National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, hardly a member of the Clinton-left, activist liberal media, described the whole thing as “obviously a PR stunt.” He added: “I wouldn’t have predicted that it would work this well. After all, Republicans insinuating that a memo written by a Republican committee chairman in a Republican-controlled Congress during a Republican presidency is being hidden from the public by some force or entity other than the Republicans strikes me as kind of hilarious.”
(This comes from an opinion piece by Robert Schlesinger in the U.S. News & World Report – hardly a “liberal” news organization – on Wednesday, January 24, 2018)
(Once again, the photo comes courtesy of pixabay.com)
It’s 2 Minutes to Midnite– Goodbye
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has updated their doomsday clock and it now shows 2 minutes to midnight, the closest to disaster we have been since 1953, when both the US and the USSR tested hydrogen bombs. This update reflects the breakdown of efforts to reduce reliance on nuclear deterrence, posturing by the American President, planned development of smaller, more usable nuclear weapons, and not least: the uncontrolled and unaddressed effects of climate change (global warming.)
You can read about it at Live Science in this article posted today.
(photo courtesy of AlexAndropov86 on pixabay.com)
“Help Me, Obi-Wan, You’re My Only Hope”
A “Nature” article published today describes a new technology capable of producing “Princess Leia” (so-called from the scene in the movie “Star Wars”) images in thin air. Here is the abstract for the Optical Trap Display, which uses floating cellulose particles trapped by laser light and illuminated by multicolor lasers:
Free-space volumetric displays, or displays that create luminous image points in space, are the technology that most closely resembles the three-dimensional displays of popular fiction1. Such displays are capable of producing images in ‘thin air’ that are visible from almost any direction and are not subject to clipping. Clipping restricts the utility of all three-dimensional displays that modulate light at a two-dimensional surface with an edge boundary; these include holographic displays, nanophotonic arrays, plasmonic displays, lenticular or lenslet displays and all technologies in which the light scattering surface and the image point are physically separate. Here we present a free-space volumetric display based on photophoretic optical trapping2 that produces full-colour graphics in free space with ten-micrometre image points using persistence of vision. This display works by first isolating a cellulose particle in a photophoretic trap created by spherical and astigmatic aberrations. The trap and particle are then scanned through a display volume while being illuminated with red, green and blue light. The result is a three-dimensional image in free space with a large colour gamut, fine detail and low apparent speckle. This platform, named the Optical Trap Display, is capable of producing image geometries that are currently unobtainable with holographic and light-field technologies, such as long-throw projections, tall sandtables and ‘wrap-around’ displays1.
(This news was written up by SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer for the Associated Press and I received it through a built-in news service from Microsoft that appears to be standard with the latest iteration of Windows 10.)
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
Hunter Shot by His Own Dog
In the Krasnokutsk district of the Saratov region, a man was shot by his own dogs when they leaped on him as he let them out of the back of his car to go hunting. He was holding a double-barreled shotgun pointed at his abdomen, and apparently the dogs triggered it when they jumped on him. He died on the way to the hospital. This was reported on Monday by the Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Saratov region. Here is the post, in Russian, on the incident, which occurred on the morning of January 21, 2018: http://saratov.sledcom.ru/news/item/1197106/
(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)
A Modest Proposal: Tell Democratic Politicians to Focus On People’s Problems Rather Than the Con
Don’s real con is that he has such an outrageous personality that everybody focuses on that instead of his really horrible policies (or lack of any rational policies at all.)
My proposal is that we focus on policy: for example, a national jobs agency that gives retraining to people who need it, and finds jobs for people who are trained already. Despite our low unemployment rate, we have people working in jobs that don’t use their real skills, jobs that don’t pay well enough to get ahead, and menial work that sucks out the soul.
A national employment agency would help some of the most alienated people in society– those who have been laid off by companies that now show trillions in profit (an estimated $2.5 trillion in cash is held by companies) and people who have been unemployed because technological advances have made their jobs obsolete (like coal miners.)
The second policy area that would be politically popular is a transportation initiative that would allow people who can’t reach their work to commute– by whatever means necessary, including car-pooling. Some of this work could be done quite cheaply. It doesn’t require building a bullet train or buying busses.
There is considerable precedent for the idea that focusing on Don the Con’s personality is not the most effective way to build long-term support. If Don leaves, do we focus on Moral Mike’s personality? That won’t work. We need to go back to first principles and talk about the policies that could improve our economy and everyone’s well-being– policies that the Republicans have ignored despite their propaganda about “Make America Great Again.”
“I’ve found no reason whatsoever to think the president has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes,” said the president’s physician, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy.
