Re-Diagnosing Donald's Psychopathy

For a very long time, I thought that Donald Trump's psychological disorder was that of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. With additional evidence, particularly from his responses to recent tragedies, I think this is the wrong diagnosis. I think the correct diagnosis is that he's suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder.

According to the DSM-V, the basis for diagnosing a person with a psychological disorder is that (a) it must fit the traits listed, (b) that there are clear impairments of self and interpersonal relations, (c) that it has been stable over a lifetime as an adult, (d) that these traits are not considered normal or expected when measured against that person's socioeconomic position, (e) and that it is not solely due to a substance (such as drugs).

We can see Donald's interpersonal impairments just by looking at his multiple marriages and his cheating on each of them, including when his current wife was pregnant. His lack of close relationships (all of his relationships are business-related, not interpersonal), and how he treats people with whom he claims to have a relationship with, also indicate a psychopathy.

Initially, I thought it was Narcissism.

Under Narcissism, the pathological personality traits are limited to (a) grandiosity (entitlement/self-centered) and (b) attention-seeking. Those traits are all found in Donald, but we can see that Donald's functional problems extend beyond these two categories and that they've long been there if we only put the pieces together of his past and present.

It's Antisocial Personality Disorder.

ASPD is characterized by the traits of (a) deceitfulness, (b) manipulativeness, (c) impulsivity, (d) hostility (to minor things, often resulting in vengeful responses), (e) risk-taking, (f) irresponsibility, (g) and callousness. We can find documented episodes of all these traits from multiple biographies on Donald, but most importantly, we can see clear evidence of these traits in his time in the Oval Office, every day. Previously, we only had periodic episodes captured by biographers; now, we have real-time, complete documentation of his actions to review.

But what about his narcissistic behavior -- those traits most definitely exist but aren't covered in ASPD, are they -- or, is he suffering from multiple psychopathies? Actually, under ASPD, self-impairment is noted by egocentrism and self-esteem issues that are associated with power (or a lack thereof).

That's all I've got for now. I meant to delve into the tactics to leverage his traits against him, but I haven't yet completed that thought process and this is already TL;DR territory.

Sources: APA's comparison of DSM-IV and DSM-V, and Wikipedia (for comparative)

America

In these dark and dire times, where White nationalists wish to strike fear in the minds of Americans, let's fight back with the hope of Neil Diamond's Song, America. Dare I say, let's make this song the theme of the Democratic Party.

America is nothing if not the dream of a land of immigrants. As Emma Lazarus wrote, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Indeed, America needs to be more like the America it's always striven to be; it needs to be that beacon of freedom seen around the world, once again.



Far,
We've been traveling far
Without a home
But not without a star

Free,
Only want to be free
We huddle close
Hang on to a dream

On the boats and on the planes
They're coming to America
Never looking back again,
They're coming to America

Home
Don't it seem so far away
Oh, we're traveling light today
In the eye of the storm
In the eye of the storm

Home
To a new and a shiny place
Make our bed and we'll say our grace
Freedom's light burning warm
Freedom's light burning warm

Everywhere around the world
They're coming to America
Ev'ry time that flag's unfurled
They're coming to America

Got a dream to take them there
They're coming to America
Got a dream they've come to share
They're coming to America

They're coming to America
They're coming to America
They're coming to America
They're coming to America
Today! Today! Today! Today! Today!

My country 'tis of thee (today)
Sweet land of liberty (today)
Of thee I sing (today)
Of thee I sing
Today! Today! Today!

If Heaven Exists...

Do you think it's White-majority?

I think it's a melting pot of good people. To assume otherwise is to explicitly accept an ethnocentric view of Heaven, which as we all know, was not the message of the 12,000 people from each of the 12 tribes of Israel references by Jesus. There was no most-favored tribe of Israel.

Exactly how racist people get into Heaven, therefore, is not apparent. You must lose your hate. Consider, that the New Testament reveals God's explicit command: Love.

And if Heaven is a melting pot of good people, why shouldn't America be that shining example of Heaven? It is utterly ridiculous and naive for people to fear a loss of the White majority. Or put another way, if you can get along with anyone regardless of race, wouldn't you like to have that on your resume when St. Peter greets you at the Gates of Heaven?

