"If Adam picks apart my thesis, I won't listen."

Yeah, yeah, here it comes, the self-diagnosis followed by the realisation that the list alone is insufficient, and that denying emotion and intuition in order to focus on faux-objective criteria is itself a form of psychopathy, and God Dammit babies you've got to be kind! (flips up trenchcoat collar and walks away in the rain. U2 starts playing on the soundtrack as the crane lifts the camera upwards and the credits start rolling over a long shot of me disappearing into a crowded street.)

***

"What jolted me was my own strange craving..."

Like I said, a desperate search for a way to hate without guilt.

***

Charlotte Scott: It's like reading a short story by a high-school student who just learned about "foreshadowing" in English class.

***

Conspiracy Theorists: "What comes through...is this complete lack of empathy." Not necessarily true. I'm sure that if they believed that they were looking at actual exploded people they'd be horrified. But...there it is. If those were actual blown-up people, that would be horrifying. So horrifying that they can't accept it, in fact, so they invent a bizarre fantasy explanation for what they're seeing so that they don't have to accept its reality. But psychopaths, according to this book, wouldn't run away from it at all.

Interview: It's called "rented off-site office space". There's not necessarily a Secret Cloak And Dagger World behind everything. They might just not want people without security clearances running around MI5 headquarters.

This chapter is a good illustration of The Right Kind Of Mad. How fortunate that we just previously had a whole chapter about The Right Kind Of Mad! It's almost like someone was trying to build a narrative.

"Hologram, Death" :rolleyes: Okay, first off the Air Force Academy is basically college for the USAF's Officer Training School. I wouldn't necessarily take anything out of there seriously, particularly when part of their education is to write proposals so that they can learn how to do it for real when they graduate. A proposal about holographic ghosts is no more indicative of real activity than a wargame where the USA invades Norway.

"The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way." Good line! It ties into the "morality play" seen so often; the idea that the people we're looking at have some fatal flaw which destroys them but that you, the viewers at home, are just fine.

***

"If the brood mare investigation did happen, he could be forgiven for not remembering." Uh, he can be forgiven for not remembering a case where a woman said that her unborn fetuses were being repeatedly sacrificed to Satan AND HE BELIEVED HER?! I'd think that one would kind of, y'know, stand out in a guy's memory...