W. Niederhut

Conspiracy "game?" Huh? What a stupid, disingenuous way to describe historiography. Only an idiot would imagine that military and government intelligence agency personnel don't "conspire" to accomplish their foreign and domestic policy objectives.

Damn. It never occurred to me that Boone's Farm may have been part of a Deep State op to make rebellious American teenagers puke... 😩

No, no please...don't remind me of Boone's Farm green apple or strawberry hill... Can't go there again...ever! 😩 But the comic relief is much appreciated. I've been worried sick all day that the newly self-anointed King of Israel will nuke Hurricane Dorian before it hits Mar-a-Lago...

LOL... I needed a good laugh today... 🤣

Good Lord.... Did you already forget about all of those Trump 2016 campaign staff guilty pleas and convictions-- including Manafort, Gates, Flynn, and Papadopoulos? How about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Manafort, Don, Jr. and Veselnitskaya? How about Manafort and Trump altering the 2016 RNC platform in Cleveland to accommodate Putin in the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Manafort sharing polling data with Russian military intelligence hackers? Roger Stone meeting with Julian Assange to discuss the "Wikileaks" material hacked by the GRU? Erovinkin's murder in Moscow the day after Trump was briefed about the Steele Dossier? I can't very well have a meaningful debate about Trump's role in Putin's Gerasimov Doctrine interference in U.S. elections with a guy who hasn't even read the Mueller Report.

Jim, You, obviously, haven't read the Mueller Report, or studied Trump's ponderous rap sheet. Do you know how many times Trump has been found guilty, and/or settled lawsuits for fraud and other crimes? As POTUS, the only thing that has protected Trump from being charged with multiple serious crimes-- including ten counts of obstruction of justice-- is Robert Mueller's stated belief/mandate that a sitting POTUS cannot be indicted. Trump is a compromised Russian asset-- used by Putin as part of the Gerasimov Doctrine strategy of weakening and dividing NATO and the U.S. along ethnic, nationalist and racial fault lines. Are you familiar with the Gerasimov Doctrine?

So ironic that you would mention Dean Baquet (not Dan) in this context. Baquet was the sleazeball at NYT who put the kibosh on any stories about Trump's ties to the Kremlin in 2016, while pushing weekly headlines about the Hillary Clinton Email-gate nothing burger. As for the comparisons of Trump's political sales tactics to those of Hitler and Goebbels, they are based in reality, including the evidence that Trump used to keep a copy of Hitler's speeches on his night stand. Scapegoating minorities and foreigners, race-based nationalism, fomenting anxiety about invaders at the border, pledging to make Germany great again... sound familiar? Of course, there is ample "fake news" in the U.S., including the highly censored coverage of Deep State ops like the JFK assassination and 9/11, but Trump has hardly been a champion of truth. He suppressed the full release of the JFKA records, and never fulfilled his campaign promise to "tell the American people who REALLY destroyed the WTC on 9/11," right? What Trump erroneously refers to as "fake news," is mostly accurate reporting about his own crimes. He is primarily invested in suppressing information about his malfeasance, not improving accurate journalism.

You pretty much nailed it, Joe. I would add, as a character trait related to his lifelong bullying, that Trump has an obvious sadistic tendency that goes beyond what we would see with a mere narcissistic lack of empathy. He seems to genuinely enjoy harming and humiliating people. His biographers have pointed out that he also takes a perverse delight in scamming people -- getting away with defrauding others. As for Trump's frequent references to "fake news," they are similar to what Hitler and Joseph Goebbels referred to as the "Lugenspresse," or "lying press." It was a deliberate targeting of the opposition press, which the Nazi Party completely abolished after burning the Reichstag and declaring martial law. (I mention this in the context of what we know about Trump keeping a copy of Hitler's speeches on his night stand.) Trump is no more interested in supporting an honest and open, free press than were Hitler and Goebbels. Geez...the guy won't even hold a bona fide press conference, or answer questions from real journalists.

And another obvious difference is that Reagan had a team of highly skilled "executives"-- Meese, Baker, et.al-- running his administration, whereas Trump is too narcissistic to hire and delegate authority to qualified executives. That is another serious problem caused by Trump's profound narcissism. He has a delusional, grandiose sense of his own knowledge and wisdom-- a Dunning-Kruger effect on steroids. He doesn't even recognize his own profound ignorance. But, I would like to mention something about Mr. Caddy's references on Trump's apparent dementia. First of all, dementia can, obviously, co-exist with Axis II psychiatric disorders-- i.e., lifelong personality disorders like narcissism and sociopathy. In fact, dementia often unmasks personality disorders. As people age, and begin to lose their "executive," frontal lobe functions, their underlying personality problems (including narcissism) become more glaringly obvious. Secondly, there are many causes of dementia, aphasia, and impaired executive functions. It is a leap to infer that Trump is suffering from fronto-temporal dementia, (FTD) in the absence of neuropsychological testing and an MRI scan of the brain. It is not a "leap," IMO, to infer that Trump has a narcissistic and antisocial personality disorder. In fact, the data is overwhelming.

It's a fair question, especially since some highly paid forensic psychiatrists I have known have the ethical standards of street walkers. As for the Goldwater Rule, it was formally rejected by the American Psychoanalytic Association recently.

That's a tall order, especially since I know less about JFK, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald than most of the forum members here. As for Donald Trump's mental health, or lack thereof, here are two references. (I've read Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee's anthology, but not Dr. Justin Frank's analysis.) Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President https://www.amazon.com/Trump-Couch-Inside-Mind-President/dp/0735220328 The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Case-Donald-Trump-Psychiatrists/dp/1250179459/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0/136-9913104-2347220?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=787JYHMSP6ADM7CZ9P0F

Any opinions from attorneys here (Mr. Caddy, Mr. Santos, et.al.) about whether Mr. Von Pein's posts meet criteria for libel? Doesn't bona fide libel consist in the publication of known falsehoods that are defamatory, with malicious intent, etc.?

