Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

I have long believed Trump is headed toward a confrontation with Mueller, and those who doubt he will finally take the plunge are making the mistake of judging Trump by the standards of a normal president and not his own demonstrated pathologies. The sacking of FBI staffer Andrew McCabe for alleged unauthorized leaking to the news media, and comments by Trump’s lawyer John Dowd calling for the firing or Robert Mueller add to an ominous drumbeat.

What are the forces and vectors pushing in this direction? Trump of course has been raging against the Department of Justice and the FBI since the campaign itself, when he demanded his opponent be locked up. He fired the FBI director for failing to demonstrate sufficient loyalty, he has repeatedly lashed the attorney general for his obviously necessary recusal from an investigation into the campaign he was part of, and he has repeatedly demanded that the same attorney general investigate his opponents.

Since the firing of James Comey, the staff around Trump have managed to placate, delay, or contain some of these impulses. But nearly every reporter following the White House now agrees that Trump is moving into a new phase of his presidency. He is aware that he has surrounded himself with people who consider him a moron or are trying to save the country from his madness, and he is relentlessly casting them off.

Trump may not be systematically breaking through the protective ring that has surrounded him, because he is barely capable of doing anything in a systematic fashion. But in fits and starts he is lurching in the same basic direction. He is doing the things his aides told him he could not do, or refused to carry out. Imposing tariffs was a major step in asserting his autonomy. Firing Rex Tillerson in humiliating fashionwas another. The case that he would leave Mueller alone relied on the assumption that Trump would stay contained forever. That assumption is crumbling.

It is also notable that Trump’s recent behavior displays a reckless disregard for even his own self-preservation. In his legal battle with Stormy Daniels, Trump is opening himself to legal discovery that may expose campaign finance violations or other misdeeds. He not only demanded the firing of McCabe, he proceeded to taunt his victim.

...

Trump believes law enforcement should operate for his benefit, punishing his enemies and protecting his friends. He admires strongmen. His contempt for democratic norms is characterological. The notion that his own government would investigate him is as unfathomable to Trump as his being called to the carpet by a Trump Organization secretary. Trump is going to go after Mueller at some point because there is no other way for Trump’s febrile mind to make sense of the world.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“Londongrad” is the nickname, not entirely affectionate, that wealthy Russians have bestowed upon Britain’s capital. The term doesn’t just designate a physical place, though many Russians do indeed live here. Londongrad is more properly a state of mind — encompassing not only the nonresident owners of large houses in Kensington, but also the British institutions, banks, law firms, accountants, private schools, art galleries, and even the Conservative Party fundraisers that have gone out of their way to accommodate them.

...

For two decades, the British establishment has agreed not to think too hard about where the Russians got their money — how cash was stolen from the state, recycled in the West, then used to help bring Vladimir Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues to power. In return, the Russians spent a lot of that money in Britain, to the benefit of the British.

The relationship has, at times, been extraordinarily complicit. ...

In her parliamentary statement, the prime minister did leave open the possibility of harsher financial sanctions. But the real question, for Britain — as well as France, Germany and the United States — is whether we are willing to end the financial relationship altogether. We could outlaw tax havens, in the Virgin Islands as well as in Delaware and Nevada; we could make it impossible to buy property anonymously; we could ban Russian companies with dubious origins from our stock exchanges. But that would cost our own financiers and real estate agents, disrupt the discreet flow of cash into the coffers of political parties, deprive the art market of its biggest investors. Does May have the nerve to do that? Do any of us?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“Londongrad” is the nickname, not entirely affectionate, that wealthy Russians have bestowed upon Britain’s capital. The term doesn’t just designate a physical place, though many Russians do indeed live here. Londongrad is more properly a state of mind — encompassing not only the nonresident owners of large houses in Kensington, but also the British institutions, banks, law firms, accountants, private schools, art galleries, and even the Conservative Party fundraisers that have gone out of their way to accommodate them.

...

For two decades, the British establishment has agreed not to think too hard about where the Russians got their money — how cash was stolen from the state, recycled in the West, then used to help bring Vladimir Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues to power. In return, the Russians spent a lot of that money in Britain, to the benefit of the British.

The relationship has, at times, been extraordinarily complicit. ...

In her parliamentary statement, the prime minister did leave open the possibility of harsher financial sanctions. But the real question, for Britain — as well as France, Germany and the United States — is whether we are willing to end the financial relationship altogether. We could outlaw tax havens, in the Virgin Islands as well as in Delaware and Nevada; we could make it impossible to buy property anonymously; we could ban Russian companies with dubious origins from our stock exchanges. But that would cost our own financiers and real estate agents, disrupt the discreet flow of cash into the coffers of political parties, deprive the art market of its biggest investors. Does May have the nerve to do that? Do any of us?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

NEW YORK (AP) — When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.

But that’s exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.

Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.

While none of the documents during a three-year period when Kushner was CEO bore his personal signature, they provide a window into the ethics of the business empire he ran before he went on to become one of the most trusted advisers to the president of the United States.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Late on Friday night, Facebook made a surprising announcement. The company said it was suspending the British firm Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), and its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica famously played a role in microtargeting messages for Donald Trump’s presidential election, using Facebook data in its models. According to bombshell reports in the New York Times and the Observer this morning, it appears that the firm stole the user information it acquired from Facebook.

A whistleblower—a former Cambridge Analytica employee—presented a dossier of evidence to reporters that, according to the Observer, “includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data.” The story is surprising on a number of levels. It suggests that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, intentionally made misrepresentations in recent testimony to the British Parliament. It implicates the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who together played a major role in the Trump campaign. But more than anything, it calls into question Facebook’s handling of what is clearly a massive breach of user privacy.

Journalists, regulatory bodies and Congress should be ready to ask a number of pressing questions to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. The answers are important- governments around the world are considering how best to regulate technology companies, and this extraordinary incident gets to the heart of the relationship between personal data, microtargeting, dark money and the impact of their combination with unaccountable platforms on the health of democracies.

Here are seven key questions:

1. Why did Facebook take more than two years to inform the public of this massive breach?

2. Did the Trump campaign or Cambridge Analytica violate campaign finance laws?

3. Did Trump campaign or Cambridge Analytica employees lie to Congress, or to the British Parliament?

4. Did Facebook’s failure to disclose this breach to the public and notify its directly affected consumers break any laws?

5. Did any of the Facebook embeds in the Trump campaign know that stolen data was being used for targeting?

6. Did Facebook have evidence its own employees mishandled this situation? Was any disciplinary action taken?

7. Did other organizations or individuals exploit these apparent weaknesses, and are there other breaches we do not know about?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

So, who is buying all these guns—and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others.

The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns.

In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]