unfolds. What I’ve seen in the voting trends of Gen Z is something politicos need to pay attention to as the next generation reaches voting age: the young white male vote is skewing conservative, in part because of how society defines and sets expectations around masculinity.

Gen Z, as a bloc, should have voted blue. Democrats, after all, claim to be the party of progress, especially when compared with the present iteration of the Republican Party, and Twenge argues that Gen Z individuals are “obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality.” Kamala Harris centered herself on a key progressive issue—salvaging women’s right to

abortion—whereas Donald Trump’ campaign was full of sexist remarks and a promise to roll back protections for transgender students in schools. And while Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz was hailed as a progressive champion, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance espoused regressive and demeaning views about women’s place in American society. All in all, if it’s true that Gen Zers are defined by their progressive views on sociopolitical issues, they should have voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket. The Harris-Walz campaign was certainly counting on it.

And they did, sort of. Fifty-four percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 voted for Harris and Walz. This is nothing new: Young people skew blue. Yet, if what Twenge and others say is true, and this group is uniquely concerned with social justice, this number should have been higher. I was certain that Gen Zers—regardless of their gender, educational attainment, or geographic location—would overwhelmingly vote for Harris. But they didn’t. Democrats lost a lot of footing with young voters, despite nearly every historically marginalized group, especially LGBTQ+ youth, leaning left.

Who, then, didn’t vote as expected? Young Gen Z white men—mainly those without college degrees—voted overwhelmingly for Trump (67 percent), which is eerily similar to their just-older millennial peers (also 67 percent). By comparison, young white working class Gen Z women were more likely to vote blue (43 percent) than their just-older millennial peers (34 percent).

As a researcher who studies identity, behavior, and aggression among young men, these patterns set off alarm bells for me.

But the answer isn’t as simple as “toxic masculinity.” What really led white, working class Gen Z men to align themselves with Trump—a candidate characterized by his anger, aggression, hatefulness, hegemony, and specific brand of manhood? Based on research spanning decades, including my own, the answer relates to three core ideas of social psychology: conformity, motivation, and threat.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

When I told my roommate that I had accepted a teaching job in Brooklyn, her jaw dropped.

“The school with the hour-and-a-half commute?” she asked.

“Well, technically three hours round trip,” I said. “But yes.”

Over the next six months, I continued to have similar conversations with friends, colleagues, and mentors. All of them thought I was crazy to trade my 25-minute commute from the Upper West Side to a Manhattan high school for an interborough expedition involving both the subway and a bus.

I had my doubts too. Research shows that more time spent commuting correlates with higher levels of fatigue and stress; another study reveals that longer commute times are associated with lower job and leisure-time satisfaction. Intuitively, “in transit” does not seem like a fun way to spend a decent chunk of one’s precious waking hours. I assumed I would tough it out for a year before finding a new job or moving closer to work.

But once I started commuting that far, I discovered something shocking: I loved it. In a postpandemic world where people are less willing than ever to travel for work, my long commute is the only thing keeping me sane.

Having hours of time on the train each week means I’m making unprecedented progress toward my goals of applying to grad school and regularly publishing essays. When I had a short commute, I tried waking up early to write for an hour before leaving for work, but maintaining the motivation to rise at 6 when I didn’t have to was difficult. Plus, I struggled to concentrate at home. I’d often get distracted by the dishwasher that I really should empty or the couch I could nap on for “just five minutes.” (It’s never just five minutes.)

Now I have three hours of guaranteed writing time every day, with home distractions out of sight and out of mind. I have a routine when I get on the subway: I stand next to the platform elevator to be directly in front of the train doors when they open. Then, I sit at the end of the bench to avoid getting squished between two strangers and place my laptop on its case, creating a makeshift desk. At first, I was convinced that everyone was judging me, but people are much more concerned with themselves or making sure they’re on the right train than they are with me. With my newfound time to work, I’ve even picked up an editing side gig that I complete solely on the subway. Not having consistent cell service to check Instagram means I’m especially focused.

When I’m not working during my commute, the quiet time to myself allows me to decompress from a chaotic day of managing teenagers. Teaching requires me to pivot with a moment’s notice based on how my students are feeling: Mia is about to blow up because Alejandro is in her seat? OK, pause my instruction and defuse the situation. The whole class enters the room, yelling about a fight they’ve just witnessed? Time to circulate to get people settled and facilitate an activity that channels their energy productively.

Life at home can be chaotic too. With a short commute, I found that having only 25 minutes before interacting with my roommates once again left me feeling stressed and overextended. My longer commute allows me to both work and have a little time to read, reflect on the day, or simply close my eyes so that I’m a calmer, more grounded person after I get home. Sure, there are people around me on the subway, but no one is going to ask me for anything.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Right now, people who love looking at the wonders of the heavens have it better than ever. Every day brings some new jaw-dropping snapshot from at least one of the myriad observatories now operating on the ground or in space, each offering a new view of alien worlds, exploding stars, colliding galaxies or any number of other astrophysical phenomena. Most of these images are paeans to cosmic forces and inconceivable scales that carve stunning beauty from epic violence.

