slate | However much we’d like to think of gender as a social construct, science suggests that real differences do exist between female and male brains. The latest evidence: a first-of-its-kind European study that finds that the female brain can be drastically reshaped by treating it with testosterone over time.
Research has shown that women have the advantage when it comes to memory and language, while men tend to have stronger spatial skills (though this too has been disputed).
But due to ethical restrictions, no study had been able to track the
direct effect that testosterone exposure has on the brain—until now.
Using neuroimaging, Dutch and Austrian researchers found that an
increase in this potent hormone led to shrinkage in key areas of the
female (transitioning to male) brain associated with language. They
presented their findings at last week’s annual meeting of the European
College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Amsterdam.
For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 18 individuals
receiving high doses of testosterone as part of female-to-male gender
reassignment surgery before and after hormone treatment. After just four
weeks of receiving testosterone, participants had lost gray matter
(which mainly processes information) in the regions of the brain that
are used for language processing. That change amounted to a “real,
quantitative difference in brain structure,” said researcher Rupert Lanzenberger of the Medical University of Vienna.
The study, while small, provides tantalizing new evidence of how
hormones can influence brain chemistry. As Lanzenberger says, “these
findings may suggest that the genuine difference between the brains of
women and men is substantially attributable to the effects of
circulating sex hormones.”
medicalexpress | A six-year study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
has added to the mounting evidence that growing up in severe poverty
affects how children's brains develop, potentially putting them at a
lifelong disadvantage.
"A lot of brain science data isn't really saying anything all
that different than the behavioral and social science data that we've
had for 20 to 30 years," Luby said. "But when you can show tangible
brain change, it has a different impact on people and a different
meaning. It just provides a level of tangible evidence."
That, too, is Pollak's take on the study.
"What this is doing is reframing the problem," he said. "Since
President Johnson declared the War on Poverty, Americans have tended to
look at poverty as a policy issue. ... But it also looks like it is a
biomedical issue."
He likens the potential effect of poverty on children to lead
paint - an environmental hazard that damaged children's brains.
"Now we certainly can begin looking at poverty that way, too," he said.
Research shows that early interventions, such as home visitation
programs for families and preschool for children, are effective and
have the potential to change lives.
That's because the brain has more "plasticity" early in life - it responds more quickly to changes in environment.
The studies on how poverty affects the development of children's
brains are relatively new. Few existed a decade ago. But now more
studies exist, and they are getting more attention in policy circles.
They suggest the need to invest in children, Wolfe said.
If society doesn't, she said, "they are worse off, and we are all worse off."
Pollak, too, stressed the potential long-term costs.
"Americans tend to really like to believe in this narrative that
everyone here has a chance," he said. This kind of research suggests
that we have some kids entering kindergarten at totally not a level
playing field - with environments that are so impoverished and
under-stimulated and nonconducive to healthy growth, we've got little
4-year-olds, 5-year-olds starting kindergarten already at an extreme
disadvantage.
"So the data really runs counter to the fact that everyone in this country has a fair shot."
declineoftheempire | In particular, when we talk about the long-term future of humans the discussion tends to branch into two directions (neither of which are necessarily actually separate).
One is the 'stewardship' route.
Here the emphasis is on how we should learn to become good stewards of
the planet, not just for our own survival, but also for a rather
nebulous greater cause; not upsetting the natural cart, allowing the
Earth to maintain a more stable balance in terms of climate and
biodiversity. A balance perhaps more representative of the long-term
state of the environment without a short-term perturbation like
ourselves.
The second route doesn't necessarily obviate the need for home stewardship, but it looks beyond the Earth.
One of our biggest talents, and one of our biggest problems as a
species, is that we thrive on expansion. We're resource and space
hungry. But instead of trying to curtail ourselves, we have the option
of spreading beyond, to the vast and untapped wealth of the solar
system. Call it the ultimate manifest destiny if
you will, except that it also offers the possibility of preserving our
homeworld by altering the fundamental equation of our existence, by
outsourcing many of our material needs.
Those are the options, Caleb? Good stewardship or leaving the Earth?
