TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!
POSTED BY: SHINYGOODGUY
UPDATED: Monday, March 9, 2026 20:06
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Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?
Richard A. Friedman FEB. 17, 2017
www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/is-it-time-to-call-trump-mentally-i
ll.html
A lot of people seem to be questioning President Trump’s mental health. This month, Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, went so far as to say he was considering proposing legislation that would require a White House psychiatrist.
More controversial is the number of mental health experts who are joining the chorus. In December, a Huffington Post article featured a letter written by three prominent psychiatry professors that cited President Trump’s “grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality” as evidence of his mental instability. While stopping short of giving the president a formal psychiatric diagnosis, the experts called for him to submit to a full medical and neuropsychiatric evaluation by impartial investigators.
A practicing psychologist went further in late January. He was quoted in a U.S. News and World Report article titled “Temperament Tantrum,” saying that President Trump has malignant narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, sadism and antisocial behavior.
I don’t doubt that these experts believe they are protecting the country from a president whose behavior they — like many of us — see as dangerous. A recent letter to the editor in this newspaper, signed by 35 psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, put it this way: “We fear that too much is at stake to be silent.” It continued, “We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.”
But the attempt to diagnose a condition in President Trump and declare him mentally unfit to serve is misguided for several reasons.
First, all experts have political beliefs that probably distort their psychiatric judgment. Consider what my mostly liberal profession said of Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, right before the election. Members of the American Psychiatric Association were surveyed about their assessment of Goldwater by the now-defunct Fact magazine. Many savaged him, calling him “paranoid,” “grossly psychotic” and a “megalomaniac.” Some provided diagnoses, like schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder.
They used their professional knowledge as a political weapon against a man they had never examined and who certainly would never have consented to their discussing his mental health in public.
Goldwater sued (successfully) and, as a result, in 1973 the A.P.A. developed the Goldwater Rule. It says that psychiatrists can discuss mental health issues with the news media, but that it is unethical for them to diagnose mental illnesses in people they have not examined and whose consent they have not received.
Contrary to what many believe, this rule does not mean that professionals must remain silent about public figures. In fact, the guidelines specifically state that mental health experts should share their knowledge to educate the public.
So while it would be unethical for a psychiatrist to say that President Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, he or she could discuss common narcissistic character traits, like grandiosity and intolerance of criticism, and how they might explain Mr. Trump’s behavior. In other words, psychiatrists can talk about the psychology and symptoms of narcissism in general, and the public is free to decide whether the information could apply to the individual.
This may seem like splitting hairs, but it isn’t. Diagnosis requires a thorough examination of a patient, a detailed history and all relevant clinical data — none of which can be gathered from afar. Narcissism, for instance, isn’t the only explanation for impulsive, inattentive and grandiose behavior. Someone could be suffering instead from another clinical problem like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; the abuse of drugs, a
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The New York Times explained why President Trump decided to hold a press conference yesterday:
For days, a frustrated and simmering president fumed inside the West Wing residence about what aides said he saw as his staff’s inadequate defense and the ineffectiveness of his own tweets....“I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos,” Mr. Trump said as he attempted — with little discipline — to read from prepared remarks listing his accomplishments since being inaugurated one month ago. “Chaos. Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”
....It all made the brooding boss feel better, people close to Mr. Trump said. The news conference, they said, was Mr. Trump’s best effort at spitting the bit out of his mouth and escaping the bridle of the West Wing, where he views his only way to communicate his side of any argument is his 140-character limited Twitter feed.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/us/politics/donald-trump-media.h
tml
The weird thing is that I suspect Trump believes this. Within his little bubble, everything really does seem to be running smoothly. He signs executive orders, holds "listening sessions," meets with foreign leaders, and issues directives to his staff. He's doing what he imagines a president should do, and figures that should produce presidential results. If the press says otherwise, then that's prima facie evidence that the press is dishonest and has it out for him.
www.reddit.com/r/TinyTrumps/
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The Trump University economics department strikes again
As the White House staff tries to put together a budget for President Donald Trump, they face a fundamental problem. Trump has promised to cut taxes, increase spending on the military and infrastructure, and avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The only way to do that without producing an exploding budget deficit is to assume a big increase in economic growth.