I can tell you that the moment before I leave this corporeal world, I will forgive all and cleanse myself of any hate. I do not want that baggage.

RIP Senator John McCain

Why do we honor John McCain? Despite his politics, he was a better man than most of us. When we describe heroes, he is one.

He endured when others would have given up. While held as a POW in Vietnam, he chose to accept years of torture rather than seek the easy way out. Lesser men would have done or said anything to avoid additional years of torture.

"I went back to him three nights later. He asked again, 'Do you want to go home?' I told him 'No.' He wanted to know why, and I told him the reason. I said that Alvarez [first American captured] should go first, then enlisted men and that kind of stuff."
...
"We went through this routine and still I told him 'No' Three nights later we went through it all over again. On the morning of the Fourth of July, 1968, which happened to be the same day that my father took over as commander in chief of U. S. Forces in the Pacific, I was led into another quiz room. 

'The Rabbit' and "The Cat" were sitting there. I walked in and sat down, and 'The Rabbit' said, 'Our senior wants to know your final answer.' 

'My final answer is the same. It's "No."'

'That is your final answer?'

'That is my final answer.'

With this 'The Cat,' who was sitting there with a pile of papers in front of him and a pen in his hand, broke the pen in two. Ink spurted all over. He stood up, kicked the chair over behind him, and said, 'They taught you too well. They taught you too well'—in perfect English, I might add. He turned, went out and slammed the door, leaving 'The Rabbit' and me sitting there. 'The Rabbit' said 'Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you. Go back to your room.'"

Life shows us that it is far more difficult to admit one's errors to the public, let alone to oneself. Throughout his life, John McCain has never shied away from coming clean and taking responsibility for his errors in judgment.

"But the principal reason for invading Iraq, that Saddam had WMD, was wrong. The war, with its cost in lives and treasure and security, can't be judged as anything other than a mistake, a very serious one, and I have to accept my share of the blame for it. None of that was known, of course, that day on the Roosevelt, when I was firm in my convictions, and self-assured. Even if we had been right about Saddam's weapons program, I shouldn't have used the occasion to cheer the prospect of war. All wars are awful."

He is a man of great honor deserving to be remembered for his humility, strength, and earnestness.

Follow-Up to What We Need

The antihero -- the flawed protagonist to our villain -- that I had previously outlined in 2015 as the means to destroying Donald Drumpf, exists: Omarosa.

She's the person we love to hate. In most scenarios, she's actually the antagonist, but in the fight against Donald, she's the flawed protagonist who's willing to sully her own cred to the very end in order to achieve her own sense of justice.

For every tape and comment she unleashes, Donald is driven to an ever-deeper self-destructive act and boy has he spiraled out of control this week. He has reportedly sought to have Jeff Sessions arrest her, though it's not clear what criminal act she's committed.

Every time the WH hits her back, she releases another tape to highlight their lies and counters with a new revelation, triggering them into another public meltdown. While the media loathe to embrace her, her voice and message are being broadcast over all channels. 

Her power to trigger Donald makes her an important antihero that we need, even if we do not want her.

Silicon Valley is NOT Liberal

This is just a brief, quick note. One of the laziest generalizations out there is that Silicon Valley is liberal.

If you review their actions closely, they are most definitely not liberal. What they are, are Progressive Libertarians.

They embrace what could be considered a dualistic belief -- that is in constant tension -- that the government ought to be hands-off and that the government should support progressive policies. On climate change, for instance, Silicon Valley would like to see the government push society towards lower GHG emissions, an inherent conflict of beliefs.

If they were liberals, they would have long ago demanded regulations of all things and an economic policy that was much more cautionary than expansionary.

That is all.

What We Need, Not What We Want

A common microeconomic saying is that needs and wants are not the same. Likewise, in 2018 what we need in America is not the same as what we want. We may want civility and a higher level of dialog, but what we need is a nasty bullfighter who will tear apart Donald Drumpf.

