The politics of booze, by Hal M. Brown

 

If wine consumption is reduced significantly it will hurt wine grape growers in my home state of Oregon, across the country, and in the rest of the world. I don't know what crops, if any, would replace the grapes growing in our beautiful wine country. The picture is from one of our many road trips to this part of the state.

Rawstory has an article (above) about lawmakers calling the new surgeon general report about even light alcohol consumption being a cancer risk being an example of the "nanny state." 

The report  is on the NIH National Cancer Institute website so RFK Jr's opinion on this is important. The report could be taken offline when Trump takes over. It is important to consider that Trump not only doesn't drink, but he has negative feelings about drinking. This is because of his alcoholic older brother, Freddy, who died at 43. It has been reported (see article in VICE) that he never had a sip of alcohol. 

Whether this would influence the infamously transactional Trump to try to suppress the report or not remains to be seen. The alcohol lobby in Washington is huge and many MAGAs rage against government interference in their lives. It is not only "the deep state" that is evil in their eyes, but "the nanny state." This has not been part of the current poltical zeitgeist but with alcohol it could be.

On the health side, the crucial parts of the report for light to moderate drinkers are those explaining the cancers that this may cause. Even light drinking increases the risk for esophageal cancer. The more a person drinks the greater the risk for head, neck, liver, breast, and colorectal cancer. Just as people could understand how inhaling smoke into their lungs could lead to the deadly lung cancer, it is common sense to understand how drinking can cause cancer in the organs that involve digestion.

The major medical news here is that for years moderate drinking was considered acceptable healthwise, and for red wine, even beneficial. 

People must have accurate up to date medical information of risks. A signficant number of people stopping or cutting down on alcohol consumption would be a hardship for grape growers, manufacturers, and retailers. The economy wouldn't crash but it would certainly be affected.

It is instructive to look at what happened when the surgeon general announced the danger of smoking and thereafter.

This was published today in the On This Day In History page in The Smithsonian Magazine.

Excerpt:

Sixty years ago, about 70 million Americans smoked tobacco. An estimated 42 percent of adults identified themselves as smokers in 1965, and advertisements for cigarettes were impossible to avoid. Tobacco products were stylish and healthy, manufacturers insisted, with Camel claiming its cigarettes “don’t get your wind” and Old Gold saying its were “fresh as mountain air.”

So it came as a shock to the American public when, on January 11, 1964, their surgeon general appeared on television saying that smoking tobacco leads to disease and death.

Here's a photo from that article:

I have no idea if the surgeon general realized the coincidence of his releasing the report on this day.

For the alcohol habits of Americans to change and thus effect the economy it would take a huge cultural shift. This was written in 2014:

50 Years Later: A Closer Look at the Impacts of First Surgeon General's Report on Smoking

Excerpt:

"The surgeon general's report in 1964 was groundbreaking and led to an important cultural shift against smoking," said ACC President John Gordon Harold, MD, MACC. "Those important findings have been followed up by countless studies on the effects of smoking, which we now know are even worse than we thought. Physicians often discuss 'moderation' when helping patients change and maintain their health habits, but that is not the case with smoking. No amount of smoking is good and several studies have shown that even a small amount tobacco is very harmful. As a society we need to eliminate smoking from our culture. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in both men and women, and if almost half of those cases are from tobacco, then that is a serious problem."

(Personal Note: I feel lucky that my partner and I never developed even a taste for, let alone a need for, alcoholic beverages and we don''t drink. I'll have a small glass of champagne at a party to make a toast, but that's it.)

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For MAGA oligarchs it's all about rubbing our noses in their billionaire power privilege, by Hal M. Brown

 

I'm not going to write about how Trump again proved he's above the law by getting barely a slap on the wrist in his sentencing this morning. Instead, I will focus on another wrist. This is the wrist of Mark Zuckerberg who, of course, is in the news having announced that he is ceasing to have fact checking on Facebook and Instagram.

Rather than that, I am going to write about this:

Zuckerberg wears $900,000 watch to announce end of Meta fact checks 

Here's more.

If Zuckerberg thought nobody would notice that he was wearing one of the most expensives watches anyone can buy, he's unbelievably naive about the way people scrutinize the internet. I think he absolutely knew what he was doing.

What we see with Trump and his billionare cronies is worse than an unabashed display of their wealth. There's a malevolence in what they do.

