DOCTOR QUACK, PRESIDENT

Insanity at the white house.  Lots of it.  I’ll make a list.

1. Need help now? Call the Poison Help line at 1-800-222-1222 or visit PoisonHelp.org

To learn more go to American Association of Poison Control Centers

https://www.aapcc.org

Poison control centers offer free, confidential, expert medical advice 24/7 through the Poison Help Line,1-800-222-1222, and our new online, interactive tool, PoisonHelp.org .

Bleach and other household chemicals are sometimes ingested by people trying to commit suicide or are drunk by toddlers who found them under the sink.  Some are scented to be attractive.  Bleach destroys blood.  IT'S POISON.

2.  Some cleaning agents have a very high proportion of alcohol — not grain alcohol as in hard drinks, but isopropyl alcohol.  Hand sanitizer uses it.  When people are in the advanced stages of addiction to alcohol, they are almost unable to keep from drinking things like aftershave or worse. Absorbine Jr. or Sterno (filter through a nylon stocking) or Lysol.  

When I was in Saskatchewan and wanted Lysol to scrub a bathroom, I had to get a clerk to fetch it for me.  They didn’t keep it on the shelves because, they said, “Indians steal it to drink all the time.”  I don’t know whether that is true, either the stealing or the drinking. It could but it's not race-related.

3.  “Ultraviolet light is a type of electromagnetic radiation that makes black-light posters glow, and is responsible for summer tans — and sunburns. However, too much exposure to UV radiation is damaging to living tissue. “  Trump imitates the results of a sun-tan booth with cosmetics, even leaving white around his eyes as though he’d been wearing sunglasses. He associates this with luxury and attractiveness and somehow knows that the tanning is from ultraviolet light which is part of sunshine, so he gets confused.

At the Valier altitude (over 3,000 feet), one of the the aspects of plants that good gardeners must consider is their resistance to ultraviolet light. People who work with viruses in labs must remember to shut off the disinfecting UV light or all their working samples will be killed. 

4.  What will kill a virus on a surface is simple soap and water.  It’s outside “skin” is fatty and will break apart if scrubbed a bit with soap.  It is not necessary to eat soap.  A virus outside a body can’t last long because it is only instructions that activate a cell to do its billing.  It's gotta have a cell.  

5.  We have come to see bodies as machine-like because we cut each other open, insert bits of plastic or metal into hearts and joints, and rearrange faces.  The near-religious respect for the complexity and vulnerability of a living body has been badly eroded.  We take pills and potions all the time, not necessarily derived from other living things like coffee or chocolate from plants, but molecules that were built in a lab and never existed before.  We are working deep in cells with nearly undetectable functions.

5.  Drug use, openly depicted in stories, has made syringes seem almost like household items and too many people know about skin popping, muscle injection and mainlining.  A relative of mine who enjoys phlebotomy worked with a “doc” who withdrew blood, bubbled it with ozone, and then replaced it.  The law stepped in, though they had been working in “confidential” clubs as privileged secrets, something like places that do “high” coffee enemas.  Colonics.

Trump knows a LOT about drugs. He also knows that celebrities play with anything that’s meant to keep them young and beautiful, though that part doesn’t seem to work with him. The speculation is that he’s a hard core meth addict, which is more dangerous because it supports bad behavior and lousy decisions.

People go into medicine for idealistic wishes to help people, or from fascination with the intricacy of the practice, but also for bad reasons.  One of the worst is greed, but I also run into control freaks, little dictators of the exam room.  Often semi-qualified women, like “nurse practitioners.”  They are not screened to keep out co-dependent enablers.

6.  The authority for medical matters is split between academia and formally qualified doctors, but both have been eroded by pharma corporations who publicly claim great benefits but privately consider the only real benefit to be profit.  Ironically, some people may be less impressed by Harvard Toxicology, whom they suspect of selling out and simply being another part of “suits” and the 1%, deliberately deceiving the yokels and the innocents.

Harvard Toxicology

@Harvard_Tox

 Please don’t inject bleach or drink disinfectant. Bleach injections cause hemolysis (where your red blood cells that carry OXYGEN break apart) and cause liver damage, and many disinfectants can cause dangerous burns or bleeding in your stomach. This tweet IS medical advice.

"Acute Care Toxicology - Harvard University

https://cmeregistration.hms.harvard.edu/events/acute-care-toxicology-cannabis-and-substance-use/location-d0809b59bcc547c1a0b6e8ec7066c8e7.aspx

This course is designed to update clinicians on the care of the intoxicated, overdose, exposure or substance abuse patient. There are approximately 1 million ED visits annually for drug poisoning while most acute care hospitals do not have a Medical Toxicologist on staff to guide care, often relying on phone consultation from a local Poison Control Center.”