This from a New York Times article about the superficial, brief screening mental exam given to Don the Con by his “personal physician”, a Navy officer who has worked in the White House for many years. The doctor neglected to mention that the exam took ten minutes out of his complete physical, and that the screening examination is not recommended for routine use by major medical societies– although, under Obamacare, physicians are reimbursed for using it on Medicare patients yearly.
Some observers have noticed a deterioration in Don’s behavior over the past few years– signs such as repeating certain words and losing his train of thought during extemporaneous speeches, not to mention the fact that he repeats the same stories over and over again. Michael Wolff, in his new book, mentioned that Don seemed to repeat the same stories again within five or ten minutes instead of being able to go thirty minutes before saying them all over again.
Don faces a significant risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) because his father was diagnosed with this disease at age 86 and died seven years later at 93, in 1999; AD is inherited but is more likely if the subject’s mother has the disease rather than the father. Age is the greatest risk factor for AD; one in fourteen adults over 65 is affected. High cholesterol is also a risk factor, which may be reduced by treatment with cholesterol-lowering drugs (Don is taking Crestor for this.)
The most important mental issue for Don the Con is personality disorder; he suffers from extreme narcissism and a deep paranoia that, for example, inhibits his ability to shake hands when introduced. He is afraid of being poisoned, and one of his reasons for preferring McDonald’s is that the food is precooked and therefore he believes that a poisoner would not be able to anticipate his showing up at a local McDonald’s for a meal.
Personality disorders and paranoia especially are difficult to detect in psychiatric interviews, although there is a screening test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and its derivative, the MMPI-2. While this test is very popular and easy to take, chances of Don voluntarily submitting to it are nil because of the depth of his paranoia.
Paranoia is especially problematic because the sufferer has a tendency to lash out, and if the condition is severe, take preemptive measures to foil his imagined enemies. The victim is also likely to punish innocent bystanders, and what is worse, even provoke conspiracies to control or imprison him. The Mueller investigation is a classic example of a paranoid’s nightmare. It is likely that Don was entirely unaware of the gravity or extent of Vladimir Putin’s efforts to co-opt him and this only aggravates his sense of injured innocence. Sufferers at the hands of Don’s administration may take some comfort in the notion that Don himself is enjoying the tortures of the damned in his own mind.
(image courtesy of pixabay, the free picture resource)
Assessment of Don the Con’s First Year in Office: Worst President Ever, and Paranoid to Boot
Mr. Trump’s first year has been an unremitting parade of disgraces that have demeaned him as well as the dignity of his office, and he has shown that this is exactly how he believes he should govern.
Most important, he is the first president to fail to defend the nation from an attack on our democracy by a hostile foreign power — and to resist the investigation of that attack. He is the first to enrich his private interests, and those of his family, directly and openly.
He is the first president to denounce the press not simply as unfair but as “the enemy of the American people.” He is the first to threaten his defeated political opponent with imprisonment. He is the first to have denigrated friendly countries and allies as well as a whole continent with racist vulgarities.
This quote comes from an opinion piece by Sean Wilentz in the Sunday Review of the New York Times, and is the most succinct and dismissive of the assessments I have seen. There have been several such assessments published by various commentators and I am sure that there are some admiring characterizations written down as well– in a Google search for “Trump’s first year” I found at least three dozen different reviews.
Oddly, there were a few really positive reviews, notably from whitehouse.gov, scattered among the derisory screeds. The NYT opinion piece has a few funny bits, such as this: when Andrew Johnson showed up to take the oath as vice-president (in 1861) he was “drunk and belligerent.”
In addition to Don’s obvious extreme narcissism, he suffers from a deep paranoia and credulity that leaves him an adherent of every conspiracy theory that is presented to him. He is so irritable that his aides remove every mention of Russia from the daily briefings and news that they give him.
Fox News obliges him with a diet of flattery and fails to mention, for example, that eighty to ninety percent of people in opinion polls approve of action to protect aliens who were illegally brought to this country as minors and have lived here ever since (“Dreamers.”) There is a whole universe of facts to which Don is completely oblivious because his sycophants have shaped the information that they provide him to fit their perceptions of his needs and temper.
Someone has been working on Don the Con to shape his policy decisions– and I’m not talking about recently. Over the last twenty years, his position on social and political policy has swung decisively to the hard right. When you review his statements over the years, you find consistent racism, but an otherwise less dogmatic outlook.
For instance, in 1999, in a video interview on NBC, he stated that he was “very pro-choice” although he hated the idea of abortion. Don has not done a lot of deep thinking in order to come to his current position– he has been approached and befriended by people who wanted to help him become President and who were coming from the Republican Party or else were foreigners who were hoping to help him become President.
These people realized that he had no chance of attaining his dream as a Democrat, especially since his inherent racism fit so poorly with Democratic policies and voters and could not be disguised. The fact that he was forced to sign a consent decree by the Justice Department and that he publicly condemned five nonwhites who were later exonerated of a notorious rape in Central Park suggested that he would have needed a “come to Jesus” moment to fit in with the Democratic platform.
