Dalton555
Dalton555's JournalI am practicing self-care to get through the next few days
4 years ago, the stress was overwhelming and when Trump ended up with the White House, it was a very sad day for me.
As I prepare for this week, I realize that I'm reading too much news, rereading the same stories and the same polls over and over.
I'm going to stop reading news. (Who am I kidding? I'm a news junkie, so for me, stopping reading means spending 5 minutes or less at CNN..)
I've already sent as much money as I can to Harrison and Biden and the DNC. So I won't be making any more contributions.
I'm going to exercise, eat right, sleep well, work on my house and yard, and take care of myself. The nervousness that this campaign season has brought about in me is undeniable. And I'm going to get on top of it.
I hope everyone does what it takes to have maximum emotional strength today, tomorrow, Tuesday, and beyond. Stay healthy everyone!
Republican gubernatorial candidate is opposed to democracy
He literally said that democracy is the road to communism.
I try to be open-minded, but these Republicans are scum.
https://twitter.com/Jemsinger/status/1312457634306424833
I just wrote to the Dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard
Yascha Mounk and his allies have decided to attack a doctoral student because the doctoral student uses Twitter.
Mounk instructed the dean to "cut" the doctoral student in order to placate an imaginary public.
https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1300181769325608963
Mounk and his allies routinely attack people for their speech and attempt to get them fired from jobs, barred from universities, deplatformed, and removed from public debate. Mounk and Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan also claim that they are doing this in order to protect free speech, and because they are opposed to cancel culture.
I wrote a nice four paragraph email to the Dean and reminded her to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech from the marauding Twitter horde led by Mounk and Weiss. Of course, I used more academic language in my missive.
More evidence of Biden's decency as a human being
Of course, this is preaching to the choir. I already believe in his decency.
https://twitter.com/jzembik/status/1296653399652552704
Halfway through the Mary Trump book
It is beautifully written. I might have a bias, as I hate Donald's Trump a great deal but also because she is a clinical psychologist and I work in behavioral health also. When we look at a human being and their behaviors, we note that a lot of these behaviors are programmed into the individual during their early formative years.
I never knew that Donald Trump's mother was as crazy and bizarre as she is in this book. Donald Trump did not have a mother. He had a woman living in the same house who did not believe that she had any right to speak to him about his life, and she was often found wandering around mumbling to herself.
Donald Trump did not have a normal father either, but was raised by a sociopath. During the childhood years, they saw each other for minutes at a time, and the process by which he was anointed by his father at age 18 is described very well.
My father is a Fortune 500 executive, or was, rather. Through him, I saw some really well-off families that functioned the way the Trumps do. There is a patriarch or matriarch, a favorite child, and the rest of the family just sits around and tries to get free rent or to get their groceries and healthcare paid for by the family.
Mary's father sat in the attic in her grandfather's house for years nursing his alcoholism, in a toxic atmosphere that triggered him constantly. He was unable to leave the family. He was unable to stop wanting his father's approval, which he failed to obtain because of his rebelliousness and then his alcoholism.
It's kind of a sad book. But the writing is so lovely.
I'm starting the Mary Trump book
It looks like a slow day for me, so I brought it with me and decided to read the prologue. Really good writing. Very insightful.
I like what she says about how diagnosing from afar misses the mark. Saying that someone has narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder really says very little about a person. Trump's awfulness lies beyond psychiatric diagnosing.
Allen Francis, who edited the DSM-IV and who has written extensively about diagnosis, points out that the problem with Trump isn't a diagnostic category but rather the fact that he is a terrible, terrible person. Trump could have narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder and still operate in a much more decent fashion. People with these disorders are not monsters, but simply evaluate interpersonal phenomena in a certain way. Most people with antisocial personality disorder or pathological narcissism are harmless. They're terrible to date, not a lot of fun to hang out with, but they don't necessarily have the core of malignancy.
Anyway, back to her book. This is great.
People are speculating about Heck's strategy
And are speculating that he wanted to be lieutenant Governor in case Inslee ends up in DC.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510802-why-a-rising-star-is-leaving-congress
Personally, I want Inslee to continue as governor.
Epstein and Barr
https://archive.org/details/donaldbarrspacerelations/mode/1upDonald Barr wrote a pornographic novel in which teen girls are imprisoned and raped and impregnated. This is before he hired Jeffrey Epstein to work at a school he ran, putting Epstein into direct contact with pubescent girls.
If you look at the first page of the novel, you will see abuse occurring on an elevated table. This is exactly the scenario that Jeffrey Epstein utilized in the molestation of hundreds of girls. Epstein derived his fetishistic scenario directly from the father of the attorney general of the United States of America.
The novel also featured a reproduction program in which a wealthy powerful man would impregnate scores of girls and young women against their will. Epstein attempted to reproduce this element of the novel in his New Mexico compound.
For a variety of reasons, I do not believe that this administration is determined to get Maxwell to speak. It seems much more clear that the attorney general and president will wish her to be silent.
Epstein had a copy of the book with him when he died. He literally carried the book with him everywhere he went.
Republicans have hated Portland for decades
I lived in Portland through the '80s and '90s, and we were very proud of our Little Beirut image.
Some really good street theater occurred during those years. For me, the highlight was always when protesters vomited red white and blue paint on the street where Quayle was speaking.
https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/12/06/rip-george-bush-heres-how-portland-protested-him-in-the-1990s-and-earned-the-name-little-beirut/
The pandemic and social anxiety
I have a vulnerability to social anxiety. At one point, I stayed home for several months years ago and could barely be in public at all. Therapy and creating a functional life got me to the point where I can handle being in public and can handle social pressures as long as I know that I have an out.
A few months ago, after Walmart had started their mask requirement, I went to a Walmart store and I parked by the garden center. I use this strategy so that I can check out in the garden center where there are fewer people and fewer triggers. I went in through the garden center, walked around the store and got things, picked up some ambient nervousness from all of the people around me, as they looked terribly frightened, and then I started making my way to the garden center to check out.
They had chained the doors shut. Apparently, that was the day that they decided to start limiting the number of people they allowed inside. They only had one door in, and one door out.
Thank goodness I was able to do my deep breathing and refocusing, but for a few seconds, it was a really ghastly trigger. Huge heavy chains wrapped around the door and held in place by a giant padlock!
The long and short of it is, I worry about people who deal with anxiety in public. I worry about the pandemic trigger of shopping for people who have agoraphobic or social anxiety triggers like I do.
Yesterday, as I left a store in Idaho, I saw an elderly couple drive up with masks on. They sat in their car for a moment, looking terrified.
This pandemic and the terrifying hateful rhetoric that is flying around and the horrific mismanagement from the White House are combining to really harm America. This is a terrible period of our history.
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Member since: Sun May 1, 2016, 11:18 PMNumber of posts: 1,474
