October 22, 2016

Oct. 24, 2016




Monday, Oct. 24, 2016
Late night edition:

My late wife indulged my wanting to have the biggest screen TV that would fit in the space we had. When I moved from Massachusetts to Oregon I didn’t take anything besides some clothes and artwork, just what would fit in the trunk of my car. So one of the first things I bought here was a 55” Samsung TV (right).
Now I am “treated” to images of Trump so vivid and detailed I can see the pores on his fish face. Recently I thought I could see the flop sweat starting on his brow. Today I saw beads of sweat on Boris Epshteyn’s upper lip. Yea!
What bothers me the most is bringing the Trump crowds into my living room in high definition. On my screen each person in the crowd is easily visible. They’re all five inch tall little zombie people. Hundreds of them not just cheering but chanting like banshees. It’s like they’re possessed. 
I was watching tonight and this was really bothering me.
Then Rachel showed the Hillary rally where my old senator Elizabeth — as my wife would have said — cut Trump a new one.
The five inch tall cheering Hillary supporters made me glad I had the TV. Focus, Hal, don’t let it get to you too much, after the election no amount of Viagra will restore their pre-election erections. 
I am not embarrassed to say that I watch a lot of television. I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu streaming video. I’m always on the lookout for shows like “Hell on Wheels,” about building the transcontinental railroad, or the two seasons of the British  “Black Mirror,” kind of like an updated “Twilight Zone.”

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I follow the latest innovations in televisions and am aware that so far only LG will have the cutting edge 65” 4K OLED television for awhile. I went to the store and took width measurement of the current model, and it fits (see above). It will dominate my living room, but I don’t care. 
 I’m thinking that once I don’t have to look at a nearly life-sized Kellyanne Conway or Trump’s slimy groper grouper mouth,  and the newer model LG televisions come out, perhaps I will celebrate Hillary’s landslide and the Democrats winning the Senate by treating myself to one.
I know my wife would say that was fine with her.
P.S.
OMG — there’s  a life sized David Duke on my screen. Rachel reports that he is high enough in the polls for the Louisiana Senate race debates. He polls  5.1% of voters in the state, .1% of the 5% needed to be allowed to participate in a November 2 debate.
Evening edition:
Don’t blame Trump for lying, it’s his brain’s fault. Really. Here’s some science.

I’ve been curious about Trump’s pathological lying since when his lies spun out of control. I’ve had conversations about it with my fellow psychotherapists. None of use could really figure it out. Could it be that he really believed the lies as they flowed out of his mouth? No there’s a possible answer. I new scientific study suggests that the more a person lies the more their brain accepts the lie as true.
This morning Vox had an intriguing piece titled “How do politicians get so comfortable with lying?”  


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www.nature.com/...

The just published study (right) described in the Vox article explains this as  “emotional adaptation.” 
It’s similar to what happens when you’re exposed to a strong smell. At first the smell is extremely noticeable, but eventually you stop noticing it as much. With time, any stimulus — a loud noise, a strong perfume, etc. — is likely to provoke a smaller response. The same goes with lying.
In summary,  Tali Sharot, a University College London neuroscientist, an author of the study said:
“Arousal is one of the telltales of lying,” Sharot said. It can take the form of sweating and faster heart rate — what polygraph machines look for to detect lies. So if the brain is less aroused by lying, that might mean a person is getting used to it. “If arousal goes down, people may be less likely to catch you in a lie,” Sharot said.
This study offers a possible explanation to the quandary I wrote about in my story, “Analyzing Trump’s Lies” the other day:
Okay, then what about the whole pathological liar accusations and descriptions we hear applied to Trump?
You may be surprised to learn that there’s no psychiatric diagnosis for this. This is from Psychiatric Times, 2008. “Pathological Lying: Symptom or Disease?” by Charles C. Dike, MD, MPH, MRCPsych
Pathological lying (PL) is a controversial topic. There is, as yet, no consensus in the psychiatric community on its definition, although there is general agreement on its core elements. PL is characterized by a long history (maybe lifelong) of frequent and repeated lying for which no apparent psychological motive or external benefit can be discerned. While ordinary lies are goal-directed and are told to obtain external benefit or to avoid punishment, pathological lies often appear purposeless. In some cases, they might be self-incriminating or damaging, which makes the behavior even more incomprehensible. Despite its relative obscurity, PL has been recognized and written about in the psychiatric literature for more than a century. The German physician, Anton Delbruck,1 is credited with being the first to describe the concept of PL. He observed that some of his patients told lies that were so abnormal and out of proportion that they deserved a special category. He sub-sequently described the lies as "pseu- dologia phantastica."


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“Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it.”
So reflected Freud in 1920. Having spent 20 years toiling away in labs, peering down microscopes, he arrived at the conclusion that the questions he wanted to answer about the human mind couldn’t be answered by what was then understood—or understandable—about the human brain. The knowledge wasn’t there, and neither were the tools. He continued to emphasize, however, that eventually, long after his own lifetime, the moment would come when brain science would be ready to fill out the psychoanalytic principles that he was busy laying down.

My psychotherapy training was psychodynamic and psychoanalytically oriented. But Freud himself began as a student of neurology, studying the brain, not the mind. His greatest discovery, the one that its him on the short list of the world’s greatest thinkers, was of the unconscious, or of the id, ego, and superego.
But even Freud said that he thought that in time major revelations about how the mind worked would come from studies of how the brain worked. 
Now with the amazing advances in brain imaging beyond CT scans: functional-MRI’s, PET Scans, Magnetoencephalography (MEG), NIRS (near infrared spectroscopy), a new field of studying the way the brain works has opened.

Trump’s Mosul Tweet prove his narcissistic rage has no conscience… and we will get to say Fuck You.

