lookin

More than 40 monkeys escape South Carolina research facility. I sure hope they don't start posting here in the Politics Forum.

I've been wondering if Trump could find a way to sell without crashing the stock and one way (if he doesn't sell outright to Musk) would be to arrange for someone to buy 10 million shares on a day when Trump sells 10 million shares. Putin couldn't do it, but one of his oligarchs could. Bin Salman could. Musk could. It seems a fairly transactional way for Trump to sell shares without cratering the stock price. Even retail Trump followers could buy up Trump's sales, although they wouldn't be as predictable as a whale or two. In fact, when I look at some of the daily trading volumes lately, it looks as if insiders must be unloading stock already. Could Trump be one of them? He says he won't sell, but he says a lot of things. 🗣️ I'm not so sure. Even if Trump loses, as he did in 2020, he still has the ability to divide the country and erode trust between the U. S. and our traditional allies. He's been out of office for four years but his pathogenic social disruption has slowed down little, if at all. We've been accustomed to ex-presidents who fade away when they lose elections but Trump seems to find new ways to keep us fighting among ourselves. And that's got to be useful to Putin.

Well, if DJT's price really is an indicator of Trump's electability - and I have no reason to doubt it - then Trump is 22% less electable today than he was yesterday. And after-hours trading shows he's another 5% less electable than at the market close. Based on today's valuation, Trump Media is worth $8 billion. I was surprised to learn that Musk's X now has an estimated market cap of only $9 billion, down 80% from the $44 billion he paid for Twitter. I don't know what either company would actually sell for, but I continue to believe that Trump's best bet would be to unload find a buyer for Trump Media and the ideal pigeon candidate would seem to be Musk. Perhaps they're waiting until after the election when Trump could be President and Musk could be the Secretary of Efficiency. If they could do for the GDP what they've done for their media companies, they could solve immigration too. We'd have millions of folks lined up at the borders waiting to get out.

If you believe that authoritarian followers make up most of Trump's base, which I do, and if you understand authoritarian followers, which I think I do, it explains much of the otherwise puzzling loyalty of Trump's base. Authoritarian followers need a leader. It doesn't matter what Trump does (as he himself has said), they will stick to him until another leader comes along that they can attach to. They will vote against their own interests rather than give up their leader. I don't think they'll magically change just because someone points out the failures of their leader. They've already taken that into account. We can despair that they're so illogical, we can tell them what lies in store for them, and/or we can try to reason with them, but that's not how authoritarian followers work. They need a leader to give them the simple answers they need to manage their fear of 'the other'. Trump is their leader and they will not give him up until there's someone else to take his place. They will not go without someone to follow. At least that's how I see it, and it's the one explanation that makes all the pieces fit together - for me anyway. My own hope is that, while they may stay with Trump as their personal leader, they won't necessarily turn out to vote. Trump has told them for years that elections are 'rigged' and that votes aren't reliable. He has also held out the threat that he will claim the presidency even if he loses the vote. I doubt there are many Democrats who believe their votes don't matter and, with any luck, that will tip the scales. 🤞

Cambridge Analytica gave me my first insight into how the manipulation was actually done and led to just enough voters in just the right precincts casting their votes for Trump in 2016, and that got him just enough Electoral College votes to win the Presidency. It claimed to possess detailed profiles on 230 million American voters based on up to 5,000 data points, everything from where you live to whether you own a car, your shopping habits and voting record, the medications you take, your religious affiliation, and the TV shows you watch. This data is available to anyone with deep pockets. But Cambridge professed to bring a unique approach to the microtargeting techniques that have become de rigueur in politics. It promised to couple consumer information with psychological data, harvested from social-media platforms and its own in-house survey research, to group voters by personality type, pegging them as agreeable or neurotic, confrontational or conciliatory, leaders or followers. It would then target these groups with specially tailored images and messages, delivered via Facebook ads, glossy mailers, or in-person interactions. I saw a couple of these ads on the internet once and they were aimed directly at the beliefs and fears of their target audience, which may have been only a handful of people. But they were likely voters and they were in the precincts that Trump needed to win. The ads were deleted from the internet soon after they were delivered to their targets. It was pure manipulation without leaving many tracks. Steve Bannon is a special case. I recall him saying clearly that he wanted to tear down 'the system'. He didn't say what he wanted to replace it with. He just wanted to tear it down. And when you take such direct and destructive aim at the bonds that underpin our society, that's when I think you've gone beyond 'free speech' or 'politics' and you've moved into pathogenic behavior. I think society has a need and a right to protect itself from these assaults.

