Vandalism By Squirrels With Aroused Teeth
June 20, 2017 at 12:13 pm | Posted in Humans and other animals | Leave a commentTags: animal behavior, prairie dog, squirrel
Baby American red squirrel, photographed 20 June 2010 by Dan Leveille.
Every one feels aroused and lustful at times.
Sometimes one part of your body feels aroused, and sometimes another.
But have your teeth ever felt aroused?
No?
Well, that proves that you are not a tree squirrel.
Previous posts on this blog have wondered what drives tree squirrels into a frenzy of arboreal vandalism several times each year. The most recent of those posts was here.
At last, we have an answer.
A local citizen’s association sponsored a walk through a local park, with a park ranger to show us how to identify the type of each tree, and to explain its ecological role and prospects.
The ranger provided the long-sought explanation of what drove the tree squirrels to their periodic frenzies of vandalism.
The squirrels are not teething, but are driven by something close to teething.
A squirrel’s teeth would become over-long unless the squirrel gnawed on something hard.
Wikipedia confirms and expands upon this explanation: tree squirrel’s’ “characteristic gnawing trait also aids in maintaining sharp teeth, and because their teeth grow continuously, prevents [the] over-growth [of their teeth].”
In short, tree squirrels have aroused teeth!
Vandalism by tree squirrels isn’t confined to trees. Tree squirrels occasionally chew on electrical wiring, sometimes in the attic of a house, or strung between poles outside.
Their non-arboreal vandalism probably has the same explanation as their vandalism of trees.
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The topic of this blog posting obliges me to end it on a more personal note.
As is clear from my picture, I am a prairie dog.
Prairie Dog, the poliblog, 2012-06-23 .
While researching squirrel teeth for this post, a relevant Wikipedia article contained this bombshell: “Prairie dogs … are a type of ground squirrel …”
Imagine my astonishment! This post has been about my own distant cousins!
Of course, prairie dogs differ from tree squirrels in important ways. That is why I have been careful throughout to call them tree squirrels.
Now, about those differences.
Prairie dogs hate black-footed ferrets. Not only are those sharp toothed nasty- dispositioned fiends of the right size to creep into our burrows, they do not read advice columnists, and therefore have no sense of boundaries.
Roy, a ferret, photgraphed by Alfredo Gutiérrez .
A picture of a ferret’s teeth, photographed by Erlendaakre, 26 September 2008.
A ferret in the middle of a war dance jump. Photographed in 2005 by Inkrat773.
Tree squirrels do not have nightmares about black-footed ferrets.
On the other hand, prairie dogs are much bigger than tree squirrels, because our weight is not limited by the strength of the branches of the most numerous trees. So our paws are much bigger, too, and that is what enabled me to write this blog. With a small stubby strap-on on each front paw, two-pawed typing is possible on a keyboard. It is very similar to two-fingered typing by a person. With a strap-on, I can even swipe a touch screen. (A bare paw doesn’t work on a touch screen. A bare paw produces too complicated an imprint for a computer that is looking for the simple dot-like pattern of a finger tip.)
The paw of a tree squirrel is too narrow to serve as the stable mount for a strap-on.
Those are some of the differences.
But still, they are cousins.
So I have three wishes for them:
– teeth that are sharp and not over-long,
– the discernment to distinguish an insulated electrical wire from a twig,
– and the understanding that although random changes of direction do help when escaping from a pursuing animal, they do not help when evading a car.
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President Chump, You Cannot Distract Us
June 6, 2017 at 7:59 am | Posted in Abuse of Office, Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom | Leave a commentTags: Emmanuel Macron, leak, Leaker in Chief, Mar-a-Lago, Mar-a-Leako, President Chump, security risk, Trump
Orangutans can use objects in creative ways. Photo taken by Postdif from Wikipedia, at the Philadelphia Zoo on 8 May 2010.
To President Chump –
When others point out inconvenient facts about you, one of your favorite tactics is to change the subject. You deliberately do something attention-grabbing, to distract the public’s attention away from the inconvenient facts.
When there are questions about the connections of you and your gang to Putin’s regime, you squawk instead about how those inconvenient facts became widely known. You squawk about leaks – you, who said “I love Wikileaks” during the campaign, when leaks had been crafted to harm your opponent, just like the more recent “leaks” that were crafted to harm Emmanuel Macron‘s campaign for the Presidency of France.