A thin line persists between medicine and poison.  Effects are not the same under different circumstances or with different genomes/epigenomes/synergistic substances. Simply following a best practices list from the insurance company is not enough. 

7.  A stubborn belief in “snake oil” persists among the kind of people who think that somewhere is an exotic substance or maybe an unsuspected cure hiding in plain sight that they can find and use, possibly at a very high price. While mocking peasant Chinese who take bear bile or pangolin scales, they go to Mexico for unproven cancer cures.  They believe in miracles because they can’t think in a trained logical way.  Our advertising does all it can to encourage this superstitious exceptionalism. 

TRUMP IS IMPEACHED

A sassy young citizen on Twitter says, "So Trump is impeached.  So what?  He gets a medal or his name goes on a list? What does it matter?"

It's hard to find a clearer bit of evidence that the young people of this country think that what the federal government does is irrelevant, as some describe it, "A shitshow that's boring."

This is the passage in the Constitution of the US that addresses what the House of Representatives, the "people's house" has just done.

"Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law."

ARTICLE I, SECTION 3, CLAUSE 7

https://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/18/punishment-for-impeachment

We're going to be wrestling with this short passage from now on, over an unlimited period of time.  Here are some of the ideas and contentions:

1.  This passage was meant to prevent using capital punishment as some European precedent had been exactly that.  Some countries still kill their impeached kings and presidents.

2.  The idea has taken hold that impeachment is a two-step process and that the Senate can "undo" the impeachment if they refuse to remove the President.  The assumption is that the House of Representatives is a "lesser" division that is overseen by the Senators, rather than the asserted equality in the Constiution.  This goes back to Greek/Roman ideas but more relevantly to the English practice of two houses, one of which is Lords, clearly more powerful, versus the ordinary Representatives sometimes depicted as a mob or rabble off the streets, uneducated and uncultured.  Certainly this last hearing has illustrated that, though ironically the Repubs have always been the "lords" full of dignity and respect, they have chosen now to be the rabble.

3.  Since only two previous presidents have been impeached by the house and the senate has declined to remove them, we are feeling our way along.  Much of law and the work of courts has been using precedents -- previous cases as a guide for what should be done.  But we haven't got much to work with here.

4.  Two presidents have been impeached, the earliest one for clearly defiant and degenerate behavior that remains objectionable, and the more recent one for lying about a blow job.  He was not impeached for fellatio alone -- which the sexual revolution has made trivial, a joke, a Hollywood plot point -- but for lying about it.  Yet, since the act was indulged in adjacent to the Oval Office and on "business time", it certainly showed contempt for the Presidency and a willingness to stoop or at least unzip.  But it wasn't illegal.

5.  Clinton remained in office.  It is unclear what constraints were put on him legally.  He remained and still remains "impeached," which at the very least means discredited.

6.  It is unclear whether Trump is now subject to criminal prosecution.  The idea that a president can't be prosecuted is in a "memo" rather than a law but doesn't address the status of an impeached president.  If the full consequence of an impeachment applies without a Senate vote to remove from office, then Trump is vulnerable to prosecution for a cascade of felonies of long standing, decades.  This was not the case for Clinton, who had committed no felonies.

Also relevant is Trump's context as a mafia-affiliated person, which means that prosecuting him for crimes involves revealing mafia criminal systems.  This is further complicated since the American mafia has become a subset of the Russian mafia which is identified with Putin's Kremlin.

7.  The President may not be pardoned once he is impeached and one assertion is that he cannot pardon anyone else.  He is no longer able to use that power.  One reason Nixon resigned when he did was so that Ford could pardon him, since he was not yet impeached, though it was surely coming soon.  Nixon DID commit a felony, lying about contracting for burglary, so the pardon was necessary.

8,  If this constraint in the Constitution is in full force now, Trump's candidacy for nomination in the next election is ended.  The use of threats about that election is ended.  The rallies are not rallies for election but merely circus.

9.  The Senate seems to think they can abridge or second-guess the work of the House of Representatives.  The media has bought this and treats the second half of this action as an ability to undo the Representative "label" as though it were not an invulnerable final decision of a two part process  As Nancy Pelosi has said, Trump is now impeached, finally and irrevocably.  The Senate is considering consequences.

10.  A parallel sentiment is that the Supreme Court can "undo" impeachment but the judgement of impeachment remains.  The Supreme Court can address the issues described above and probably some others.

11.  A circle of sycophants has formed around Trump.  These people have benefitted with money, status, power to run sub-sets of government and the like.  They will fight hard to maintain their access but they have no legal standing.  Some, more cautious and honorable, have left.

