What''s the deal with Trump wanting the Panama Canal back and Canada to be a state. It's all about his being threatened by the President Musk meme. By Hal M.Brown

How long before Trump starts wearing the MAGA Panama hat? I want bragging rights for predicting this if he does.

President Theodore Roosevelt wore a Panama hat when he visited the Panama Canal. Will Turmp wear his own version when he goes there if he can take it back? My hunch is that Trump felt he needed an issue to change the subject from people saying Musk was really the president. Maybe we'll see Trump wearing a MAGA Panama hat.

Just as I was starting to write this Jonathan LeMire said this on MSNBC - "when the Time Magazine cover drops" about a Time cover about Elon being president. I was going to write that I really hope they have a snarky cover showing President Musk. Trump pays attention to Time Magazine covers! I made this to post on X using the X logo to cover Trump's face.

I don't follow X having moved to BlueSky (here) but being able to do things like this is the only reason I use it.

Back to the Panama Canal story...

Trump's bringing this up pretty much out of nowhere except the convoluted recesses of his warped mind demonstrates that even though he is about to be sworn in as president he is still deeply insecure. The bloviating macho man has always had an Achille's Heel and it is having a superior macho man take the limelight away from him.

Another Trump weakness is having a woman make the news like Stormy Daniels did by mocking his masculinity and E. Jean Carroll did by forcing him to endure day after day in court. I think that every minute he spent in court he was seething inside and was plotting his revenge.

People make fun of Trump's dancing and although I haven't seen Musk dance at a Trump rally, he does dance in his own energetic odd way. Here's a video

He also can enthusiatically leap quite high, apparently, as shown below, not pleasing Trump.

Musk often wears his black Colonize Mars t-shirt and in this photo he looks like he could be using levitating powers to actually start the journey.

As far as who the real macho man is, Musk is the richest man in the world. Trump is rich and just got back on the Forbes 400 list, but he's nowhere near as rich as Musk who is worth 10 times as much as he is. As far as another common, albeit phallocentric, measure of masculine prowess, Musk has 12 children. Critics question whether Trump and Melania even share a bedroom. Musk just had a baby.

Trump wants to round up undocumented people who want to live here and be productive members of our society.  He wants to depict them as evil so he can be say he vanquished them and saved innocent true Americans from being victims of horrific crimes. Musk wants the immigration problem to be resolved but his focues is on how much it costs.

Musk wants to be known for DOGE and saving the goverment and Americans billions, but he also is passionate about sending people to inhabit another planet. Instead of wanting to be known for helping to cure cancer he tried to cut funding for children's cancer research. Wanting to rocket off to Mars just isn't as glamorous and manly an accomplishment as curing cancer. This is why you won't see Trump making this an focus of his presidency.

Trump has made many promises he is unlikely to be able to keep. People are not particulary patient. They want to see lower grocery prices as soon as he takes office. Trump has to make good on his Hitlerian rhetoric about rounding up immigrants and deporting them. He wants this to happen overnight. Of course it won't and the endeavor which will be marked by ineptitude will be met with a lot of blowback and bad publicity. Trump is setting himself up for failure. So what does he do? He decides to take the Panama Canal back.

On top of this he has also once again brought up the idea of buying Greenland.

There is something so utterly self-defeating about Trump interjecting Panama and Greenland into the news coverage that I can only clincally explain it by positing that the viral President Musk meme has hit his Achille's Heel and hobbled him so he is totally off balance. He is desperate for a diversion. He want to show how powerful he is. He's decided that one way to do this is to pull a Putin. He wants to annex land, in this case a canal, and Greenland, and even the entire country of Canada making it our 51st state. 

He tried unsuccessfully to antagonize Prime Minister of Canada so perhaps this is why he took on the president of Panama. He's trying to sell this idea on Truth Social:

I can't keep up with the images about President Musk that I see posted in social media. Below are just a few of them.

These are mine:

I doubt very much that Trump sees any of these. I admit I enjoy making them and in all modesty think his wearing the "I'm the boss" t-shirt is one of the best I used AI to create. 