And Nick Timiraos at the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is planning to do just that — by making things up.
www.wsj.com/articles/trump-teams-growth-forecasts-far-rosier-than-thos
e-of-cbo-private-economists-1487356278
Trump assumes that the economy will be 17 percent larger than the current CBO estimate. Since Trump is assuming that GDP will be much higher, that will naturally mean that the Trump deficit as a share of GDP will be much lower.
The White House “estimate” is wildly at odds with the consensus of Congress, the Federal Reserve, and private sector forecasts. Most presidents would worry that if the staff are ordered to make up fake numbers, the staff will leak about it to the Wall Street journal. Most presidents lack Trump’s shamelessness.
Most presidents are trying, on some level, to work with Congress to get things done. Congress needs to use Congressional Budget Office numbers when legislating, so a fake White House forecast doesn’t help a president’s allies on the Hill. In effect, Trump is simply tossing congressional Republicans a hot potato — telling them he is disavowing responsibility for any of the tradeoffs inherent in governing, and that the responsibility is all on them to work things out.
www.vox.com/2017/2/17/14651208/trump-budget-forecast
Problems only arise if a bunch of snooty Ivy League economists insist that Trump is delusional, which explains why Trump hasn't bothered to hire anyone for his Council of Economic Advisers. They would just tell him stuff he doesn't want to hear.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump's first press conference is full of his false claims, his grievances and attacks on the media.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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FULL EVENT President Donald Trump HUUGE Rally in Melbourne, Florida, Feb. 18, 2017
Premiere Episode of Trump Show Disappoints With Sluggish Pacing and Dated Material
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/premiere-episode-trump-show-dis
appoints-sluggish-pacing-and-dated-material
Yesterday's episode of the Trump Show was disappointing. It started late and much of it was read off a teleprompter. A few miscellaneous comments:
No tie! Truly, Trump is a man of the people.
The first five minutes is dedicated solely to trashing the media. He says he wants to speak directly to The People without the filter of fake news. "When the media lies, I won't let them get away with it."
This is all done in service of a speech carried live and commercial-free by all three cable news channels.
The White House is running "smoothly, very smoothly."
He wants to bring back mining jobs for "clean, very clean coal." I'm sensing a rhetorical trend here.
He reprises several of his greatest hits: His Obamacare replacement will provide much better health care at a much lower cost. No more jobs are going to be sent overseas. He's going to slap a 35 percent tax on goods sent back here. And he still wants a "trillion dollar" infrastructure plan.
Jobs are already "pouring back in" to the country.
"Not one network will show the crowd," he says at the exact moment the pool camera pulls back to show the crowd.
He says he got the price of Air Force One down by a billion dollars. When did that happen? Let's google a bit...ah. It's just your basic Trump bullshit. The CEO of Boeing has agreed to keep the price tag below $4 billion for a project that's currently estimated to cost between $3.2 billion and $3.7 billion. Nice work, Donald.
He also got the price of the F-35 down by "hundreds of billions" dollars. It's actually hundreds of millions, but who's counting? And it was a price reduction that was already in the works before Trump ever got involved.
He says Obama was letting immigrants into the country with "no vetting, no nothing." This is just a ridiculous lie.
Meh. I doubt this rally did much for him. Even his most fervent supporters are starting to figure out that Trump isn't accomplishing a whole lot. Besides, how often can he go back to this well? Is he going to hold a pep rally every month? If he does, he better start coming up with some new material.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:The researchers found profound differences in brain activity based on assumptions the audience made about the speaker. In the Christian subjects, activity spiked in analytical areas of the brain in response to the non-Christian speakers, but plummeted when they listened to the speaker they believed was known for healing powers. These changes were not present in the secular group. The researchers drew parallels to similar experiments done on subjects on hypnosis, noting that hypnotism, when it works, was usually preceded by the massive frontal deactivation—in effect, a “handing over” of executive function to the hypnotist. Further, they found that “the more the Christian participants deactivate their executive and social cognitive networks, the higher they rate the speaker’s charisma post-scan.”