12.  Something similar has happened among citizen Republicans or Democrats who benefitted or believed they benefitted from Trump's policies and conversely among those who have been punished by them.  These constituents have been in turmoil because promised benefits haven't appeared and some have suffered to the point of suicide.

13.  An insidious tendency towards the use of force and private armies has seized  on both the militarization of borders and civil jurisdictions like police forces as well as exceptions for the military based on secrecy, like torture.  At the same time the removal of rules and inspectors, the de-regulation, the failure to fund "safety nets" or basic infrastructure, have made life more dangerous and anxious.

14.  The realization has come that the reason there is a major shortage of public money has nothing to do with the level of taxation and more to do with financial structuring that allows money to be pocketed by the ultra-rich.  Billions are drained off and stashed, often laundered in countries considered stable and lawful.  Putin's raked-off billions are stored in the US and England. Without Trump's interference, we might be able to seize those moneys.

15.  Demographics are a big part of this.  The old legislators who have no other careers than staying in office are one factor.  Young journalists with bad educations, working at the pleasure of older bosses who have no other standards than marketing profit and who are protected by being behind the scenes, anonymous, control the content of both news and the steady flow of stories about glamourized criminals and exaggerated sex.  Women and people of color now have theoretical access but still little participation.

In the coming days many of these issues will be raised and few will be resolved.  But it is a plain, solemn, and damning fact that Trump is impeached for all time.

DARK NIGHT

Yesterday was divided between weed-whipping what grass would stand back up after being flattened by hail, pulling up weeds by their roots, untangling and piling the branches the wind tore down -- until my shoulders ached and I was out of breath -- and then at the computer trying to do something metaphorically similar with the concepts that plague us. Like the invention of capital, predatory capitalism, venture capitalism, and monetary systems plus industrialism plus xenophobic nations plus climate change.  I went to YouTube so there would be diagrams to follow.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-epr8lPIZYE  I kept hearing about Picketty so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i78cyClvaeg.  And so on.  I don't quite get it, but it's a start.  I appreciate Khan Academy.

Going to bed early, I had the covers to myself because all the cats were outside where the moon is still nearly full, clambering through the big cottonwood tree.  Waking at two in overcast blackness, I was full of impending doom.  The house has broken windows and the cap on the furnace vent has blown off.  Shingles are missing.  The back door is too misaligned to be locked conventionally, so it is secured with a bolt across the whole door, an improvisation. My pickup has enough gas for the moment, but the firing has occasional misses and hail punched holes in the bed topper.  I'm sorting and weeding books, so there are stacks of them and boxes of them everywhere.  Two o'clock can be terror time.

I'd heard Trump's sexist attack -- nothing new there.  Computer on.  Twitter was exploding with reaction.  At last.  CHUNK had another of his amazing animated cartoons of the toddling tinyman who is NEVER sexist, always stable, higher IQ than geniuses, richer than anyone can believe, and the most humble person on the face of the planet.  Did I mention faithful intimate relationships with mature nurturing women? 

Rick Wilson wrote a satire that had me laughing.  Trump's two fav children are deposed by the incarceration of their father and Ivanka has taken refuge in the Midwest, working at a diner until someone she fears finds her.  

A sample:

"The tension drains out of her. "So you're not here to..."

Jerry [formerly known as Jared] grins, "What? Kill you in a weird ritual with a lot of candles and chanting with a priest in a goat mask, then ritually butcher you then dance naked in your skin? Jesus, Ivanka, I'm not Stephen Miller."

Nor is this bit of fan-fiction out of "Eyes Wide Shut."   Maybe.  Laughter woke the cats, who wanted food, and I'm hungry as well.  Friskies.  Toaster waffles. Raspberry yogurt.  It feels possible to go back to sleep.  Nothing dramatic really happened.  There were no national raids of cities, people loaded into boxcars  -- Trump lied again. The four Squad leaders are calm but determined.  Lindsey Graham is not.

Ever alert, the marketers are offering doorbells that tell you who's out there, since unless there is a court order, judge-signed, warrant, you don't have to open up.  Not even open a car.  ICE cannot issue valid warrants.  Lock the doors and refuse politely.  Quietly, the old campaigners from the escape-from-the-draft-movement are remembering how to evade authorities who are not backed by the culture, who think they ARE the law only because they wear the uniform.

It's 8AM.  The kittens who stayed up the rest of the night to play, rattling around tipping over book stacks, are now exhausted and sleeping.  It has rained softly.  The town is silent except for dependable people driving by on their way to work.  There are half as many as there used to be.  Half the houses are for sale.  Half the windows are boarded, waiting for new glass.