That doesn’t work any more. We are on to you.
Speakers and posters at the March for Truth on June 3 said so, loud and clear.
Every morning, you will wake up to us asking again about your taxes.
You will wake up to us asking again about your conflicts of interest.
You will wake up to us asking again about your loyalty.
You will wake up to us asking again about whether you are a security risk – you, the first US President ever to have been called The Leaker in Chief. (Yes, that was one of the posters at the March for Truth.)
Perhaps Mar-a-Lago should be renamed Mar-a-Leako.
The March for Truth on June 3, 2017, in Portland, Oregon, which was one of its many cities. Photographed by ‘Another Believer’.
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The ‘Racist Right’, Not the ‘Alt-Right’, and Not ‘White Nationalist’
May 16, 2017 at 2:11 pm | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom | 2 CommentsTags: alt-right, John Woodrow Cox, Laura Vozzella, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, nationalist right, Nazi, racism, Richard Spencer, Stephen Bannon, Washington Post, white nationalist, white racism, white supremacist
A dune-dwelling Aptostichus sp from Baja California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
There is no such thing as the ‘alt-right’.
What presently calls itself the ‘alt-right’ is really the white-racist right.
It is racist because because the group favors people solely on the basis of birth – upon skin color and ethnic ancestry – not upon earned achievement (moral/humanitarian, intellectual, artistic, or athletic).
The present usage of ‘alt-right’ is a ‘framing‘ trick, designed to hide the group’s goals behind a phrase that sounds more benign than ‘white racist’ or ‘white supremicist’.
In part, Richard Spencer’s appropriation of the term was probably because ‘alt-right’ sounds almost like ‘all right’. That would heighten the mask of benignity.
The term ‘alt-right’ is camouflage, like the false surface created by a trap-door spider.
Promyrmekiaphila burrow entrance closed, in northern California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
Spencer also uses another phrase as camouflage: ‘nationalist right’.
In using that phrase he wants to hide behind the long pedigree of nationalism, in an attempt to pass his radical position off as being somewhere on the mainstream spectrum.
But he reveals the racism underneath by having used his new term at demonstrations against the removal of monuments to the Confederacy. No matter how the racists try to deflect attention from the fact, the Confederacy was an attempt to ensure the long-term survival of slavery. That reveals that white-racism underlies the ‘nationalist right’.
When coupled with Spencer’s views and goals, it is impossible to forget an earlier use of ‘nationalism’ as a camouflage for racism. ‘Nazi’ was the abbreviation of the German words for National Socialism.
This is not just guilt by association. There is evidence for a real connection.
John Woodrow Cox interviewed Richard Spencer at a party that Spencer’s group held in Washington, DC, not long after Trump’s election. Some at the party gave a Sieg Heil salute. At one point, Spencer said “Let’s party like its 1933.” Spencer had previously dated an Asian-American woman, but now regrets his deviation from racially-pure behavior. He said that he would never again date a non-white woman and that interracial relationships should be forbidden. Cox asked, “How, in a nation with more than 100 million blacks, Asians and Latinos, could a whites-only territory be created without overwhelming violence?” Spencer’s answer: “Look, maybe it will be horribly bloody and terrible.”
Just last week, Spencer led two rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, opposing the removal of Confederate memorials there. One of those rallies was lit by torches. Charlotteville’s Mayor pointed out the wrong-headedness of the rallies, evoking a storm of racist tweets. One of them said “I smell Jew.” (The Mayor is Jewish.)
(Interestingly, one of the chants at the second rally was “Russia is our friend”. An echo of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.)
Every time that you say or write ‘alt-right’ or ‘nationalist right’, you are falling into the trap, and are inadvertantly advancing the white racist cause.
Promyrmekiaphila burrow entrance open, in northern California. Photo by Marshal Hedin.
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Dishonorable Devin Nunes: What Are His Loyalties?
March 29, 2017 at 12:18 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Disinformation, Dysfunctional Politics, Enemies of Freedom, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Adam Entous, Devin Nunes, Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, House of Representatives, Julie Tate, Karoun Demirjian, Philip Rucker, Putin, Robert Costa, Russian interference in the Presidential election
Illustration of the Devil in the Codex Gigas, folio 270 recto, early 13th century, by Herman the Recluse of the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice.
To what Is Devil Nunes loyal?