Not in the least! You've had Trump's number from the get-go. And I agree with you that, even if Trump loses, we will still be vulnerable to the pathogens that come out of his mouth every time he opens it. We can dismiss it as 'just politics' or 'free speech' but the damage it has done to both individuals and to society as a whole has been, in my opinion, destabilizing to the point of fracture. If he loses the election, he'll continue to tear at the social bonds that have kept us united to this point. And I'd like to see us address the past damage and the potential for future damage as a public health issue. We've tackled nationwide physical health issues in the past and I'd like to see us tackle nationwide mental health issues with the same urgency. In the meantime, I'll encourage each one of us to pay attention to what is entering our minds, how we feel about it and what we do with those feelings. If I find myself passing along social pathogens, I become part of the problem. And that's not good for my mental health or anyone else's. At least, that's how I've got it figured out so far.

Ever since 2016 when Trump rode down the escalator and started his rant about Muslims and immigrants, I realized that he was a voice dedicated to causing division and not unity. The best analogy I could think of was that he was spreading pathogens without regard for those who would catch the social illness he was causing. I’ve posted about this over the years and have wondered why the analogy has not become mainstream. There are certainly enough examples of damage to individuals and to social groups, including our nation and the democracy which has bound us together for 250 years. While Trump is still, in my opinion, the super-spreader, there are many around him who have picked up the disease and passed it on to those around them and, over time, throughout the nation and abroad. It has mystified me that we often seem to be sleepwalking through a plague that is every bit as damaging to our species as typhoid, HIV and Covid. Even more damaging when you realize we don’t have any vaccines against a social plague. To further explore the analogy between a physical plague and a social plague, I went back to the case of Typhoid Mary, a cook in the New York City area in the early 1900’s, and an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever. At the time, there was little awareness that someone could carry and pass along typhoid germs without showing any symptoms herself. It took a private investigator to track down several families who had been infected by typhus and learn that they had all hired Mary Mallon as a cook shortly before they became ill. When she was contacted by the investigator, she refused to give urine and stool samples and denied that she could have passed on the disease to others. The New York City Health Department stepped in, had her arrested as a public health threat, and forced her to provide samples. They determined that she was loaded with typhus germs and kept her confined for nearly three years. There was a lot of disagreement about the way she was treated and she was eventually released, after promising she would no longer work as a cook. She soon realized she could make $50 a month as a cook and only $20 a month as a maid, so went back to cooking again. Of course, more infections and deaths followed her around and she was once again arrested and put into quarantine for the rest of her life. I shared this analogy with a friend last week and he asked about conditions back in the early 1900’s versus today. He hit the nail on the head and we discussed the fact that no one really understood that an apparently healthy carrier could pass on pathogens to others causing sickness and death. So it was difficult to trace the illnesses back to an individual asymptomatic carrier and, even once that had happened, there were few laws in place to remove the source of the infections. Today we’ve got that knowledge, along with the tools to stop the spread of pathogens. At least that’s true for biological pathogens. But when it comes to social pathogens that can cause social disease among a broad segment of the population, we’re right back to where we were more than a century ago. I don’t think we’ve yet documented the types and amounts of social damage that can be done by spreading divisiveness, fear, anger, and hatred throughout our society. We can see the results all around us and many of us will experience a decline in social bonds as our brains fill up with negative feelings and disconnection from large parts of our society. We could easily make a case that this decline in social health ends up in a world war. We’ve often considered that the human species could be wiped out by a physical plague but, to me anyway, it seems just as likely that we could be wiped out by a social plague. The role of social media seems abundantly clear in this process. It gives one antisocial individual the opportunity to infect millions of others in less than a minute. And the algorithms are tuned so that the antisocial pathogens are transmitted most efficiently to those who are vulnerable to a message of divisiveness. It’s the equivalent of setting up a Typhoid Mary kissing booth in every home connected to the internet. I think the analogy also extends to the lack of awareness and the lack of tools available to New York City doctors dealing with typhus a century ago compared with the lack of awareness and lack of tools we have today in dealing with the spread of social illness. Just as Typhoid Mary complained that she wasn’t doing anything wrong and that she had the right to cook for anyone who would hire her, we have social disruptors complaining that they’re not doing anything wrong and that the First Amendment gives them the right to say anything they want, no matter how many people they infect and no matter how damaging it is to our society. Mary Mallon took her first cooking job and began to infect her employers’ families in 1900. She was tracked down and written up in 1907. She was first quarantined between 1907 and 1910. She was released and continued to cook and infect others for eight more years until she was again tracked down and placed in quarantine until her death twenty-three years later. Donald Trump came down his escalator in 2016 and began spreading pathogens when he got to the bottom and faced the cameras. I believe he’s been a superspreader in the eight years since. I wish I knew when the public health experts will start including social pathogens in their battle against physical pathogens. Until we develop a mental immune system, or a herd immunity, and/or some kind of vaccine against social pathogens, I guess it will be up to us as individuals to be aware of what kind of ideas we let enter our brains and damage us. To those already infected, it will be difficult to stop them from spreading the damage simply because passing these social pathogens along is part of the illness. I don’t know if anyone will bother reading this lengthy post, or - inshallah - responding with their own ideas. But it sure helped me get a few thoughts together. Please consider it a social sneeze, behind a mask of course and on my way to wash up.