What about Door #3? What about the unfortunately fact that Homo sapiens is hell-bent on destroying the biosphere, and in so doing, taking themselves down in the process?
Caleb does say something about this possibility ... sort of.
Of course, this cosmic pathway could go wrong. We could start altering the environmental state of Mars and mess that up. Or, without care, we could risk destabilizing our global economy and balance of power. After all, we seem to be barely capable of managing 196 recognized countries, adding more offworld states is unlikely to help.
But on a grand scale, for the ultimate preservation of the species,
the solar system may be our savior. There's only one surefire way to
avoid extinction by asteroid impacts or supervolcanoes, or sheer
overcrowding. Put some of us somewhere else.
We might carelessly "risk" destabilizing the global economy and the balance of power. And that's it?
Caleb, you started off with the Holocene (Sixth) Extinction. How did
you get from a human-caused mass extinction to "destabilizing the global
economy" in only five paragraphs?
ourfiniteworld | I gave a list of likely changes to expect in my January post.
These haven’t changed. I won’t repeat them all here. Instead, I will
give an overview of what is going wrong and offer some thoughts
regarding why others are not pointing out this same problem.
Overview of What is Going Wrong
The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse. Back in 2008, the world financial system almost collapsed. This time, our chances of avoiding collapse are very slim.
Without the financial system, pretty much nothing else works:
the oil extraction system, the electricity delivery system, the pension
system, the ability of the stock market to hold its value. The change
we are encountering is similar to losing the operating system on a
computer, or unplugging a refrigerator from the wall.
We don’t know how fast things will unravel, but things are likely to be quite different in as short a time as a year. World
financial leaders are likely to “pull out the stops,” trying to keep
things together. A big part of our problem is too much debt. This is
hard to fix, because reducing debt reduces demand and makes commodity
prices fall further. With low prices, production of commodities is
likely to fall. For example, food production using fossil fuel inputs is
likely to greatly decline over time, as is oil, gas, and coal
production.
The electricity system, as delivered by the grid, is likely to fail in approximately the same timeframe as our oil-based system. Nothing
will fail overnight, but it seems highly unlikely that electricity will
outlast oil by more than a year or two. All systems are dependent on
the financial system. If the oil system cannot pay its workers and get
replacement parts because of a collapse in the financial system, the
same is likely to be true of the electrical grid system.
Our economy is a self-organized networked system that continuously dissipates energy, known in physics as a dissipative structure. Other
examples of dissipative structures include all plants and animals
(including humans) and hurricanes. All of these grow from small
beginnings, gradually plateau in size, and eventually collapse and die.
We know of a huge number of prior civilizations that have collapsed.
This appears to have happened when the return on human labor has fallen too low. This
is much like the after-tax wages of non-elite workers falling too low.
Wages reflect not only the workers’ own energy (gained from eating
food), but any supplemental energy used, such as from draft animals,
wind-powered boats, or electricity. Falling median wages, especially of
young people, are one of the indications that our economy is headed
toward collapse, just like the other economies.
The reason that collapse happens quickly has to do with debt and derivatives.
Our networked economy requires debt in order to extract fossil fuels
from the ground and to create renewable energy sources, for several
reasons: (a) Producers don’t have to save up as much money in advance,
(b) Middle-men making products that use energy products (such cars and
refrigerators) can “finance” their factories, so they don’t have to save
up as much, (c) Consumers can afford to buy “big-ticket” items like
homes and cars, with the use of plans that allow monthly payments, so
they don’t have to save up as much, and (d) Most importantly, debt helps raise the price of commodities of all sorts
(including oil and electricity), because it allows more customers to
afford products that use them. The problem as the economy slows, and as
we add more and more debt, is that eventually debt collapses. This
happens because the economy fails to grow enough to allow the economy to
generate sufficient goods and services to keep the system going–that
is, pay adequate wages, even to non-elite workers; pay growing
government and corporate overhead; and repay debt with interest, all at
the same time. Figure 2 is an illustration of the problem with the debt
component.
newsweek | The US diplomatic service dates back to the Revolution, but it was in the post–World War II environment that the modern State Department came to be.