The one who is better known as Devin Nunes (R-Calif.)
Based on his stonewalling of investigations into Russia’s role, and his frantic attempts to divert the focus of the investigation away from Russia and away from Trump’s campaign, and toward the patriots who alerted the country, and his secret nightime trip to confer with the White House, it appears that Devin Nunes’ loyalties, in their order of importance to him, are
- First, Devin Nunes himself, followed – possibly closely – by his family.
- Second, Trump, followed – possibly closely – by the Republican Party in its present grotesquely deformed version.
- Third, possibly the United States, possibly including the district that he supposedly represents.
Given that order of priorities, it is not fitting that Nunes should be a member of the House Intelligence Committee, much less that he should chair it.
Nunes was in Trump’s transition team. Yet he claims that there is no conflict of interest for him to lead the investigation of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
The conflict of interest is clear. Nunes cannot be objective about this issue.
In attempting to deflect attention away from the real danger – Putin’s mafia – Devin Nunes betrayed his country.
He doesn’t belong in Congress.
For his future, his best career option is to apply to become a caddy at one of Trump’s golf courses.
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Donald J. Trump is Persona Non Grata at our house
March 5, 2017 at 10:28 pm | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Fortune magazine, John Baron, John Barron, John Miller, John Oliver, Soutern Poverty Law Center, The New Yorker magazine, Trump, Washington Post
Detail of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, retouched by Bluszczokrzew .
Donald J. Trump is Persona Non Grata at our house.
We will not welcome him in, nor shake his hand. In fact, we will not let him in. We do not want to see his face – not in person, nor in the news. We do not want to hear his voice, nor his self-serving opinions.
This rejection also applies to John Miller and to John Barron/John Baron, if Trump again lies by pretending to be them, and feeds major newspapers “their” views on Trump, in a bizarre attempt to trick the newspapers into adopting positions favorable to Trump’s ‘brand’. For examples of Trump doing this, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Yes, the same Donald Trump who claims that every unfavorable news report is fake “news” has tried repeatedly to create fake news.
A national organization should host an online registry where millions of Americans, and millions in other countries, could declare that Trump is persona non grata to them, too.
The hosting organization should not be one like CREDO Action nor MoveOn nor the ACLU, whose positions on other issues are divisive enough to repel many of those who would otherwise sign against Trump.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) would be an ideal hosting organization. (The SPLC’s scope is much wider than its name indicates: it monitors and educates against bigotry and injustice against every ethnic group.) So would any major environmental organization.
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The Women’s March On Washington Has A Lesson For The March For Science
February 25, 2017 at 2:51 pm | Posted in Abuse of Office, Climate change, Disinformation, Enemies of Planet Earth, Global warming, Practical tips | Leave a commentTags: Donald Trump, Ellen McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Lavanya Ramanathan, Maura Judkis, Sean Spicer, The March for Science, The Women's March on Washington
Rikugien, a Japanese garden in Tokyo, Japan, photographed by Fg2 on March 29, 2005.
Next April 22 will be Earth Day.
The March for Science will be on that day.
Scientists – and those who appreciate science – will be demonstrating to remind everyone of how indispensible science is to our understanding of how the world works, and to our ability to survive and thrive.
To survive and thrive we use tools: mental tools – concepts, knowledge (conclusions) and skills – and physical tools.
The demonstrators will be reminding us all that the relentless testing of all of our tools, using testable evidence, is the only way of arriving at conclusions and other tools that are reliable enough to build upon.
Well-tested conclusions and other tools are fruitful even when they are incomplete or approximate. Because tested tools have withstood at least some testing, they carry at least some information, so they contain clues as to improve on them.
From experience, we know that well-tested conclusions and well-tested other tools exist, and are better in the long run than unreliable conclusions and other tools.
A testable and well-tested assertion is worth of being called a fact. An unsupported assertion is not worthy of being called a fact. There is no such thing as an alternative fact. There can be alternative perceptions, but not alternative facts.
That is what the demonstrators desperately want to remind us of, because malignant people are trying to make us forget that hard-earned understanding, and if we do forget it, our future will be as was aptly described by Thomas Hobbes: nasty, brutish and short.
For the March for Science to be all that it can be, it must learn an important lesson from the Women’s March on Washington.
Photo by Mobilus In Mobili of the Women’s March on Washington, 21 January 2017
Ellen McCarthy, Lavanya Ramanathan, Maura Judkis published in the Washington Post an informative account of that event.