Is it bad that I use my computer as a window?  A tall figure with a white forehead is there.  He doesn't work for the FBI.  Wendell Berry.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/going-home-with-wendell-berry  I had been thinking about him because of the little circle of far-north Canadian farmers that are living his kind of life.  Fine educations, religious literacy, private capital and all, they post from their "office" while driving tractors and on the backs of horses, moving cattle.  No one says, "Go back where you came from."  They are busy making a better place where they are.

Berry went back where he was from, Port Royal, Kentucky, and blended his academic career with running a farm.  "The integration of the various animals and crops into a relatively small acreage becomes a formal problem that is just as interesting and just as demanding as the arrangement of the parts of a novel."   He knew about the "village virus," accusations of ignorance and narrowness, but he was somehow immune.  He never told anyone to get out.

It's not that I agree with Berry all the time.  It's just that I like his attitude, his calmness, his willingness to work things through -- literally "work" by putting energy and thought into everything.  In the Sixties when he started out, there were a lot of people thinking along the same lines -- Wes Jackson, Schumacher, Rodale.  Some of them were in Canada.  

There is on my Twitter feed another group of people, the indigenous families that were "always" there and who are beginning to work through corporative resource capture and industrial-triggered climate change.  They are funny, experimental, and willing to risk death.  They are changing a nation.

So now it's almost nine o'clock.  The federal trials are beginning on the East Coast.  The doors everywhere are being pried open.  My mother used to say,  "The mills of the Gods grind slowly but they grind exceeding fine."  Babies are dying in cages at the border.  People have been deported to places they don't know since they weren't born there.  Injustice, poverty, injury, mental trauma, are added to fear of crimes people barely escaped.  The base of much of it is drugs sold to prosperous Americans as a pleasure and escape.  There's blood on the diamond dust.

If I survive, which I won't for very long since I'm old, I'll be very interested to see what happens next.  In the meantime, I'll push the kittens aside and nap a little bit.  And, Wendell, you need to know that I never did agree with you making your wife type all your eighty books, though she did it willingly.  Could be I'm just jealous. But I'm five years younger than you.

DARK

I'm on Twitter and risk my eyes there too often because if I wade through a lot of nonsense, there are valuable insights.  The ones I like the best are the ones with which I agree.  For instance, James Gleick -- a respected science writer -- says:  "Trump is inadvertently sharing more about his dark fantasies than anyone wanted to know."

He is reacting to Daniel Dale, a Toronto journalist, who remarks:  "Experts on human trafficking say Trump’s tales about women being bound, gagged and stuffed in airless vans to be brought in from Mexico do not resemble any reality…"

We're already aware that this big lump of a boy-man gets his information from the most sensational and opportunistic medias.  He posts to Twitter all the time, but I have no fantasies about him reading the comments or responses.  He imagines he is devastatingly powerful and doesn't want interference with that notion.  It's rather clear that Putin has replaced Fred in Trump's mind.  At first Trump didn't know he was owned, even though he's mafia born and bred.  He was a fish not recognizing water.  The moment of truth was probably Helsinki if I'm accurately reading the body language in the photo of the two men emerging from a private frank talk.  Putin grins like the cat that ate the canary, Trump looks like one mauled and chewed little bird.  His shoulders slump, his head hangs.

I've hinted that when Putin is through with Trump, he'll simply rub him out, the way he has so many others, but the truth is that Trump is so obviously a blind child who doesn't realize that Manhattan is neither the Vatican nor Moscow, that his limitations are known to everyone by now:  there will be no need.  He is a weak reed who cannot even deliver on a set-up that should have sent all the marbles into his corner.

So now I wonder whether Putin, like May, is going to be confronted with his limitations and whether disrupting the world order (destroying NATO, for instance) might not throw him into the bonfire of his own vanities.  Once it was all based on the atomic bomb, but now that is a trivial lever in a world where the whole planet is turning against human beings with no button to push, no red emergency phone, no bombers in the air -- just human refusal to see and understand that we're using up all the water, that the ocean is awash with plastic, that the tiny trajectories of our lives are swept away by aeons of cosmic inevitability.  I've never seen any indication that Putin can operate a computer or understand how the internet works.

But Gleick and Dale, almost acting as therapists, have pointed to Trump's own inescapable internal horror films.  The only reason Trump hasn't run screaming mad in the night is that he has a fantasy that he can be a super-hero who socks the threat in the throat -- when in fact he only has a check book and the stupidity of all the people who fail to see it's only a book of IOU's.  I suspect Putin has seen the real horror of life and accepts it as a norm.  No fantasies as protection against the possibilities of a terrible fate.

The only thing more ridiculous than Trump throwing rolls of paper towels at flood victims (so far) was mocking state dinners with a table of fast food flanked by elaborate candleabras.  Reworking his grinning "host" image with the monster from Pan's Labyrinth was very apt, the staring eyes literally in thehands of a child-imagined monster.