Its origins coincided with the appointment of Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, in 1973. Kissinger’s appointment was unusual in several respects. Kissinger did not just head up the State Department; he was also concurrently appointed national security advisor, facilitating a tighter integration between the foreign relations and military and intelligence arms of the US government.
While the State Department had long had a cable system, the appointment of Kissinger led to logistical changes in how cables were written, indexed and stored. For the first time, the bulk of cables were transmitted electronically. This period of major innovation is still present in the way the department operates today.
The US Department of State is unique among the formal bureaucracies of the United States. Other agencies aspire to administrate one function or another, but the State Department represents, and even houses, all major elements of US national power. It provides cover for the CIA, buildings for the NSA mass-interception equipment, office space and communications facilities for the FBI, the military and other government agencies and staff to act as sales agents and political advisors for the largest US corporations.
One cannot properly understand an institution like the State Department from the outside, any more than Renaissance artists could discover how animals worked without opening them up and poking about inside. As the diplomatic apparatus of the United States, the State Department is directly involved in putting a friendly face on empire, concealing its underlying mechanics.
Every year, more than $1 billion is budgeted for “public diplomacy,” a circumlocutory term for outward-facing propaganda. Public diplomacy explicitly aims to influence journalists and civil society, so that they serve as conduits for State Department messaging.
While national archives have produced impressive collections of internal state communications, their material is intentionally withheld or made difficult to access for decades, until it is stripped of potency. This is inevitable, as national archives are not structured to resist the blowback (in the form of withdrawn funding or termination of officials) that timely, accessible archives of international significance would produce.
What makes the revelation of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them. The internal communications of the US Department of State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when.
Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations. Reading them is a much more effective way of understanding an institution like the State Department than reading reports by journalists on the public pronouncements of Hillary Clinton, or [White House Communications Director] Jen Psaki.
While in their internal communications State Department officials must match their pens to the latest DC orthodoxies should they wish to stand out in Washington for the “right” reasons and not the “wrong” ones, these elements of political correctness are themselves noteworthy and visible to outsiders who are not sufficiently indoctrinated.
Many cables are deliberative or logistical, and their causal relationships across time and space with other cables and with externally documented events create a web of interpretive constraints that reliably show how the US Department of State and the agencies that inter-operate with its cable system understand their place in the world.
Only by approaching this corpus holistically—over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity—does the true human cost of empire heave into view.
kunstler |The tremors rattling markets are not exactly what they seem to be. A
meme prevails that these movements represent a kind of financial
peristalsis — regular wavelike workings of eternal progress toward an
epic more of
everything, especially profits! You can forget the supposedly “normal”
cycles of the techno-industrial arrangement, which means, in particular,
the business cycle of the standard economics textbooks. Those cycle are
dying.
They’re dying because there really are Limits to Growth
and we are now solidly in grips of those limits. Only we can’t
recognize the way it is expressing itself, especially in political
terms. What’s afoot is a not “recession” but a permanent contraction of
what has been normal for a little over two hundred years. There is not
going to be more of everything, especially profits, and the stock
buyback orgy that has animated the corporate executive suites will be
recognized shortly for what it is: an assest-stripping operation.
What’s happening now is a
permanent contraction. Well, of course, nothing lasts forever, and the
contraction is one phase of a greater transition. The cornucopians and
techno-narcissists would like to think that we are transitioning into an
even more lavish era of techno-wonderama — life in a padded recliner
tapping on a tablet for everything!
I don’t think so. Rather, we’re going medieval, and we’re doing it the
hard way because there’s just not enough to go around and the swollen
populations of the world are going to be fighting over what’s left.
Actually, we’ll be lucky if we
can go medieval, because there’s no guarantee that the contraction has
to stop there, especially if we behave really badly about it — and based
on the way we’re acting now, it’s hard to be optimistic about our
behavior improving. Going medieval would imply living within the solar
energy income of the planet, and by that I don’t mean photo-voltaic
panels, but rather what the planet might provide in the way of plant and
animal “income” for a substantially smaller population of humans. That
plus a long-term resource salvage operation.