But they mis-interpreted one feature of what happened there, and it is exactly that feature that the planners of the March for Science need to understand correctly.
The mis-interpretation occured in these lines in the article:
” But the group gathered in Washington, which organizers said topped 500,000, wasn’t an unfettered love fest. As the program of speakers stretched into the third hour, many in the crowd, like penned race horses itching to run, began to chant: “Let us march!”
And resentment brewed as some marchers took off while speakers of color were still standing at the microphone.
“This whole thing is supposed to be about intersectional feminism, and they’re just walking out on speeches,” said Telfer Carpenter, 22, an equity studies major at the University of Toronto who had come in on an overnight bus. “I think the first people to leave were old white women. They left when a Muslim woman was speaking and when a Korean woman was speaking. A mark has been missed.” ”
I was there, and the crowd’s impatience had nothing to do with who was speaking or with what they were saying.
It had everything to do with it being “the third hour“.
At that point, we no longer cared or even noticed who was speaking. Most of us couldn’t see the stage, so we couldn’t see any ethnic or religious indicators of the speakers.
Most people had been standing since well before the program began: for more than three hours.
We had been happy to hear what the early speakers had said. But now we were saturated. We didn’t want to hear another thing, no matter how pertinent, no matter how interesting it would have been if we had heard it earlier.
That would have been true even if we had been seated and warm. But we were stiff and cold – and most important – the speeches had continued beyond our attention span.
Enthusiastic attendees morphed into disgruntled attendees.
Three hours was just too much. We needed to move. We wanted to march, since that would be how we would have our say. We wanted to shout at the White House, “Lock him up!”, as we so delightedly shouted once we started walking.
It is easy to see why the planners of the March made the mistake of exceeding our attention span.
The planners had wanted to enlist the participation and support of as many organizations as possible.
Each of those organizations wanted to publicize its cause and its views. It wanted time in the limelight for its spokesperson.
The error was in allotting too much time to each of so many speakers.
The organizers of the March for Science will likewise have enlisted many participating organizations.
The guiding principle for any such event should be to have at most an hour and a half of speeches, total.
If that means five minutes per speaker, that will be far better than what happened here. The need to make each statement brief will yield more memorable statements.
View of the Women’s March on Washington from the roof of the Voice of America building in Washington, D.C. January 21, 2017 (B. Allen / VOA)
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Streep Versus Creep
January 16, 2017 at 6:48 pm | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Fairness, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Ann Hornaday, Dana Milbank, Donald Trump, Elahe Izadi and Amy B Wang, Emily Heil, Eugene Robinson, Glenn Kessler, Hank Stuever, Helena Andrews-Dyer, John Howard, Kathleen Parker, Margaret Sullivan, Meryl Streep, Serge Kovaleski, The Trump Regime, Vera Coking
Meryl Streep, 16 February 2016, usbotschaftberlin, https://www.flickr.com/photos/usbotschaftberlin/24452956954/
During the recent Golden Globes ceremony, Meryl Streep described how revolted she had been by Donald Trump’s bullying parody, at a campaign event on November 24, 2015, of Serge Kovaleski, an excellent reporter for the New York Times, who happens to be disabled. An astounding video containing both Trump’s jeering, and Streep’s comment on that jeering, is viewable at the beginning of the online version of Ann Hornaday’s article in the Washington Post about the Golden Globes event. An excellent article by Elahe Izadi and Amy B Wang also contains the video, along with the complete transcript of Meryl Streep’s remarks.
Trump, being Trump, responded by lying, in a tweet, that he hadn’t been jeering at Kovalevski. The video shows clearly that he had been jeering, in exactly the manner of a schoolyard bully. An eye-opening analysis by Glenn Kessler gives the background to Trump’s jeering, and to Trump’s multiple lies about it.
Hornaday notes that Trump’s jeering was “to distract his audience from the fact that Kovaleski caught him in another lie, about Muslim Americans celebrating on Sept. 11, 2001” Glenn Kessler’s article provides abundant evidence confirming Hornaday’s statement. Jeering to distract attention away from Trump’s own lies is a standard Trump tactic.
Hornaday notes that Trump’s tweet also called Steep “an “overrated” actress and “a Hillary flunky””. As was just mentioned, a standard Trump tactic is to smear anyone who points out any of his errors. Another standard Trump tactic is to claim that his critic is an unpopular has-been.