I deeply respect our former FLOTUS - an incredible woman. Her message was the right one at that time and in the context she delivered it. But these are now critical times. And for our future and our children’s, we must have a fighter to end this dumpster fire of a presidency. https://t.co/wUEBVLM16o

— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) August 12, 2018

Back in December 2015, I noted that the way to stop Donald Drumpf was to find a self-sacrificing hero who would take up the cause of being a bullfighter going mano-a-mano with Donald. The presumption then was that the downside was the destruction of one's own cred in the process, eliminating any future political ambitions.

Come 2018 and Donald has plowed the trenches of the deepest abyss -- a place where the vilest, decrepit, evil humans live. This has eliminated the concerns of an anti-Donald bullfighter losing his/her cred; there is so much to attack with, there is no need to dip one's toes into the cesspool where Donald lives.

Out of anonymity came Michael Avenatti, a different type of champion in an anomalous time. First, he took up the cause of an adult film actress and showed how her rights and honor were no less important than anyone else's. Then, he took up the cause of immigrant children who had been illegally separated from their parents and stripped of their dignity. All the while, he has deliberately targeted Donald Drumpf for his incompetence, bad judgment, and criminal behavior.

He's challenged Donald's manhood, his competency, his intelligence, and his values. And Donald has been rendered impotent to fight back. People instinctively know that Avenatti is what we need, which is why so many people are leaking info to him and going to him for help.

We may want a Barack Obama but what we need is a Michael Avenatti.

Patting Myself on the Back.

In light of today's NYT article regarding the circumstances surrounding Rod Rosenstein and the firing of James Comey, I feel that my 5 Thoughts post on the matter was spot-on and is still relevant.

Also, I really need to improve my writing style. Ugh.

General Observations About Pain

Pain blocks itchiness. Also, allergies are a pain in the head.

"Wait, did you mean, 'pain in the ass'?"

No. I friggin mean pain in my face -- from the nasal congestion after sneezing a dozen times.

"Oh."

Yeah.

But on the bright side -- you know there's always a bright side -- pain is a reminder that I'm alive. As the old M.A.S.H. song goes, "suicide is painless", so clearly, I'm alive and able to see the birds, the rainbows, the...

Ah...ah...achoo!

Fuck pain. Where's that ibuprofen?

Today's Thought, June 24, 2018

"The Emperor Has No Clothes!"

I've come upon an epiphany of sorts, thinking about the value of authenticity and what is real. It wasn't until a little kid correctly pointed out that the Emperor's finest silk threads woven intricately was nothing more than air, that the villagers understood the comedy of what had transpired.

As such, and since no one appears willing to go toe to toe with Donald to drag him through the mud, there is an alternative method to destroying him: Physically point at his visage and start laughing at him when he says something stupid or otherwise lies. When he responds with an insult, point again and laugh harder!

Being ridiculed -- especially in the form of being laughed at -- prevents you from having to drag yourself into the mud that Donald lives in, but it is also especially painful for the ego to sustain on a regular basis. It is humiliating to endure, and when everyone else follows the lead and starts laughing, the chorus of laughter directed at Donald would be unbearable.

He is so sensitive to matters of his looks, wealth, and intelligence, it should be extremely easy to humiliate him.

Or not. Some people enjoy watching the Republic collapse, I suppose.

Today's Thought, June 19, 2018

"Help me!"

I sometimes wonder if most things Donald does is really just a quiet scream for help to save him from his ego being crushed -- the implicit calls of a narcissist?

His current rant blaming Democrats for child separations at the border can, in a sense, be understood as a plea for Democrats to save his ego by explicitly banning child separations. From the start of his administration, his call to the Mexican President was a plea for Pieto to save him from embarrassment over the wall.

He didn't understand healthcare policy so his claims of how great his plans were, were actually a call to Republicans to draw up a plan to match his rhetoric. Same goes for Afghanistan, North Korea, global trade, etc.

Those tariffs could actually be his way of pleading with other nations to look the other way to give him foreign policy wins he needs, right before he quietly drops the tariffs and let things resettle back to where they were before.

Absent the response he was looking for, his ego is left with no other choice than to escalate and push through -- until someone saves him, that is.