This quote is from M.M. Owen in Aeon.  "On the right, there is the attempt to preserve the old tribal markers of people and place, despite them being, at the deepest level, basically imaginary. On the left, identity is framed as at once gravely determined, tying you to entire human histories of either victimhood or guilt – and also so self-determined and infinitely flexible as to be almost meaningless. Whatever your affiliation, we are consumed with thinking about our identity, and everyone is confused."  He's talking about Erikson, who was a fatherless German psychoanalyst who believed that people like Luther or Gandhi were exemplifiers of their time and place. 

So is Trump an exemplification of our times?  (Is Putin the same except in a different place?)  Insurgencies and new dictators abound.  It's possible to make a pretty good case that life is following art is following life is following nightmare is following living horror.  A story that imagined putting children "on ice" in cages would have been considered preposterous until we all saw it on television.  Such stories have made the reports seem preposterous, even as we're looking at them.  The ability of a computer/TV screen to be hoaxed by CGI-altering images has convinced us even more that there is no reality -- not really.  

All of this atrocity and preposterousness can only be dealt with as circus.  Except the circus doesn't normally include real and lethal events (Two children dead so far while incarcerated in the US.  Many more deaths on the way north.  At least one adult forced to return home has been murdered.)

Various challengers say to Trump, "We're killing children!" and his answer is "So does everyone else."  It's a child's morality.  The trouble is it's true. Reformers hope that putting photos of the most desperately starved children on the news will motivate us to do something about it.  It only throws the real story into the Halloween category.  "A warning, some people may find these photos hard to watch" means in reality "call the kids that want to test their thrill-meter once more."  Writers, esp for television shows, are challenged to think up the most ghastly stuff.  How can we not-quite-kill James Bond one more sexual and deviant time?

At least it relieves the boredom.  For a while.  The shine has been off sex for quite a while.  It takes a lot of energy and stagecraft or it's not "real".  Violence is the backup.

CRAZY LIKE A FOX

Before I try to understand the use of mental health categories as curses, allegations of worthlessness and evil, which Scaramouche brought up in regard to the president’s staff, I need to deal with a phrase often used to praise the President, that he is “crazy like a fox.”  That is, like the famous mob boss, Vincent Gigante called “Chin”, who went onto the streets in his pajamas to project insanity as a cover.  A person who is “crazy like a fox” pretends to do things that are unaccountable, startling and against convention because they are using them as cover in a deliberate and therefore sane way.  

The most drastic is presidents who start wars in order to cover their own bad behavior.  War is an ultimate distraction.  Forbidding soldiers who have unconventional sexual identities (though being gay or trans is fairly conventional these days, at least in media terms) or giving police advice to “rough up” those they arrest (social tinder as we approach the most flammable time of the year) might be evidence of personal hangups or pandering to a class of people who consider political correctness to be a form of unjustified restraint, an insanity of educated people.

Trump has been considered “crazy like a fox” as a clever strategy that obviously works because he is rich.  Wealth is considered both evidence and a virtue.  Until now the media has never described how often he has gone into bankruptcy, lost deals, and diminished his inherited fortune.  How he has managed to evade justice in the courts has been attributed to buying the best lawyers.  But now we understand that like a delinquent son, he has had a sugar daddy: Russia.  The sugar was compromising in terms of sex, but much more than that, the mafia-type glue of extortion, money-laundering, blackmail, and other proscribed but common practices — all leading up to treason, a wickedness he sees all around him, but only as personal betrayal of himself.

Categories of sane behavior are not so interesting to people as is insanity.  Since craziness was medicalized a couple of centuries ago -- a part of our surrender of much of philosophy to science or pseudoscience -- we’ve all become adept at distinguishing the categories (boxes) created by theory systems built on behavior and introspection rather than bodily function, an irony.  The brain is in a bone box where it is accessible only under methods we’ve just recently developed, like fMRI or molecular analysis of the glymphatic fluids.  We’re just now figuring out which little blob of tissue does what and how.

A further difficulty when dealing with psych stuff is a form of craziness: projection.  We see everyone else through the lens of our own prejudices and predilections.  The bitter women who accuse their lovers of treating them badly out of narcissism (self-centered neglect and abuse in the lover’s own interests) can be queried in terms of whether they didn’t enter the relationship for their own benefit (money, protection, affection).  

By now this whole generation in America has been accused of narcissism to the extent that sub-categories of the classification have had to be invented to keeping it from being such a junk category that it’s no longer useful.  “Malignant,” “grandiose,” psychopathic” are favs of Sam Vaknin who has created a career by calmly claiming to be a diagnosed narcissist.  By now, wannabes have been suggesting that there is such a thing as “healthy” narcissism, merely self-protection and possibly with happy consequences.  