Don has a long history of being readily swayed, temporarily, by personal arguments presented by people who have access to him. He is likely to befriend and allow access to people he believes are powerful– mostly people with a lot of money. Steve Bannon, for example, not a very attractive person, is said to be worth $20 million.
Don is also attracted to, and respectful of, military men, especially generals. This is consistent with his promotion of Killer Kelly to the post of Chief of Staff. Although Kelly has imposed some order on the White House, he is beholden to his master and reflexively protects him. At the same time, he is responsible for many of the details as well as the general tone of Don’s policies– he controls who Don can see personally during the day, and thus who can provide him with information (which is shaped by his interlocutors’ worldviews) that then molds his policy.
Kelly cannot control to whom Don speaks on the phone, particularly at night, when he is locked into his private bedroom at the White House; it is said that he faced opposition from the Secret Service when he insisted on installing a lock on his bedroom door (you can imagine the distress of a Secret Service agent who is unable to access the President when he hears sounds of a crisis inside a locked room.)
Don calls whomever he feels like calling, and there is a short list of almost entirely wealthy men his age that he calls. Kelly also cannot control what Don sees on his television, although that is less of a problem since Fox is so reliable in its presentation of the right-wing worldview.
That irresistibly reminds me of a story about the 1954 death of Stalin, one of the world’s two or three most prolific paranoiac murderers. It seems that Stalin had a stroke during the night and failed to open his bedroom door at the usual time the next morning. His personal attendant was afraid to disturb him, so he was left paralyzed in his bedroom for at least twelve hours until the servant summoned up the courage to “disturb” him.
Stalin was still alive when he was discovered, but he died a few days later. The grisly show trials that had been going on for years stopped immediately when he died; a group of doctors who were on trial for their lives based on a made-up conspiracy were spared by his death.
The parallels between Stalin and Don are most notable in terms of paranoid delusions– there is little else to compare them. Stalin came to power a relatively young man and ruled for more than 30 years. Don is already, at 71, the oldest president to be elected for the first time– although the oldest to serve was Reagan, who was re-elected at 73 (and we now know that he had early-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, exacerbated by brain anoxia following the 1981 assassination attempt after which surgeons found him with a .22 slug lodged in his lung close to his heart.)
Reagan offers few parallels to Don either, although Don’s father died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Reagan was an affable man who actually had some experience, as the governor of California, and was not impaired by narcissism nor paranoia. I think Don’s paranoia is even more dangerous than his narcissism.
Today’s quote comes from a New York Times article about the negotiations between Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer over lunch on Friday. Apparently, Mr. Schumer thought he had a deal when lunch was over, but Mr. Kelly called him later and said that the deal was off “because it didn’t contain enough restrictions on immigration.”
It would seem that Don is not in charge at the White House if he can orally negotiate a deal to avoid a government shutdown and address all the issues that Democrats are concerned about, but then be overruled by a phone call from his Chief of Staff. I personally fear that Don is really not in charge; Killer Kelly is known to be to the right of Don the Con on immigration, especially, and the Killer felt that Don gave away too much to Schumer.
What strikes me as bizarre is just what “immigration restrictions” Kelly thinks need to be added to a bill that requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass. Whatever it was that he needed cut off or “restricted” could have been done by executive order if it was constitutional.
More likely, he wanted to do something like end birthright citizenship or chain immigration, items that far right xenophobic Republicans hate. If he did those things by executive order, they’d be stopped by the courts, so they would have to be ordained by law– not just any law, but one that averts a filibuster.
Here is the nut of the problem– Republicans want, in exchange for the DACA provision, to end birthright citizenship or chain immigration (or something equally radical, at least symbolically)– and they’re willing to run out the clock on DACA or even shut down the government to force the Democrats to go along.
That is the “reasoning” behind the “shithole” language: two far-right Congressmen (with Kelly’s connivance) pressured Don into making an incoherent, off-the-cuff rant about “shithole” countries and telling the bipartisan conference committee (for that is what the meeting was supposed to be, with three Congressmen from each party) to “take out” Haiti.
They did this partly by presenting Don with a list of the numbers and national origins of the people who had immigrated to this country in the last year– information for which he had no context. For example, did he know the historical rates of immigration from all countries; did he know what happened to people from various countries after they entered this country, what their economic status was or became, and so on?
No. He has neither any in-depth nor even a shallow knowledge of the topic, just prejudices based on half-heard Fox News scare stories. He is simply not qualified to negotiate an immigration deal.
On Saturday, though, Mr. Schumer said that even members of the president’s party had by now recognized that Mr. Trump, a professed deal maker, was ill-equipped to strike a political compromise.
