I believe all of what you're saying, priorities, et cetera, et cetera. My question is about political will. We know where Europe is at at the moment. And it seems to me that most governments now have a very important job of jobs for people, and all of that. I'm just wondering, do you believe that the Europeans have the political will to really want to continue the journey that you're about and your team are about, and that they're going to keep that at the heart of what you're about as it were, saving ourselves, et cetera, et cetera? Thank you. Gentleman behind in the white shirt there, yes? And have I a third hand anywhere? Hello, my name's Graham. I'm a lecturer in school business in London. I'm with the Humanitarian Logistics Institute. My query, I completely agree with everything that the Commissioner had said. I'm drawn to your two priorities about anticipating the crisis and the professionalism. Obviously, my background being in logistics and the role it plays in humanitarian operations. And one of the things that comes up time and again when I go to conferences, academic conferences, is the lack of funding that goes into training preparation for humanitarian agencies. They only get the funding, obviously, when the crisis arises from the public. Is there a mechanism, or will you be offering a mechanism to provide funding for training for a 19-year-old switch? As you're saying, the preparation phase could assist, and could cut down costs as well. Thank you very much. Third part of the stage, no? Yes, I see another hand there. And we'll just take those three interventions here. Hi, I'm Thomas. I'm a PhD researcher at the Institute of College. I have two questions. The first is related to the criteria that are used to define humanitarian disasters when they are officially recognised. Is that an event or a situation that becomes a disaster? And I suppose specifically you talked about Libya and Syria. That they have officially been recognised and at what point they become recognised. And also could a economic crisis be recognised as a humanitarian disaster somewhere like Greece at the moment? Could it be a humanitarian disaster? And my other point is just in relation to your priority of anticipating disasters. Do you see any potential to link early warning systems to some kind of automated response mechanism and thinking in a private sector do you have weather indexed insurance? Could we have weather indexed aid programmes or something? Thank you very much. Three very interesting interventions there. Commissioner now. I'll try to... Can we have the mic? Can you manage?  Let me have the microphone. And I'm sure the minister would have his own views on political will. Europeans, European citizens remain committed to help people in their most dire moment of need. Four out of five Europeans say they want us to provide humanitarian assistance to people devastated by disasters or conflicts. And this is a very small drop vis-a-vis the time before the crisis. But with the same token, citizens expect more from us. They expect to do more with their sacrifice and they expect focus on results. So when I started as a commissioner probably if you were to ask me what did you do last year I would say last year we did programmes and projects for 1.1 billion euros, which is what we did. When you ask me now I would say maybe I would start with the same but I would say we have touched the lives of nearly 150 million people around the world providing food and water and shelter and protection and medical care. And I would be able to then drill down and say what is it that we do? We now are providing assistance for the Issa Hel as the minister announced. This is a big looming crisis. We, the commission, we are providing 275 million euros of humanitarian aid and development assistance. With this money we are going to get more than a million kids to benefit. We are going to get 500,000 pregnant women to benefit and we can go through the, we can say 7 million in total will be touched by this funding of people affected by the disaster. So that accountability is what I think has changed, not the will. If we don't manage to deliver this focus on results I worry that the support of our population may go down. We also need to be clear that stability in places like Issa Hel is relevant for us. If Mali and Mauritania and Northern Nigeria and then Chad and Niger, if they fall into a path of insecurity that's going to come and bite us. But this is the logical argument we have to put in front of people regularly and in a credible way. I am very much in favor of having programs that have the longer term capacity in mind. In our program, one of the legislations we will be passing is for Volunteer Humanitarian Corp for Europe and there the emphasis is on selecting and training volunteers and then of course deploying volunteers. We today have eco funds that go to support capacity in NGOs. Not huge amounts but they are there and more importantly eight to ten percent of our money is invested in disaster risk reduction. These are activities that help us to learn how to bring down the they are basically learning training activities. Where we still fail is in our ability to recognize the role of prepositioning logistics delivery. They are still debating this area I am sure you are aware of it and it is important that this debate kind of brings results. How we define disasters? Of course we look at the people at risk population at risk in a conflict it would be how many people die I mean are there people living being you know lives lost how many are displaced how many are at risk in a natural disaster similarly we would look at the population at risk and we would look at can we help people and on that basis we make decisions for Syria we just made a three million funding decision on February 3 because we qualify this to be a humanitarian emergency. It goes for ambulances, medical care but also for support potentially for refugees that are likely to go up. Greece I would not qualify as a humanitarian disaster. I mean I go to places where being a humanitarian commissioner actually helps to see our own crisis in Europe with different paraphrase. Of course if you have an economic crisis that needs to truly devastating consequences of a magnitude you know obviously it is very difficult for the Greek people I don't want to understate it but Europe is rich we have to be very honest with ourselves even with our crisis we are rich not only materially rich we have institutions rule of law we have the accumulated well the knowledge the skills we are in a little bit of a mess because Europe has lived beyond its means for a while not each country not every and each country but collectively we spent more than we earned so now we have to buckle up I mean in Eastern Europe we went through that and it was very painful it was very painful but we came out of it stronger and more competitive so I you know I would be careful to put the in fairness to Greece part of the problem in Greece to be very blunt is that the politicians of Greece have not been able to create a platform for national unity in the face of crisis here in Ireland I think people have done it it is still painful but there is a much stronger sense of we are going to pull go through this we will pull out of this crisis now we can go through the reasons why it happened point fingers in my job pointing fingers should come last let's get out of the mess and then come to you know assess what happened and how it happened so that would be my take on it and on early warning system you have a very good point a very good point we are doing better because especially after the tsunami there is much more invested in early warning systems but we are not where we should be in integrating what they tell us for action take this a hell early warnings are saying there is trouble coming but it hasn't yet arrived and there is this risk I mean why do we need to wait until kids die to say ah it is a crisis there I think we still have a way to go to make early warning systems a decision making tool of the kind they should be just as recently as yesterday on a radio program the comment came up about Greece and the fact that their economic crisis is leading to people not being able to get the most basic of medicines and some NGOs