There is a great deal of evidence in the public domain about Trump's personality disorder, including vignettes about his childhood history-- punching his music teacher in the eye in grade school, adamantly refusing to ever admit that he was wrong, truancy, and frequent detentions before being sent to a military school at age 13, etc. And, yes, it is possible to make reasonably accurate inferences about the psychiatric disorders of public figures without a sit down interview. The entire field of psychoanalytic history (Erik Erickson, Anthony Storr, et.al.) is predicated on that concept. If anything, a comprehensive, longitudinal history is a far more sound basis for diagnosing some psychiatric disorders than a sit down interview-- especially in the case of antisocial personality disorders, where the subject is skilled at dissembling.

Anyone who is not alarmed by Trump's bizarre behavior this week is not paying attention. I've treated a lot of people with narcissistic personality disorders over the years, but no one as severely impaired as Donald Trump. The essence of NPD is what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut described as the "grandiose self" -- something which emerges in childhood as a defense against inner feelings of worthlessness. People with NPD have fragile self-esteem, and typically become enraged when anyone criticizes them, disagrees with them, or confronts them about their shortcomings. They also have grossly impaired perceptions of people, tending to either idealize or devalue others-- as a projection of their divided sense of self (worthless vs.wonderful.) Trump has repeatedly appointed "idealized" staffers, (and wives) only to devalue, curse, and denigrate them, in time.

E. Howard Hunt's wife?

Well said, Joe. The American middle class has fallen behind the middle classes of most Western European "social democracies" in metrics of prosperity -- income, wealth, healthcare access, education, vacation days, and retirement prospects. And, as Paul Krugman has pointed out recently, the current denigration of "socialism" by the U.S. right wing media is based on an erroneous concept of free market "social democracy" in Western Europe and the G-7. Western European capitalists were not able to destroy the labor movement and denigrate "socialism" as effectively as their American counterparts during the past 70 years. Edward Bernays' techniques, diligently implemented by our captains of industry, have played a major role in the destruction of "social democracy" in the U.S.-- along with the heavily-funded "misanthropic libertarian" machinations of Robber Barons like the Koch brothers, as described in Nancy MacLean's critically-acclaimed history of Koch-ism, Democracy in Chains. Our U.S. political culture has shifted so far to the right in recent decades that Eisenhower Republicanism (and even many of Reagan's policy positions!) would now be regarded as too "liberal" by most Tea Party Republicans.

I recall reading a paper during my psychiatry residency training many years ago (circa 1983) about amphetamines causing rats in close quarters to kill each other. Has anyone looked into the subject of the CIA possibly trafficking in amphetamines at Altamont? The CIA, certainly, seemed to be involved in cocaine trafficking in California during the Iran-Contra years-- if the Gary Webb/Kill the Messenger history is true.

It's truly astonishing to think about the way the mainstream U.S. media (including the NYT!) managed to censor all of the muck on Trump (and Melania) in 2016, while running weekly headlines about the Email-gate nothing burger. We now know that Fox News directly censored the story of Stormy Daniels in October of 2016. I had a debate with a friend about this in the summer of 2016 in which I theorized that the MSM promotion of Trump was most likely about tax cuts. As for the larger story of Bernays and U.S. propaganda in the 20th century, we know that Bernays, himself, had urged America's captains of industry to use his techniques to denigrate socialism. It was a YUGE public relations success story. Socialism has been a very dirty word in U.S. society for the past 80 years-- despite the overwhelming popularity of the New Deal (and Medicare.)

Yeah, Ron, Edward Bernays was Freud's Doppelneffe-- his sister's son and the son of his wife's brother. IMO, he was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Goebbels, certainly, admired his work, and the CIA "Mockingbird" geniuses from OSS psy ops in WWII must have.

Coincidentally, 1963 was also the year that Brian Wilson had his first serious psychotic break and experienced the onset of auditory hallucinations-- according the recently produced biographical film, Love and Mercy, FWIW. Haven't read the reviews, but I thought the film was a poignant portrayal of Wilson's struggle with schizoaffective disorder, and his gradual recovery after he met his second (and current) wife.

People are reflexively cynical about Godwin's Law, but there are many valid parallels between Trump's political tricks and those of Hitler and Goebbels. According to Trump's first wife, Ivana, the Donald used to keep a copy of Hitler's speeches on his night stand, which is all the more bizarre in that Donald Trump never reads any books. Joseph Goebbels was a big fan of Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, the Godfather of modern propaganda and "perception management." Like Trump, Goebbels always staged Hitler's speeches (prior to 1932) in crowded venues with enthusiastic audiences.

Wow. Thanks to Joseph McBride for posting. It never occurred to me that the Altamont and "Manson" murders may have been psy ops/black ops run by the military-industrial complex to destroy the counter culture. I do remember the contemporary headline, "MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES." Jerry Garcia was right. Once in awhile you get shown the light in the strangest of places, if you look at it right.

Unless Lance Payette gets a contract to write, Reclaiming Epstein.

Gerald Posner may get a contract soon to write a new book about Jeffrey Epstein's death. It will be entitled, Case Closed II.

I read somewhere that Bill Barr, himself, had visited Epstein at the MCC after he was attacked two weeks ago. I don't know if the story is true but, if it is, I could image a conversation along the lines... Epstein: Bill, I can't take it any longer. It's unbearable here. I'd rather be dead. Barr: That could be arranged, Jeff. The President doesn't want you to suffer. As you know, he thinks you're a terrific guy.