To say it is all over the news is an understatement. Consider this simple Google News search for President Musk.

Click above to enlarge image

Trump is that he's the most transparently self-revealing president in my lifetime. This sounds like a complement considering that he has also lied more than any president or presidential candidate this needs some explanation. Most of his lies reveal something about the inner workings of his mind. This goes for many of the words he types on social media and utters when he goes off the teleprompter when he speaks. 

There was a time when mental health professionals were criticized for trying to diagnose Trump without assessing him in person. By now I hope those who lambasted us realize that we have so much information about his psychopathogy it would be a kind of malpractice not to diagnose him. 

Trump is a malignant narcissist who is a dangerous to our democracy. In addtion he meets every critera for being an examplar for the Dark Triad.

Trump, who lacks a semblence of empathy, has a sadistic streak. So do others like Stephen Miller and his choice to head the immigration round up Tom Homan. Like with Trump, the cruelty is the point. Being cruel makes them feel tough and manly.

Related:

Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski on plot to take Greenland: 'We have not expanded our country in 70 years'

"Corey, what do you make of Trump's threat about the Panama Canal?" Newsmax host Logan Ratick asked the Trump adviser.

"Yeah, once again, this is President Trump focused on America first," Lewandowski explained. "We sold it for a dollar, which was just the most ridiculous thing that anybody has ever seen."

"And so it's time to make sure that our independence and our dominance on the world stage is back in play," he continued. "He's talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn't have its influence there."

"This is a president who is making outside-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that, once again, the United States is the dominant world superpower."

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If the aliens don't save us from Trump maybe the bird flu will, by Hal M. Brown

This is the CDC information about the bird flu.

At present the bird, or avain, flu is not highly effective at infecting humans. Read more from the Oregon Public Broadcasting article here. This is the concerning takeaway from the article:

There are two paths the virus could take to get better at infecting humans

Good news is, you’re not a duck or a cat. The bad news is, viruses evolve. 

Viruses accumulate mutations - little mistakes - when they copy themselves. Over time, those mistakes can add up to something that helps a virus gain entry into a new host’s cells. 

According to Messer, historically, it’s taken between three and five mutations of a flu virus’s hemagglutinin to allow it to shift from one animal host (birds, cows) to another (humans).

“We know from COVID-19, that’s not a huge number of mutations,” Messer said. 

And there’s a second path, a shortcut that bird flu could take to gain the ability to get into people and transmit between us.

But Messer says the question of how sick the virus could make us if it evolves is a profound unknown.

The virus may only be typically mild because it has to struggle to enter every human airway cell it infects. If it evolves to get better at binding to human lung cells, that could be enough to make it a more virulent infection. 

Messer said that just because the virus is mild in humans right now, that “does not in any way ensure that it will remain mild.” 

There are crucial unanswered medical questions about human to human contagion right now. From what I understand scientists are able to speculate about mutations but they can only go so far in making predictions. Consider: "Mutation is part of being a virus. Viruses mutate to adapt to their surroundings and more effectively move from host to host. Mutations can cause viruses to better evade our immune systems, treatments and vaccines. A mutation can help the virus gain traits that better help it reproduce quickly or adhere better to the surface of human cells." Reference.

What will happen if the bird flu mutates to become easily transmittable from person to person and we have a pandemic?

The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed. Reference. 

With Trump as president and possibly, perhaps likely, RFK Jr. as the top health official, there is every reason to fear that the federal response to bird flu will be even more inept as the response to Covid was in Trump's first term.

Not only is RFK Jr. an anti-vaxxer but he advocates drinking raw milk. The science isn't in for sure whether drinking raw milk increases the risk of contracting bird flu, but there is a chance it does. Consider:

The health risks associated with unpasteurized milk are compounded with the advent of bird flu, which is increasingly spreading to non-avian farm animals. The HPAI H5N1 virus was first detected in American dairy cattle in March of this year, leading to increased monitoring by federal health agencies. 