and medical NGOs have moved in now so it is entirely possible that if they are already in the system they may come looking for some assistance from development aid budgets because products like insulin are not being given not being made available even to diabetics so that has got to a very basic nature so we might see somewhere we could ask the minister as well I just want to correct myself of course if there are people who suffer we have to always never mind rich or poor society there has to be room for compassion so don't get my answer to say because we did provide help to Japan it's a rich country I'm not saying never ever when I look at Greece they are our neighbors I mean we live door to door I think there is more resilience in the Greek society that kind of meets the eye and I am more confident just a very question in relation to the political will I think the political will is very strong still here in Ireland there isn't any question there despite the economic crisis and the experience which I suppose just shows the robustness that is out amongst the public in general and the awareness of humanitarian disasters and the need for aid and also the need for development I suppose in the broader sense of the European Union we have heard some of one or two countries here and there who are requesting the appropriateness of meeting targets EU targets etc EU targets in the context of the economic crisis but I don't think the same thing as far as I can gather the commissioner obviously knows the situation much better that there is anything substantial in that respect but I do think that it does it behoves all of us to make sure again as the commissioner was saying about how we use the aid it is better with less it is useful professional greater coordination in relation to the NGOs in relation to the countries bilaterally better coordination in relation to multilateral aid better professionals in terms of the other question that was raised and the awareness and that people are able to see that this is effective, that the outcomes are effective and that it is not just a one sort of thing that there is some pathway true so that you look when you provide the humanitarian aid on an emergency basis it is going the step further to try and provide development that is going to allow a situation whereby this will not arise again this disaster will try to and I think once that is done people are very logical they will see the situation and they are very compassionate and I think the situation can be the whole area of whether or not people are still prepared to make the contribution I think there is no question about it at all and that is in relation to what Nora was saying there about the Department of Foreign Affairs has humanitarian teams we do have a rapid deployment core in place and of course as well as there being humanitarian teams to act very quickly in the emergency there are humanitarian hopes around about whether there is supply stockpiled available for distribution and that various countries will share their supplies and various NGOs so that there can be a very rapid deployment so I think all of that is extremely important and I think the Commissioner may know that we are pursuing the possibility of having such a humanitarian help in Shannon and we are looking at a feasibility study on that to see how what we might do in Ireland in this respect so we are looking forward to looking forward to talking to the Commissioner about this later on but also looking forward to the feasibility basis particularly encouraged by your attitude of neutrality on the importance of it because I have been working on it for the first time in Haiti in terms of access and the area that I have been working in is a partnership program between peace building and humanitarian aid and I am wondering if you could say a little bit about the tension that can exist in the differences of approaches between peace building and humanitarian aid because I have been out in Haiti for six years and initially was advising out there in conflict in communities I have worked with gang members so I have been working with our Steeds Exes and with an attitude of neutrality to access and sit down with the gang members and have brought them to Ireland as well but one of the things post-earthquake that obviously came into play was the humanitarian approach created a lot of conflict I think we are all aware of it and most of my efforts in the last three years have been about advising on reducing the conflicts in the tensions that exist between a peace building process which is a long term intervention and a humanitarian aid approach and I am very happy to do so but I am only short here Thank you very much Thank you Dheer Thank you Commissioner My name is Hans Soma I had a docus the umbrella group of Irish Development NGOs one of the mechanisms that NGOs use to increase their cooperation coordination and I once thank you very much for your contribution and also thank you very much for your availability to meet with the NGOs this morning I know you are meeting with the minister of Foreign Affairs Committee and I think that you are saying three things to them today one is thank you very much and I really appreciate that message that is a really important message that people in Ireland need to hear I think you said also very much a clear message about acting early and the wisdom of investing in prevention rather than responding to crises and I think there is a very strong third message that you have for us today around the importance of humanitarian principles and I suppose that is the one I am most worried about and certainly our members would be worried about a pressure being out there in the European Union member states on the humanitarian principles and I wonder if you can set this straight on that Thank you very much, you can hand the mic from back up here, thank you Thank you for the questions on Haiti when I arrived there after the earthquake and we traveled around we visited devastating areas my first thought was that as terrible this earthquake was and it was terrible, terrible it wasn't Haiti's biggest problem Haiti's biggest problem are the decades of no development the conflicts that had been boiling and of course got unleashed and that to get to the point of stability this is going to be a long, long and it's not going to be three years and five years as some of those who came in New York to support Haiti were hoping it's going to be longer I do believe that there is more we can do to build bridges between the humanitarian community that has a very clear mandate to save lives and the development community those like you who work on resilience on basically buildings social strength because for us in the humanitarian world it is not good enough to save a life we want to see this life worth living and for this reason I personally strongly believe in the need to talk to groups that have different mandates and seek where we can actually unite around a common goal the common goal of course is a more stable more prosperous world that is a better place for our children to live not easy though not easy and we actually had lunch discussion that very difficult to build horizontal connections much easier to take your mandate and run with it but we all have an obligation to do better and as the crisis is forcing as the economic crisis is forcing to be more competitive, leaner hopefully it would force us to be more connected on the development side and you can count on us being on that issue on the principles we in Europe with the Lisbon Treaty we created two things the external action service and an independent humanitarian aid commissioner and the latter my position it is to provide neutrality and independence of humanitarian aid and protect it there have been some leanings but it is now very clear that humanitarian action is outside of the external action service it is neutral and independent and it is based on principles but we have to continue to work on those and again I might turn to the minister later today as we discussed the future presidency what we can do together for this banner proposition of Europe because I'll tell you I actually believe not only morally this is the right thing to do but it is beneficial for Europe because it puts Europe on