WaPo | Trump, on the evidence of past behavior, would take whatever
political shape the moment required. But the direction upon which his
spinning compass has settled is instructive. His approach has little to
do with the Republican Party’s history of religious conservatism. Nor is
it rooted primarily in tea party constitutionalism. Trump is pressing a
case against corrupt and cosmopolitan elites; against mass and illegal
immigration and the dilution of American identity; and against the
economic dislocations of free trade and business capitalism.
Insofar
as Trump leads a movement, it is headed in the direction of a more
European form of secular, nationalist, right-wing populism. Were Trump
to succeed, the GOP would be an anti-immigration party of the white
working class. Before he fails — as he certainly will — Americans may
long for the good old days of the religious right.
A number of
thoughtful conservatives are attempting to take the good parts of
Trump’s message — his unapologetic nationalism, his identification with
working-class discontents — while minimizing the parts that appeal to
the lowest human instincts. They prefer their Trumpism with a little
less Trump. But by leading off with the issue of immigration, by
proposing to narrow the protections of the 14th Amendment, by
representing undocumented Mexicans
as rapists, criminals and sources of infectious disease, by pledging to
construct a wall across a continent, by promising the roundup and
forced deportation of 11 million people, Trump has made looking on the
bright side pretty difficult. In fact, Trump’s political approach is
defined by the fomenting of conflict with foreigners: with scheming
Mexicans and predatory Chinese. Remove the appeal to base instincts and
you are left with little but opposition to entitlement reform.
NYTimes | When
Hollywood wants us to understand a character, it gives us a Rosebud —
an event or an object, like the wooden sled in “Citizen Kane,” that
reflects the character’s essence. Mr. Trump’s Rosebud moment, I learned
recently from a story on WNYC, happened one day in 1964, when he accompanied his father to the opening ceremony of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
As Mr. Trump recounted the story
for Howard Blum in The New York Times in 1980: “The rain was coming
down for hours … But all I’m thinking about is that all these
politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded.” Even as a
wet-behind-the-ears kid, he wanted the reporter to understand, he
couldn’t abide the hypocrisy of big shots. “In a corner,” he continued,
“just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer
who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart
into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.
“I
realized then and there,” the budding real estate mogul and future
Republican front-runner concluded, “that if you let people treat you how
they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I
would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
Who
was that sad sack in the corner? It’s worth asking, because the Trump
Rosebud moment reveals more than he perhaps realizes — and not just
about himself, but about the people who are swelling his poll numbers.
Othmar H. Ammann
was born in Switzerland, not Sweden, in 1879, and came to the United
States in 1904. He proposed, designed and oversaw the construction of
the George Washington Bridge and was closely involved with others around
the country, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco among them. As the
chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and the Triborough
Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he oversaw the building of the Lincoln
Tunnel, the Outerbridge Crossing and the Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck,
Triborough, Bayonne and Goethals Bridges.
NYTimes | There
are many things we should remember about the events of late August and
early September 2005, and the political fallout shouldn’t be near the
top of the list. Still, the disaster in New Orleans did the Bush
administration a great deal of damage — and conservatives have never
stopped trying to take their revenge. Every time something has gone
wrong on President Obama’s watch, critics have been quick to declare the
event “Obama’s Katrina.” How many Katrinas has Mr. Obama had so far? By one count, 23.
Somehow,
however, these putative Katrinas never end up having the political
impact of the lethal debacle that unfolded a decade ago. Partly that’s
because many of the alleged disasters weren’t disasters after all. For
example, the teething problems of Healthcare.gov were embarrassing, but
they were eventually resolved — without anyone dying in the process —
and at this point Obamacare looks like a huge success.
Beyond
that, Katrina was special in political terms because it revealed such a
huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President
George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping
America safe. He wasn’t. But as long as he was talking tough about
terrorists, it was hard for the public to see what a lousy job he was
doing. It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s
cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his
bubble.
What
we should have learned from Katrina, in other words, was that political
poseurs with nothing much to offer besides bluster can nonetheless fool
many people into believing that they’re strong leaders. And that’s a
lesson we’re learning all over again as the 2016 presidential race
unfolds.
WaPo | Brian Beutler has an important piece in which he raises an unsettling question:
Could the next Republican president nominate one or more Supreme Court
justices who would seek to restore a pre-New Deal judicial conception of
liberty of contract, with the goal of undermining much of the
regulatory state that many Americans take for granted today?