A tweet by a twit,
Who is full of it.
That is, who is full of himself!
Trump’s tweets and his public statements are his way of flailing about against critics, and against inconvenient truths (to use Al Gore’s indispensible phrase).
When Trump senses a threat, verbally he writhes frantically, like a startled snake.
American pipe snake = false coral snake (Anilius scytale). Photographed 12 December 2007 by DuSantos.
Trump flails about because he cannot use logic. He cannot use facts. He has never cared about either logic or facts, so he never learned how to use them.
So Trump has left only bald unsupported assertions.
Trump finds unsupported assertions to be a congenial tool. After all, Trump has a history of pretending to be other people , sometimes “John Miller”, and sometimes “John Barron”. While pretending to be these other people, Trump says about Trump what Trump would like to have had other people say about him. That is a con-man’s tactic.
This is a variant of Trump’s tactic of claiming that un-named “other people say” or “many people say”. Trump ascribes to these invented people the inuendo that Trump wants to plant.
To be charitable about it, Trumps false statements are not always deliberate lies. Sometimes Trump makes an unfounded statement simply because he cannot distinguish how the world is from how he thinks the world ought to be. At any moment, Trump’s idea of how the world ought to be is the same as whatever would have best served Trump’s current purpose. This is a natural confusion for anyone who thinks that the Universe revolves around him. A prime example of this facet of Trump’s fun-house mirror is his habit of asserting that each source that points out his flaws is “failing” or “overated”.
Trump likes to pin disparaging labels on other people to ‘re-frame the discussion’. Sometimes this is simply a smear tactic. At other times, as with Trump’s jeering at Kovalevski, it is a tactic for drawing attention away from a fact or a question that is unfavorable to Trump.
‘Lyin Ted’, ‘Lyin Hillary’ – you get the idea. The smears are rarely founded on fact.
Margaret Sullivan has recently written an incisive overview of Trump’s approach to using lies as a tool.
Since Trump’s labels and tweets are designed to re-direct the conversation, ‘most convenient for Trump’ usually means that Trump’s smears ascribe to Trump’s critics Trump’s own unsavory traits.
A recent example of a different aspect of Trump’s lies is his claim that before his inauguration, Washington DC had run out of inauguration gowns. Trump’s claim was quickly refuted . But Trump didn’t care: he relies on the fact that his original bombastic claim will stick in the mind better than will its later disproof.
When Trump was told about the Putin-authorized spying on him – and the resulting cyber-theft of Trump’s personal and financial data – Trump’s immediate reaction was to deny that it had happenened.
The most charitable way to describe Trump’s tweets and public statements:
Trump gives himself a colonoscopy, and reports what he sees.
Schematic overview of colonoscopy procedure
Trump will be the first President in US history to constitute a major security risk.
This is important, so lets consider it further.
Trump finds Putin’s authoritarianism more congenial than the checks and balances of a free society.
Trump doesn’t understand the value of a free society, so he never bothered to understand what is required to sustain a free society.
So Trump does not accept America’s founding ideas.
Trump does not even know what America’s founders sought to accomplish.
Trump mistakenly takes ‘Amass wealth! WIN! WIN!’ to be America’s defining goal.
So Trump does not even know what he should be defending.
That is just part of why he is a security risk.
Trump will be the first President whose loyalty to the United States is questionable.
Trump seems to be more loyal to Putin than to the US. Trump certainly believes Putin more readily than he believes the CIA and the FBI. Trump accepts Putin’s statements immediately, without any scepticism. At first Trump unconditionally rejected the CIA’s and the FBI’s findings – despite the evidence for them. Then he grudgingly accepted some aspects of those findings, again without having any non-subjective basis for rejecting the finding that Putin’s scheme had helped Trump. As Kathleen Parker (a Republican) asks in a valuable op-ed, “Well, didn’t it? Didn’t Trump loudly call upon Russia to hack Clinton’s emails?” Two valuable op-eds (here and here) by Dana Milbank discuss the bias of Trump and his circle toward Putin.
The only possible conclusion: Trump is more loyal to Trump than to the US.
Trump has no self-control. His fragile self-esteme gives him a thin skin.
When opposed or disparaged he thrashes about defensively.
He deludedly thinks that his gut reactions are better than learning the facts, and are much better than thinking before reacting.