“What’s even more frustrating than President Trump’s intransigence is the way he seems amenable to these compromises before completely switching positions and backing off,” he said on the Senate floor. “Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O.”
Comment of the Day: Russian Money Flowed Through the NRA to Don the Con and the Republicans
(That’s right, it’s the Swiss National Rifle Association)
Glenn Simpson, one of the founders of Fusion GPS (the company that did opposition research on Don the Con before the election and hired Christopher Steele) gave testimony to both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees; the Senate testimony, released publicly last week, had a few bombshells, like the Trump Money Pits in the United Kingdom– two golf courses that received $200 million in Trump Organization funding last year for “remodeling” (money laundering) while their combined revenue was less than $30 million and both showed losses of several millions each.
The House testimony went public yesterday, and there was a landmine in there that didn’t go unnoticed: the Russia-NRA connection. It turns out that the NRA was the biggest “dark money” donor to the Trump campaign in 2016– $30 million out of a total of $55 million donated to various Republican candidates.
Well, guess who is a life member of the NRA? Alexander Torshin, a Russian billionaire and deputy governor of the Russian central bank. He was at the NRA’s annual convention last year, when the organization officially backed Don the Con for President. Torshin met with Don Jr. but he wasn’t able to secure a meeting with the big Don, despite emails routed through Christian fundamentalist acquaintances inviting Don to a dinner being held there. Supposedly Torshin attended another dinner that Don also attended, but I guess he didn’t get to sit at the high table with him.
Apparently, the Russian who founded a group in Russia that promoted “gun rights” (there is not such a thing in the Russian constitution) and an American founded a limited liability company “to help pay her tuition to graduate school” but which turns out to be an ideal conduit for disguising the source of money which apparently is flowing into the NRA from Russia. If the NRA is really compromised, then the whole Republican Party will take a huge hit for accepting money from a source that accepted money from foreigners– the law against foreign money in elections includes indirect sources as well.
This comment was posted to an op-ed in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg, entitled “Is This the Collusion We’ve Been Waiting For?” She is quoting from the op-ed in her first sentence.
ChristineMcM
is a trusted commenter Massachusetts 10 hours ago
“Gun laws in Russia are strict, and if people close to Putin actually wanted to change them, creating a group alluding to America’s Second Amendment seems like a weird way to do it. As Simpson said in his House testimony: “Vladimir Putin is not in favor of universal gun ownership for Russians. And so it’s all a big charade, basically.””
I swear to God you can’t make this up! In one sense it would make perfect sense, because it exploits all the horror that were predicted when the Supreme Court decided the outcome of possibly the worst decision in our nation’s history: Citizens United.
Has such a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Citizens United” unleashing the notion that citizens are people and ‘dark money’ need not be revealed in the name of free speech,
So, in essence, if the money trail reveals a big donation from Russian oligarchs/mafia/whatever to the NRA, directed to the dark money pit, we have the Russians exploiting both our first and second amendments to influence our elections.
That would be a major federal felony for all parties, but of course nailing a Russian would be tough. As you say, though, Michelle, this level of corruption falls squarely on the GOP.
Let’s hope the FBI can complete its work before the GOP, trying to make it public enemy Number One shuts down its investigation.
Isn’t it possible Putin’s Russian didn’t need nukes to attack and weaken American democracy–just hard cold cash?
(No, that’s not the American NRA, it’s the Swiss NRA and the picture is from pixabay.)
“Well, look. To be Jewish, you have to be optimistic, because if you’re not we would have perished in the desert. We’d never have reached the end of that 40-year hike. We would all have perished without optimism.”
This statement could be interpreted as a sort of in-joke. It comes from a Guardian interview in which Spielberg explained that he felt the urgent need to make “The Post” because of Don the Con’s ascension, not because of the sexual abuse scandal that erupted while the film was being made. In the film, Meryl Streep plays the woman who owned the Washington Post at the time of the Watergate scandal; she portrays the oppressive feeling that women used to get when surrounded by men, even when they were nominally in charge.
The revelations about Harvey Weinstein are, in their own way, as bad as the things that are coming to light about Don the Con, who has already labelled Chuck Schumer as “Shutdown Schumer” — as if he didn’t set up the confrontation that forced Democrats to demand the inclusion of DACA reinstatement in the current continuing resolution. McConnell piled on by saying that “the Democrats are willing to shut down the government over the protection of some illegal aliens” even though time is running out to restore the lives and futures of people brought to this country illegally as children who are trying mightily to fit in to the only society they have ever known. These people– people who were brought here illegally as children and have lived here since then– cannot be dismissed by the phrase “illegal aliens.”
(The image of prayers at the Western Wall is from pixabay.)
Conrad Theodore Seitz 