Hal Brown’s July blog
My photo blog is here. +++ Links to all the several dozen articles I cross-posted to Daily Kos with comments are here.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Was the Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch meeting a brilliant, if devious, ploy to get the email issue over and done with?

Loretta Lynch said that she wouldn’t involve her department in the process which usually follows an FBI investigation. By leaving the decision as to whether our not involve the DOJ in deciding whether or not to prosecute to the recommendation of the FBI, the matter should be decided. 

Now that the FBI has announced they didn’t find any reason to prosecute, in retrospect this looks like this 

Monday, July 4, 2016
Narcissist Trump can’t apologize, and nobody will say "why don’t you just say I’m sorry?"

A photo by Evgenii Khaldeai showing a Jewish couple
 wearing stars as they were required to do in Nazi-occupied areas.

There’s been lots of commentary about the Star of David being used in a Trump Tweet, but I have another take on it. No matter whether or not, consciously or unconsciously, somebody used the symbol so powerful and symbolic to Jews and others to appeal to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, there are other facts that have to be considered. 

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What we heard was denial, especially from the wormy Corey Lewandowski, saying it was merely meant to be a star, or a sheriff’s star. And, in the Trumpian manner, comes a heeping  helping of blame the media deflection. 

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All over the news this morning is that Trump is defending the original post, despite the fact that it originated first from a notoriously racist Tweeter, and then was repost on a racist website. I have yet to hear someone confront a Trump surrogate by directly asking why Trump can’t simply say he is sorry. 

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Admit he or someone associated with him made a mistake? Really, and pigs fly and Shrek is real.

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About the closest to an apology that has come from the Trump camp is that their deleting the star and replacing it with a circle was enough to show they recognized it was inappropriate. Some Republican on MSNBC just said that everyone in the campaign “regrets that this has happened.” Of course they do! Because it was wrong? No, because they had to do damage control.

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HERE ARE MY FACTS

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Fact 1) Many people were offended, and nobody apologized. 

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Fact 2)  “I’m sorry” is something children usually learn early on to say when they’ve done something wrong, whether deliberate or not. If you say something that hurts someone’s feelings, you say that you are sorry.

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Fact 3) People with narcissistic personality disorder never apologize. They feel no shame.

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All this brings to mind the most famous line from the Army-McCarthy hearings:

I meant to do you no personal injury, and if I did, beg your pardon. 

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?  Special Counsel for the Army Joseph N. Welch.

Comment

Sunday, July 3, 2016

BRAIN ON DRUGS

 07.03.16 4:10 AM ET

Your Grandma Needs To Be Smoking Pot

It's going to be pretty hard to keep weed illegal when your grandparents are smoking it to prevent Alzheimer's.

This week scientists found evidence that the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), may be able to remove the buildup of a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer’s. It’s good news for the fastest growing group of marijuana users—seniors—and gives those above the age of 50 who haven’t come out of the pot closet a good reason to do so.  LINK

Or for the scientific among us:

Article | OPEN

Amyloid proteotoxicity initiates an inflammatory response blocked by cannabinoids

• Antonio Currais
• , Oswald Quehenberger
• , Aaron M Armando
• , Daniel Daugherty
• , Pam Maher
•  & David Schubert

• npj Aging and Mechanisms of Disease 2, Article number: 16012 (2016)
• doi:10.1038/npjamd.2016.12
• Download Citation
• • Alzheimer's disease
  • Neurodegeneration

Received:

05 January 2016

Accepted:

16 February 2016

Published online:

23 June 2016

Abstract

The beta amyloid (Aβ) and other aggregating proteins in the brain increase with age and are frequently found within neurons. The mechanistic relationship between intracellular amyloid, aging and neurodegeneration is not, however, well understood. We use a proteotoxicity model based upon the inducible expression of Aβ in a human central nervous system nerve cell line to characterize a distinct form of nerve cell death caused by intracellular Aβ. It is shown that intracellular Aβ initiates a toxic inflammatory response leading to the cell's demise. Aβ induces the expression of multiple proinflammatory genes and an increase in both arachidonic acid and eicosanoids, including prostaglandins that are neuroprotective and leukotrienes that potentiate death. Cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol stimulate the removal of intraneuronal Aβ, block the inflammatory response, and are protective. Altogether these data show that there is a complex and likely autocatalytic inflammatory response within nerve cells caused by the accumulation of intracellular Aβ, and that this early form of proteotoxicity can be blocked by the activation of cannabinoid receptors. CONTINUED 

Saturday, July 2, 2016

What’s wrong with this picture?

You can be forgiven if you didn’t catch it right off,
I don’t know ifI would have if I hadn’t seen it first on The Huffington Post.

I didn’t read the 800 page Benghazi report but someone did, give me a break, Gowdy wanted people to print it out…
In one sentence:
The internal documents don’t prove evidence of a scandal, but they do show an administration reflexively concerned with the politics of a national security emergency.

Friday, July 1, 2016
Quote of the day: “Donald Trump is like the ball in a pinball game.” Stuart Evans on the Lawrence O’Donnell show on MSNBC.
Evans wrote a book about a president similar to Trump, except he never could have imagined a president as batshit crazy as Trump.

A few years ago I started noodling on a novel that I hoped would expose the fault lines that seemed to be splitting our politics. My thought was to take reality and push it to the edge both for comic affect and to offer up a cautionary tale of where our politics might be headed. I finished the book in the summer of 2015 and I was a little worried that I had gone too far. How believable would it be that a xenophobic Republican who wanted to ban immigration and deport millions might actually be a real contender for president?
Well, now we know. Donald Trump hasn’t called for a new Bill of Rights like Armstrong George, the handsome fire-breather in my novel, The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear, but he’s the first candidate who’s running as if the Bill of Rights doesn’t exist. (If we get through this election without some reporter asking Trump if he can name the amendments in the Bill of Rights, it will be a crying shame.) Even while channeling my darkest impulses—and Lord knows we all have them, which is probably the key to Trump’s success so far—it never occurred to me that a candidate for president of the United States of America could call for a religious test to enter the United States without being considered a frothing lunatic. Continued on Daily Beast

BACK…. earlier articles:
More June articles May, 2016 April, 2016