Those are the many other reasons why Trump is a security risk.
Imagine that your job was to vet applicants for security clearances, and to either approve or disapprove their applications.
Would you approve this unstable, flailing Trump?
I wouldn’t.
Trump poses a dilemma for those loyal Americans who are tasked to divulge sensitive information to this flailing buffoon who lacks all self-control.
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Now consider Trump’s slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’.
Leave aside the fact that both Trump and his followers often twist the slogan into ‘Make America Grate Again’.
Leave aside also that a notable segment of Trump’s followers interpret the slogan as ‘Make America Hate Again’.
Consider instead why America was great in the 1950s and early 1960s, at least for some of its citizens.
At that time, many formerly economically and poltically important countries were still reeling from the physical devastation that had occurred on their soil during the Second World War. Their economies had been destroyed. Their infrastructure had been destroyed. Some countries even had to reconstruct their political structures.
For example, rationing continued in England for many years after the end of the Second World War.
None of those handicaps existed in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Of those four countries, the US had – by far – the largest economy and the largest manufacturing capability.
Our manufacturing and transportation infrastructure had swelled during the war, and our political structure was intact. We were able to supply what the ravaged countries needed to buy.
Few other countries could compete with us in that respect. Many of the other unravaged countries were still colonies, or were economically very undeveloped for other reasons.
In those days, manufacturing required many laborers. Automation was limited. Filling orders, monitoring inventory, keeping records, sending written or oral messages all required human hands. That meant a huge demand for human labor.
Labor couldn’t cross borders easily. Shipping was slow or expensive, and was itself labor-intensive. So the demand for labor was futher concentrated in the few favored locations.
That concentration of advantages will not happen again.
Trump will not be able to produce the job landscape that he promises.
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There is much discussion these days as to whether respecting the office of the President entails respecting Trump.
Respecting an office means respecting its intended role – its potential contribution to society.
Respecting an office does not entail respecting any particular occupant of that office. Whether a particular occupant earns respect depends upon the occupant’s principles, virtues and weaknesses.
It is impossible to repect the upcoming occupant of the Presidency.
Trump is both creepy, and a creep.
Creepy? Witness Trump’s remarks to Billy Bush. I’ve never encountered a man whose locker-room conversation was as despicable as Trump’s. Trump needs Tic Tacs for the brain.
A creep? Witness Trump’s attempt to boot Vera Coking, an elderly widow in Atlantic City who merely wanted to live the rest of her days in her own home, with its treasured memories. Trump wanted the spot to make more parking for his casino.
Proto-President Creepy Creep,
Sneers at the humaneness of Meryl Streep.
A poseur at charity, secretly selfish and cheap.
Weak self-esteem, hidden by boasts in a heap.
Hidden also by smears that convince only sheep*.
Deceitful disgusting defective Donny The Creep.
A twisted brain, and a heart of ice.
Defective Donny just isn’t nice.
Sad!
Mad!
Bad!
* No insult is intended to bovine sheep, only to human sheep.
On January 20, 2017, President-elect Creepy Creep will become President Creepy Creep.
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Defective Trump and Imperfect Hillary
October 17, 2016 at 10:45 am | Posted in Conceited, Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Fairness, Presidential election | Leave a commentTags: Donald Chump, Donald Trump, Glen Kessler, Hillary Clinton, John Miller, John Oliver, Lyin' Donny
Line art representation of a quill pen. Archives of Pearson Scott Foresman, donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Hillary Clinton is an ordinary fibber, like you and me.
Trump is not an ordinary liar. Trump is a psychopathic liar.
Here is the evidence.
We are polite to people we don’t like. We invent a reason why we “can’t” accept an invitation. Again and again, we tell our children a suitably sanitized version of the truth about something. We tell a garishly dressed friend that they look good. “No, it doesn’t make you look fat.” A minister warmly greets a secretly less-liked member of the congregation. A teacher responds to an annoying question by saying “that is a good question”. An elected official enthusiatically welcomes a disliked constituent. A server in a restaurant, a sales person in a store, … The list is endless.
Probably no one can go through live without telling many fibs – at least, no one who keeps friends and a job. And that is true even in open societies, where saying what you believe would not lead to imprisonment or death.
Everyone who wants to influence policy and public life must fib.