Ho-hum, we expect this of some of the super-wealthy. A goodly number of them were happy to show the public how rich they were in shows like Life Styles of the Rich And Famous. It ran for 11 years. They have pictorial articles about them in glossy magazines. The proletariat eats this crap up.

What the billionaire MAGA oligarchs are doing is rubbing the noses of their adversaries in their privilege. They enjoy knowing they can get away with just about anything. 

There's no "just about" with Trump. He thinks he can get away with absolutely anything. I doubt that the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk think that they could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and suffer no consequenses. They probably think the can do everything else, but probably not commit a cold blooded murder in plain sight. 

The only one of these billionaires who seemed to have gone a bit too far was Jeff Bezos. He got a lot of negative press when he nixed letting The Washington Post make an endorsement prior to the election. It is a telling observation about the times we live in that he got as much blowback later when he spiked the Ann Telnais editorial cartoon. Of course that cartoon expresses what I am writing about, i.e., that money can buy just about anything. Still, Bezos is not running for anything and he can easily afford to loose some Washington Post subscribers.

The Zuckerberg watch wearing story may seem like a small thing. However, since men, unless they're rappers, generally don't wear jewelry and thus can display their wealth by wearing an expensive necklace. Watches are the most visible way men can demonstrate their wealth by how they look.  

Women, oh say let's pick Melania Trump at random, have their own way of showing off privilege. See:

A look inside Melania Trump’s extravagant jewelry collection – From beloved husband Donald Trump’s $3 million wedding band to her Van Cleef & Arpels diamond earrings she wore for the 2017 White House inauguration

Perhaps Musk, who doesn't collect and wear expensive watches (as far as I know), is a tad bit more secure than Zuckerberg. Who the hell knows? Both seem to have been nerdy kids who may not have been popular. I'll put it simply saying that they may be playing their own script of "The Revenge of the Nerds." Since I am here today to bury these guys, not to psychoanalyze them, I'll refer you to the following which describes them as feeling like nerds when they were growing up:

History of Mark Zuckerberg: the nerd who created Facebook and changed the world

Elon Musk biography portrays a brutal character driven by lofty dreams

These two proved to the world that their brains were more valuable in the long run than being a prom king. What both of them have in common with Trump that they like to rub our noses in their privilege. 

Update:

'So rich and yet so weak': Vitriol unleashed as Mark Zuckerberg lauds Trump to Joe Rogan

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Forget the narcissism in malignant narcissism, Trump is just pure malignant, by Hal M. Brown

 

'Malignancy': Historian says 'everything just feels worse all the time' with Trump

 is the article in RawStory that prompted me to write, for the umpteenth time, about Trump being a malignant narcissist. I also posted a comment along with an AI picture of Trump looking at himself in a mirror.

Wikipedia gets everything right about malignant narcissism except the photo.

Narcissis wasn't the embodiment of evil even though narcissism was named for him. The entry is about malignant narcissism. A photo of Trump, who is a preening grandiose narcissist, should replace the painting of him. If you haven't googled Trump malignant narcissism you can click here.

There are two defintions of malignant. Many of us, myself included, are familiar with the feelings that come when you first hear a doctor utter that word about yourself or, in my case, a loved one. The other definition doesn't relate to death per se. The word is malevolent. The meaning is simple: having or showing a wish to do evil to others.

Trump fits the defintion of malignant narcissist. He could just as accurately be called a malevolent narcissist. I think it is a more fitting term since there's only one meaning of malevolent.

Trump would be evil even if he didn't have a grain of narcissism in his personality. His narcissism makes him more evil. This is because he exercises his evil impulses not merely because he gets a visceral satisfaction out of doing this, but because of his unrelenting need for attention and self-aggrandizement.

Erich Fromm, and a bit later Otto Kernberg, both greats in psychology, put psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder together to describe a syndrome where someone experiences sadistic satisfaction in inflicting or having pain inflicted on others and is an extreme narcissist. 

This defines Trump and many of the people he has selected to work in his adminstration to turn the country into what shows all signs of becoming a ruthless dictatorship. 

Case in point:

'Shock and awe': What Trump 'border czar' Tom Homan has said he plans to do starting on Day 1

Last week, while appearing on Donald Trump Jr.'s podcast, the president-elect's son asked incoming "border czar" Tom Homan what border and immigration-related action the public can expect to see on Day 1 of the new Trump administration.

"Shock and awe," Homan responded. "Shock and awe," he repeated with a smile.

I think is is important to understand the meaning of the term "shock and awe."

Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy's perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight. Though the concept has a variety of historical precedents, the doctrine was explained by Harlan K. Ullmanand James P. Wade in 1996 and was developed specifically for application by the US military by the National Defense University of the United States. Wikipedia.

Note what I highlighted in the illustration in the Wikipedia article (click to enlarge). 

All it will take will be for one overzealous Trump stormtrooper to decide to open fire on someone, or a group of people, for us to have a Kent State type massacre. It's also possible that someone about to be deported will use violence to resist and give the Trump stormtroops an excuse to respond with deadly force.

Is the country ready for pictures like this?

Unlike the photos from Kent State (above) they won't be still pictures. They will be live videos in full color because Trump, Homan, Stephen Miller, and others want as many people as possible to see their glorious shock and awe.

Is the country ready to see this? My fear is that half the country not only is ready, but they want it to happen because, for them, (as Adam Sewer titled his book) the cruelty is the point.

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Whether it's demented or not, we're all now at the mercy of Trump's big brain, by Hal M. Brown.

 

How the holy Hell does Hezbo-f*cken-llah being involved in Jan. 6th pop into Trump's brain when he's downplaying what happened on Jan. 6th? 

Here's is the excerpt about this from HuffPost:

Trump took questions from reporters near the end of the roughly hour-long remarks, during which he pledged to make “major pardons” for people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Asked if he intends to pardon anyone convicted of violent offenses for their actions that day, Trump dodged — instead appearing to blame both the FBI and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, for the violence.

“We have to find out about Hezbollah, we have to find out about who, exactly, was in that whole thing,” Trump said. “Because people that did some bad things were not prosecuted.”

Hezbollah? Really? These guys?

Trump likes to brag about how intelligent he is. He characterizes this by saying he has a very, very big brain. Consider this from a science website:

Trump's "Very, Very Large Brain" Comment Underscores Myth About Intelligence

Intelligence has a lot more to do with what's inside your brain than its size.

BY SARAH SLOAT

SEP. 27, 2018

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly dedicated moments of his presidency to informing the public about his intelligence. A few weeks before he took office, Trump announced he didn’t need daily intelligence briefings because “I’m, like, a smart person.” In January, he reminded everyone on Twitter that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.” Now, he’s telling reporters about his “very, very large brain.” But contrary to longstanding claims, a bigger brain doesn’t mean a smarter man.

Speaking at a press conference in New York on Wednesday, Trump referenced an interview that Michael Pillsbury, the Hudson Institutes director for Chinese strategy, gave to Fox News last month. Pillsbury said that China respects Trump because he is “so smart.”

“If you look at Mr. Pillsburgy, the leading authority on China, he was on a good show — I won’t mention the name of the show — recently,” Trump said. “And he was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain.”

The article explains that the size of a brain has nothing to do with intelligence: "Assuming that absolute brain size is decisive for intelligence, then whales or elephants should be more intelligent than humans, and horses more intelligent than chimpanzees, which definitely is not the case.” 

Perhaps Trump really believes his brain is literally larger than 99.9% of the world's population and that this means his IQ ranks in the upper 1/10 of one percent. Of course this would put him off the top of the IQ test scales at the Einstein level.  

If brain size determined intelligence, Trump would be less intelligent than he was as a young man because brains shrink as people age:

"Your cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain, gets thinner as you age. It's especially noticeable in the frontal lobe, which processes memory, emotions, impulse control, problem-solving, social interaction, and motor function. Thinning can also be noticeable in parts of the temporal lobe, which is located behind the ears and helps people understand words, speak, read, write, and connect words with their meanings." WebMD

The brain shrinking, or atrophy, that is inevitable when one ages does not affect intelligence. What does happen with some people when they age is that they develop one or another form of dementia. 

Human brains weigh between 2.8 to 3.1 pounds. Brain size can vary slightly among different populations and individuals. Gender also plays a role in brain size variations. On average, male brains are about 10% larger than female brains. However, this difference disappears when accounting for body size, and importantly, there’s no evidence that this size difference translates to any cognitive advantages. (Reference: Human Brain Size: Exploring Dimensions, Comparisons, and Evolutionary Significance)

There's no way of knowing if Trump has dementia at this point. There's no actual diagnostic test for it like an MRI which can find a brain tumor that is affecting behavior. A dementia diagnosis can only be made with a full neurological assessment. Whether you're an expert or a lay person you can only reach a conclusion based on your observations of Trump's behavior.

