Sunday, February 10, 2019

Overstimulated

Via Institut Français de l'Éducation.

One of the worst things is that the 2020 presidential campaign seems to have begun. In fact it seems to have begun several months ago but I was in denial until the official announcements started coming out, but it's now impossible to ignore, because of course the media doesn't want to talk about anything other than Gillibrand's concern about the most photogenic way to eat chicken and waffles.

Incidentally,

You don't remember that, do you? Neither do I. That's because the only reporter with the courage to cover it was Kathleen Carey of the Daily Times of Delaware County, PA; when W claimed that he, unlike that decadent patrician John Kerry, took his cheesesteaks "Whiz with," he was prevaricating:
And the intrepid Carey came up with her own expose. She reported that Bush actually “prefers his steak absent of the usual Cheez Whiz and provolone, accompanied only by cheese of the American variety,” information that she obtained from her own Deep Throat, one Caeser Barnabei, the owner of the well-known cheesesteak shop, Jim’s Place. Barnabei, who has fed the Bush camp on previous swings through Pennsylvania and provided “70 to 80 hoagies” for the Bush campaign yesterday, confided to Carey that “the Jim’s Special is altered to whet the ‘W’ appetite.”
Meanwhile,


That is, the mid-range missiles that are forbidden under the INF treaty that Trump is gleefully tearing to pieces; as could have been, and probably was predicted, the truly gleeful one is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who has dived into violating it right away, almost before the six-month waiting period has even gotten started (while publicly deploring Trump's abrogation of it in deeply tsk-tsk terms, which will allow Trump to cite this as an instance of how he was "tough" with the Russian president). North Ossetia is just across the border from South Ossetia, one of the territories Putin stole from the Georgian Republic in 2012 in what was probably a bigger land grab, proportionately, that all the land Russia has stolen in the Ukraine.

Also, Trump employs so many illegal immigrants in his hotels and golf resorts that there are entire villages in Costa Rica living off remittances from Bedminster:

Naturally the Trump organization has started firing them all.

And he decided he's entitled to ignore the Magnitsky Act:
And the inauguration committee:
Digby quotes Jennifer Senior in the New York Times:
“Our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime,” writes the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.”
Recently, I phoned Levitin. He told me he suspects that humans during the Trump era are unwittingly re-enacting the rat experiments that James Olds and Peter Milner did in the 1950s, wherein the creatures repeatedly pressed a lever to feel an electric jolt to their reward centers. The poor subjects became such hostages to gratification that they stopped eating, drinking, even having sex. Eventually, they died of exhaustion.
And adds, on her own account,

I am one of those rats zapping myself for stimulation and I think it's possible that I will, in fact, die of exhaustion. 
I realize that I'm not a normal American in this instance. I am immersed in this stuff 24/7 and have been for many years. But there is something different now. It's much, much more intense but I'd guess that many millions of normal people are feeling this more than they used to as well. 
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