Beutler reports on a movement among legal-minded libertarians to rehabilitate the Lochner
decision, the notorious 1905 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a
state law limiting the working hours of bakers, giving its name to the
“Lochner era” of Supreme Court rulings in which economic regulations
established by popularly elected officials were struck down as
unconstitutional. The Lochner era is widely seen to have ended during
the New Deal, when the Court upheld (among many other things) a state
minimum wage law, concluding that liberty of contract is not an
“absolute” right.
Sam Bagenstos, a liberal constitutional scholar at the University of Michigan, tells Beutler
that “a full fledged return to Lochner” could ultimately undermine a
whole host of economic regulations, including minimum wage, overtime,
and worker safety laws and even possibly laws protecting customers from
discrimination based on race.
One leading libertarian lawyer
tells Beutler frankly that the goal is to invalidate much social welfare
legislation “at the federal level,” though I would add that a Lochner
restoration might invalidate a fair amount of it at the state level as
well. Libertarians are frustrated with the Roberts court for its rulings
preserving Obamacare — decisions that have been widely interpreted as a
sign of Roberts’ judicial restraint and deference to the elected
branches — and the hope is that a Republican president will appoint more
unabashedly activist judges when it comes to placing limits on federal
power to regulate the economy:
WaPo | Critics, including many leading conservative economists in Washington,
call Trump’s plans “nativist,” “protectionist” and incompatible with
the party’s core pro-market beliefs. They also worry Trump’s ideas
could spread to other GOP contenders.
“This is a very dangerous moment, I think, for the Republican Party,”
said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and co-founder of the
Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which has been meeting with candidates
to urge them to adopt low-tax, low-regulation policies to grow the
economy.
“What Trump is saying about trade and immigration is a political and
economic disaster,” Moore said. “He’s almost now making it cool and
acceptable to be nativist on immigration and protectionist on trade.
That’s destroying a lot of the progress we’ve made as a party in the
last 30 years.”
Many Republican candidates beyond Trump have voiced opposition to new
free-trade deals, including the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership
being negotiated by the Obama administration with several Asian
countries. While every GOP candidate promises to secure the nation’s
southern border and crack down on illegal immigration, some are now
expressing an openness to reducing levels of legal immigration.
Free-market economists have long argued that trade and immigration are
critical to growing the U.S. economy. Top Republicans have frequently
adopted those beliefs.
But a growing portion of the conservative base -- and, to a lesser
extent, the country as a whole -- now blames American workers’ economic
woes on competition from illegal immigrants and from low-skilled
foreign factory workers abroad.
In a 2014 Public Religion Research Institute survey, 57 percent of
Republicans said immigrants mostly hurt the economy by driving down
wages, compared with 33 percent who said they help by providing
low-cost labor. The nation as a whole split evenly on the question.
NYTimes | For
years, Republicans have run for office on promises of cutting taxes and
bolstering business to stimulate economic growth, pledging allegiance
to a Reaganesque model of conservatism that has largely become the
party’s orthodoxy.
But
this election cycle, the Republican presidential candidate who
currently leads in most polls is taking a different approach, and it is
jangling the nerves of some of the party’s most traditional supporters.
The tendency of that candidate, the billionaire developer Donald J. Trump,
to make provocative, headline-grabbing speeches has helped obscure an
emerging set of beliefs: that he would raise taxes in certain areas,
particularly on corporations that he believes do not act in the best
interests of the United States.
In
recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American
companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened
to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he
has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from
cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the
United States.
Alarmed
that those ideas might catch on with some of Mr. Trump’s Republican
rivals — as his immigration policies have — the Club for Growth, an
anti-tax think tank, is pulling together a team of economists to
scrutinize his proposals and calculate the economic impact if he is
elected.
“All of those are anti-growth policies,” said David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth,
a group that Republican candidates routinely court. “Yes he’s a
businessman, but if those are the policies he implements, they’ll drive
the economy into the ground and we’ll see huge drops in G.D.P., and
frankly I think it would lead to massive loss of jobs.”