In addition to these categories, mental health malfunctions may be classified as “personality disorders,” a failure to form a good identity; or something more deep-seated, until one comes to the level of psychosis, which is extreme, obvious, and must be treated with drastic means like chemical restraint or a strait-jacket.  These days it is most often the cop on the street who must meet it with a club, a taser, or pepper spray — or, to save time, a bullet.

Ingestion-based psychosis entered upon to get insight or pleasure can destroy the capacity to function.  So we suspect The Mooch of cursing because he is “high” which means without restraint.  http://www.politicususa.com/2017/07/27/moochs-crazy-mobster-style-record-phone-call-fit-job.html

Let’s look at his choice of insanities:  “fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”  I’m not counting “cock-blocked” or auto-cock-sucking.  “Paranoid schizophrenic” is believing that people are after you when they are not; believing that the whole world is hostile and destructive (which is not exactly fantasy) to an intense degree that hampers behavior and leads to a bodily state of constant panic.  Schizophrenic means an identity and function that are scattered, incoherent, out of touch with reality.  These accusations are an elaborate way of saying someone is lying.

Science is now telling us that there is NO reality except what we create as a construct in our own minds.  Mental health people have not assimilated this yet, but observation of the world confirms that people have quite different ideas about what is real and sometimes they are irreconcilable.  The crux of the problem is that a “culture” develops an idea of what is real (normal) and will create niches for people whose reality is productive (artists, scientists) but cannot tolerate for its own self-preservation any individual or sub-group faction (mafia, religion, Posse Comitatus) that is destructive.  If the sub-group gets big enough, “reality” can be renegotiated.  (Blacks, Native Americans and women can be citizens.  Sex need not be confined to marriage.)

A human being is a complex system of cells that cooperate to perform certain functions.  If one little function, like circulating oxygen or neural messaging, gets interrupted, the results can destroy function and sanity.  It can be very subtle.  A concussion to the pre-frontal cortex can seem like simple orneriness.  Our industrial chemical molecules kill bees and sterilize men without us even realizing it until the consequences are painful.  Mental health consensus is something like that.  Our social valuing of greed, domination, violence — indeed, their celebration by the media as dramatic Old Testament behaviors — have pushed and tempted individuals into an insane level of acts toxic enough to force the culture as a whole to deal with it for the sake of its own preservation.

But this is a culture that IS paranoid schizophrenic, suspecting that anyone who is not “like us” is a danger; or destroying children, the disabled, and the elderly while claiming we love and protect them; insisting that we are honorable and good-looking, when we are not.  Luckily, due to human variousness and written memory, there are still people capable of negotiating the return of the rule of law IF they have the courage and focus.  And IF another paranoid schizophrenic country doesn’t start a nuclear war, provoked by insane presidents.

QUESTIONS TO ADDRESS

A bloated man in a bathrobe is screaming and cursing his televison set in the White House.  There are questions:  does he wear under his bathrobe his underwear (boxers or briefs? t-shirts or singlets?) or his pajamas?  Does he sleep with that hair still on?  Are only his face and hands orange or his whole body?  Has anyone seen him in a short sleeved shirt much less a Speedo?  All his suits look the same but he’s gaining weight.  Are those suits hung by size somewhere?

Most of all, we want to know how to get rid of him.  There’s a lot of opinionating about how he won the presidency.  It’s certainly a challenge to the idea that crowd-sourcing is a good way to choose a leader.  We’d have been better off electing Donald Duck than Donald Trump.  He told us he could grab people by their private parts (altho if he’d said “grab men by their dicks” the reaction would have been different), that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and no one would stop him.  He was right.  Or so it seems so far.

But I think the better question is why he was the candidate offered by the Republican Primary.  There were a few who were worse, but none who were more ridiculous.  I think Trump was the candidate who was most likely to let the Repub oligarchs go on sliding along their racist and sexist Sour Grapes programs and sideline critiques without ever having to govern out in the open by developing alternatives.  Exhibit A is health insurance.  

I’m happy to grant that the Clintons were and are just as much bought-out by international corporations, as much locked into the past, and will even grant that Obama was not the detached and enlightened alternative many of us hoped.  But Trump added major monetary dependence on Putin’s Russia.  That’s different.  It’s not blackmail as much as bribery and subsequent extortion.  To him it was a cause for pride — he has no consciousness that it was disloyal, a kind of golden shower more shameful than peeing.