Without this we are left with looking at Trump's behavior to try to discern whether these recent examples of his throwing out abberant ideas are a manifestion of brain disease or of Trump's psychological condition. It may very well be the latter. Trump may be feeling that, since he has won the election, he can totally let loose and express any thought no matter how weird or unrealistic that pops into his mind. 

A personal note: When group of residents in the senior community where I live started an improv group, I didn't even consider joining even though I thought it would be fun. I think I have a modicum of talent for this. I knew I couldn't do improv without being able to go blue and unleash my inner Lenny Bruce.

Where did Hezbollah come from when he was trying to gaslight about Jan. 6th? You can say it doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't. It could be that he'd been seeing stories about it on the news or reading about it since. It has been in the news:

We are still left with not knowing what is really going on in Trump's big brain. It could be that he's showing more signs of dementia. It could be that we're seeing the true Trump unleashed in all his unhinged glory.

If this is dementia one thing is certain: it will get worse. If this occurs there will be a point where it will be impossible to hide given Trump's lust to be in the limelight and his being a motor mouth. He won't have the advantage of being given questions in advance like he was 30 minutes before his Fox News Iowa Town Hall (see article). Besides, even being given a heads up about questions wouldn't make a difference since the results of an election won't be in the balance. He won't feel he has to come across as presidential.

There is no way anyone with severe dementia can present as cognitively unimpaired. If this happens we have the 25th Amendment scenario. I have no doubt that once it is obvious to the public, Vance would lose his loyalty to Trump in a New York minute.

 

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Do you know what the Streisand effect is? It has nothing to do with singing but is relevant to efforts to hide the truth. By Hal M. Brown

 

Click here to enlarge the original image of Barbra Streisand's cliff-top residence in Malibu which she attempted to suppress in 2003 to full size. 

I didn't know what The Streisand effect was until I read this on BlueSky:

Click above to enlarge.

Here's an explanation of what the Streisand effect is:

The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information. 

The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand, whose attorney attempted in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, taken to document coastal erosion in California, inadvertently drawing far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph. The effect exemplifies psychological reactance, in which the attempt to hide information instead makes it more interesting to seek out and propagate.

Attempts to suppress information are often made through cease-and-desist letters, but instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes receives extensive publicity, as well as the creation of media such as videos and spoof songs, which can be mirrored on the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks. In addition, seeking or obtaining an injunction to prohibit something from being published or to remove something that is already published can lead to increased publicity of the published work.

The Streisand effect is an example of psychological reactance, wherein once people are aware that some information is being kept from them, they are significantly more motivated to acquire and spread it.

Read numerous examples and the back story with Streisand on Wikipedia here.

In the past few days we have Trump making a last ditch effort to stop the release of Jack Smith's report. Trump’s lawyers said they reviewed a two-volume draft copy over the weekend. The question anyone following this should be asking is what is in the report that they don't want the public to know about.  There are no doubt many people who thought that the entire Jack Smith matter was done and dusted. Now Trump's efforts may pique their interest whether or not it is ever released.

Trump, through his lawyers, also tried unsuccesfully to stop the sentencing in the E. Jean Carroll trial.  This can have the same effect.

As long as we have the semblence of a free press everything Trump is going to do to try to censor the news will make the news. This doesn't only apply to Trump. It was reported today that Mark Zuckerberg is going to stop independent fact checking on Facebook and Instagram.This has already led to an accusation that he on of the oligarchs showing fealty to Trump. 

Last week Jeff Bezos wouldn't allow an Ann Telnais editorial cartoon showing him and other billionaires bring money to Trump. This led to a huge media and public reaction against a media mogul .

The danger with Trump is that he could succesfully hide information so nobody ever finds out that he's hiding it. This can only be done in a complete dictatorship where the press is totally controlled. The Streisand effect only works when the attempt to suppress information is done in secret. Fortunately you can't do this by filing lawsuits. It can be done in the intelligence community. The planning for the raid to kill bin Laden is an example.  Many military and national security operations illustrate this. The Manhattan Project and D-Day are other examples.

Trump will obviously try to make his administration leak-proof. He will always want to control the flow of information. If the past is prologue, Trump's administration will leak like a sieve.  If he tries to use the legal system to manipulate public opinion there is a good chance the effort will backfire.  

The more noise Trump makes about something being fake news the more likely it is to be fact-checked regardless, and often because of, efforts to stop fact-checking.  

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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.

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