Chris Christie always knows how to twist the knife. 😄 On Sunday, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie told ABC This Week that a controversy of Robinson was “predictable” because Robinson’s tenure in public life “has shown erratic, sometimes highly offensive statements over and over again”. But Christie acknowledged that it was a problem for Republicans because “as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we’re going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.” Christie said he doubted that other Republicans would be affected, a political concept know(n) as “reverse coattails”, but said Robinson “is starting to get the feel for what it’s like to have been a former friend of Donald Trump’s”. He added: “Donald Trump, from a political perspective, smells rotting flesh better than anybody you’ll ever find ... And I bet you, George, before we get to November 5, he’s going to claim to not even really know who Mark Robinson is.”

Well now, there's her first State Dinner! Curried Chicken à la Donald Trump Ingredients: 2 1/2 lb chicken pieces 3 large onions roughly chopped (paste) 2 large tomatoes pureed 2 Tbsp garlic-ginger paste 2 Tsp coriander powder 2 Tsp cumin powder ½ Tsp turmeric powder ½ Tsp red chilli powder 1 Tsp garam masala powder salt to taste 2 Tbsp ghee coriander chopped for garnishing Instructions: 1. Heat ghee in a pan. Add onion paste and ginger-garlic paste. Sauté this paste until golden brown. 2. Add the tomato puree to the mixture in the pan. Then add the powder spices; coriander powder, cumin powder, garam masala, red chilli powder, and turmeric powder. Add salt as required and sauté the mixture well until the ghee starts to separate. 3. Add the chicken pieces to the pan and stir them well until they are coated in the mixture. Cook them until they start changing color and turn golden brown. 4. Add 1 and ½ cup of water and stir the chicken. Cover the pan with a lid and let the chicken cook until it turns tender. 5. Once cooked, you can garnish the curry with chopped coriander and serve it hot with steamed basmati rice or roti. Can be prepared ahead, hair-sprayed and stored in a dark place for up to four years.

See, right here in the Talmud it says, 'If a kippah makes you look silly, a MAGA hat is permitted.'

DJT's average daily trading volume is just under 9 million shares. Today's volume was 13 million shares. That suggests to me that some insiders came out of lockup and sold a few. Not a lot and it will be interesting to see if it continues next week. I wonder who sold today?