highest standing and I see when I talk to people I see the respect they have for Europe for being able to do the right thing just because it is the right thing to do not for any political gains not for contracts not for influence and I think we would do a huge to our citizens if we stand back from these principles and we need to work on getting the general public to understand why they are important and I would admit when I came from the World Bank to become a commissioner I knew the theory but it is a very different thing now to now the practice and I think we have a job to do to share this and make it understandable to each and every one of us thank you very much indeed commissioner we are coming to the end of our meeting here just listening to the commissioner in her last statement there it strikes me if there is any kind of silver cloud or silver lining to the economic crisis we are going through it has forced our European leaders to talk horizontally as well as in their own little nation in their own country so perhaps that dialogue has been a starting point and will continue on nobody is an island on their own and I think if ever we wanted to see the world as one big village we have seen it in the last two or three years in the policies and the dialogue that has to be going on between leaders I want on all your perhaps to thank first of all all of you for attending here today for the very interesting submissions put in I want to thank the management team here in the volunteer center for allowing us to use this venue which is very suitable venue appropriate venue to have had this discussion I want to thank the institute of international and European affairs for their cooperation with the RSA section of the department of foreign affairs for this team of debates that will be ongoing in the institute and I particularly want to thank minister Joe Costolo for being here because that shows just what his interest is that he's not all doing something else that he's at the time to be here to listen to both the commissioner and to all of you and I particularly want to thank commissioner I think we have all been very impressed with her knowledge her passion, her interest and her practicality I think maybe I could say this I mean women are practical features and I think you saw a very good demonstration of that today a woman from Bulgaria country that a lot of us wouldn't know a great deal about so we're extremely impressed very beautiful country people have been there on holidays and so I want on all your behalf to thank the commissioner for giving us her time today for her passion and her knowledge and her expertise and I hope and I think we will all go away renewed in whatever aspect of development work we might be involved in as a result of your talk today and as a result of the ministers thank you all very much


Missing from most history books is a key moment leading to the culture wars now ripping through American politics. In 1970, hundreds of construction workers pummeled around a thousand student demonstrators in New York City, including two of my friends. The hard hat riot, as it came to be known, ushered in an era of cynical fear monger, aimed at dividing the nation. The student demonstrators were protesting the Vietnam War and the deadly shooting of four student activists at Kent State University that occurred just days before. The workers who attacked them carried American flags and chanted USA all the way and America love it or leave it. They chased the students through the streets, attacking those who looked like hippies with their hard hats and steel-toed boots. When my friends in the anti-war movement called to tell me about the riot later that day, I was stunned. Student activists and union workers duking it out in the streets over the war, I mean, for goodness sake, weren't we on the same side? According to reports, the police did little to stop the mayhem. Some even egged on the thuggery when a group of hard hats moved menacingly toward the action. A patrolman apparently shouted, Give them hell boys, give them one for me. The construction workers then marched toward a barely protected city hall. Why? Because the mayor's staff had lowered the American flag in honor of the Kent State dead. In a scene eerily foreshadowing the January 6th Capitol riot, they pushed their way toward the building. Fearing the mob would break in, city officials raised the flag. The hard hats also ripped down the Red Cross banner that was hanging at nearby Trinity Church. And in their fury against university students protesting the war, they stormed a nearby Pace University building, smashing lobby windows with their tools and beating students and professors. Around 100 people were wounded that day, most of whom were college students. Several police officers were also hurt. Six people were reportedly arrested, but only one construction worker. My friends escaped injury, but they were traumatized. The hard hat riot had immediate political consequences. It was, in my opinion, a seminal moment in America's cultural wars. Then President Richard Nixon exploited the riot for political advantage. His administration had been working on a blue collar strategy to shift white working class voters to the Republican Party. God for the hard hats, Nixon exclaimed when he heard about the riot. But rather than passing pro-labor policies to court workers, which would go against the values of the pro-business Republican Party, Nixon sought to use cultural issues like patriotism and support for the troops to drive a wedge between factions of the Democratic Party. Workers without college degrees and progressives. Nixon invited union leaders, some of whom were involved in the riot, to the White House. They presented Nixon with a hard hat inscribed with Commander-in-Chief and an American flag pin. Nixon praised the union workers as people from middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism. Nixon's strategy to use the hard hat riot to appeal to blue collar voters paid off. In his 1972 re-election campaign against the anti-war Democrat George McGovern, Nixon secured a victory with ease and gained the majority of votes from organized labor. The only time in modern history a Republican presidential candidate accomplished such a feat. The hard hat riot revealed a deep fracture in the coalition of workers and progressives that FDR had knitted together in the 1930s. And the later alliance of black Americans, liberals and blue collar whites that led to Lyndon Johnson's landslide re-election in 1964. The mostly white construction workers who attacked the demonstrators had felt abandoned and forgotten as the civil rights movement rightfully took hold. They felt stiff by the clever cowards kids with draft deferments and burdened by an economy no longer guaranteeing upward mobility. The class and race-based tensions that Nixon exploited would worsen over the next half century. I witnessed this when I was Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration. I spent much of my time in the Midwest and other parts of the country where blue collar workers felt abandoned in an economy dominated by Wall Street. I saw their anger and resentment. I heard their frustrations. In my view, the Democratic Party has not done enough to respond as Republicans have destroyed unions, exacerbated economic inequality through trickle-down economic nonsense, tried to gut just about every social safety that we have and stood in the way of practically every effort to use the power of government to help working people. Today, the right is trying to channel that same anger and violence against the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ plus community, especially transgender people and drag queens, and whatever else they consider woke. It's the same cynical ploy to instill a fear of the other as a means to distract from the oppression and looting being done by the oligarchs who dominate so much of our economy and our politics. As such, today we face the same questions we faced in 1970. Will we finally recognize that we are more in common with each other than with those who seek to divide us for political and economic gain? Can we unite in solidarity and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared by all? I truly believe that we can.


