Losing freedoms one seagull at a time

 

I can’t describe the profound symbolism of birds any better than the following introduction to this webpage with three famous poems1 about birds and freedom:

Birds have long been a symbol of freedom and liberation, their ability to soar through the sky representing our deep-rooted desire to break free from earthly constraints. Throughout the ages, poets from every corner of the world have been captivated by these feathered creatures and have penned verses that celebrate their grace, resilience, and unrestrained spirit. In this article, we will explore a handful of poems about birds and freedom, each offering a unique perspective on the profound connection between flight and the human yearning for liberation.

We’re used to our freedoms. We’re used to the various aspect of our democracy. We can say that we cherish democracy but generally we don’t think about how fortunate we, as Americans, are to have the freedoms, rights, and privileges we have every moment of every day. 

Here’s how this relates to the photo on the top of the page.

I took this photo a few years ago on the Oregon coast. It is of the much photographed Haystacks Rock at Cannon Beach (do an image search to see here). 

By luck I captured a moment in time that told a story. As you can see in a closer look it shows a family, especially the four little girls, expressing delight as they feed and watch the seagulls.

Let’s say that each seagull represents an American freedom. I count about 27 birds in the photo. By chance there are 27 Amendments in the Constitution. The first ten constitute the Bill of Rights.

Take one seagull on the ground from the far right away, and nobody in the group will notice. Take a few away, the same. Even if they all disappear, it may not register with them. 

Move to the next closer group and they may realize they aren’t surrounded by a flock of seagulls but it may not bother them. But then if more and more of the birds they are paying attention to and interacting with vanish, they notice. There will be a point before there’s only one or two seagulls left when they realize that something really drastic has happened.

They they will be standing on famous scenic beach by themselves. They will hear the waves and smell the salt air and they will have each other, but something precious will be missing. It wouldn’t be that the seagulls, the freedoms, decided to fly away. It will be that they were taken away.

It won’t be the end of the world for them. The vacation, and life, will go on. However, something beyond price will have been stolen from them one bird, one freedom, one right, at a time.

Addendum:

I propose that the answer to the question “If you could have one and only one superpower which one would you chose" tells a great deal about you. If you choose a power that makes you strong it suggests that is a need. Perhaps you need to fight for freedom like Superman and other superheros. On the other hand, you may want this power so you can dominate others. If you say you’d like to be able to fly I think you are more my kind of person.

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1

The three poems are “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, “The Eagle” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson.

If Comey is found guilty of the two charges it doesn't mean "Russia, Russia, Russia" was a hoax. In fact, it may show that it was real. What a trial may eventually prove to more people is that Russia, Russia, Russia was real.

I really don’t have much more to say than what is in my title except to add that Comey is being charged with lying to Congress about a leak, but not Russia interferring in American elections to help Donald Trump.

I’d like to see the chyrons and headlines reads like the following:

I keep reading and hearing that Pam Bondi had doubts about bringing this case forward. This makes me wonder about whether she realized this as much as she knew that they had a weak case on the charges themselves. 

What I can tell so far is that the government’s case hinges on what Andrew McCabe claims about being authorized to leak information to The Wall Street Journal. If this is true than it seems to me as as non-lawyer that it boils down to a he-said and he-said case. Who ya gonna believe. Maybe McCabe misheard what Comey said. On the other hand, it’s also possible Comey misheard what McCabe said.

This seems to add up to

What this trial won’t decide is whether there’s reasonable doubt about whether or not Russia tried to sway the election in Trump’s favor by using social media and other methods. That has already been decided. Just ask Wikipedia if they did.

Yes, Russia has interfered in multiple U.S. elections, including the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, primarily through disinformation campaigns and propaganda aimed at influencing voter perceptions and outcomes. These efforts have been aimed at damaging Democratic candidates and supporting those aligned with Russian interests.

Not only has Wikipedia (and others) come to this conclusion. Wiki has also shown that the public also does not believe “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax:

Public opinion on whether Russia interfered in U.S. elections varies, but numerous polls indicate that a significant portion of Americans, often around 60-70%, believe that Russia did interfere, particularly in the 2016 election. This belief is supported by findings from U.S. intelligence agencies and various investigations.

I think Trump believes that by discrediting Comey he can delude the public, and perhaps himself, that Russia had nothing to do with him winning the 2024 election. 

We will see if I’m corrrect about this when we hear him ranting (and posting) about how if Comey is convicted, or knowing Trump, just because he was indicted, that this proves Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax.

Information about Russian election interference will be part of the trial and perhaps new information will come out. What a trial may eventually prove to more people is that Russia, Russia, Russia was real.

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The many frequencies of violence, By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 Whether it is the man who shot Charlie Kirk or the person who shot the people at the Dallas ICE facility we do not know with certainty their exact motives. In instances like this partisans and others often jump to conclusions and sometimes attribute motives to advance their own political narratives. What should be incontrovertible is that in these cases and most others we don’t know precisely what was in the minds of those who decided to act on violent thoughts and impulses.