Republicanism, Explained

72 years ago a prescient (and very talented) Irving Berlin wrote, "Anything You Can Do". Today, it perfectly describes the Republican Party's dogma, and specifically, Donald:

Anything you can do,

I can do better

I can do anything

Better than you.

No, you can't.

Yes, I can. No, you can't.

Yes, I can. No, you can't.

Yes, I can,

Yes, I can!

Anything you can be

I can be greater.

Sooner or later,

I'm greater than you.

No, you're not. Yes, I am.

No, you're not. Yes, I am.

No, you're NOT!. Yes, I am.

Yes, I am!

Anything you can buy

I can buy cheaper.

I can buy anything

Cheaper than you.

Fifty cents?

Forty cents! Thirty cents?

Twenty cents! No, you can't!

Yes, I can,

Yes, I can!

Oh, the vanity and egotism! By any measure, Donald just screwed the pooch and underwhelmed in Singapore in his dealing with NK.

US - DPRK Outcome

The following statement from the U.S. was released:

In the agreed statement, we and the DPRK also said that as part of the final resolution of the nuclear issue we are prepared to establish diplomatic representation in each other's capitals and to reduce barriers to trade and investment, as a move toward full normalization.

Representation would initially take the form of liaison offices. This will be closely linked to overall progress on the nuclear issue. 

On north-south relations, the DPRK stated that it remains prepared to implement the North-South joint declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. We told the DPRK representative that the U.S. is prepared to provide the the DPRK with assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons against it by the U.S.

The date of this statement's release was August 13, 1994.*

I tricked you, my dear reader, to help you understand that today's joint statement from Kim Jong-Un and Donald amounted to a reiteration of what President Clinton and Kim Jong-Il produced some 24 years ago.

This should concern you a great deal.

Only an inept, gullible team like Donald's administration would have basically reproduced the Clinton-era agreement and added honorifics throughout in order to appease Kim Jong-Un. Donald's cordial treatment with direct talks between two leaders is just fodder for North Korea.




* -- Refers to the US-DPRK 4-part agreement that was summarized and sent to US diplomats around the world.

The Hallmarks of a Bad Relationship

The compilation of details from Donald's letter to North Korea, and from before/after:

☑️ -- You didn't answer my calls.
☑️ -- I even had a special token made to commemorate our relationship.
☑️ -- You were talking bad about me behind my back.
☑️ -- I kept saying nice things about you to everyone.
☑️ -- They told me you weren't being sincere in our relationship.
☑️ -- I think you're trying to sabotage this relationship.
☑️ -- I wanted to be the one to break our relationship up.
☑️ -- But if you treat me nice again, I'd reconsider.

The Questions Mueller Apparently Wants to Ask Donald

Via NYT, h/t to Rachel Maddow Show, here's the list of questions that Mueller's special counsel apparently wants to ask Donald.

The list is long and the questions are all open-ended. Even with advanced knowledge of the questions, every one of them has its own peril, as each question is directly meant to establish an intention of either conspiracy or obstruction (or worse). For someone as garrulous and prone to bullshitting as Donald is, this is an impossible task for him, particularly if the interview were conducted in-person, as there would be dozens of follow-up questions stemming from each one in this list. Also, let's not forget that Mueller's team has already collected tons of physical evidence and testimony to establish a factual record of these events, making many of these questions perjury traps in and of themselves.

As we already know that the Mueller team does not leak a single thing, we can only conclude that the White House leaked these questions to the NYT, but the motivation is unclear. If anything, it shows just how many individual events directly relate to the criminal threats he's facing. 