WaPo | Walker loyalists say the first priority should be to help the
governor rebalance himself as a candidate. That, they say, will require
some tough love from his campaign advisers and more discipline in
developing answers to questions about issues that are not central to
Walker’s core message.
While a few of Walker’s campaign staffers
have worked with him before, many are newcomers. Two of Walker’s former
top political advisers, Keith Gilkes and Stephan Thompson, are now in
charge of the pro-Walker super PAC that is legally separated from the
campaign.
The campaign is led by Rick Wiley, a former Republican
National Committee political director who grew up in the Midwest and has
worked in Wisconsin before. Wiley is frequently on the trail with
Walker, and several top supporters say he acts too much like a buddy and
not enough like a chief operating officer.
“Every candidate
needs somebody that can checkmate them in private, like a Karl Rove and
‘W,’ ” one top donor said, referring to George W. Bush’s longtime
political adviser. “Is there some concern about senior experience around
the governor, actual presidential experience? Yes, no question.”
Wiley,
through a campaign spokeswoman, declined to respond to the comments. A
spokeswoman said that while the campaign manager did spend the first
full week of Walker’s campaign on the road and has made a few trips
since then, he is usually at work in Madison.
Despite the falling
poll numbers, Walker supporters are optimistic his campaign can still
rebound — particularly if he performs well at the Sept. 16 debate at the
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
“All campaigns go through
cycles, and nobody has ridden all the way to victory,” said Gregory W.
Slayton, a major Walker fundraiser who lives in New Hampshire. “There
isn’t a candidate out there who hasn’t had really serious issues or
challenges.”
firstlook | After investing a sizable fortune into building a political machine that now rivals
the size and budgets of both major political parties, the conservative
billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are seeing some of their top
operatives take jobs with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
The fact that many of Trump’s political positions are at odds with those of the Koch brothers does not seem to be a factor.
Take Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, who spent many
years of his career working for the Koch political network, first as an assistant at
the Koch-led group Citizens for a Sound Economy in 1997 and from 2008
through earlier this year as a senior staff member to the Koch’s primary
grassroots group, Americans for Prosperity. Over the last seven years,
Lewandowski helped the Koch network organize Tea Party events and get-out-the-vote efforts for Republican candidates for office.
Alan Cobb, a strategic consultant for Trump, is the former director of Kansas public affairs for Koch Industries and also worked for years as a vice president at Americans for Prosperity.
Trump is being counseled by
lawyer Donald F. McGahn, the former Federal Election Commission chair
who just months ago represented the Koch political network during
hearings with the FEC. McGahn is listed as affiliated with Freedom Partners Action Fund, the Super PAC set up by the Koch brothers and their lobbyists.
In New Hampshire, Trump’s state director is Matt Ciepielowski, the
former New Hampshire state field director for Americans for
Prosperity. As National Journalreported,
as Trump works to develop a team to win the New Hampshire primary, he
has hired multiple AFP staff, and even leased a campaign headquarters in
the same office building as AFP’s office in Manchester.
newrepublic | Donald Trump is the Republican
frontrunner for president, a fact that has befuddled just about
everybody—except perhaps Trump himself—and spawned countless theories:
He's leading because Americans are frustrated with politicians and want a straight-talking outsider. Because he shamelessly caters to paranoid conservatives. Because he's famous. He's not politically correct. He never says sorry. He's unfailingly entertaining. And the press can't resist
him. But there's another reason that no one has considered yet, a
secret weapon that has propelled past charismatic politicians like Bill
Clinton and Theodore Roosevelt to the White House: hypomanic temperament.
