Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

Stocks Sink as Wall Street Grapples With Growth Concerns

Winning.

Reduced growth = Lower earnings = lower treasury receipts in the form of tax collections = higher deficit = higher inflation = erosion of US prosperity.

Guess who will get hit the hardest? Those earning under $100K.....oh wait, the constituents of poor states who vote red.

The U.S. posted the widest November budget deficit on record as spending doubled revenue.

Outlays jumped 18 percent to $411 billion last month, while receipts were little changed at $206 billion, the Treasury Department said in a monthly report on Thursday. That left a $205 billion shortfall, compared with a $139 billion gap a year earlier.

The U.S. ran the largest deficit in six years in fiscal 2018, the first full year of Donald Trump’s presidency when his Republican party enacted a tax-cut package and raised federal spending for the military and other priorities. The measures have added to the growing federal deficit, which is forecast to push past $1 trillion by 2020 when the U.S. next holds presidential elections.

In the first two months of the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, the gap widened to $305.4 billion, compared with $201.8 billion the same period a year earlier.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

As Rick Noack pointed out Monday in The Washington Post, European media has taken a particular liking to spoof Trump and his administration. Germany's Heute-Show, presented by comedian and journalist Oliver Welke on the ZDF network, named Trump a Goldener Vollpfosten—translated as "Golden Idiot" or "Golden Dumbass"—for the fourth year in a row, sharing this year's title with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un and the whole United Kingdom, among others.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Longtime Lawfare readers may be familiar with the work we have published on “sextortion”—a form of remote sexual violence that usually involves a perpetrator obtaining explicit images or video of a victim and using that material for blackmail, often to produce further sexual material or money. Editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittes and I, along with colleagues Cody Poplin and Clara Spera, did a fair bit of research on the matter a few years ago. At the time, we thought of it as something near the edge of the issues with which Lawfare concerns itself—certainly within the publication's ambit as a question of violence enabled by changing technology, but not a matter at the dead center of “hard national security choices.”

Well, that’s changed, thanks to the Internet Research Agency troll farm.

On Dec. 17, the Senate intelligence committee released two reports on Russia’s social media influence efforts, one by the Computational Propaganda Research Project and one by the group New Knowledge. The documents are lengthy and worth reading through with care. But one passage immediately stuck out to me: a description in the New Knowledge report on what appear to have been Internet Research Agency efforts to stockpile material for sextortion.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

tRumpers ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Marchlewska M, Castellanos KA, Lewczuk K, Kofta M, Cichocka A. My way or the highway: High narcissism and low self-esteem predict decreased support for democracy. British Journal of Social Psychology 2018;0. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12290

In two studies, we analysed the relationships between different types of self-evaluation (i.e., narcissism and self-esteem) and support for democracy. Support for democracy requires the ability to respect the views and opinions of others, even if one disagrees with them. Classic studies have linked support for democracy with high self-evaluation, which should assume psychological security and, thus, the ability to trust others. However, not all forms of high self-evaluation are secure.

Narcissists have high feelings of self-worth, but tend to be defensive: They are easily threatened by criticisms or conflicting views. We then expected that while support for democracy should be positively predicted by secure, non-narcissistic self-evaluation, it should be negatively predicted by narcissistic self-evaluation.

In two studies, conducted in the United States (Study 1, n = 407) and in Poland (Study 2, n = 405), support for democracy was positively predicted by self-esteem and negatively predicted by narcissism. Study 2 additionally demonstrated that interpersonal trust mediated the effects of self-esteem on support for democracy.

We discuss the role of psychological predispositions in understanding support for democratic systems.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

At the request of Judge Emmet Sullivan, the Special Counsel's Office has filed a redacted version of the report—known as an FD-302 or simply 302—produced by FBI agents following their January 2017 interview of then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The document is available here and below.

 

[Michael Scally MD]