1. What did you know about phone calls that Mr. Flynn made with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in late December 2016?
2. What was your reaction to news reports on Jan. 12, 2017, and Feb. 8-9, 2017?
3. What did you know about Sally Yates’s meetings about Mr. Flynn?
4. How was the decision made to fire Mr. Flynn on Feb. 13, 2017?
5. After the resignations, what efforts were made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardon?
6. What was your opinion of Mr. Comey during the transition?
7. What did you think about Mr. Comey’s intelligence briefing on Jan. 6, 2017, about Russian election interference?
8. What was your reaction to Mr. Comey’s briefing that day about other intelligence matters?
9. What was the purpose of your Jan. 27, 2017, dinner with Mr. Comey, and what was said?
10. What was the purpose of your Feb. 14, 2017, meeting with Mr. Comey, and what was said?
11. What did you know about the F.B.I.’s investigation into Mr. Flynn and Russia in the days leading up to Mr. Comey’s testimony on March 20, 2017?
12. What did you do in reaction to the March 20 testimony? Describe your contacts with intelligence officials.
13. What did you think and do in reaction to the news that the special counsel was speaking to Mr. Rogers, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Coats?
14. What was the purpose of your calls to Mr. Comey on March 30 and April 11, 2017?
15. What was the purpose of your April 11, 2017, statement to Maria Bartiromo?
16. What did you think and do about Mr. Comey’s May 3, 2017, testimony?
17. Regarding the decision to fire Mr. Comey: When was it made? Why? Who played a role?
18. What did you mean when you told Russian diplomats on May 10, 2017, that firing Mr. Comey had taken the pressure off?
19. What did you mean in your interview with Lester Holt about Mr. Comey and Russia?
20. What was the purpose of your May 12, 2017, tweet?
21. What did you think about Mr. Comey’s June 8, 2017, testimony regarding Mr. Flynn, and what did you do about it?
22. What was the purpose of the September and October 2017 statements, including tweets, regarding an investigation of Mr. Comey?
23. What is the reason for your continued criticism of Mr. Comey and his former deputy, Andrew G. McCabe?
24. What did you think and do regarding the recusal of Mr. Sessions?
25. What efforts did you make to try to get him to change his mind?
26. Did you discuss whether Mr. Sessions would protect you, and reference past attorneys general?
27. What did you think and what did you do in reaction to the news of the appointment of the special counsel?
28. Why did you hold Mr. Sessions’s resignation until May 31, 2017, and with whom did you discuss it?
29. What discussions did you have with Reince Priebus in July 2017 about obtaining the Sessions resignation? With whom did you discuss it?
30. What discussions did you have regarding terminating the special counsel, and what did you do when that consideration was reported in January 2018?
31. What was the purpose of your July 2017 criticism of Mr. Sessions?
32. When did you become aware of the Trump Tower meeting?
33. What involvement did you have in the communication strategy, including the release of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails?
34. During a 2013 trip to Russia, what communication and relationships did you have with the Agalarovs and Russian government officials?
35. What communication did you have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign?
36. What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding any meeting with Mr. Putin? Did you discuss it with others?
37. What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding Russian sanctions?
38. What involvement did you have concerning platform changes regarding arming Ukraine?
39. During the campaign, what did you know about Russian hacking, use of social media or other acts aimed at the campaign?
40. What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your campaign, including by Paul Manafort, to Russia about potential assistance to the campaign?
41. What did you know about communication between Roger Stone, his associates, Julian Assange or WikiLeaks?
42. What did you know during the transition about an attempt to establish back-channel communication to Russia, and Jared Kushner’s efforts?
43. What do you know about a 2017 meeting in Seychelles involving Erik Prince?
44. What do you know about a Ukrainian peace proposal provided to Mr. Cohen in 2017?

---

ADD: I just had the revelation of why someone inside of the White House leaked this list. They wanted to use the panoply of public, legal experts to weigh in on the seriousness/level of risk of the case against Donald, as if to demonstrate to Donald that he hasn't fully comprehended just how much trouble he's in, and how his outrageous tweets and off-script statements are making it worse.

St. Vincent.

St. Vincent. She speaks to my soul. I discovered her when watching her perform, via YouTube, at Coachella, the other week. I think I need to start listening to KNRK again; I've been missing out on too many good groups and tunes.

What People Don't Understand About Generation X

Douglas Coupland's seminal book, which gave rise to the term, long ago summed up the ethos of a generation: Fuck the world because it already fucked me over royally.