George Washington understood that slavery was evil and unjust, and undermined the political principles he fought for. He and some of his friends brainstormed ways of ending slavery, and in his will he freed all of the slaves that he personally owned. (He could not legally free the slaves owned by his wife.) But Washington knew that he could not express his view openly, if he were to deal effectively with what were then the most pressing issues that he faced.
Lincoln likewise. Hence the limited position he took during his first Presidential campaign, and hence also the delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, and its incomplete coverage.
FDR favored Britain and France over Hitler before the US entered the Second World War, but he could not say so, given the isolationist (indeed, Trumpian) mood in the US before we were attacked.
Lyndon Johnson favored increased fairness toward African Americans well before he was able to act upon his views. He urged the leaders of the Civil Rights movement to increase the poltical pressure on him, to provide him political cover while still leaving him politically effective.
By the way, these examples show the hypocrisy of those who fault Hillary for not always expressing her long term political goals out loud.
That brings us back to Trump.
Trump is not an ordinary liar. Trump is a psychopathic liar.
Trump lies as easily as he breathes, without guilt, with conviction. That is what distinguishes a psychopathic liar from an ordinary fibber.
Psychopathic lying is an essential trait of all great con men, since a person who does not feel guilty comes across as more convincing.
Trump might even really believe his own lies. Since Trump avoids the effort of critical thinking, he may unconciously and automatically swivel his beliefs to whatever would be convenient for him at the moment.
Of course you know about Trump’s lying birtherism, and his more recent lie that Hillary started birtherism.
You know about the many recent disproofs of Trump’s claim that no one respects women more than he does.
You probably remember how, during the second debate with Hillary, Trump attempted to immediately change the subject to ISIS.
You know about how Trump continues to deny that he favored the Iraq War, despite the videos that disprove his claim.
You might know that Trump is a champion earner of Four Pinnochios from Glen Kessler’s fact-checking columns in the Washington Post.
But that Trump is a psychopathic con-man is spectacularly proved by the multiple incidents in which he called newspapers, pretending to be someone else who was telling the newspaper about Trump.
Look at the following, which were found via this:
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1. Donald Trump’s ‘John Miller’ interview is even crazier than you think …
May 16, 2016 – The name Trump assumed varied slightly — “John Miller,” John Barron,” and “John Baron” — but the goal didn’t: Tout Trump as a hyper-cool, …
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2. Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself – The …
May 13, 2016 – The man on the phone vigorously defending Donald Trump says he’s a media spokesman named John Miller, but then he says, “I’m sort of new …
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3. John Oliver – Donald Trump and John Miller – YouTube
May 16, 2016 – Uploaded by consumer
From HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. … Mix – John Oliver – Donald Trump and John …
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4. Donald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character …
The New Yorker
May 13, 2016 – John Cassidy on the newly surfaced recording from the nineties in which Donald Trump apparently poses as his own spokesman.
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5. Miller Time: Donald Trump Lied that he was ‘John Miller’ To Spread …
May 14, 2016 – When [People magazine’s] reporter called Trump’s office for an explanation, she was told that John Miller had gone home and that Trump …
Trump pretended that someone else said about Trump precisely what Trump wanted said about Trump.
That is a con.
That is just like a scammer who calls you up to tell you that your licence to the operating system on your computer has expired, or that your computer is full of malware that they will remove if you turn over complete control of your computer to them.
Doesn’t Trump’s masquerade remind you of Trump’s distinctive trick of claiming that un-named other people are saying what he would like said about one event or issue after another?
One of Trump’s many lies is that Hillary Clinton is a bigger liar than the rest of us. Trying to pin the label of liar on his competitors had been a theme of Trump’s campaign in the primaries. Now, in the general election, he is trying to pin it on Hillary. But Trump lies much more often than Hillary, and his lies are far more dangerous.
Even if Trump does believe his own lies, some part of his brain is uneasy about them.
That is probably why ‘liar’ is his favorite insult, and is why he uses it so promiscuously.
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The present post should be regarded as part of what will be a series of replies to common but misguided assertions that Trump has tried to implant in the public’s discussion of the candidates for President. In particular, many of these assertions were usefully collected together in Greg Tag’s comment on the previous post, How to Vote Against Trump . These assertions implicitly rest upon Trump’s lie that Hillary Clinton is a bigger liar than the rest of us.