The CDC still considers the risk posed by pasteurized milk to the general public to be very low. In a  statement of September 30 of this year, the FDA and USDA asserted that they "are confident that pasteurization is effective at inactivating H5N1 in raw milk as it is for the pathogens against which we began pasteurizing raw milk 100 years ago." The USDA began testing testing the nation’s milk supply for H5N1 on December 15 of this year.

Pasteurized milk remains safe to drink, but drinking raw milk significantly increases your risk of infection. "Since early December of this year, nearly 60 human cases [of avian flu] in the US had been confirmed, including several in children and teenagers," says Maddie Pasquariello, MS, RD. (Reference)

One of Trump's enemies, Gavin Newsom, was the first governor to take proactive action to minimize the risk to humans from bird flu (reference). Trump coined the nickname Governor Gavin 'NewSCUM' for him (reference). Merely hating him could lead Trump to dig in his heels to resist admitting bird flu is a risk and taking measures to mitigate the danger.

As more and more Democratic governors follow Newsom and initated action to slow down the spread of bird flu, including mandating vaccination for groups where it was possible to do so and strongly recommending it for others, this probably would lead to a red state vs blue state division. The red states are Trump's base so he'd pander to their governors. This would add impetus to his refusal to take federal action to slow down the spread of bird flu before it dangerously mutated. Thus it could become a pandemic. 

Even if the mutation was highly contagious and only made people very sick but was rarely fatal in otherwise healthy people, it would signficantly disrupt the economy and have a negative impact on people's lives.

Only Anthony Fauci's credibility saved the country from even more devasting loss of life and, despite Trump's stupid recommedations at press conferences, he saved Trump's reputation as well. Trump ended up claiming to have ended the pandemic. It's no wonder there is a move among hardcore MAGA to jail Fauci. He's the Covid hero. MAGA wants to discredit him. Trump says he personally is the Covid hero. It is another blatant example of gaslighting. We all saw the press conferences where Dr. Deborah Birx looked stunned when Trump asked her about injecting disinfectant. (See "Dr. Birx Wished She Was in 'Twilight Zone' When Trump Suggested Injecting Disinfectant to Treat COVID")

Regardless of the evidence to the contrary, Trump says he saved millions from dying (read article from PoliFact).

If Trump blunders in his response to a highly contagious mutation of bird flu, keep in mind he won't have objective experts to advise and save him. He will listen to people who are TV doctors or their equivalent who will tell him what he wants to hear. He will make decisions about a proactive federal response to bird flu is appropriate based on what he believes is politically expedient. 

In his own ignorance about science he will play to the scientific ignorance of his base the same way he did with Covid. Because the disease is a type of influenza it doesn't sound as dangerous as it is. The average person doesn't know that the Spanish Flu killed between 17 million and possibly as many as 100 million people worldwide. 

 This is what Trump said on Fox News:

Trump, March 24: I brought some numbers here. We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off, I mean every year. Now when I heard the number — you know, we average 37,000 people a year. Can you believe that? And actually this year we’re having a bad flu season. But we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies, say, “Stop making cars. We don’t want any cars anymore.” We have to get back to work.

Bob Woodward documented in his book "Rage" how Trump knew how deadly Covid would be but tried to minimize the threat (read article).

In the worst case lacking a robust federal response to bird flu millions could die, in a less serious case, the economy could crash.

This could turn out to be similar in some ways to what would happen if Trump was told by military experts saying that the drones really were an advance force for an invasion by the aliens who have been monitoring the failure of humans to achive peaceful coexistence so they could enter the galatic community and he ignored it, and then it happened. To get our attention they might have to vaporize a few major cities.

If I had to choose between the alien invasion and a pandemic which might wipe out half the human race I would chose the former. At least it might be possible to negotiate with the aliens. 

I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

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Sabrina Haake's "take" on Musk and his admitting he uses ketamine prompted me to write today's blog, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Under the influence of ketamine, by Sabrina Haake

I am an admirer of Sabrina Haake who publishes a SubStack with the eponymous and rhyming title of The Haake Take. Her columns are also published on RawStory, Salon, and elsewhere. She is an attorney specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense.  She  ran unsuccessfully in an Indiana Democratic primary for Congress in 2020.