The "lockup" period, during which Trump and other insiders can't sell their stock, is likely to expire this Thursday, September 19th - as long as the stock price stays above $12. If it drops below that price, the lockup period will expire on September 25th. Trump has said he's not going to sell any of his stock - and I think he'd be crazy to do so at this point - but other insiders are free to sell theirs. That would include Don Junior and Devin Nunes who is currently running the company. Also free to sell its 8 million shares is ARC Global, one of the early investors. If it were me, I'd probably hang on to the stock and hope Trump can sell the whole mess in one fell swoop. But I can understand those who want to get out now and won't be surprised if selling pressure drives the price down further at the end of this week or early next week. At the current price, I understand that Trump's shares are worth around $2 billion, about half of his $4 billion net worth. But the company is losing money and not growing its already low subscriber base. As far as I can tell, its only value lies in a $300 million pile of cash. Since Trump owns 60% of the company, his share of that hard asset would be just under $200 million. If he doesn't sell the company and rides it down to zero, his total net worth would then be around $2 billion. Forbes says it would be more like $1.7 billion. If I recall, he's got fines coming due in an amount right around a half-billion dollars. It's amazing to think that, when he rode down that elevator in 2016, he said he was worth $10 billion and now he may actually be worth a tenth of that amount. I recall posting at that time that paying him a real $10 billion to just go away and never be heard from again would be one of the best investments this country could ever make. I wonder if he also wishes he could roll back the clock.

Dogs and cats and geese better scurry Immigrants eat them up in a hurry Either raw or cooked in a curry 🎶 🎶 🎶 Says the guy With a fringe on top

Quite the contrary. I may have been a bit too cute with the irony in my post. I think you and I see things pretty much the same way. Most of the focus seems to be on the influencers and, in posts gone by, on the authoritarian 'leaders'. And that's appropriate, necessary and fine with me. But I also have been looking closely at authoritarian followers and, lately, on those who are influenced by the social media influencers. Authoritarian followers caused a lot of trouble in Hitler's Germany. I read an account from one of Hitler's secretaries about the day after Hitler committed suicide. Civilian staff in the bunker were slipping away to make it through Berlin toward the American soldiers in the west. Most of the military staff were trying to do the same thing, but many were shot outside the bunker by German soldiers who had taken an oath of loyalty to Hitler and they considered any soldier who wanted to escape to be a traitor and deserving of death. They considered this 'oath of loyalty' to Hitler to be in force, even though Hitler was dead. Those are the kind of authoritarian followers who give me the willies. The Trump followers who marched to the Capitol on January 6th to "Hang Mike Pence" give me the willies too. And, while I'm not as rattled by those who 'follow' the Tenet Media influencers who took money from the Russians to fill their followers' heads with anti-democratic ideas, the day may soon come when I am. A follower with a computer is one thing but a follower with brass knuckles and a gun is quite another. I think it's shortsighted not to understand these authoritarian followers, what makes them tick and, most important, how to make sure they don't end up following someone who wants to mobilize them against what still remains of our democratic society. We definitely need to pay attention to the influencers but, in my opinion, we need to pay attention to the 'influencees'. There are many more of them and, when led down a destructive path, they can tear a nation apart. My preference, of course, would be for a society full of independent thinkers who look at a wide range of information and reach their own conclusions. But history and social research tells us that there will always be a subset of followers. If that's the case, we need to find a way to reach them and make sure they don't get pulled along toward destructive behaviors.

Gotta admit, this whole ‘influencer’ thing pretty much snuck up on me. We had class presidents and prom kings and queens in my salad days but we didn’t follow them around and try to act like them. Fact is our ‘B’ group had more activities going on that the ‘A’ group would come and join. There were more of us and we were more active. So it seems strange to me now that millions of kids and young adults are latching on to some pretty shallow ‘influencers’ and trying to mimic their moves and their thoughts, such as they are. Maybe it’s because young folks spend so much time on their screens where shiny objects draw the most attention. The idea that Russia or anybody else would spend millions of dollars hiring ‘influencers’ to brainwash their followers - influencees? - caught me by surprise and made me worry that independent thinkers might be a dying breed. But I realize it’s the same kind of worrying that I do about authoritarian followers and that they’re probably cut from the same cloth as social media followers. If so, they'll likely be a steady third of the population. I try my best to understand what makes followers tick and to honor the choices they make - or, more likely - the choices they don’t make. I sure wouldn’t want to log in to a website every day to find out what I’m supposed to think. Except maybe this one. Every day, it seems my esteemed fellow posters do all the research and lay out the facts so thoroughly that all I need to do is hit the ‘Like’ button. And if Putin wants to slip them a fistful of rubles, who am I to make waves?