Originally posted by second:
Trump says Obama was letting immigrants into the country with "no vetting, no nothing." This is just a ridiculous lie.
Schjødt explained his findings in the context of a theory called the “predictive coding framework.” The brain is essentially a pattern recognition machine, constantly making predictions. Our perception is a combination of our prior expectations—expressed in the form of these automatic predictions—and actual sensory perception. As long as the sensory information matches the predictions, the brain hums along. When there is dissonance, the brain steps into make a correction. But when we are around people we believe to have special powers or abilities—when we have made an implicit decision that we can trust them—we seem to unconsciously down-regulate our analytical thinking.
“If you expect to experience God, or you are in the presence of a charismatic or religious expert, then you believe whatever is going on is correct, and it will lead you to that particular experience, so you don’t invest too many resources in being skeptical and checking,” Schjødt said.
– from “The Anatomy of Charisma” What makes a person magnetic and why we should be wary.
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma
Aberbach, a noted academic at McGill University and the London School of Economics, points to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler—two sides of the historical coin—as telling case studies. They both grew out of Depression-era needs of their respective nations. And they illustrate how profound an influence an individual charismatic can have.
“In the case of Roosevelt, he represented the ability to fight back in time of adversity,” Aberbach said. “On a personal level, he had fought back, and he could represent the nation that was fighting back. As a person, he could represent the group. In that sense, he was charismatic. I think that’s what it comes down to. The nation or the group seeks that person that represents them at a given time, and it’s unconscious.”
In the case of Hitler, Aberbach said, “A lot of people felt good when they heard him. It’s often forgotten because newsreel clips often represent him as a sort of raving lunatic. But in fact people were taken into a different kind of realm, a different kind of existence, where they felt one with Germany, they felt a sense of national pride, they felt an aggressive hope in their future.”
– from “The Anatomy of Charisma” What makes a person magnetic and why we should be wary.
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma
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With over 1,000 days to go, Trump launches re-election bid:
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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What are talking about Shiny, I never make anything up.
Just to be post #1800 <-- ?!?
So Firefly back on the air, huh?
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Quote:Not stupider, but ordinary people, maybe too ordinary: “The essence of demagoguery is recognizing that appealing to people’s emotions is the most rational way to move them. After all, that’s where people make their moral decisions.”
Originally posted by G:
In other words: Trump supporters are stupider.
– from “The Anatomy of Charisma” What makes a person magnetic and why we should be wary.
http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/the-anatomy-of-charisma
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Trump "Considering" Intriguing New Way to Lie With Statistics
www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-considers-change-in-calculat
ing-u-s-trade-deficit-1487523299
The Trump administration is considering changing the way it calculates U.S. trade deficits, a shift that would make the country’s trade gap appear larger than it had in past years, according to people involved in the discussions.
The leading idea under consideration would exclude from U.S. exports any goods first imported into the country, such as cars, and then transferred to a third country like Canada or Mexico unchanged, these people told The Wall Street Journal.
Economists say that approach would inflate trade deficit numbers because it would typically count goods as imports when they come into the country but not count the same goods when they go back out, known as re-exports.
While Trump is at it, he could change his new jobs report to show all the people who have gained a job but not the ones who have lost a job. That should make the economy look great, just like Trump wants it.
Trump “Explains” His Swedish Terror Comment That Baffled Sweden
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-explains-sweden-terror-comme
nt-baffled-nation-n723006
Trump watched Tucker Carlson interviewing right-wing filmmaker Ami Horowitz, who had recently made a documentary bitching and moaning about Sweden's refugee policy. Trump’s imagination “enhanced” the film (he lied, in other words) to include terrorists terrorizing Sweden in some way Trump did not specify. Or maybe he was trying to mislead his audience, but wanted plausible deniability? Only Trump knows, but the Swedish government knows that the terror only happened in Trump’s brain, not in the real world.
Anybody think Trump will be carefully explaining it to his audience so that any misunderstanding caused “accidentally” by Trump will be corrected?
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