This is from Wikipedia (~here):

On October 4, 1986, while walking along Park Avenue to his New York apartment, Rather (those who don’t know who Dan Rather was click here) was attacked and punched from behind by a man who demanded to know “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” while a second assailant chased and beat him. As the assailant pummeled and kicked Rather, he kept repeating the question. In describing the incident, Rather said “I got mugged. Who understands these things? I didn’t and I don’t now. I didn’t make a lot of it at the time and I don’t now. I wish I knew who did it and why, but I have no idea.” Until the crime was solved years later, Rather’s description of the bizarre crime led some to doubt the veracity of his account, although the doorman and building supervisor who came to Rather’s aid fully confirmed his version of events

The answer came 10 years later:

In 1997, a TV critic writing in the New York Daily News solved the mystery, publishing a photo of the alleged assailant, William Tager, who received a 12.5-to-25-year prison sentence for killing NBC stagehand Campbell Montgomery outside The Today Show studio in 1994. Rather confirmed the story: “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the person.” New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said “William Tager’s identity as the man who attacked Mr. Rather was established in the course of an investigation by my office.”Tager claimed he thought television networks were beaming signals into his brain. When he murdered the stagehand, Tager was trying to force his way into an NBC studio with a weapon, to find out the frequency the networks were using to attack him, so that he could block it. Tager was paroled in October 2010.

My point in recounting this incident is that while we don’t always initially understand why people act violently, there’s always a reason, whether it is due to a brain tumor as was speculated in the case of mass murderer Charles Whitman (see article) or people being members of a death cult like the Manson family. Some people that commit violent crimes or engage in inhumane acts are mentally ill. There’s no one size fits all when it comes to explaining such behaviors. It is instructive to look, not at only medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, but also to social psychology (defintion) and sociology to understand why people participate in or condone violence.

The people who act violently usually aren’t going around shooting, stabbing, or mugging people. They can be like the ICE agent who felt he had every justification for throwing Kat Abughazleh to the ground (see article with video).

To understand man’s inhumanity to man for example, you can look to the social science experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the ealy 1960 (see Wiki article) or read “How The Milgram Experiment Showed That Anyone Could Be A Monster.”

Another experiment was Phillip Zombardo’s Stanford prison experiment where students played prison guards and they ended up being cruel, though not violent, to the other subjects who played the prisioners.

You can also look at the work of Daniel Goldhagen, a former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University turned author. He is best known for writing 1996’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” . In that book, to quote Wikipedia, he “posits that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were ‘willing executioners’ in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ in German identity that had developed in the preceding centuries.” He argued that this form of antisemitism was widespread in Germany and that it was unique to Germany. His conclusion is that because of this ordinary Germans willingly killed or informed on Jews. Wikipedia notes that “Goldhagen asserted that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes with a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.

To understand why we have shootings in a country awash in guns we have to understand that, while there are outlier cases including those who, it seems every other day open fire on groups of people to psychopathic serial killers, the majority of violent acts are committed, dare I suggest “merely,” by those who lack a moral sensibility of what is right and wrong, and they believe that what they are doing advances a righteous cause. They are like the subjects in the Migram experiments and those described in Goldhagen’s book. They are,to put it succinctly 

In both of my examples, for different reasons, the ordinary people who inflicted pain, or in the Milgram experiment thought that they were inflicting pain on people, believed they were doing it for the right reasons.

The fact is that much of humanity, has not evolved far enough to rise above the prejudices and pressures which lead people to say a clear and unambiguous “no” when an inner or outer voice tells them to harm someone.

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Which Trump personality will we get? Is getting the Nobel Peace Prize so important to Trump that he’d risk pissing off Putin?

 

I read the following in RAWSTORY:

This is a quote from David Ignatius on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today: 

One way to read what happened yesterday is the one person who could nominate Donald Trump effectively for the Nobel Peace Prize is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That’s the one nomination that might really carry some weight in Oslo.

And if Zelenskyy truly is convinced that the president who spoke with him, not to the United Nations General Assembly, is the real man, that’s going to be, you know, as Zelenskyy put it about Trump, maybe a game changer. That’s, forgive a cynical view of what happened, but that may be behind it.

Trump clinically isn’t a multiple personality (When I was in practice I had experience treating patients with this diagnosias - now called dissociative identity disorder (see Wiki), but he might as well be.) With these individuals, what they both think and do at any given time depends on which personality, called an alter, is in control of thoughts and behaviors. At times the other personalities actually have amnesia for the periods the present personality is in control.  Sometimes alters are aware of what happens when they are not in control.

