Showing posts with label Donald Trump. Show all posts

November 30, 2022

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup
By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Is it any coincidence that all of the people who have become one person train wrecks and the large group that has become a huge highway traffic pileup are Republicans? I can't think of a Democrat but would be happy if readers can find one to add to my list.

In a quick glance at RawStory this morning I saw these articles:

The first one is about the coming battle in the House for who will be Speaker. I consider this just the beginning of what will be a huge traffic pileup for the House GOP as they begin their investigations into Hunter Biden, who everyone has heard of but few care about, to Alejandro Mayorkas who nobody has heard of but will once the hearings start. Their eventual goal may be to try to impeach President Biden, an effort that might be successful in the Republican controlled House but will go nowhere in the Senate.

What it all adds up to is a gridlocked (to use another traffic term) legislative agenda in the House which you better believe Democrats will publicize to their advantage when popular bills go down to defeat.

The individuals who have the most ginormous train wrecks Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are the most publicized. The lack of judgment and self-defeating grandiose narcissism of these two is

If Herschel Walker loses he will be added to the list. Hell, if he wins, covering his putting his foot in his mouth as a Senator will prove irresistible to media.

Other train wrecks who make the news who come to mind are Kari Lake (read story) and Ye (who is apparently going to run for president with

Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos helping in his campaign ).

I predict that there will be many opportunities for the likes of Jim Jordan (read yesterday's blog story about the soon to be chair of the GOP Judiciary Committee) and other House Republicans, especially those in the Freedom Caucus who crave attention like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Goetz, to vie for the dubious distinction of becoming headline grabbing train wreck of the day or week.

The reason some of the individuals who will crash and burn will be due to calculated attempts to gain notoriety and to stand out in a crowded field. Keep my highway metaphor, compare it to someone driving 100 MPH in attempt to beat everyone else to a destination.

Most of them also just happen to meet the many of the clinical criteria for having a narcissistic personality disorder. This is from The Mayo Clinic:

Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
Take advantage of others to get what they want.
Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special recognition or treatment.
Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

November 11, 2022

Trump is ready to "rock and roll", will be do the Trumpty Dumpty?

Trump is ready to "rock and roll", will he do it to the Trumpty Dumpty?

By Hal Brown

Update on bottom of page

I think Rupert Murdoch who, more than any one individual, brought us the Donald Trump presidency, may have given us the name of his dance. In fact his NY Post illustration can easily be used to depict him dancing:

The following article prompted me to envision Trump actually trying to rock and roll.

It is a summary of this Daily Beast article (requires subscription):

I don't know about the political wisdom for his campaign of announcing now. Politics aside, this is the portion that got to me:

The former president intends to announce his third White House bid Tuesday at 9 p.m., even as a number of Republicans have said publicly and privately that the party should move on from him, but sources told The Daily Beast he's ready to "rock and roll."

Someone put together a compilation video so I could remind myself of his self-satisfied dance moves.

Click above to view video

He no doubt thinks he's John Tavolta in Saturday night fever when in fact he's more like Elaine dancing on Seinfeld:

On consideration, I think Elaine, who like Trump believes she's an excellent dancer, is a better dancer if only because she is really letting go. I venture a guess that Julia Louis-Dreyfus really enjoyed doing these scenes. Here's a brief video of her explaining how she put together the well known Elaine Dance.

Sources supposedly who know of what they speak say that Trump is "ready to rock and roll" though I don't see any reports that he has said these words.

I don't really think it is in character for him to say those words, though perhaps he's heard them in a war movie before the good guys move out, as in "let's rock and roll." He may say this before he takes the stage in some of his rallies to "YMCA" or another rock song though I doubt it.

Having written this, I can't wait to see how he makes this announcement. Will he dance? Points for me if he does.

(Watch another video here).

Update:

It is official now that one of Trump's sleaziest looking sycophants, Jason Miller, announced Trump was going to announce his candidacy on the show of one of his other sleazy looking sycophants:

Trump’s ‘Fired Up’: Jason Miller Says Former President Will Still Announce 2024 Run on Tuesday Despite Midterms Backlash - MSN

Now the only question is whether he will come out to make his announcement dancing the new Trumpity Dumpity perhaps to a new version of YMCA sung for him by The Village People. He could use as a backdrop an image from the soon to be released video game Hellscape.

click above to enlarge

November 3, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 6 - Whither Trump

Mired in Muskland - 6

Whither Trump?

by Hal Brown

There is a general consensus that once the election in over Elon Musk will allow Donald Trump to tweet on Twitter again. While I expect the prognosticators are correct in this I am not sure Trump will necessarily start tweeting again even if Musk approves this for several reasons.