Does it sound like an excuse to not give a fuck about the world? It isn't. Ask many liberal baby boomers and they'll openly admit that their generation screwed up later generations. What they won't tell you is that their greed, which has turned into legacy wealth, shall be passed down to their progeny -- the Y-Generation/the Millenials. Well then, the only generation that has been screwed is the X-Gen.

The baby boomers -- the yuppies and their Gordon Gekko-worshiping of greed that drove materialistic consumerism into a mountain of personal debt and false claims of self-reliance -- are to blame. Their embrace of Reaganism and the continued idiocy of the love affair with low taxes and the dismantling of the welfare system of the Great Society has left us with...the Shithole Society.

Grunge was our zeitgeist. Come as you are. We said, "fuck you very much, corporate assholes."

And the goddamn baby boomers fucking commercialized it and turned it into a fashion statement.

Fuck the world.

That's what Generation X is about. Fucking reality bites.

Change.

Change is -- no matter what anyone says -- difficult.

It's taken me some time to finally reach the point where I've freed my creative mind from the constraints of professional practice. I've always told myself that I'll know the point where my design has reached the point of freedom. After dozens of iterations of multiple ideas and countless redirections, I've found myself, again.



When I say that I've found myself, again, what I mean is that I've rediscovered the pure creativity that I'd lost from working within the confines of a firm. Before I was laid off during the crisis of 2008, I'd started exploring some unique design language that would have separated myself from anyone else at the firm I'd been working for, and for that matter anywhere else.

Some might say that I trapped myself by working at firms that are mediocre at best. Maybe. But the problem one might encounter from working at a creative firm is that of absorption of someone else's language. Each high-end design firm has a distinguishable design language, whether Olson-Kundig, Gehry Partners, or Rotondi.

Mediocrity is the security blanket of working within the known design language of others; you're not truly creative if you cannot or will not explore and define your own design language.

When I say that I've found myself, again, I mean that the self-identity I'd just birthed during my 3rd year in design school has finally been rediscovered.



Part of this rediscovery came in the form of revisiting old projects from design studio, using modern tools of 3D modeling (above) with a matured capacity for self-exploration.

I know I'm better. I know I've got the ability and capacity to explore and judge my work, such that my own language is clear and understandable.

The Rubicon of Climate Change

You might think that, by hitting some arbitrary target of max climate warming over the next decade or two, we'll be okay, as if that were the Rubicon. We've long crossed the Rubicon.

The evidence is there: rising ocean levels, collapsing glaciers, disappearing Arctic ice mass, stronger storms and droughts, ocean acidification, everything. The presence of these effects is the evidence that we've crossed the Rubicon.

Raise the temperature slightly and the ice cube melts slightly faster. Hold the temperature at the current level and the ice cube still melts but at the current pace.

If the Earth's natural systems can attenuate X units of carbon dioxide but we're already releasing X*1.2 units of carbon dioxide, even if we stopped the increase of carbon dioxide, we're still left with an accumulation of excess carbon dioxide.

What we're engaged in, is wishful thinking.

The Paris Accord may have been the world's best effort to date, but it is what politicians do to make themselves feel better about a problem so enormous, that the only palatable political solution is to sell incremental change as heroic action. That scientists offered an arbitrary target of max global warming, is akin to President Obama cutting down the size of his own stimulus package to make it agreeable for politicians to vote for.

We're still moving forward with the worst of the climate change effects, but we're putting it off into some further distant future, partly on the belief that we'll be able to build the technologies to further attenuate or actively reverse climate change. And I agree that we should be able to discover and build such technologies, but the costs will be higher than if we made those investments today, and we'll still feel the effects of climate change.

If you asked the soul of the dead frog whose body was boiled slowly what his Rubicon was, he would gladly tell you that it was the moment someone turned the stove on.

The Meaning of Life

I had an epiphany this morning on the meaning of life:

Life is about

living as long

and

as well

as you can.

That's it. There is no deeper meaning to life; everything we attribute to life and death, good or bad, long or short, fits into this simple description.

At this point in life, this epiphany is more like a tool to pivot away from the past and into a different phase of life. Translation: It's nearing spring cleaning time and part of the spring cleaning also means major life changes.