Both the Narcissist and the Psychopath offer you a fantasy. The Narcissist fantasy consists of, we are going to be each other's mother, and we are also going to be each other's child. The Psychopath's fantasy is, I'm going to make all your dreams come true. But both types of fantasies are predatory, and you are the prey. The fantasies are goal-oriented and self-centered. And today I'm going to discuss the dynamics of predator and prey, boring from a variety of disciplines, mathematics, biology, psychology, etc., etc., displaying my amazing erudition in unparalleled vocabulary. Why? Because babies in bebets. I am Samhagni. The author of Malignanse Flav, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the illustrious faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, Cambridge, United Kingdom, Toronto, Canada, and the Inevitable Outreach Campus in Lagos, Nigeria, which is in Africa, and Apropos Africa, let's talk about predators and prey. What happens when the predator fails to find prey? Basically, narcissists and psychopaths find it more and more difficult to find victims, to locate targets, to home in on the gullible and the vulnerable. Why is that? Number one, victim awareness. I started my work in the late 1980s and early 1990s when no one has heard of narcissists. And so I contributed by coming up with the idea of narcissistic abuse, describing it for the first time and so on and so forth. I launched a essentially global movement of victim awareness.  So there's no space left for narcissists and psychopaths. I'm kidding you not. They find it increasingly more and more difficult to deceive people, to pull the wool over people's eyes, to drag them, to groom them, and to love bomb them into the shared fantasy. The more victims are aware of the attributes, the behaviors, the traits, the warning signs, the red alerts, which have to do with narcissists and psychopaths, the more difficult narcissists and psychopaths find it to corral, cajole, or convince someone, persuade someone to join them in the shared fantasy. This is issue number one. Number two, narcissistic abuse, again, first described by me in the 1990s. Narcissistic abuse is now stigmatized. Once within the constellation of behaviors that constitute narcissistic abuse, some elements have been actually criminalized in some countries. So for example, coercive control is now criminal in the United Kingdom and in other countries. So narcissistic abuse is not only frowned upon, considered socially unacceptable, beyond the pale something to be stigmatized and shunned, but it's also being criminalized. Now this, put this together, reluctant, totally aware victims who are on the alert, who fend off attempts by narcissists and psychopaths because they identify them, they recognize them, on the one hand, and an increasing willingness to criminalize and stigmatize such behaviors and to punish the perpetrators. Put these two together and you have a field day for victims and a serious emerging problem for predators. What happens to a predator when the number of prey declines? What happens to predators when they can no longer find prey? This is a topic, the delectable topic of today's video. We start of course with game theory. Game theory is a branch of mathematics and game theory says that when everyone becomes a predator, there's no prey, an increase in the number of predators reduces the availability of prey proportionally and in due time, absolutely and then everyone dies out. Each member of the predator class just dies out. The historical origin of the predator prey issue in game theory can be traced back to Benda, B-E-N-D-A in 1985. Benda together with some other scholars adopted the predator prey ecology problem into a pursuit environment which focus on the dynamics of cooperative behavior between predator agents. That is very interesting because what Benda has discovered is that there's a number of prey declines because the prey is more alert, the prey is faster, the prey is whatever reason or the prey has died out for some reason or the prey moved on to another niche in the ecosystem. Whatever the case may be, what Benda has discovered is that predators tend to team up, they tend to cooperate and collaborate in the pursuit of and hunting of prey. That's a point to remember because we are beginning to see coalitions of narcissists, of psychopaths hunting together. It's like herds or tribes or hunting expeditions or posies or so we have, it's no longer an individual thing but the hunting is done in collectives. Benda has predicted this outcome. We see this in politics, we see this in show business, we see this in other arenas of life increasingly more so. Another model is the hawk dove model, hawk like bird dove like bird model. It illustrates an evolutionary dilemma. In the hawk dove model we pit pro-social and selfish behavior in direct competition over a shareable resource, you. Narcissists and psychopaths adopt a variety of strategies to captivate you, to introduce you into the shared fantasy. Some of these strategies are actually pro-social, communal, moral, narcissists and psychopaths pretend to be sheep rather than wolves, they pretend to be codependent, they pretend to be victims of narcissistic abuse. They go online and they convince you that they have been harmed and hurt repeatedly by narcissists, they're helpless, they're childlike, they're in need of your love and protection. They keep whining about having been abused, having been maltreated, having been mistreated and so on and so forth. They cry on camera and beg for your understanding and love and collaboration. This is a strategy, a dangerous strategy, very typical of covert narcissists. Doves pigeons, they're not the same, have a proclivity to share resources and in this sense covert narcissists are the doves in the dove hawk model. Doves rather fight and suffer the course in effort to acquire the resources in its entirety, they refuse to share. But both doves and hawks are predators. It's very important to understand this and I encourage you to watch my video on mimicry. Covert narcissists and many psychopaths imitate victims in order to victimize you. It's a very dangerous environment, especially online. Now, there are this set of equations, mathematical equations, perish the thought and they are known as Lotka-Volterra equations. They're also known as Lotka-Volterra predator primordial. It's a pair of first order non-linear differential equations. They are used to describe the dynamics of biological systems in which two species interact. One species is a predator, the other species is prey. Narcissists and their victims or co-dependents, narcissists and borderlines, psychopaths and narcissists actually, psychopaths and borderlines, etc. So one species is predator, one is prey, Lotka-Volterra model. In the model, predators thrive when prey is plentiful, but ultimately the predator depletes, outstrips the food supply and it is the predator which ends up declining. I think this is exactly what's happening with narcissists and psychopaths. They have overplayed their hand, they were overconfident and consequently the number of prey, the number of targets and victims available is decreasing, is shrinking because people have become aware, behaviors have been stigmatized or even criminalized and not so many specimens of prey are available to narcissists and psychopaths. That's why they form collectives in order to hunt together, increasing the chances of a successful hunt. As a predator population is low, the prey population increases again and the cycle recommences. These dynamics continue in a population cycle of growth and decline. Two other scholars, Leslie and Gower, created a model which is characterized by a logistic type, predator growth equation. The environmental carrying capacity of predators is a function of the available prey quantity. So this is the Leslie Gower model. It seems that everyone is in agreement, that the longevity, the success, the reproducibility in terms of procreation in biology, in terms of mental contagion or psychological contagion in society, all these depend crucially on the number of suckers, on the