Personally, I've never cosied up to a Log Cabin Republican, but if someone is gay and also buys into a politically conservative worldview I imagine it's good to have a group who shares the same views. I wouldn't make it illegal, that's for sure, and I'd do my best not to be judgmental unless I felt that I was being judged for being a gay liberal. I might think they're naive or perhaps misinformed in some ways, but I expect they'd think the same of me. So I'd willingly enter into a debate and see where we come out. But, just like the mainstream Republican party has been infested by the Trump lunacy, the Log Cabin Republicans probably have too. And I doubt it's easy. To be a Mar-a-Lago Cabin Republican, I'd have to be attracted to guys, long for life pre-Stonewall, and pretend that Donald Trump should be America's boss and the leader of the free world. It would be a heavy lift. I think the hardest part would be finding some orange lip gloss so I didn't leave any prints on his ass. 💋

Seems like the stock price is a bet on whether or not Trump gets elected. If he doesn't, the company continues to lose money and DJT becomes a penny stock. If he does, I expect the price will go up. But even then, he couldn't unload his shares without cratering the stock price. My guess is that he's hoping to get elected and then sell the company to somebody with more money than sense. Hmm. I wonder who that could be.

Gosh, I sure hope they sent it to the cleaners first.

Perhaps he could hire a stand-in.

Apparently Melania's Mar-a-Lago speech to the Log Cabin Republicans cost them $237,500. I'm guessing Donald also made a tidy sum renting out the space and feeding them. Not that there's anything wrong with that. No doubt they brought in a lot more than that from members who wanted to hear what was on the former First Lady's mind. Personally, I've never heard her say anything that I'd pay to hear. I could see forking over a couple grand to go hear Dolley Madison speak but, when it comes to the Trumps, I'm more of a 'silence-is-golden' kind of guy.

This isn't a Valencia. Feels more like Silly Putty. All my feet are sticking. Terrible place to lay an egg. One quick dump and I'm outta here. 💩 🪰 🌀

Hmm. 🤔 Well let's see. First off, Haniyeh was Hamas' chief negotiator in peace talks being brokered by Egypt and Qatar. So those are now off the table, perhaps for good. Second, Haniyeh was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran's newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who publicly supported revisiting Iran's nuclear deal that Trump aborted in 2018. So that glimmer of hope has been squelched. And, third, right in the middle of installing a new more Western-leaning administration, Iran's territorial integrity was publicly and violently breached. So there's a sucker punch waiting to be avenged. If Israel had sat down specifically to create a plan for widening the war, I don't see how they could have done much more than they did with this assassination. Fortunately, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is more optimistic than I am. "I don't think war is inevitable," Austin said. "I maintain that. I think there's always room and opportunity for diplomacy, and I'd like to see parties pursue those opportunities." Wouldn't we all?

Maybe he's postal, Maybe it's Maybelline© 🎶 🎶 🎶

As far as I can tell, there's a built-in problem for authoritarian followers. They have to wait until their leader has settled in on what they need to believe. If they head out on their own today, and the leader takes a different direction tomorrow, they've got some serious cleanup to do. Or they may be under the bus for good. Trump is unpredictable on the best of days. With the curves he's been thrown recently (Biden, Harris, Project 2025), he's going to take some time figuring out his targets. Anyone who speaks his mind before then is taking a big risk. I'd be surprised if someone as opinionated as Vance stays out of trouble. I wouldn't be surprised to hear radio silence from Trump's loyal followers until the cue cards are signed off and printed.

Perhaps Trump farts botox?