One is that he is a man who is loathe to appear to beg for anything, let alone accept something whicht he knows will be perceived in his MAGA base as his currying favor with the richest man in the world.

In their collective cultish mind this will be viewed as Musk winning and Trump losing.

Another is that if he goes back to tweeting it would be an admission that his Truth Social website failed to make a dent in the social media world. It would be tantamount to saying he was wrong and we know this is something Trump never does.

Trump wants to control all aspects of his messaging and he can only do that on Truth Social. While it doesn't get many clicks when he posts something outrageous or newsworthy there the media is likely to republish it.

For example this made the news yesterday:

Clicking above will engage but not go to Truth Social

A mere 4,300 people sent it on and 16,967 gave it a heart but journalists picked it up.

Yet an additional reason he'd eschew tweeting, perhaps a primary one, and stay on Truth Social is that he can generate revenue from the platform in the form of donations.

No doubt he or his tech savvy crew are following who the Truth Social readers are and they know they are hard-core MAGAs and susceptible to his grift. They must have a way of tracking where the donations came from.

Click here to read the statistica Truth Social Statistics

Meanwhile for those who don't look at Elon's tweets, here's some of what he's been up to:

Yes Elon, we know you know about neurons. As far as scientists have been able to determine a single neuron in an instant of time is not self-aware but linked to other neurons in the brain we have a functioning mind.

The total number of neurons in the brain of a human is around a hundred billion. I don't think you can double this for Musk just based on his personal worth.

Is Twitter like a neuron having billions of some kind of interactions over time making Twitter being a collective cybernetic super-intelligence?

Elon is super-intelligent. He may be able to develop Twitter into a collective cybernetic super-intelligence. The concern I have, along with many others, is who will program ethics, morality, truth, and common decency into the cybernetic super-intelligence. I don't think he can depend on the so-called collective to do this.

I found the AOC sweatshirt on her website here. He encircled the cost. As far as cotton sweatshirts go $58 may seem excessive, but I assume part of the profit goes to her campaign in some way or another. Consider that The Trump store charges a whopping $185:

So why did Elon use AOC instead of Trump?

Notice he didn't use this from her mech store which is also $58.

Maybe Musk will set his own example and sell some more reasonably priced Twitter merchandise at a discount for those who subscribe and throw in a free t-shirt if your sign up for a year.

Elon makes a good point. Twitter may be the most interesting place on the Internet. You are reading the tweets because you elected to read my blog but possibly don't ever go to Twitter since I don't put links to it here.

He may be revealing more about himself in the tweet about hw interesting Twitter is. He was managed to make himself in around a week to be the most interesting person on the Internet unceremoniously taking the position from Donald Trump who I found interesting because he is the poster child for malignant sociopathic narcissism.

As a therapist I have been intrigued by Musk whose narcissism may be indicative of his having a narcissistic personality disorder but crucially without the sociopathy we see in Trump.

Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people
Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions
Needing continual admiration from others
Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people
Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them
Pompous and arrogant demeanor

I wondered if he made the cartoon faces himself thinking he might have a talent as a cartoonist. I did a Google Image search and discovered were he found them.

Click to enlarge

About me

October 22, 2022

Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?

By Hal Brown

Previous editions in archives >>>:

From The NY Times: In the most basic sense, any legal arguments seeking to get Mr. Trump off the hook would merely need to be weighty enough to produce two and a half months of litigation. If Republicans pick up enough seats in the midterm elections to take over the House in January, as polls suggest is likely, they are virtually certain to shut down the Jan. 6 committee, a move that would invalidate the subpoena. NY Times

A few words (my bold) in The New York Times subtitle ("If the ex-president turns down the drama of testifying, his legal team could mount several constitutional and procedural arguments in court") of all that I've seen, comes the closest to addressing my speculation though there's nothing about it in the article itself.

The photo they used does suggest how much Trump likes to have the spotlight on him.

I am stuck on this subject because it seems that anybody with a public forum is saying Trump will wait out the clock hoping that the GOP takes control of the House in January and dissolves the J6 Committee.

This presupposes he doesn't want to have the ginormous megaphone which such testifying would give him as long as the Committee acceded to his demand that his appearance be televised live. I am hearing that he could end up testifying for two or three days.

