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 senence 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 aboiut 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 was in college in the 1960s, but didn't take these drugs myself, knew people who did who sometimes told of what were called "bad trips." Some ended up in hospital psychiatric units sometimes being treated with major anti-psychotic drugs. 

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 "treatment" 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.

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.

..........................................

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.

..........................................

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)

Trump is suing an Iowa paper and a polling company, what's next if polls show his approval ratings tanking? Will he sue the polls? By Hal M. Brown

 

This is from the Raw Story article above:

President-elect Donald Trump managed to cobble together a popular vote-winning coalition and he did so by making notable but modest gains with certain minority groups. 

But the problem for him, wrote Ronald Brownstein for CNN, is that he won the election with a group of voters who broadly don't like him, and may not even agree with some of his core policies like mass deportations. They simply took a chance on him over economic discontent, he wrote — and it won't take much for that to come crumbling down.

The portion that caught my attention is highlighted below:

"If Trump provides his most controversial nominees – such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Kash Patel as director of the FBI – a 'blank check' to pursue polarizing agendas, [GOP pollster White] Ayres said, 'we are going to be looking at Joe Biden level-job approval numbers before we turn around' for Trump," Brownstein wrote.

 

If you follow the news (above, discussion about it is on MSNBC as I write this) you know about Trump suing the Des Moines Register and a polling company (here's a CNN article):

I wrote this last week:

Here are excerpts:

There's a part of me that I don't really know what to make of when it comes to wishing the absolute worst for the country during the next four years so people who voted for Trump suffer.  In order for this to happen lots of good people will also suffer. In fact it is the good people will initially suffer more than the typical Trump voter. I don't want to see people suffer, not just know they are suffering, but literally see them suffering on television. But for the country to turn around this has to happen.

I offer for your consideration my Trump Tesla analogy.

I know that the people who thought Trump would usher in a a world of bluebirds and happiness for them personally are going to at some time be poleaxed with the realization that they bought the lemon of all lemon cars from a slick psychopathic salesman. The Trump car, let's say for obvious reasons that it is a Tesla, looked great in the showroom. Maybe they took it on a test drive and were impressed with the head snapping acceleration (one model will do 0-60 in less than two seconds and has a top speed of 200) and all electonic gewgaws. 

Perhaps in time these buyers will eventually discover the transmission had a nasty habit of freezing up. They might discover the hard way that there were faulty airbags, that the navigation system didn't know north from south, that the air conditioning is faulty, and there's a glitch in the automatic locking system that may engage trapping them inside. Back to the consequences of this at the end of the blog.

I concluded:

The pragmatic part of me knows that for the country to change and for compassionate democracy and a moral society to be embraced by enough voters to swing the next two elections to Democrats things have to go very very badly for those who voted for Trump. The Trump promised shiny new Trump Tesla has to be exposed as a junker. Things not only have to go so badly that the Democrats take control of Congress in two years and the presidency in four, but enough of the conservatives on the Supreme Court also must realize what evil they have enabled and the court has to take steps to put America back on course.

If enough voters realize they bought a slick looking junker named Trump they could vote Democratic in the next election and not only wrest control of Congress from Republicans but win in statewide elections. 

Trump wants to control the media. His rich friends are helping him. It wasn't just Jeff Bezos refusing to let The Washington Post publish an editorial endorsement for Harris prior to the election. For example, today we have the story of the Trump-supporting owner of the Los Angeles Times turning the paper into more of an outlet for Trump propaganda. Here's a report from another Trump propaganda paper, the New York Post, about this:

LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong tells editorial board to ‘take a break from writing about Trump’

If people who voted for Trump because they were gullible and believed his lies, how will they learn that they are among many who are angry about this? Perhaps it will take talking to friends about increasing grocery prices or other effects they can see in their everyday lives. But if Trump has his druthers they won't find out about his growing unpopularity from the approval numbers provided by polling companies very possibly because every time they show his popularity dropping he will sue the companies. This will instill doubt in the veracity of the numbers. Obviously this would be Trump's intention.

He will use his usual technique of claiming the opposite of any inconvenient truth and saying his numbers are soaring and he is the most popular president in history. After all, he's managed to spread the word far and wide that he won a mandate in the election and thus is empowered to do anything he wants to do.

Consider: 

The first U.S. presidential poll to use modern statistical methods was a Gallup poll in 1936. But the first known presidential straw polls date to 1824—over a century before. 

These early straw polls were regional and informal. Newspapers reported the results as information about local opinions rather than possible predictions about how the national election might play out. Local straw polls continued throughout the 19th century. Then in 1916, The Literary Digest launched a national presidential poll. The magazine’s methods were flawed, but for five consecutive presidential races, the winner of The Literary Digest poll was also the winner of the actual election. 

This streak ended in 1936, when George Gallup predicted Franklin D. Roosevelt would win reelection and The Literary Digest said he wouldn’t. Gallup’s poll was a victory for statistical survey methods, and paved the way for modern presidential polling. From History.com

What would happen if Trump sued or threatened to sue every polling company and any media who published the results of the polls if they showed he was becoming unpopular. What if there were no more public opinion polls? The public would have no way of knowing about the national sentiment about what he was doing aside from talking to their friends unless there were street protests covered by the media. But then what if Trump sued companies that covered the protests? 

Going even further, perhaps coming from my own Trump hopefully not a derangement syndrome which I believe is based on a knowledge of history and my own rational fears, what if Trump declared a national emergency, outlawed protests, and called in the military to break protests up?

Going even further into Trump exercising dictatorial control and going full-on despot, what if an incident like the Kent State massacre happened and the regular media and social media couldn't publish photos like these?

The worst of the worst may not happen. It is possible that Trump's consuming need for revenge will lessen in time and his deep desire to be seen as both the most deeply loved and most horribly feared person in history will be satisfied.

I hope, if I live to see the day all of this plays out, and that I am not writing blogs saying "you were warned" but rather issuing a mea culpa.

Consider yesterday's blog with two Venn diagrams illustrating why I have such fear about what Trump may do to our democracy.

Click above to enlarge image. Click here to read blog.

Related:

ABC News capitulates to Donald Trump. Is this the future of American media? Salon

Excerpt (my highlight):

If past is prologue, people who want unadulterated news about the coming Trump administration will probably have to listen to podcasts and watch independent political coverage on YouTube and read independent blogs on the internet.

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)