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.

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)

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)

Bending at the knee before Trump with a pile of Benjamins: A new to me Ben Franklin quote deserves to be shared. By Hal M. Brown

 

The irony of all this, depicted above with a generic AI created billionaire bending at the knees (you have to imagine he's before Trump), is that Ben Franklin ended up with his face on the $100 bill. I wonder how he'd feel today about the role money plays in politics?

He might remind us of the following:"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

I read the quote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" in a comment to Eugene Robinson's Washington Post column "The risks of declaring fealty to Donald Trump: Don’t count on the president-elect to reward knee-bending with gratitude" (subscription).

Robinson begins:

Titans of industry and commerce, beware. When you bend the knee to the Mad King, when you shower him with money and bathe him in flattery, he will receive your gifts with apparent gratitude. But he will want more. He will always want more.

He concludes:

But if history is any guide, reasonable people who try to work with Trump eventually reach a point where they feel they have to part ways with him. And when those reasonable people tell the world why, Trump lashes out at them. He tries to hurt them. He does not forgive — unless the “traitor” offers a humiliating public display of submission, as did Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and so many other Republican politicians. But even then, Trump never, ever forgets.

Meanwhile, half of the country — the half that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, and that believes Trump has forfeited the right to ever be seen as a “normal” president — sees the traffic jam of limousines in the Mar-a-Lago driveway as, most charitably, an obvious mistake.

What’s the definition of hubris? Telling oneself, “I’m going to be the one who finally talks some sense into Donald Trump. Surely, he’ll listen to me.”

I saw the Franklin quote, which was new to me, in the comments (click below to enlarge). You can read my reply to Kevin Slick on the bottom.

This is Kevin Slick's BlueSky page. He confirmed that the comment was his.

He has a substack page which includes his music (here).

As I promised I posted the quote on BlueSky with the illustration I used for this blog:

It turns out that this quote has been the subject of scholarship, for example in the website "A Quote in Context" I found a 2020 article by Leya Delray on the subject (here) which goes into depth about the meaning. 

This is the paragraph in Franklin's writing which includes the quote which I highlighted:

“…we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety…”

I also found an interview on NPR's All Things Considered with Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor of Lawfare (here), which includes the following about what Franklin was referring to in the quote:

He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.

Here's an article about how liberals (supposedly) misuse the quote: How The World Butchered Benjamin Franklin’s Quote On Liberty Vs. Security.

That article begins:

One of America’s favorite liberal phrases has been sent through the political spin machine and polished into a Frankenstein of sorts, thus rendering it inaccurate and far from its original intention. You might have heard that American founding father Benjamin Franklin said something like “Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither.”

The quote has been the siren song of anti-war protesters and, most recently, the banner for mass online protests against the NSA’s surveillance program.

 

However, it goes on to explain:

The letter wasn’t about liberty but about taxes and the ability to “raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him.”

 

Indeed, if you look at the text surrounding the famous quote, it’s pretty clearly about money: “Our assemblies have of late had so many supply bill, and of such different kinds, rejected, on various pretences,” wrote Franklin.

 

There’s not much on liberty, as we understand the concept, in the entire letter.

You can see how the quote is quite relevant to the situation today where a billionaire bunch is bending at the knee before, as Robinson describes Trump, a  mad King, with bags of cash to curry his favor. In this sense the quote applies to these drenched in dollars corporate king kissers. It is about their liberty and their safety to make as much money as possible. 

Addendum:

I've admired Ben Franklin since I was a child and read the 1939 book "Ben and Me" which is a story told from the perspective of a mouse, Amos, who lived in his house and became his good friend and advisor.

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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)

Trump's soulless cruelty is the point and, appallingly, many Americans get off on it, by Hal M. Brown

 

D. Earl Stephens gets it right in his RawStory essay "Americans get off on hurt, cruelty and revenge — and soulless Trump is their hero." 

I read two articles is RawStory prior to deciding to write this. Before reading the essay by D. Earl Stephens (above) I read this:

Highlighted below is what struck me as revelatory:

"In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend," Trump mused to reporters at his luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday.

"I don't know, my personality changed or something."

What this sugests to me is that Trump is very much aware that his personality has been so noxious to many people that they just don't want to be physically near him. As I read these words I sense that he takes delight in this. 

This man is by any objective measure a malignant narcissist and someone who has all of the traits of a person described as being a manifestion of The Dark Triad. 

Here's a Wikipedia definition:

All three dark triad traits are conceptually distinct although empirical evidence shows them to be overlapping. They are associated with a callous–manipulative interpersonal style.

• Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy.
• Machiavellianism is characterized by manipulativeness, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest.
• Psychopathy is characterized by continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits, and remorselessness. It is considered the most malevolent of the dark triad.

Not all of Trump's supporters fit neatly into the Dark Triad. In fact, the majority of them probably have some traits to an extent but not all three. They don't necessarily dominate their personalty and significantly influence their behavior. I view them as the type of people who enjoy watching people suffer at the hands of their heroes whether in political news or on TV shows and in movies.

What I find of grave concern is that, as Stephens put it, these people "get off on it." They react vicariously experiencing pleasure when they observe Trump use his Dark Triad "buff boxer muscles" to punch others in the face and even more so when he aims his blows below the belt. As unbelievable as it is to those of us living in the rational world they see Trump like I used AI to depict him in the images left and bottom left, not as he'd really look in the upper left, below:

When Trump is up, as he often is, at 2:00 posting vicious messages aimed at his enemies he knows that the audience that will be turned on by them. To use some words in Stephen's essay he does this both to hurt his enemies and to entertain his cult of warped, ghoulish, knuckle-draggers.

Related:

We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history (also in RawStory) 

Yesterday's blog:

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)