In the first sentence of her article she refers to this NY Times article from a few days ago:

Her article begins:

Psychedelic drugs hit the news last week just as America’s unelected oligarch started blowing up the government, because, chaos.

She writes the following about Elon Musk:

Musk, whose life is not ending anytime soon, uses ketamine to reduce his “negative chemical states like depression,” and says he uses the drug once every other week “or something like that.”

She goes on further about Musk:

Elon Musk’s judgment is… impaired

Although a budget finally passed yesterday, Musk created deliberate and unnecessary chaos to get there. Musk posted 100+ feverish tweets with misleading or outright false claims to kill the first deal. Among other juvenile rants, he posted, “Just close down the govt until January 20th. Defund everything. We will be fine for 33 days.” He posted in a separate tweet that a federal government shutdown “doesn’t actually shut down critical functions.”

He’s a complete governance idiot, but all Trump the intellectual midget sees is shiny rocket. Trump assumes that since Musk works with technology, Musk is all wise; it's a dangerous assumption any teenage boy might make.

Ketamine, according to doctors who prescribe it, is wildly effective at suppressing fear of death, which is great for patients facing imminent death. But for people like Musk who aren’t facing death, I’m not so sure losing fear of death is a good thing. I’m not sure a giant national defense contractor should have an “alternative perspective” of what death means, because for the rest of us who aren’t on ketamine, death means we’re dead and it’s not a temporary condition.

As a therapist retired after over 40 years in practice, I was pleased when my state of Oregon legalized the use of psilocybin, which is similar to ketamine, for treatment of certain emotional disorders. This is the psychedelic chemical obtained in certain mushrooms. These mushrooms have been used by native tribes where they are called "sacred mushrooms" and used in certain ceremonies. In Oregon there is a protocol for treatment with psilocybin which always includes a trained facilitator. The following is from the State of Oregon Heath website:

Will someone be there to help me during the administration session?

Yes, a licensed facilitator will support you in your journey. The Oregon Psilocybin Services Act ensures that psilocybin services will be non-directive, which means that licensed facilitators will not direct you or psychoanalyze you while you are in an altered state. They will help calm you, make you comfortable, and be present with you through the entire session but will not interfere with your experience unless you need additional support. For example, facilitators are allowed to engage in appropriate touch, such as on the hand or shoulder, and perhaps a hug, but only if that is agreed up on before the administration session. If you have toileting, mobility, assistive device support or interpretation needs, a client-support person may be allowed to be present with you for an administration session, but they would have to be prepared for the administration session by a licensed facilitator to learn about informed consent, the Client Bill of Rights, and how not to interfere with a session while supporting a client with specific accessibility needs.

Musk is taking katamine on his own. This is no surprise given his egotism. However, it also shows to me that he doesn't want anyone privy to his innermost thoughts and feelings. 

As a therapist I can say that one runs a huge risk when they take a psychedelic drug like ketamine, LSD, or psilocybin on their own. 

Those, like myself, who were in college in the 1960s, knew people who did. I didn't use these substances myself but had friends who did. They sometimes told about their so-called "bad trips."  A few ended up in hospital psychiatric units sometimes being treated with major anti-psychotic drugs. When I was doing my clincial internship I saw someone in a psychiatric hosptial who I was barely acquainted with.  He hung out at the student grill and knew some people I knew. He was on Thorazine which was used in those days for such reactions. He had experienced a severe reaction on LSD and was like a zombie because of the medication. 

Musk has revealed his that he is neurodivergent and has Asperger’s syndrome. This is part of the autism spectrum disorder. WebMd tells us that There aren't any drugs approved by the FDA to specifically treat Asperger's or autism spectrum disorders. WebMD tells us that "some medications, though, can help with related symptoms like depression and anxiety." Another website (The Mood Center) says:

 "People with Asperger’s have benefited from ketamine treatments to help with various issues that may have been caused by the difficulty of living with autism. Additionally, there have been reports that ketamine therapy may also improve the primary symptoms of autism."