number of gullible people out there, on the number of potential victims, targets, marks. So the less aware a population is, the more naive, this is called naive population, exactly like a virus. The less immune a population is to the charms of the narcissist and the manipulations, Machiavellian manipulation of the psychopath, the more successful the narcissist or the psychopath would be in their quest to secure the prey for a variety of reasons, shared fantasy in the case of a narcissist, some goal orientation in the case of the psychopath, narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist, sex, power and money in the case of the psychopath. They all require raw material. The raw material is you. The finished product is the goal in the case of the psychopath and narcissistic supply in the case of a narcissist, but the raw material that goes into the manufacturing process is absolutely limited to you. You are the one. If you were to deny yourself, if you were to prevent access, render yourself inaccessible to the narcissist and psychopath, the incidents and prevalence of narcissism and psychopathy as adaptive strategies according to these models would decline. And this is known as a cascade and we are going to discuss it a bit later. Now there is an open question here. Is the virus of narcissism self-limiting or not? Is it a self-limiting organism? I encourage you to watch the video I've made comparing narcissism to a virus using epidemiological models or the links to all these videos are in the description. So a self-limiting organism or colony of organisms limits its own growth by its actions. It's a very important thing. The limitation in growth is a direct outcome of overdoing it, overdoing it. Actions which are exaggerated, which are inconsiderate, which are unwise, lead to self-limitation.  So by killing the hosts, the virus would be self-limiting.   A single organism may have a maximum size determined by genetics. colony of organism may release waste, which is ultimately toxic to the colony once it exceeds a certain level amount of population. In some cases, a self-limiting nature of a colony may be advantageous to the continued survival of the colony, and that is a case of parasites for example. So the number of members of a colony, if it becomes too high, it kills the host and the colony dies out. Same thing is happening with narcissism. As narcissism, pathological narcissism becomes a positive adaptation in our post-modern civilization. More and more people become narcissists because narcissism pays and narcissism works. It is a very number of narcissists. It is this increase, this exponential eruption of narcissism that will limit narcissism. Narcissism is self-limiting by virtue of the fact that more and more people becoming narcissists and fewer and fewer people remain as prey. It's a very simple, commonsensical thing. You don't need to be a scientist for this. As numbers become high, the host or the victims or the prey die out or disappear and this self-limitation restricts the viability of predators and it ensures the long-term survival of other species or essentially prey. We have this in medical conditions. It's a condition that runs its course, it's self-limiting without the need of any external influence or medical treatment. We have many such things, the common cold for example, or some varieties of the flu. The fact that a condition is self-limiting doesn't mean that medical treatment wouldn't bring this condition or its symptoms to an end more quickly or that medical attention is not necessary, not needed, that's all I'm saying. But in the vast majority of cases, even when left to its own devices, the condition is self-limiting, because predatory organisms have built in mechanisms of equilibrium. They know when to stop. They know when not to not kill all the prey, to not destroy all the hosts, to not ruin their environment. There's only one exception, human beings. Human beings ruin their environment and within human beings, narcissists never know when to stop. They simply don't know when to stop and so they run out of victims or prey. This is reminiscent of something called trophic cascades. Narcissists are often compared to vampires, aliens, or robots and so on and so forth. One of the most frequent comparisons, at least in my experience, is between narcissists and sharks. They smell blood in the water. They use cold empathy to discern your vulnerabilities, your chinks in the armor, your soft spots, your shortcomings and frailties, the buttons to push, and in this sense they're a little like sharks. I want to read to you an extended excerpt from a book about sharks. The book is titled Why Sharks Matter by David Schiffman. It's an amazing book, by the way, even if you're not interested in sharks. And I'm not. But it's an amazing book about the danse macabre, the tango between predator and prey and the ripple effects that come from the removal or diminish size of a predator's population. So I'm leading here to something very interesting. The decline in the population of prey and the decline in the potential number of victims and targets, because they become more self-aware or because the activity of targeting them and victimizing them is stigmatized or criminalized or whatever. The decline in the population of prey leads to a decline in the population of the predator. But what we have observed in sharks raises a fascinating question. Why are there narcissists? What did the evolution want to accomplish by creating narcissists and psychopaths? Maybe these predatory creatures are needed somehow. Maybe they have a function to drive us forward somehow. I am not a proponent of this view, which is promoted by the likes of Dutton and Maccoby and others, other scholars. I don't hold this view. But I must admit that if we were to compare narcissists to sharks, this raises some very interesting question about the indispensability of predators. We need predators, actually. Otherwise, the whole chain of being goes out of whack, falls apart, and everything is destabilized massively. This is what I'm about to read to you. I'm going to read an excerpt from the book Why Sharks Matter by David Schiffman. Listen well, what happens when the shark population is overcome, reduced too dramatically, and throughout my reading, ask yourself, replace the word shark with narcissists, and ask yourself, what would happen if all narcissists were to vanish tomorrow, if all psychopaths were to die? Would that not somehow endanger our own existence, imperil the delicate equilibrium and balance that is the chain of being? David Schiffman. Sometimes the ecological effects resulting from changes in predator populations ripple through the food chain. This ripple effect is called a trophic cascade. The classic example of a trophic cascade comes from the Pacific Northwest. When Orca whales began to consume more and more sea otters in the kelp forests of the North Pacific, it wasn't surprising that sea otter populations declined. But the plot thickened. One of sea otters' favorite foods is the sea archin, which they consume by adorably crushing them with rocks on their bellies. The population declines of sea otters then resulted in sea urchin predation release. The increasing sea urchin population ate more and more of their preferred food, seaweeds called kelp, resulting in kelp declines. All of this was caused by a change at the top of the food web. Even though area whales and otters don't eat kelp, changes in how Orcas whales interact with otters significantly affect or affected kelp, and that was bad for everything that lived in the kelp forests. The most famous example of a trophic cascade in a terrestrial ecosystem occurred in Yellowstone National Park. As a result of wolf declines, fewer wolves meant an increase in the wolf prey population, including giant herbivores like elk. More elk meant more grazing, and perhaps most impactfully grazing in areas where elk were previously afraid to graze, such as riverbanks, that restricted their ability to run away from a predator. This led to major disruptions in a unique Yellowstone ecosystem called an aspen forest. The Yellowstone