He never would have accepted the primary nomination if A) he had understood his fortune -- or the lack thereof -- would be exposed and destroyed, and B) he had understood that his faux lifestyle of “wealth” would be worthless, hardly different from some old guy holed up in a decrepit motel in a town the Interstate has by-passed, cursing at the television set.  At least in the White House he probably has a huge flat-screen tv.  And his best decision all along has been not to drink or he might be throwing bottles at his expensive screen.

Becoming a traitor is not a concept Donald understands, along with all the other things he doesn’t understand.  I think the possibility of conviction and incarceration are just now penetrating his gold-plated cloud, but his children and cohort are also just now realizing that they are vulnerable.  Michael Flynn, not yet a gone goose because of his evidence value, knows what he’s facing.  Melania, a hardened survivor, has known all along.  The staff in the White House says they are gradually understanding how to manage the Donald: don’t present alternatives, offer one path and make sure it’s flattering.  No one has explained how they’ve been keeping him from phoning Michael Flynn for advice and reassurance.  Many people have suggested destroying that cell phone.

One of my favorite quotes from Bob Scriver is that if someone does something outrageous enough, they can get away with it.  Conventional expectations blind us to the endless alternatives that Trump should never have pointed out to him.  Although probably his best alternative at this point is to leave for his favorite island, but that’s a conventional thing to do.  Run.  Some of those not fired yet have taken that “door,” to use Comey’s metaphor.

When they say we’re in a Constitutional Crisis, what they mean is that the framers were well aware of having to guard against kings and aspiring kings taking over, so they put the main power in the Congress.  But — in spite of “The Madness of King George III” (I recommend the movie with that title) — there was no real check on a madman.  We just declared independence.  (The South tried that, but that’s a different issue.)

The Internet has changed everything.  IMHO, the study described as “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” has blasted open our understanding of ourselves and given access to our indulgence of our worst side.  I don’t mean sex — I mean narcissistic preoccupations that we hide even from our own idea of who we are.  Big Data means that everything is knowable and cannot be erased, no matter how embarrassing.  Hacking means even enemies can know how much Preparation H you buy.  Video, including monitoring street and security cameras, reveals much, satellite surveillance (sometimes controlling weapons) is universal and incredibly detailed.  GPS supplies a way to code and follow locations far beyond the capacity of maps.

The same generation that has grown up with video games of amazing complexities has suffered through education that never addresses the principles of honor and courage for fear of offending someone.  The way we think of secrets seems to be a matter of concentric circles:  the tightest secrecy is telling no one, next entitled is the spouse or immediate family, then the cohort (far more powerful now that the generations have broken apart), the job, the local government (city, county, state), and so on.  In other words, it’s not an abstract principle that guides us but rather loyalty to persons.  Therefore, who they are, criminal or destructive or ridiculous, counts more than legal or literary or religious ideas.  The idea of "God" as an ultimate standard, omnipotent, knowing "hearts", is no longer operative in the US.  It's telling that our money is labeled with God.

Our legal pretense that businesses and institutions are “persons” subjects them to the same peculiar assumptions as real persons.  “Limited Liability Corporations” are able by law to escape from lawsuits, penalties, and so on.  “Shell corporations” are zombies and yet they “own” huge sums of money.  One can “own”, launder, disguise, and disappear the shells and their records.  One can own the rights to Donald Duck.  The right to use the name “Trump” is a big part of his wealth.  I hear the name is being taken off buildings to avoid attack by folks who are displacing their feelings about Donald.  Live by the name, go broke by the name.

It’s hard — maybe impossible — to separate Trump the man from Trump the Shell Corporation.  Maybe we don’t care.  Maybe we should concentrate on keeping the USA from being merely a shell corporation.

THE CYBER POLICE STATE

Trump on his hackable Android 

which he uses to government business at dinner parties.

The most “American” aspect to this unfolding scandal about Trump and the espionage coming from the Russia is the selling of ads for the Rachel Maddow Show — as well as forcing MSNBC watchers onto paid platforms.  Like the Washington Post and New York Times “pay walls,” the first beneficiary of the story of our own danger is booming sales.”

Put that aside.

Senate hearings about the crazy unendingness makes it clear that we’re paying for our own childish neglect of the issues of the cyber world, a revolution of technology (among others) that is as life-changing as the industrial revolution.  The internet is a millennial railroad, an airport that lands on your table, a harvesting combine that reduces a whole crew to one college kid earning summer money.  It was just too subtle to see without re-focusing.  There are two schools of thought:  if you can find the same motives and foibles, it’s the sameold sameold.  The other one is that this is quite different and we need to stretch to get our heads around it.

I was particularly impressed by the Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, though I could only bring up the second half on YouTube.  I normally watch a lot of intense police procedural movies — this felt the same.  It was adult, controlled, technical but accessible.  Nothing else got done at this house except cat feeding so they’d stay out from in front of my screen.