 

Note the word "treatments" which is used in the section on ketamine assisted psychotherapy. 

Musk isn't, as far as we know, engaged in any kind of psychotherapy. We don't know if he ever had been. I doubt Trump understands that Musk, while apparently not an alcoholic, is using a substance that effects his brain functioning as much as alcohol does, albeit in a very different way.

Addendum:

Here's an article about the differences between katamine and philocybin.

The founder of the Duty to Warn movement, Dr. John D. Gartner, in addition to being one of the top mental health professionals who have warned about the dangerous psychopathology of Donald Trump (since 2017), has taken an interest in psilocybin therapy calling it the enlightenment cure (read article).

Yesterday's blog was also about Elon Musk. 

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I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

The halbrown.org platform includes a Disquis comment section. To use it you have to register on Disquis. Go to bottom of blogs and click sign up with Disquis.

This is the fully featured comment feature used on RawStory.

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In "Who's the Boss" show White House sequel we ask who plays Tony and who plays Angela? Hint: neither are played by Vance. By Hal M. Brown

As I completed this blog this was on CNN:

I can't take the comparision between the competition for the designation of "boss" as in "who's the boss" between Trump and Musk beyond the title of the long running award winning (eight seasons) tv series starring Tony Danza and Judith Light as the the adults, Tony and Angela, and Alyissa Milano and Danny Pintauro as the children. 

I am just using the title since it was the ongoing theme of competition for dominance in a family-like situation in a tv series. (Tony and Angela aren't partners.)

The person who is supposed to be the boss in our current version of the Bizarro World of American politics is Donald Trump.  A larger version of the big bellied boss AI picture is above:

Technical note: In order to get the lettering on the shirt I used AI to make an image of Trump in a t-shirt and took the lettering from a publicity photo for "Who's the Boss."

The only person in the Trump-o-sphere close enough to him so he casts the shadow of his magnificence in their direction, who has a driving ambition is Elon Musk. He seems to be physically the closest to Trump in most photos. 

The only other person in the race to be the boss, is J.D. Vance. He does this in a very different way than Musk. In the recent government funding battle he's been making the news frequently. One risks serious injuries trying to get between Vance and a camera.

There is no doubt in my mind that Vance wants to be president and he is only biding his time hoping Trump meets him maker in the great beyond (wherever that might be) sooner rather than later. He knows that once Trump is in office his role will be greatly diminished and what he says and does will be about as newsworthy as the publicity seeking antics of George Santos or Matt Gaetz.

He knows that Musk and Trump have developed a bro-bond that he can never come close to having with him. From all I've been able to discern Trump actually enjoys being with Musk. My hunch is that Vance is plotting ways to break that bond and hoping he can fill the vacuum left behind.

Unfortunately for Vance if Trump dumps Musk because he decides theres no room in the room for two attention craving kings he may decide never to let anyone with any semblence of charisma get close to him. 

Vance wasn't in either of these photos (Melania wasn't in the family photo so I added her on the left and added Vance on the right in the airplane photo, click images to enlarge):

The best Vance he could do to show how close he was to Trump was posting a poorly photoshopped image for Thanksgiving.

I am not sure what Musk's end game is. He knows his glory days will last only as long as Trump is president. He knows, just like Vance does, that Trump could bite the big one (not a Big Mac or it could happen while biting a Big Mac) and shuffle off the mortal coil to the Mar-a-Lago in the sky (or in the other place).

Trump mocks those men he considers beta males. His former BFF Howard Stern is an example. He is attracted to so-called alpha males, men who he believes rule the phallocentric manophere, men who he considers almost, but not quite, as hypermasculine as himself. 

The risk Musk is taking on his quest to become ruler of the country if not of the world, besides that of Trump taking a one way trip to the Pearly Gates, is that Trump feels overshadowed by him. 

If that happens I predict Trump will dump him like he's a hot baboon.

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I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)