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| Bill Watterson |
Is 45 decompensating?
There have been suggestions that TЯUMP is on a downward spiral and is decompensating. It seems to have accelerated since he got trumped in the election.
Decompensation: (from Alley Dog.com) "Decompensation is when someone with a mental illness, who was maintaining their mental illness well, starts to worsen. Signs that decompensation is occurring are a worsening of symptoms, inability to cope with stress and change, and difficulty with normal life situations like social situations and financial issues."
But his worsening mental state has been noted by several writers in the past year: Back in July 2018, his Art of the Deal ghostwriter sounded alarms. And before that, in February 2017, psychologists started raising red flags, despite deep reservations that mental health professionals should refrain from diagnosis without personally examining the patient.
Is it really worsening or just more of the same? This week's interview with the Washington Post was similar to other off-the-rails interviews he has done, for example his truly bizarre interviews with Time Magazine on March 22, 2017 and with the AP on April 23, 2017.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times outline several indications that there's a meltdown happening, with more firings and a definite bitter mood from Mrs. Putin.
Indeed, he has looked terribly depressed lately.
For example, at the G20 Summit last week:
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| Poor Donny! |
But his mood was brightened when Putie arrived in France.
I still subscribe to the notion that he possibly has frontotemporal dementia. In an earlier post, I noted subtle motor symptoms that my indicate a motor neuron disease, such as ALS. And since then, I haven't seen any more little tics or fasciculations, though I would LOVE to have a look at his tongue. He had another weird wandering episode at the G20 when he wandered off the stage where leaders were going to take a group photo. He left his host hanging. An aide had to run after him. Just like we had to do in the memory care unit.
The sour mood may be attributable to some big blows he's felt in the last few weeks.
The Russia Investigation is heating up. More guilty pleas came in. Another raid on a Trump associate was made, his former tax attorney Ed Burke. There's no indication that the raid was directly related to the Rabid Yam, but he's gotta be nervous when one of his attorney's offices gets raided by the Feds! Paul Manafort lost his plea deal when it was determined that he lied to investigators. Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about a Trump Tower deal in Moscow. I can't help it; I feel for Mikey CocoPuffs. Of all of the criminals who surround SCROTUS, he seems like the one who is truly trying to do the right thing now. And he must be doing the right thing, cuz his former baby boss is livid with him, saying Cohen should serve "a full and complete sentence." No pardon for him!
Here's a good summary of the timeline of the attempted Moscow tower deal and the election from Washington Monthly. Note the date of publications: this was from back in May! There are indications that Donny Jr. may be under the microscope. There will be more coming out about Dolt 45's business dealings in Russia, or more about whatever Putin is holding over him. We'll learn more once the 116th Congress convenes in January and the House re-starts its own investigation and when we see Mueller's report, which is predicted to be released soon.
The final election results were tabulated. Though the Senate actually gained some seats for Republicans, who now have a 53-seat majority, the House decisively turned toward the Democrats, with a pickup of 39 seats.
What was really surprising was that Orange County, California flipped blue. This stalwart conservative county is sending Democrats to occupy all seven of its House seats in the 116th Congress.
Voter turnout was the highest for a midterm election in over a century. Democrats received over 60 million votes, which is an astounding number. It approaches the number of votes 45 got in the
Presidential election (63 million votes). As Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight said, "There's not any precedent for an opposition party coming this close to matching the president's vote total from 2 years earlier." This, even in the face of the right's voter suppression efforts.
All of that means trouble for Trump in 2020.
The government committed more atrocities against immigrants and asylum seekers. It quickly became apparent that the White Pride Piper's decision to send thousands of troops to the border just before the election was a political stunt. He couldn't stop talking about the "invasion" of "illegals" marching through Mexico toward the U.S. He couldn't stop, that is, until the election was over.
Last week the group of migrants arrived at the border. They were gassed with tear gas, including women and children. We saw disturbing images. Most humans on the planet were viscerally upset. Even this human is beginning to understand the atrocities:
It’s about time one of the Fox News mouth pieces became so rattled that they broke the narrative on air. Never would have guessed it would be Geraldo. pic.twitter.com/0yicl0sJmZ— Timothy Michael Jennings (@TheTimJennings) November 27, 2018
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| Kevin Siers |
It was determined by the CIA that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But the Orange Moron doesn't believe our agency's conclusions. He handled it with a shrug appropriate for his basketball team losing the game because he missed a layup. "It is what it is." "Maybe he did, maybe he didn't."
This image was just shocking and probably illustrates the underpinnings of SCROTUS's ball-handling.
Leave it to SNL to spin it for us:
A report was published from 13 federal agencies and the White House out about Climate Change. And it ain't looking good. Here is the 1600 page report, Fourth National Climate Assessment, if you'd like to review it! It's a sobering report. There are dire warnings. But the President* shrugs and says, "I don't believe it."
It reminded me of another report that came out several years ago. I was so struck by the original article that I read in April, 2011, that I went to the newspaper archives to find it. A group of scientists skeptical of climate change reviewed the data in a Koch Brothers-financed study, hoping to show that there was no global warming trend. But their conclusion was, yep, the data is sound. Climate change is happening. You can read that article below. More readable text is below the clippings
Climate change Mon, Apr 4, 2011 – Page 14 · The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America) · Newspapers.com
Review Backs Climate Findings
Margot Roosevelt
Los Angeles Times
April 4, 2011
A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller,a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called “the legitimate concerns” of skeptics who believe global warming is exaggerated.