We know it is Trump’s wish that he can claim that an ISIS victory in Mosul is Obama and Hilary’s fault. I’ve concluded that there are no depths to which Trump won’t go to express his narcissistic rage as he anticipates the idea of losing.

​Add this to his trying to invalidate our election — to the entire world — by doubling and tripling down on his outright lie about our election system being rigged. 
From the way the battle to re-take ISIS is going I think there’s a good change that either it will be clear ISIS is losing badly, or they have already lost before the election. 




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The shameless Trump Tweet (right) is beyond the pale in so many ways. 
It could be argued that this is the most egregious example of Trump’s narcissistic  rage.
The garden variety narcissist expresses the rage that follows narcissistic injury which is defined as a major blow to their grandiose self-image. At the worst they may lash out like a cornered wounded animal. 
Trump’s Tweet is historic. It is probably the only example of a presidential candidate rooting for the enemy.
I wrote about the topic of Trump’s narcotic rage a month ago speculating about what would happen with Trump when it became clear he was losing, or actually did lose.
I wrote……”we need to understand narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage. We must understand what happens when circumstances drive extreme narcissists into a state of rage, and consider what might happen when one has the power to influence and persuade a significant portion of the population to act out.”
"Narcissistic rage is the response of a narcissist to anything they perceive as a threat to their ego, their control or their power. It is usually intense, out of proportion, often random and is used to manipulate."
This is what we can expect: "And at the same time the narcissist may also be plotting how to get revenge on the person who dared to challenge them. So the person gets twice the punishment...!"
Instead of his directing his rage against only person (Hillary Clinton) he may direct it against the system.
Trump is gambling on ISIS winning in Mosul. He is putting his bets against the coalition and the United States which he calls the failed system. 

Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016

Joy Reid had Tony Schwartz, the outspoken author of “The Art of the Deal” on this morning. Schwartz has taken up the void of the absent mental health professionals who are most qualified to explain the psychopathology of Donald Trump.
Not that these psychotherapists don’t have opinions about Trump, but they been scared away from expressing them publicly by the admonition against doing so by the American Psychiatric Association. Of course this only applies to psychiatrists, by those in other mental health professions have taken this as a rule. 
This doesn’t apply to me since I’ve have written many stories here about my impressions of Trump’s diagnosis. 
The lack of credible experts to explain the unusual mix of narcissistic and other psychopathology that adds up to what some have referred to as “Trumpism” leaves it to others, in particular David Corn, who have only second hand observations of Trump. However, Schwartz is unique in that he spent a year and a half with Trump.
Thus what he had to say this morning is especially illuminating.
  •  He described the neurology (using terms prefrontal cortex and amygdala) to describe how he doesn’t think Trump has conscious control when he say some things. He just talked about deep narcissistic injury… and us shrinks aren’t supposed to talk about Trump’s psychopathology. He pointed to his own head to illustrate how what Hillary said at the debates went into his brain and out his mouth without any intermediate conscious mediation.
  •  Smallest vocabulary of any person that’s ever run for public office … 200 word… Schwartz
  •  "Trump doesn’t know the words irony, nuance, subtly”
  •  "He feels like a cornered rat."
  •  “Narcissism has evolved into paranoia"
  • He suspects hundreds of women have had that experience with Trump
  •  "He isn’t capable of caring about anyone, he’s so needy himself, there isn’t any left to give to anybody else —“
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2016
Click above to read and make comments on Daily Kos



I can’t find any Kos stories about Jessica Drake, the client of Gloria Allred who is the 11th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.
He can’t deny knowing her because she has a photo of the two of them together.
Rather than excerpting biographical sections from her up to the minute Wikipedia profile which ends with ...
On October 22, 2016 Drake and attorney Gloria Allred held a news conference where Drake accused Republican presidential candidate and businessman Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and of offering her US$10,000.00 to join him in his suite during a golf tournament in Florida in 2006.
While her life story is unusual among the 11 women what she does share with the 10 others is that like them she comes across as highly credible…. credible, sincere, engaging, and likable. 
Trump stood on hallowed ground today and announced that he was going to sue every woman who dared to lie about him. It occurred to me, and the commentators on MSNBC, that he just might not have all that much time to engage in 11 lawsuits (and likely countersuits) while still being president.
I thought perhaps he could do his presidential work in the wee hours of the morning, though it might be difficult to schedule meetings at 1:00 AM.  But then I realized this would impinge on his Tweeting time.
It’s amazing to me, hell, it’s amazing to all my friends and to — well I assume each and every Cossack —  that three-quarters of Republicans polled by YouGov don't feel that sexual assault attacks by Donald Trump would disqualify him from the presidency.
Unfracking-beliavable...

I was surprised to see that the little piece I wrote below and posted on Daily Kos last night got moved to the Most Shared list and stayed on for 24 hours and was shared an Facebook 1,224 times.


Friday, Oct. 19, 2016
Evening update:



Just letting everyone not watching Rachel know about this.  Another example of her stellar research staff.  They discovered that somebody plagiarized his best joke from an R.J. Matson cartoon (see www.rjmatson.com/… for more of his work) which was on Roll Call.










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The New Yorker article begins with this...

The media is even more biased this year than ever before. You want the proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it. It's fantastic. They think she's absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech and people get on her case. And I don't get it. I don't know why. And it wasn't her fault. Stand up, Melania. Come on. She took a lot of abuse. Oh, I'm in trouble when I go home tonight. She didn't know about that one. Am I OK? Is that OK?
Here’s the joke video: www.msn.com/...










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The New Yorker article ends with this.

How highly Rachel is regarded? Awhile back she got a night before exclusive about the first Newsweek bombshell. Tonight she got an exclusive from the next New Yorker which has an article praising Hillary.


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