case study also remains one of the best examples of predator restoration. When wolves were eventually restored, they ate more elk, bringing the population back under control and pushing elk back to their normal feeding grounds. As a result, the aspen forest is growing back. So what about sharks, which are sometimes called the wolves of the sea? There are two commonly cited examples of shark-driven trophic cascades. Both are considered fairly controversial in the marine biology world, but I'll explain them here because you are likely to come across them in the conservation discourse. The first was documented in a 2007 paper led by Ram Meyers. It took place near North Carolina's Outer Banks, where seven species of apex predatory sharks have declined significantly since the 1970s. Sandbar sharks experienced the least decline, 87%, since 1972. Exceeding 99% since 1972 have been documented among several other species of sharks. These declines were believed to result in predation release of small sharks and rays including the cow-nose ray. The authors claim that this increase in cow-nose rays used to be the prey of sharks. When the sharks declined, almost disappeared, cow-nose rays' populations exploded. This is called predation release. So the authors claim that this increase in cow-nose rays was partially responsible for a collapse in populations of Bay scallops, once a commercially important fish in the region, resulting in a shark, cow-nose ray, scallop, trophic cascade. To me, says Schiffman, the key message of this study was, sharks are important and bad things can happen when we overfish sharks, so let's not do that. Others got a different and unfortunate message from this study.  This led to the birth of the Save the Bay Eat Array movement. There were even fishing tournaments for cow-nose rays, where anglers used explosive-tipped arrows to shoot at the surface swimming rays, which is hardly sporting in my opinion. It is unlikely that ray populations could survive this kind of pressure for any extended time, given their very low reproductive rates. I'd argue that trying to solve a conservation crisis by causing another conservation crisis is perhaps not ideal. Remember throughout these texts, replace the names of the animals with narcissists and victims. It turns out that the data I'm continuing to read from Schiffman's book, it turns out that the data showing this trophic cascade has major flaws in its underlying assumptions and has been thoroughly rebutted. If you look closely at the data, it would suggest that cow-nose ray populations supposedly started to increase well after scallop populations began to collapse, almost as if something else caused the scallop populations to decline. Dean Grubbs, who led the rebuttal, pointed out that this explanation only makes sense if you think that cow-nose rays can go back in time, like the Terminator. So cow-nose ray populations aren't increasing as much as these data seem to show. What's instead happened is that existing cow-nose rays are migrating into new waters. Furthermore, sharp populations haven't declined as much as these data seem to show. The Grubbs rebuttal also notes that including more datasets complicates the supposedly clear pattern shown by the Myers paper. Finally, cow-nose rays don't really eat very many scallops. So although this is a well-known example of a trophic cascade that is often cited by environmentalists as a reason to protect sharks, it's a fundamentally flawed one. Another possible shark-driven trophic cascade might operate on the coral reefs. Coral animals have a symbiotic relationship with tiny photosynthetic organisms called zooxanthelia. They live inside the corals, the zooxanthelia, live inside the corals and secrete sugars, which the corals eat. Presumably they are not diabetic. Without exposure to light, zenoxanthelia, zooxanthelia, I'm sorry, cannot photosynthesize and the corals will starve their vino sugar. Happily, herbivorous fish like parrotfish help to graze fast-growing algae off of the corals, ensuring that sunlight can reach the zooxanthelia. Parrotfish are eaten by larger fish like grouper, which are eaten by, you guessed it, sharks. The decline of shark populations may cause predation release in grouper, an increase in grouper populations, which then eat more and more parrotfish. Fewer parrotfish means more algae growing on coral reefs, which means dying corals. This model seems to be essentially correct, but it's more complicated than that. It turns out that humans aren't just overfishing the sharks, but also overfishing the groupers, and in some cases even the parrotfish. Algae also grows on the coral for, because of warmer waters or nutrient blooms, not simply because parrotfish populations are declining. Additionally, corals face other threats besides algae overgrowth. And while it's true that reef sharks often occupy a pretty similar seep on the food chain as groupers, some larger sharks eat small and medium-sized groupers. So do sharks keep coral reefs healthy? They certainly play important roles in maintaining coral reef health under many circumstances, but as you can see, there are many variables to consider. A 2013 paper claimed to find true evidence of a trophic cascade on coral reefs. Specifically, the authors argued that Pacific coral reefs, reefs that have been heavily fished, were home to fewer sharks and more medium-sized predators called mesopredators. And this created a situation in unprotected reefs that differed from situations in protected reefs which had more sharks and fewer mesopredators like groupers. On fished reefs with more mesopredators, the authors find fewer herbivorous fishers. In this case of a trophic cascade, with declines in sharks indirectly leading to declines in herbivores, is this true? Not so fast. A 2016 paper claims that the pattern isn't quite so clear. The rebuttal argues that the difference in shark populations between fished and protected reefs isn't as significant as claimed in the 2013 paper. Furthermore, the 2016 paper argues that some of the fish species in the 2013 paper authors that authors counted as mesopredators should not have been created as such, because sharks don't eat these species. That rebuttal got a rebuttal, which got another rebuttal, that's a way of science. As of this writing, there hasn't been any conclusive evidence of trophic cascades driven by the loss of sharks on coral reefs. In fact, an early 2021 paper found pretty strong evidence of the lack of trophic cascades on the Great Barrier Reef, but the search is ongoing. Other possible shark trophic cascades include a reef shark, octopus, rock lobster food chain. Overfishing reef sharks in Australia seems to have led to an explosion in numbers of their octopus prey, which aces all the rock lobsters and damaged one fishery. Yet another possibility, yet another possibly shark driven trophic cascade involves seals. Fewer sharks means more seals, which eat a lot more fish. Trophic cascades are powerful forces in nature, but they're also really hard to detect because food webs are so large and complicated. I'd guess that even though some of the most popular examples of shark driven trophic cascades may be flawed, it is very likely that some reef cascades caused by sharks are out there. Some conservation activists have taken things too far, incorrectly asserting that because of trophic cascades, the crash of shark populations could be directly responsible for the extinction of all life on Earth. According to this argument, which got its highest profile mention in the documentary Shark Water, phytoplankton, the base of the ocean food web, produce about half of all oxygen on Earth. If we lose sharks, the reasoning goes, this will destabilize the whole ocean, kill all the phytoplankton and result in the loss of half of all oxygen on the planet, killing everything, ourselves included. Let me note again here that this is not correct, but it's an example of using trophic cascade theory for conservation advocacy. Trophic cascades are generally speaking more likely to occur in simpler ecosystems, with more straightforward food chains. If you have five species that