Without delving into what, if any, actual psychiatric diagnoses Trump shows signs of having (I’ve already done that), I want to be clear that while he is erratic and contradicts himself and often seems to express different sides or aspects of his personality, I have seen no indications that he has this diagnosis. If he did it would explain just about all of his vacillating and sometimes extreme, irrational, and bizarre behavior.

Trump is rightfully described as “transactional.” Thus it is very possible that when he measures the pros vs the cons for him he may decide to honor his promise to Zelensky.

Is getting the Nobel Peace Prize so important to him that he’d risk pissing off Putin? Every Ukrainian and Russian soldier hopes so because their lives depend on it.

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With his sadistic psychopathic personality the guardrails, hell, the sensibilities, of decency don't apply to Trump. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Yesterday in “Who will be the last clown standing? My AI had an ominous take on this question” I used AI to make illustrations. Today wanted to write about Trump’s mental illness for the umpteenth time.

I thought I could either try to write about something I hadn’t addressed before or peruse the articles I’ve written since 2017.

Instead I took the lazy route and I used AI to search for what I wrote about Trump being mentally ill. I discovered Google search’s AI actually summarized what I’d written.

I am not sure anybody has a mutha-forken idea why Trump , who has already pretty damn completely cemented his dictatorship, is doing insane crap like blathering on about finding the cause of autism and going nutso over Jimmy Kimmell? This is friggen aberant behavior. There’s no sensible reason for it, hence it can be called irrational. It only makes sense if one assumes he is mentally ill.

In between the loony things he says and does we see moments of sanity. For example it made sense for him to deify Charlie Kirk and make himself the massive mega-star of the Kirk memorial extravaganza, and then see if he could get away with his comment about hating his enemies. While this was more proof of his sadistic psychopathic personality, it demonstrated to him that the guardrails, hell, the sensibilities, of decency didn’t apply to him. 

I mean, good folks, I count myself as one of the shrinks, and a senior one at that with 40 years of clinical practice in the rear view mirror, who has been pondering the meanings behind the mental manifestations of this guy since 2017. 

Maybe I had it figured out and forgot my conclusions. Maybe my age, 81, is catching up with me. I thought that perhaps Artificial Intelligence could help me find something I came up with and it slipped my mind. 

This is why I just searched “Hal Brown, MSW, Trump mentally ill” on Google (link) and discovered their AI generated essay (part of which is in my illustration) about what I concluded about Trump’s mental illness. Here it is:

AI Overview

Hal Brown, an MSW (Master of Social Work) and retired psychotherapist, has publicly suggested that Donald Trump is mentally ill

However, no qualified medical professional who has personally examined Donald Trump has made such a diagnosis. The American Psychiatric Association's "Goldwater Rule" prohibits psychiatrists from offering professional opinions on public figures they have not examined.

Arguments made by Hal Brown

• Brown has made his claims in blog posts, including one on Medium in August 2024 titled, "Does Trump have a mental illness and if he does does this make him dangerous and unfit for office?".

• He is also associated with the group Duty to Warn, which in 2017 petitioned to remove Trump from office, arguing he has a "serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President".

  There’s more but if you want to read it click above, and for even more click below.

  

  • This, alas, doesn’t really answer all of questions about all the wildly weird shit Trump does, shit that seems to get wilder and weirder every day. Perhaps it is best to chalk it up to his being a an overgrown attention seeking toddler who can’t abide being out of the limelight for more than a day or two.

    

    

    

    He’s still going on inthe same tenor. I am sure this will be written about thoughout the day. Above is my texting commentary to a friend.

    

    

    My comment:

    “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said at the memorial fo Kirk. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.”

    This was after Erika Kirk said she forgave the man who killed her husband and that “the answer to hate is not hate.”

    PBS titled their article about this "Trump ‘authentically himself’ for saying he hates opponents at Kirk funeral, White House says" referring to Karoline Leavitt (the article has a video https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-trump-authentically-himself-for-saying-he-hates-opponents-at-kirk-funeral-white-house-says )

    She said:

    “Look, the president is authentically himself. I think that’s why millions of Americans across the country love him and support him, including Erika Kirk, who you saw so beautifully was on stage with the president in an unthinkable moment, in the midst of an unthinkable tragedy and was leaning on the president.”

    This is actually one of the few times Leavitt has told the truth. Trump AUTHENTICALLY is a psychopathic sadistic malignant narcissist who is drunk on power and gets a visceral rush out of trolling liberals by saying outrageously nasty things. The more he feels he is untouchable and ensconced in his dictatorship the more unfiltered be becomes when he speaks or tweets. Far worse than just what comes out of his mouth or in his online posts is when he expresses this by ordering actions, like blowing up boats, which kill people, siccing his gestapo on people he wants to deport, or his lowlife lawyers from DOJ on his enemies.

    The mooforker monarch thinks saying outrageous insulting things is the height of humor when in fact he's a gaping garbage mouth spewing noxious and dangerous hate.

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