To
be clear, I’m not using my authority as a professor of psychiatry to
call Trump mentally ill. Hypomanic temperament is not an illness. It is
genetically linked to bipolar disorder and manifests the same traits as
mania—but crucially, does so to a less severe and more functional
degree. Historically, hypomanic temperament has received little
attention compared to bipolar disorder, but the founders of modern
psychiatry—Eugen Bleuler, Emil Kraepelin, Ernst Kretschmer—first
described these personalities around a century ago. "Hypomanics," as I
describe them in In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography:
are
whirlwinds of activity who are filled with energy and need little
sleep, less than 6 hours. They are restless, impatient and easily bored,
needing constant stimulation… and tend to dominate conversations. They
are driven, ambitious and veritable forces of nature in pursuit of their
goals. While these goals may appear grandiose to others, they are
supremely confident of success—and no one can tell them otherwise…. They
can be exuberant, charming, witty, gregarious but also arrogant…. They
are impulsive in ways that show poor judgment, saying things off the top
of their head, and acting on ideas and desires quickly, seemingly
oblivious to potentially damaging consequences. They are risk takers who
seem oblivious to how risky their behavior truly is. They have large
libidos and often act out sexually. Indeed all of their appetites are
heightened.
This description doesn't just match Clinton; it also sounds an awful lot like Trump. He reports,
for example, “I usually sleep only four hours a night,” which by itself
is usually a pretty reliable indicator of hypomania, and something he
boasts about: “How can you compete against people like me if I sleep
only four hours?” He claims
to work seven days a week, and in a typical 18-hour day makes “over a
hundred" phone calls and have “at least a dozen meetings.” “Without
passion you don't have energy, without energy you have nothing!” Trump
has tweeted. Hence his taunt
of Jeb Bush as “a low energy person,” by contrast. Like most
hypomanics, he is distractible. “Most successful people have very short
attention spans. It has a lot to do with imagination,” he once wrote.
He is correct. The same rapidity of thought that helps engender
creativity makes it difficult to stay on one linear track of ideas
without skipping to the next. Like most hypomanics, he follows
his “vision, no matter how crazy or idiotic other people think it is.”
Trump sees himself as a person of destiny and no one is going to talk
him out of it. Trump's inflated self-esteem is illustrated by the fact
that his net worth is reported by Forbes to be $4 billion, a fraction of the $10 billion he claims. It’s not just hyperbole: Hypomanics' wild optimism systematically distorts their perceptions.
Dripping
with arrogance, Trump is an uber-aggressive alpha male who gleefully
dominates, bullies, and colorfully disparages his competitors and
critics. His hypomanic energy gives him that elusive charisma: Whether
you love him or hate him (and charismatic figures produce such polarized
responses) he makes himself the center of attention, the most exciting
figure on the stage, who consumes all the oxygen in the room.
cbsnews | On Saturday, he took aim at top aide Huma Abedin, who has been embroiled in the recent controversy over Clinton's use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department,
and accused her of sharing classified information with her husband.
Abedin's husband, the former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, also
suffered a few Trump insults.
"[Abedin's] receiving very, very important information and giving it
to Hillary. Who else is she giving it to? Her husband has serious
problems and on top of that, he now works for a public relations firm,"
Trump said Saturday in a press conference following an appearance at the
National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) convention in
Nashville.
Trump added that Abedin was "married to a guy who is
obviously psychologically disturbed," referencing the lewd photo scandal
that forced Weiner to resign from Congress in 2011. Trump had previously donated $2,000 to Weiner's 2010 congressional campaign, according to the Washington Post.
"So
how can she be married to this guy who's got these major problems?
She's getting her most important information, it could be, in the world.
Who knows what he's going to do with it? Forget about her," the
Republican contender continued. "What she did is a very dangerous thing
for this country, and probably it's a criminal act."
A recent investigation found
that while Abedin, a current Clinton campaign staffer, worked for the
former secretary at the State Department, she had forwarded at least one
email that contained potentially classified information.
Trump
went after Clinton herself, for comments likening some Republican views
on abortion to be expected "from some of the terrorist groups."
"I
thought what Hillary Clinton said about terrorists and Republicans
being terrorists was a disgraceful statement and she should take it
back," Trump said. "She insulted many, many great people."
WaPo | This cartoon, which comes from the pen of Clay Bennett, the editorial
cartoonist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, expresses the belief
of almost all of the Republican establishment.
Sure, Donald Trump
is leading in the polls everywhere right now, but so was Howard Dean at
this point in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary race. And Dean
wound up flaming out with Democrats making the "Dated Dean, Married Kerry" bumper sticker a very real thing.
So,
eventually, the thinking goes, Trump's support will flame out. The
Summer of Trump will turn into the fall of discontent (or something).