serve similar ecological roles as top predators, losing one species probably won't disrupt the whole system, because the other four species can still keep mid-level predator populations in check. If you have only one top predator, losing its ecological role is more likely to disrupt the whole system. The examples described above range from hotly debated to thoroughly debunked, and I share them just to illustrate the general principle, despite their particular imperfections. Despite their flaws, these high-profile examples are still useful to think about, if only because something like this is probably happening somewhere. One I'm trying to illustrate with this very extended excerpt is that we don't know enough about the predator-prey relationships between narcissists and psychopaths and their victims within the ecosystem known as civilization or modern or post-modern society. We definitely don't know enough about narcissists and psychopaths' interactions with targets or victims in more traditionalist, conservative, under-documented, and under-studied societies and cultures all over the world, which they constitute the majority of humanity. So back off a bit, don't make exaggerated claims. I'm the one who coined the phrase narcissism pandemic and narcissism epidemic. I coined these phrases at the end of the 1980s, and they were later adopted and recirculated, recycled by scholars and self-styled experts throughout the decades. But one shouldn't go too far. We shouldn't run too far with this metaphor. We really don't have enough information. We also are not quite sure which type of cascade may occur should narcissism and psychopathy become self-limiting. Imagine tomorrow the overwhelming vast majority of potential victims, potential targets, are well informed, well educated, and well equipped to fend off the advances of narcissists and psychopaths. The population of narcissists and psychopaths should decline from an evolutionary point of view and gradually, of course, incrementally, but it should decline. What would happen then? Is this a trophy cascade where the population of victims and targets explode? Would this destabilize human society somehow? Do narcissists and psychopaths fulfill some role of control over population control? Some regulatory evolutionary mechanism? Trophy cascades are powerful, indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems. They occur when the trophic level in a food web is suppressed. So it's an ecological concept and it can be applied theoretically to populations such as narcissists and psychopaths and their victims. Definitely we use these populations as cohorts in studies, in psychology. Narcissists and psychopaths are apex predators. They are top predators. They prey upon others. They prey upon people with narcissistic style as well. So this would create some destabilizing effect, but isn't going to be a top-down cascade? That's a trophic cascade where the top predator controls the primary prey population. Is this going to be this kind of thing? It's an open question. The removal of the top predator in the top-down cascade alters the dynamics. The primary kind of targets and so on overpopulate and then they in their turn become predators, actually. So we have this possibility. This happens with invasive species, for example. We have this possibility. Another possibility is it a bottom-up cascade. The population of victims somehow controls the increase or decrease in the energy of the higher trophic levels, the predators. I mentioned stigmatization, criminalization, more awareness and so on. These are control. These are regulatory mechanisms that somehow inhibit populations of narcissists and psychopaths and definitely inhibit their behaviors. Or maybe we will come through a phase of subsidy cascade where species populations at one trophic level can be supplemented by some kind of external input or external food, external prey. So we could see narcissists and psychopaths branching out, migrating, exporting their exploitation to naive populations, the same way a virus does. We don't know what's going to happen, but I think it's high time to begin to discuss the impact that increasing awareness, stigmatization and criminalization, the impacts that these trends which are powerful in exorbitant becoming stronger by the day, the impacts these trends are having on narcissists, psychopaths, their strategies, choices, decisions and ultimate survival.


This 2016 Ford F-350 Crew Cab Short Box Single Rear Wheel is stock number 12279Z. We're here at Summit Automotive in Fondlack, Wisconsin, near new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters. This 2016 Ford F-350 has the 6.2-liter V8 engine. It has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop per the state of Wisconsin inspection process. It has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off, and this truck is 100% ready to go. Shadow Black is the color. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, 60 frames per second, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone, or television, I highly recommend turning them on right now because it is definitely your best way to check out the quality, condition, and options of the truck before seeing it in person. And if you like the video and would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel, in the lower right-hand part of the screen is a subscribe button. Click that, and then click the bell notifications, and you'll get updates on the videos we do each and every day here at Summit Auto of our new and used inventory. This one comes with the factory 18-inch alloy rims with the chrome covers, and it has Michelin LT275-70R18 tires with right around half the tread left on them. Frame and underbody is in really nice shape. It has the Rancho suspension shocks there, part of the FX4 off-road package. Front fender is in excellent shape. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. Front bumper is in excellent condition as well. Very nice and clean. I've personally driven this truck, took it on a camping trip. My truck is in the shop, so I needed a vehicle to use, so I used this one, and boy, this thing was great. Had no issues, ran really good, pulled my camper really nice too. I'd highly recommend it just from a high-quality vehicle. Brakes work good. Everything was really good on this truck. As you go down this side of the vehicle, take notice of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. We take these HD videos, so if you are far away or even if you're close by and cannot make the trip down, but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here, there's no surprises, and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you may be at. Very nice down that side. This back rim is in excellent shape. And the back tires have just as much tread as the front tires they even might have a little bit more. I'd say 70 to 80% of the tread left on these back tires. Frame and underbody once again is in very nice shape. It's like that all the way underneath. Lower rockers and cab corners all look really nice too. And it does come with the factory chrome step bars. FX4 off-road suspension package. Chrome tipped exhaust rear bumpers in great shape. No major dents or dings on there. It does have the backup parking sensors. Full towing package, of course. Receiver hitch, 4-pin, 7-pin wiring. The tailgate is in very nice condition as well. It does have a locking tailgate. The tailgate step assist has a trifecta fold-up tonneau cover. That's in pretty nice shape. You get a spray-in bedliner, fifth wheel, and gooseneck prep package. And it does have 7-pin wiring back here. No, my camper was not a fifth wheel or a gooseneck. It's just a pull-behind trailer. I didn't use that, but if you did have a fifth wheel or gooseneck, it'd be good for that too. Down this side of the truck just as clean as that passenger side. No dents or dings in the box. Looks really good. And for full disclosure, this back rim is in excellent shape as well. Down the rest of this side of the truck looks really good. It does have the door code entry. We have the code for that. And if you ever wanted to find out your