Accepting the subpoena and testifying live would make must-see television for both his cult who want to see him make fools of his interrogators and those who want to see the J6 Committee members and their lawyers eviscerate him.

He does have another option, albeit a lesser one, aside from insisting his testimony be live.

What Steve Bannon did after his trial, which wasn't televised, gives him another way to gain public attention.

Steve Bannon is a boisterous buffoon and I doubt many hardcore Trumpers take him all that seriously. Some may even wonder why Trump allows himself to have his photo taken with him, even when it looks like he's holding his breath so as not to inhale the noxious fumes I can imagine emanating from the man who looks like he hasn't bathed in a week.

You may notice that if you do an image search for the two of them most show them a fair distance apart from each other.

Click above to enlarge

Donald Trump, to his cult, is their epideictic emperor, not that many even know the meaning of the word epideictic.

Trump could decide that he could testify behind closed doors because he knows that he'd have the opportunity to say anything he wanted and have his remarks (or rant) televised on every station afterwards.

Bannon took only a few minutes but Trump could go on like he does at his rallies for as long as he wanted to. He knows that networks, even Fox News, have stopped broadcasting his rallies. I am sure Trump misses this. Each network just broadcasts what they think are newsworthy snippets.

Trump may not be willing to admit it to himself, at least not fully, but at some level I think he knows he needs to revamp his act because his performance has gotten stale to all but his most loyal cult members.

If he made a speech after testifying in private I think it would be covered, if not in its entirety, for a long time on most networks. I can see MSNBC and other stations cutting away if and when he starts repeating himself and lapses into an unhinged string of lies and grievances.

Regardless, he would be able to star in his own show without being interrupted by pesky interrogators and, like Bannon did, he'd refuse to take questions from reporters

More recent blog editions:

October 16, 2022

Trump Junior praises conspiracy theorists for pattern recognition ability

Trump Junior praises conspiracy theorists for pattern recognition ability

by Hal Brown

I took the above photo, and the one below, at Little Harbor Beach on Buzzard's Bay in Wareham, MA.

Click above to enlarge

This story was prompted by these Truth Social posts by Donald Trump, Jr. who is turning ever more orange and unhinged as he embraces the lunatic beliefs of his bigly brained blowhard daddy.

Clicking above will enlarge image but will not go to Truth Social

In the Truth Social post series above Junior references "pattern recognition" and lauds conspiracy theorists for having the ability to see nefarious patterns others miss which prove Democratic conspiracies.

I don't know which of Trump's older sons is the bigger idiot. What I do know is that coments like this are a good example of projection:

Junior thinks he is so very smart and throws out the term "pattern recognition" using it in a colloquial way. Actually this is what it means:

Pattern recognition is the ability of machines to identify patterns in data, and then use those patterns to make decisions or predictions. This guide provides an overview of the most important techniques used to recognize patterns and real-world applications. Reference.

The way Junior uses the term was part of the theme of a novel by that name:

"The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data."

He thinks that believing what we know are his and other fellow residents of Magaland are delusions are the result of the result of the brilliant ability to see patterns others are too dumb to recognize. In fact he and these MAGA delusionists might as well be seeing the patterns they want to see in the clouds.

Seeing patterns of behavior that actually reveal a not readily discernible truth of a matter is something investigators, whether good journalists or detectives, are adept at.

Actually seeing patterns that don't prove anything, but rather support a person's delusional beliefs suggest their reality testing is impaired at best and buying into delusions supporting a political agenda, or have a paranoid disorder as a worst case.

I don't know where the majority of those who believe in the ludicrous claims of QAnon fit on some sort of continuum between merely being gullible and having a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. I expect this now or will be the subject of research studies.

One of my dear childhood friends and neighbors (Hi, GWC...) and I still reminisce about how we used to lay on the grass in her yard and loved it when we found patterns in the clouds. We might point and say "that one looks like a bird" or typically "that looks like a face."

My partner and I always enjoy looking at the sky whether at home or rides in the beautiful Oregon countryside. Generally we just just appreciate the way the clouds take the bland pallet of a blue sky and turn it into an artistic display. Occasionally a pattern jumps out at us.

We don't think that the pattern has any other meaning than the fortuitous accident of upper atmospheric weather, but then again we're not delusional.

Note:

Junior still is on Twitter where he posted the same message and had supportive and critical replies, one apparently from Elon Musk.