TRUMP with his old Android he uses 

to do government business at dinner parties.

Even the schools who are teaching keyboarding and coding, thinking they are giving their kids the ability to use computers, are not providing the thinking skills, analysis and insight they need to REALLY operate on computers.  (Trump evidently cannot use a keyboard computer.)  What computers can do — besides providing vid games and ordering clothes — is only activated and effective if the person brings a context that is broad and deep.  But we seem to be locked into villages of about a hundred people who hate change, which is the way our biology is programmed.  It takes some effort and even some help to escape that.  All the truly sophisticated testifiers are saying that we just had the wrong focus, weren’t thinking big enough.  That includes the Russians.

This might be a clue:  the trash roll-off manager, a woman I respect, thinks global warming is an invented issue, not real, and her “proof” is that long cycles of global warming and thawing happen all the time and they are natural throughout the history of the planet.  Therefore it is silly to try to interfere.  I quite agree that planetary temperature cycles are natural, recurring, and dynamic, but what I finally realized is that she thinks it’s like the weather cycles that I see happening — like recurrence of what happened in the Sixties which I witnessed.

What she doesn’t grasp is that the global warming (climate change) that I see demonstrated in pictures and data is FAR more extreme, maybe not survivable by most humans.  And our efforts (though effective to some degree) are focused on greenhouse gases (which is good) instead of preparing for the unthinkable consequence of losing all our fine coastal cities, which will mean major changes inland to accommodate those people.  Also, changes in the great gyres of current that warm some countries.  It might happen within decades, not centuries.  This political crisis we’re struggling with is very parallel.  

Over the last half century I’ve seen the institutions that I valued and tried to participate in constructively go straight to near-evil, all the time dressed up and smiling.  The UU ministers used to joke (over their laypeople’s heads) about people who would not admit evil existed.  It’s not a blind “spot”, it’s a whole denial of an aspect of every human culture.  Trump has been acting like Putin through his whole life, but no one nailed him for it.  We have seen the Russian enemy and “he” is us, demanding control and respect by force.

I’m glued to Rachel Maddow, but if the profiteering of her thoughts keep escalating, I will have to decide whether to pay or not.  What puzzles me is that in the comments — when I don’t block them — how many people, usually female, sneer at her and hope something bad will happen to her.  Evidently our reaction, partly competitive, is being so terrified by the news that we try to kill the messenger who says the cops are coming.  If the goal of Russia was to take America down a few pegs, the same is true of these curdled watchers.  In fact, that seems to be the driving goal of, well, one-third of Americans.  “I demand respect!  You think you’re so good!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3CFwkoqxIs

This vid discusses whether Trump has Alzheimers.  I’ve been convinced of the diagnosis from the beginning.  I’ve worked in neurology wards that included people with Alzheimers.  It’s a distinctive affliction — not like florid psychosis.  If Trump admitted it, he might plead innocent due to insanity, but except at the beginning, the capacity for self-reflection is gone.  (Assuming Trump ever had any accurate idea of himself, which is appears he never did.)  But what about his staff and family?  So self-involved that they didn’t notice?  Or just tending the goose to get the golden eggs as long as they could?

I can understand Putin deciding Trump was an idiot who could be managed.  The intel people are saying that Putin himself was amazed at how easy it was, and yet how impossible it was to predict what would happen next.  I can also understand that Trump’s daughter wants to be there in case of something wild happening.  She is Ivanka’s daughter and Ivanka is no fool.  Those women KNOW that Trump is losing his mind and they must be preparing for it.  But I cannot understand why one-third of American citizens would vote for an obviously crazy man and still defend him as he is gradually revealed as also a criminal man.

And yet the greatest threat is the cloud of consequences to our lives as we take advantage of this situation (just as we did with 9/11) to become more defensive, rigid and regulation ensnared.  Trump’s fancy flourishes of signing (on an empty desk) have given permission for a lot of people to be hurt, for programs to be destroyed, for invasions of our lives to increase.  Already.

I was impressed by the expert testifying to the senate committee (I’ve got to learn all these names) who said that the identification and access cards swinging from lanyards on the necks of half the people in the room did NOT have a true computer chip on them — only a picture of a chip, ineffective.  A couple of senators hurried to shut him up.  Others were scribbling quickly, probably notes to get real chips ASAP.  We settle for the appearance of security — not real security, which is constant human insight and action.  “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

This site helps you to guard your info at borders.  How long before a traffic stop will mean your handheld is plugged into the main computer for download?  When you cross into Canada now, they run your id through their computer to see if you have a record.  Where do you think TruthFinder got their program?  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/us-border-phone-computer-searches-how-to-protect?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=219834&subid=10790770&CMP=GT_US_collection