door code for your 11-16, SuperDuty in the upper right-hand part of the screen is a video on how to do that. These mirrors are heated. Directional signals on there. They power fold-in. They power telescope out. And those mirrors are really nice, especially when you're pulling a camper. I found that out as well when I drove this truck. My truck does not have the tow mirrors, so it was a nice treat to have that. Power driver's seat with the XLT package. Gray cloth interior. No rips. No tears. The truck's never been smoked in. It has Husky, all-weather floor mats. Auto headlamps, power pedals, tilt, telescopic steering wheel, power windows, power locks, power mirrors. And these mirrors do power fold-in. I always like showing both sides so that you know that both sides are working properly. And you do have to have the ignition on for those power scope, the power scope option to work. We'll hop inside. Take a look at the information center and radio, and everything that the interior has to offer. You can see that this truck has 34,422 miles. Instrument cluster is very nice and clean. You get the cruise control and information center controls on the steering wheel. No scuffs or scrapes. Bluetooth and audio controls on the right. Six-speed automatic transmission with the optional tap shift. Does have the CD player. Turned-off or wheel drive. Climate controls. You get a factory brake controller. Four-upfit switches. Sync system for your Bluetooth cell phone with an AUX and a USB, and a couple 12-volt power points up front. That floor mat goes over the hump. Pass and your side seat and floor mat are in excellent shape as well. No rips or tears. Once again, this truck's never been smoked in. Smells very, very clean inside. Headliner's absolutely perfect. Side curtain airbags, map lights, and you get a power slide and rear window button up there. Your backup camera shows up in the rear view mirror. So that works nicely. We'll take a quick look at the back seats, and then we'll start it up and take a look under the hood. Back seats. The back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. Power sliding rear window with the built-in rear defrost. Very nice and clean husky floor mats back here. You do get lockable storage underneath here. There's your receiver hitch reducer. And this locks with the ignition key right there. And then behind here, you do get latch, or, yeah, latch tether anchors. Those are nice for any child car seats. Side curtain airbags, child safety locks on the back doors and the bottoms of the doors all look really good on this truck. We'll start it up and take a look under the hood. Starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. You do get a compass and temperature display. You can see that those mirrors do power scope out and in. They work nicely. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video. You will have been able to tell just how clean this truck is all the way around, inside and out. Under the hood, we have the 6.2 liter V8 engine. Engine-based, very clean, runs very smooth. Once again, this truck has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop as a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. Air is your emissions sticker right there. This truck is 100%. Ready to go. I would highly recommend this truck from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wranglers, halftones, sweet quarter tons, one tons. You name it, we've got to go to that website right there. www.summitauto.com Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle locations all at www.summitauto.com And if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to www.youtube.com. Remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact, in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel in the upper left. A link to more F-350 videos like this one in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those, check us out. And we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean. Very nice 2016 Ford F-350 Crew Cab Short Box XLT FX4, single rear wheel, and shadow black clear coat. Thanks again for checking out the video.


A three-story brick building, Mary Gates Hall. A man in a wheelchair rolls past the arched doors.  A door opens. Words appear. Access Technology Center, Learning Lab. Welcome to Mary Gates Hall. Advocates for equal access. Hi, I'm Dan Comden. I'm manager of the Access Technology Center. And in this space in the basement of Mary Gates Hall, we provide consulting services for accessible design of web pages and online applications. We also do accommodations for students, faculty and staff who have disabilities who need some help using computing technology. We've got a showroom behind me that has all kinds of technology that can help people with various disabilities have access to computers. Disability Resources for Students. Also located in the basement is the Disability Resources for Students Office. They provide academic accommodations for students with disabilities. They provide accessible academic materials in alternate digital format. They provide for extended exam times. And they actually have a testing center that's located here as well. Very active during finals and midterms. This is the counseling part of Disability Resources for Students where the counselors who meet with individual students to discuss accommodations are located. And in here we have John McGough, who's the Associate Director of Disability Resources for Students. Hi, John. Hey, Dan. We work with over 2,000 students a year ensuring that they have equal access to university programs and classes. In DRS, we work with students in every program across the university. That's undergraduate students, graduate students, students in professional programs like medicine or law. In working with our counseling staff, our counseling staff works to ensure that the students can access the classroom. That means that lectures are accessible to them. This could include sign language interpreters or closed captioned videos. We work to ensure that their books are accessible to them. This could be textbooks in Braille or audio or many other digital formats. We work to ensure that clinical experiences and field trips are also accessible. Krista Greer, Assistant Director. These accommodations are designed to level the playing field, not to give preferential access. Leveling the playing field means that a student with a disability has the same right to succeed or fail as any other student. One important thing to keep in mind is that the term disability is really broad under the law. Many people may hear the term disability and think of individuals who are blind, low vision or in a wheelchair. That actually makes up probably less than 10% of the students our office works with. Common diagnoses that students have in working with our office could be things like anxiety or depression, attention deficit disorder, chronic health conditions. Here we have the D-Center, the Disability and Deaf Culture Center. This is a student run organization that provides a space for students to hang out, study or meet. So my name is Leslie Ellis. I'm the advisor here at the D-Center. Hey, how's it going with the website? We feel really strongly that there should be a center for disabled students to come together and be able to share space, to maybe unwind from the day, maybe take a break between classes. Oh, you're applying for new jobs now? Yeah. The transition from the K-12 system into higher education can be a bit of a shock for some students. They come from a very supportive environment to an environment that is supportive, but requires that the student really be their own best advocate. They have to seek out the services. So it's really nice to have these different units co-located in the same building. See you soon. For more information about disability resources for students, visit D-E-P-T-S dot Washington dot E-D-U slash U-W-D-R-S. And for more information about the D-Center, visit D-E-P-T-S dot Washington dot E-D-U slash D-Center. This video is funded by Accessible Technology Services of UW-IT, Copyright 2017, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.