Don’s number one reason for claiming that Mueller was prejudiced against him and trying to fire him, last June, was that, after Mueller had resigned from his golf club (possibly because he moved away), the club had failed to refund his membership fees as Mueller had requested by letter:
The dispute was hardly a dispute at all. According to a person familiar [with the] matter, Mueller had sent a letter requesting a dues refund in accordance with normal club practice and never heard back.
(Stolen from the Washington Post via Slate, courtesy of Slate chief news blogger
(photo courtesy of pexels at pixabay.com)
Dr. Lukasz Niec, working in a Michigan hospital during a flu epidemic that is still ongoing, holds a valid green card (he’s still a citizen of Poland) and has been in the US for forty years since his father brought him legally into the country as a child. He was convicted of a misdemeanor as a teenager that involved “moral turpitude” (whatever that is) but has been practicing medicine for the last ten years without a hitch. He was abruptly detained, incommunicado, by ICE agents on his first day off after a week of double shifts. His crime, according to ICE? He was convicted of two offenses 26 years ago as a teenager: receiving stolen goods and destruction of property worth less than $100; one crime was “erased” from his record– but these crimes involve “moral turpitude” and are reason enough to deport him. The real reason for his arrest? He has had 18 contacts with the police over the past few years, all involving traffic violations such as not having proof of insurance, not changing the address on his license, and parking near a fire hydrant. His worst offense? Driving drunk (“under the influence” in 2008, for which he served probation for a year, and for which the court “set aside” his conviction. ICE officers claimed that he “came under scrutiny” because of these mostly trivial violations of traffic laws. His employer, Bronson Healthcare, has appealed for his release, noted his service to the community as a physician, and argued that they need him back at work.
It appears that this man is a target for law enforcement officers who apparently have a vendetta against him; perhaps it is related to his ex-fiancee, who has a child with him and is trying to prevent him seeing her. She charged him with child abuse last summer because of a bruise which she claimed was a bite mark; the case was dismissed because the bruise didn’t look like a bite mark and it was unknown who caused it or when it was suffered.
In addition to these complications, the judgement of “moral turpitude” seems arbitrary. If something is against the law, doesn’t that automatically imply “moral turpitude”? Or is it only for “moral” crimes?
PS The fact that this man came to the attention of ICE because of numerous contacts with the law, none of which have resulted in convictions in the past ten years, highlights the trick that law-enforcement personnel play on people who are arrested, then found not guilty: they keep a record of the arrests and act as if the arrest alone is enough to taint a person with law-breaking. After all, if he was arrested, he must have been guilty of something– right? It’s always guilty until proven innocent.
People who have been detained, even when they are released following a hearing, have their DACA status removed even though they were actually detained by mistake: this happened to Daniel Ramirez, who was picked up at the same time when ICE agents came to arrest his father (their original target.) Agents claimed that the fact that he had a tattoo on his arm showed he was a gang member. Even though his lawyer, Luis Cortes, disproved this to the satisfaction of an immigration judge and Ramirez was released after a month in custody, he was left without DACA protection and lost his job. (This information comes from an article in “The New Yorker.”)
(The reports about Niec came from an article , one of several on the case in “Michigan Live” by unknown authors since Dr. Niec was taken away on January 16; national newspapers have picked up the story. Interestingly, numerous comments on the Michigan Live story were submitted by people who seem to have a vendetta against him, inflated the child abuse allegations from dismissed to convicted, and consider his traffic offenses to be sufficient reason to deport him.)
(The picture, by Mohamed Hassan, comes courtesy of pixabay.com)
More than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned on Election Day, officials say, resulting in ballot discrepancies in 59% of precincts that raise questions about the reliability of future election results in a city dominated by Democratic and minority voters.
“This is not the first time,” adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. “We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.” Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines “hit up against each other and malfunction” as they’re being transported to the precincts.
(This comes from Time magazine in a news piece by CHARLOTTE ALTER on December 14, 2016)
(Illustration courtesy of pixabay.com)
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.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 