But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is “excellent.... We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.”
The hearing was called by GOP leaders of the House Science and Technology committee,who have expressed doubts about the integrity of climate science. It was one of several inquiries in recent weeks as the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb planet-heating emissions from industrial plants and motor vehicles have come under strenuous attack in Congress.
Muller said his group was surprised by its findings, but he cautioned that the initial assessment is based on only 2% of the 1.6 billion measurements that will eventually be examined.
The Berkeley project’s biggest private backer, at $150,000, is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch are the nation’s most prominent funders of efforts to prevent curbs on the burning of fossil fuels, the largest contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The $620,000 project is also partly funded by the federal Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Muller is a senior scientist. Muller said theKoch foundation and other contributors will have no influence over the results, which he plans to submit to peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Review backs climate findings A team challenging temperature data says its early results support the prevailing view. Ken Caldeira,an atmospheric scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science,which contributed some funding to the Berkeley effort, said Muller’s statement to Congress was “honorable” in recognizing that “previous temperature reconstructions basically got it right…. Willingness to revise views in the face of empirical data is the hallmark of the good scientific process.”
But conservative critics who had expected Muller’s group to demonstrate a bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment.
Anthony Watts,a former TV weatherman who runs the skeptic blog WattsUp- WithThat.com, wrote that the Berkeley group is releasing results that are not “fully working and debugged yet.... But, post normal science political theater is like that.”
Over the years, Muller has praised Watts’ efforts to show that weather station data in official studies are untrustworthy because of the urban heat island effect, which boosts temperature readings in areas that have been encroached on by cities and suburbs.
But leading climatologists said the previous studies accounted for the effect, and the Berkeley analysis is confirming that, Muller acknowledged. “Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming?” he asked in his written testimony. “We’ve studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.”
Temperature data are gathered from tens of thousands of weather stations around the globe, many of which have incomplete records. Over the last two decades, three independent groups have used different combinations of stations and varying statistical methods and yet arrived at nearly identical conclusions: The planet’s surface, on average, has warmed about 0.75 degrees centigrade (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since the beginning of the 20th century.
Temperature data were the focus of the so-called 2009 Climategate controversy,in which opponents of greenhouse gas regulation alleged that leaked emails from a British climate laboratory showed manipulation of weather station records. Five U.S. and British government and university investigations have refuted the charges.
“For those who wish to discredit the science, this [temperature] record is the holy grail,” said Peter Thorne, a leading expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “They figure if they can discredit this, then society would have significant doubts about all of climate science.”
Thorne said scientists who contributed to the three main studies — by NOAA, NASA and Britain’s Met Office— welcome new peer-reviewed research. But he said the Berkeley team had been “seriously compromised” by publicizing its work before publishing any vetted papers.
On the project’s website, in a public lecture and in statements to the media, Muller had portrayed the Berkeley effort as rectifying the “biases” of previous studies, a task he compared with“Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables.” He said his study would be “more precise,” analyzing data from 39,000 stations — more than any other study — and offering “transparent,” rather than “homogenized” data.
Kevin Trenberth,who heads the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university consortium, said he was“highly skeptical of the hype and claims” surrounding the Berkeley effort. “The team has some good people,” he said, “but not the expertise required in certain areas, and purely statistical approaches are naive.”
The project team includes UC Berkeley statistician David Brillinger and UC Berkeley physicists Don Groom,Robert Jacobsen, Saul Perlmutter,Arthur Rosenfeld and Jonathan Wurtele. The group’s atmospheric scientist is Judith Curry,chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at Georgia Tech,who has suggested that temperature data were “airbrushed” by other scientists.
One full-time staffer, Richard Rohde,who recently earned a doctorate in statistics, is doing most of the work, Muller said.
Although in his testimony Muller praised the “integrity” of previous studies, he said estimates of human- caused warming need to be “improved.” And despite his preliminary praise for earlier studies, he said further data-crunching “could bring our current agreement into disagreement.”
Other scientists noted that temperature is only one factor in climate change. “Even if the thermometer had never been invented, the evidence is there from deep ocean changes, from receding glaciers, from rising sea levels and receding sea ice and spring snow cover,” Thorne said. “All the physical indicators are consistent with a warming world. There is no doubt the trend of temperature is upwards since the early 20th century. And that trend is accelerating.” margot.roosevelt@ latimes.com
And some other tidbits from my reading and perusing....
Comics from 11/29/18. The way 45 is changing our language:
Adding to my last post about fact checkers. Last week CNN ran split-scene fact-checks in real time during a Sarah Sanders press conference. Brilliant.
Sanders claims that the climate report by the Trump administration is "not based on facts" pic.twitter.com/Ga6peti5OB— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) November 27, 2018
More about lying: A Newsweek op/ed about Don the Con's lying and its relationship to fascism.
A Yale Professor sounds another warning about fascism.
A quite disturbing report that Trumpty Dumpty considered letting Turkey kill a US resident in order to placate Erdogan about Khashoggi’s murder. What the royal f∩ck?!
Too late for Thanksgiving dinner, but Amanda Marcotte, on Salon, suggests ways of interacting with the fact-free conservatives, something that I've been struggling with and writing about on this blog.
And I love this conversation: Are Civics Lessons a Constitutional Right? This Student is Suing for Them. We have civics test for new citizens. Why are our schools falling behind?
Thanks for letting my mind wander, friends! Keep resisting out there!
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