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How to Vote Against Trump
September 27, 2016 at 12:56 pm | Posted in Disinformation, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Fairness, Presidential election | 3 CommentsTags: Donald Trump, Gary Johnson, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, Libertarian Party, Presidential election, Ralph Nader, spoiler
Twice the impact. Created 2016-09-26 by thepoliblog.WordPress.com.
How can you best fight against Trump?
How can you best protect
- the country,
- freedom of speech,
- political freedom here and world-wide,
- innocent persons,
- human fairness,
- the US Treasury,
- the human world,
- and the natural world,
against the damage that each of those would suffer if Mussolini-like Trump became President?
Some of the voters who are revolted by Trump are planning to vote against Trump without voting for Hillary.
They are planning to vote against Trump by voting for the Green candidate, or are planning to vote for the Libertarian candidate.
But a vote for anyone other than Hillary is only half a vote against Trump.
Here is why.
Although voting for one of the spoiler candidates doesn’t increase Trump’s tally, it also doesn’t increase his opponent’s tally. It has zero effect on the comparison of their two tallys, which is the comparison that will determine who becomes President.
A vote for Hillary doesn’t increase Trump’s tally by 1, but also does increase Hillary’s tally by 1.
That increases the difference between Hillary’s tally and Trump’s tally by 2 units.
That is two blows against Trump.
A vote for the Green or for the Libertarian candidate doesn’t increase Trump’s tally by 1, but that is only half the effect on the difference between Hillary’s tally and Trump’s tally that would be produced by a vote for Hillary.
Remember what happened when Ralph Nader acted (unintentionally) as a spoiler against Gore.
How did that turn out?
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Questions that Moderators Should Ask Trump in the Presidential Election Debates
September 19, 2016 at 3:27 pm | Posted in Conceited, Enemies of Freedom, Enemies of Planet Earth, Presidential election | 2 CommentsTags: Anderson Cooper, Assad, Chinese Communist Party, Chris Wallace, Clinton, dictators, Hillary, Hitler, Kim Jong Un, Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Michael Morell, Mike Vickers, moderators, Mussolini, Presidential Election debates, Putin, Trump, Trump's tax forms
The Presidential Election Debate on September 26 will be moderated by Lester Holt,
Lester Holt, Sept. 25, 2012, before departing Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan.
that on October 9 will be moderated by Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper,
Martha Raddatz interviews John W. Miller, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet, Combined Maritime Forces, 24 September 2014.
![Anderson Cooper at Tulane University, 14 May 2010 . By Tulane Public Relations (Anderson Cooper & Tim Clinton) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.](https://thepoliblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/354x480-anderson_cooper_at_tulane_university.jpg)
Anderson Cooper at Tulane University, 14 May 2010 . By Tulane Public Relations (Anderson Cooper & Tim Clinton) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
Chris Wallace in Washington, D.C., February 23, 2010
Photo by Jim Greenhill from Arlington and Durango, USA – 100223-A-3715G-168 .
Here are three questions that every moderator of a Presidential Debate should ask Trump.
Why hasn’t Trump released those of his tax forms that are not being audited?
If they will be released, when?
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Trump admires Putin.
Putin supports Assad, the dictator of Syria.
Does Trump support Assad?
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Trump admires Putin’s way of controlling Russia, and of suppressing dissent.
Putin’s techniques are completely contrary to the US Consititution.
Which of Putin’s techniques would Trump adopt, and which would he reject?
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A moderator who does not ask these questions is not exercising due diligence.
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An addendum to this post:
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Mr. Trump, you have expressed your approval of the forcefulness of so many dictators:
– Putin;
– the Chinese Communist Party, for its brutal suppression in June 1989 of the demonstrating students in Beijing and in other cities;
– Kim Jong Un .
Please name the dictators – present (such as Assad) or historical (such as Saddam Hussein) – whose forcefulness you don’t approve. How do the dictators you do approve differ from those you don’t approve?
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Mr. Trump, an op-ed by defense and intelligence experts Michael Morell and Mike Vickers says that “At the Comander-in-Chief Forum on Sept. 7, you [Trump] said that as long as Putin says nice things about you, you will say nice things about him.” If we were back in the 1930s, would you have said “As long as Hitler says nice things about me, I’ll say nice things about him”? After all, Hitler would have liked your isolationism, so he would indeed have said nice things about you.
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Fact: Of all of the dictators, past and present, Trump most resembles Mussolini.
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