But not everything in our galaxy (or beyond) is the outcome of such ostentatious chaos. Some of the most visually captivating celestial objects are quiet, steady, even calm—and so dark that they not only emit no visible light but actually absorb it, creating a blackness so profound they seem to be a notch cut out in space.

These shadowy expanses have many sobriquets—dark nebulae, dust clouds, knots—but I prefer to call them Bok globules, a name they received in honor of Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who studied them.

A Bok globule is a small, dense clump of cosmic dust; millions of them are scattered around our galaxy. They are cold and opaque to visible light, so much so that until quite recently the only way to see them was in silhouette against brighter background material. While not as splashy as their star-factory cousins, such as the Orion Nebula, Bok globules can still make stars, albeit in a more artisanal way: they make one or a few at a time that are largely hidden from our prying eyes in the dust’s abyssal depths.

Of all the dark globules we can see with our telescopes, my favorite beyond a doubt is Barnard 68, colloquially called B68. Located about 500 light-years from Earth, it’s a vaguely comma-shaped and coal-black cloud a mere half light-year wide, spanning some five trillion kilometers. We see it easily because it’s in the constellation Ophiuchus, with the star-packed center of our Milky Way galaxy as its backdrop. B68 appears to us as negative space, an absence of stars.

Why is it so dark? Although mostly made of hydrogen gas (like pretty much everything else in our galaxy), B68 also has an abundance of carbon. Some of this element is locked up in small molecules such as carbon monoxide, but much of the rest instead resides in long, complex molecules that make up what astronomers generically call dust. One distinguishing (or extinguishing) characteristic of dust is its capacity to block visible light.

And dust clouds can be dark indeed. In the case of B68, any star located on the other side from us will have its light diminished by a factor of 15 trillion. To put this in perspective, dimming the sun in our sky by this much would reduce it to a fourth-magnitude star difficult to spot in even mildly light-polluted skies. If you were on one side of B68 and the sun on the other, the sun’s light would be so attenuated across that half light-year that it would become invisible to the naked eye.

Such extreme darkness makes B68—and Bok globules more generally—subject to continual mistaken identity. Some years ago astronomers discovered the existence of huge volumes of space largely bereft of galaxies; these are called cosmic voids and can be many millions of light-years across. Alas, I’ve seen quite a few breathless videos and articles about them illustrated with an image of B68. It’s irritating to me as an astronomer to see this mistake because these are very different objects, but it’s also rather amusing because the actual voids being discussed are millions of times larger than our friendly nearby Bok globule.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan, where Thompson’s company was hosting a conference. The New York Police Department said the shooting was a “targeted attack” and that the gunman remains at large, but few other details have been released. Surveillance video captured the moment the shooter calmly approached Thompson, pointed a pistol equipped with a silencer, fired multiple shots, and fled on an electric bike. Police are now combing through video footage to track him down, including at a nearby Starbucks the shooter visited.

Many who noted the details of the shooting had an immediate question: Is this what a professional hit looks like in real life? The NYPD has said nothing of the sort, but that didn’t stop speculation from running rampant online. Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has decades of expertise studying professional killers, has a unique perspective on that. He’s spent years dispelling myths about contract killings born of movies and Law & Order episodes. He told me he found aspects of the attack peculiar and agreed to talk to me while emphasizing that it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about a crime for which very little information has been released. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dennis Kenney: The first thing that’s unusual is that the shooter appeared to have a silencer. They’re not impossible to get, but they’re not readily available. The second thing is that he appeared to have inside information on the victim’s location. He knew where to wait and when to wait. The fact that he used the silencer didn’t make sense to me at first until I saw that the shooting took place at about 6:30 in the morning. Generally, if it was a midmorning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a lot of noise to scare observers off. But obviously, at that time, no one was around. It also suggested that the urgency of the shooting was important. CEOs of health care companies are just not that hard to find in isolated settings. So the fact that he chose to do it in midtown Manhattan was a little bit unique.

Police called it a “brazen targeted attack.” You’ve studied contract killings and so-called hit men and sought to dispel myths about these kinds of crimes. What do you think of speculation that this was a hit?

I think it’s pretty unlikely. My understanding is the CEO was being investigated for insider trading and some other financial violation. The fact that he ran a health care company—they tend to leave a lot of angry people in their wake. So, it seemed to be someone who knew what they were doing, but the idea of a professional hit man, those are pretty few and far between. So I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.

Do contract killings usually play out in such dramatic fashion?

A professional hit man would probably prefer to do something less public with limited exposure. Doing it in the middle of midtown—there’s just too many things that can go wrong, so you probably prefer generally not to do it there. However, if it was time sensitive, then that would make a difference. There’s a range of hit men, so it could be somebody that was hired, but it’s unlikely.

Is there any other reason you think it’s unlikely?

This obviously was not the target’s usual routine. A professional would generally try to catch him in his regular routine in a place where the exposure of the shooter is minimized so that the risk of being caught or observed is pretty low. Manhattan, particularly in midtown, you’ve got cameras everywhere. I understand that they’ve got some fairly decent shots of the guy’s face while he was in Starbucks or something like that nearby. The exposure was fairly high, and most professionals don’t like that amount of risk. Again, unless it was time sensitive—there could be any number of reasons why it was important that it happened that day.

.

New York City Police Department

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________