People who say they are for Trump now are having a laugh but will come to their senses when the actual time to vote nears and they start caring about things like electability. Or Trump will fundamentally disqualify himself in some meaningful way some time soon.
WaPo | If nothing else, the Sunday move reduces Sharpton’s broadcast time
from five hours per week to one hour per week. His activist stature on
MSNBC just sustained an 80 percent drop. The clash between Sharpton’s
incarnations emerged in striking ways during MSNBC’s coverage of the
cases of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner — instances where
Sharpton functioned as an advocate for the families and helped to
organize protests. “He has an important voice for any audience, but
especially for our audience on justice, civil rights and equality issues
and we want that voice to be part of menu of things that MSNBC has to
offer,” says the NBC News source.
That voice will have less
opportunity to showcase its activism, meaning that the sources he
formerly interviewed on “PoliticsNation” may opt for other shows on the
network. “If you’re an Eric Garner family member . . . you might be more
comfortable on [Sharpton’s Sunday show] but you might want to get on
the ‘Today’ show,” said the NBC News source.
fp | As you drive in through Queens, where LaGuardia Airport and the
World’s Fair grounds once stood, you see emerging amid the cranes and
the scaffolding the outlines of the Trump Presidential Resort and
Casino. Gambling has been legal across America since shortly after his
election, providing most of the funding for many of the new president’s
signature major projects, from the gilding of customs halls to extending
health insurance coverage to include free Hair Club for Men
and most forms of plastic surgery for women (or as the new president
called it, his “Be Kind to Dogs Act”) to ensuring that every public high
school in America has the “Trump bare essentials,” including a
heliport, cafeteria cocktail waitresses, and laser teeth whitening for
disadvantaged students.
Through all the glitz, however, you notice that the city is starting
to take on many of the other grimmer hallmarks of past Trump development
projects. Like Atlantic City, it seems full of busloads of the elderly
being led past assorted hookers, small-time hoods, and Elvis
impersonators. Yakov Smirnoff
is the toast of Broadway. And, of course, the city has embraced one of
Trump’s favorite financing techniques — bankruptcy. (Just “taking
advantage” of the country’s laws, as he likes to put it. Or as he
memorably put it in his first inaugural, “Only a schmuck wouldn’t use
those laws to cancel the nation’s debt. Serves those Chinese investors
who bought U.S. Treasurys right. Am I the nation’s best deal-maker, or
what?”)
It is not very luxe on the southern border either. There, a
30-foot-high wall dressed up with the finest gilded barbed wire on top
(“I have the biggest heart. The biggest.”) extends from the Gulf of
Mexico to the Pacific. There is just one small door situated between
Juárez and El Paso. Over it a sign reads “Servant’s Entrance.” Next to
it is a small stand with copies of what has become known as the Trump
Constitution, available in “English and Mexican.” One notable alteration
is that the 14th Amendment has been deleted. (“Some top legal minds
think you can fix the whole problem with white-out. So, that’s what I
did. If someone wants to sue, they can sue. Good luck winning now that I
can print my own money. Am I the world’s best problem solver, or
what?”)
The place where the shine has really come to America, however, is
clearly in the White House. Everybody in the country remembers the
hourlong television special that featured first lady Melania Knauss-Trump taking Americans on a Jackie Kennedy-like tour
of the renovated grounds and “world class” executive mansion. With
fountains like those at Las Vegas’s Bellagio (“only classier, much, much
classier”), the actual Hall of Mirrors from Versailles (“I made
Hollande an offer he couldn’t refuse”), and monitors/screens in every
room that stream an around-the-clock live broadcast of a presidential
reality show that now is showing on every C-SPAN channel (“And the
ratings are killer! I am crushing Dancing with the Stars.), it
is not the first Trump Palace, but is now certainly the biggest.
(Admittedly, it nearly burned down during Trump’s first state dinner
when well-known hothead turned Secretary of State John Bolton actually
spontaneously combusted, setting Chinese President Xi Jinping on fire
while he was eating the “double” Big Mac the president had promised him.
But as the president said, “Fire, what fire? Next question.”)
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