And anyone expected anything else from the President whose every act was self obsessed self aggrandizement about his 'Legacy'?
AmericanThinker
Thomas Lifson
Jan 10, 2017
The
first community organizer to become president has managed to anger
community groups so much with his planned personal monument, aka a
"presidential center," that part of the plan was just scrapped.
Lolly Bowean of the Chicago Tribune reports:
Bowing
to community pressure, the Obama Foundation has scrapped its plan for
an above-ground parking garage and will instead build an underground
facility below the presidential center in Jackson Park, officials said
late Monday.
The
original plan would have grabbed a treasured part of Chicago's park
system, the Midway (site of Chicago's World's Fair), for a two-story
garage. The group Save the Midway sprang
up to protect the historic public park land from a private developer
(the Obama Foundation) appropriating the land for a private purpose (the
Obama Center will not be part of the National Archives System):
The embarrassment is palpable:
After
numerous meetings with the community and other valued stakeholders over
the past months, the Foundation understands that many of those voices
feel strongly that the parking for the OPC should be located within the
OPC campus in Jackson Park. The Foundation has heard those voices, and
has decided to locate the OPC's parking underground in Jackson Park.
But
Jackson Park, whose land is being appropriated, is also a park,
designed by the great Frederick Law Olmstead, and occupies a premier
Lakefront site. No less than the Midway, it is a precious legacy of the
"City Beautiful" movement of the late nineteenth century that
transformed Chicago from a raw and often ugly product of rapid growth
into a rival of Paris when it comes to parks and vistas. An open letter from over one hundred faculty
members of the University of Chicago, which neighbors the Obama
monument along with the Museum of Science and Industry, lays out these
concerns:
First,
there are concerns that the Obama Center as currently planned will not
provide the promised development or economic benefits to the
neighborhoods. Because the current plans place the Center next to the
Museum of Science and Industry and across the street from the University
of Chicago campus, there is no available adjacent land in which to
start a new business, set up a new café or restaurant, bring another
cultural center to the neighborhood. It looks to many neighbors [as
though] the only new jobs created will be as staff to the Obama Center,
hence the widespread support for a Community Benefits Agreement.
Second,
the current plan calls for taking a large section of a[] historic
public park and giving it to a private entity for development. Jackson
Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, is on the National Register of
Historic Places and is one of the most important urban parks in the
nation. Construction of a permanent architectural monument violates
Olmsted's vision of a democratic urban park. On the current plans the
intrusion into the park is huge: twenty-one acres, the size of two large
city blocks. At a time of increasing complexity and pressure in urban
life, Chicago should be dedicated to preserving our public parks as open
areas for relaxation and play for all its citizens. We also note that
the Obama Center has abandoned its original plans to be a Presidential
Library. It will be a private entity with no official connection to the
National Archives. ...
[I]t
is the taxpayers of Chicago who are going to be forced to pay hundreds
of millions of dollars for this project, according to estimates by the
Chicago Department of Transportation. The required widening of Lake
Shore Drive alone is estimated to be over $100 million. Not only are
public lands being given to a private entity[,] but the public will pay
to have Cornell Drive closed and Stony Island Avenue and Lake Shore
Drive widened. We are concerned that these are not the best ways to use
public funds to invest in the future of Chicago.
We
University of Chicago faculty who sign this letter are ourselves a
diverse group and different issues will matter more to some of us than
to others. But we share with so many of our neighbors the belief that
the current plans need significant revision. We are concerned that
rather than becoming a bold vision for urban living in the future it
will soon become an object[] lesson in the mistakes of the past. We
urge the Obama Foundation to explore alternative sites on the South Side
that could be developed with more economic benefits, better public
transportation, and less cost to taxpayers. We would be pleased to
support the Obama Center if the plan genuinely promoted economic
development in our neighborhoods and respected our precious public urban
parks.
Aside
from the issue of imposing costs on taxpayers and mauling the work of
America's foremost park designer (Olmstead designed Central Park in New
York), the monument is taking on what David Brooks of the New York Times
might call "lowbrow" functions so undignified that the hard-left Guardian raises its eyebrows:
In
Chicago, where Obama began his audacious political journey, there is
concern about plans to include in his library a digital archive rather
than stacks of papers and books. More than that, the suitably modern,
$1.5bn edifice in the city's Jackson Park will include a basketball
court, a yoga space[,] and a test kitchen.
In a scathing column in
the Chicago Tribune, Ron Grossman called out the plans as unworthy of
the tradition. "Mr President, I've got to tell you: the renderings for
your museum are … more likely to congeal than stir blood," he wrote,
adding: "Is [this] how you want to be remembered? As the healthy-eating
and meditation-advocating president … That's not how I want the story
to come down to my grandchildren's children."
As for that "suitably modern" design, it appears to my eyes to be designed in the tradition known as "brutalism" for its use of raw concrete and blank facades:
To
my eyes, the main structure looks like a cenotaph with wide hips (a
tribute to Michelle O?) that Godzilla emerged from the Lake Michigan
waters and took a bite out of, exposing a little corner of what hides
inside behind the blank concrete.
Has nobody involved in planning this structure ever heard of the wind effect on
tall buildings? Placing a tall structure next to an open plaza right
off Lake Michigan seems like a good way to ensure that the plaza will be
windy and, in the winter, covered with ice. People coming to the
monument to play basketball or cook food risk being blown off their feet
if the inevitable ice cover is not salted heavily, causing runoff into
the lake.
Thank You Mr Lifson and American Thinker.
dailycaller
Gabrielle OkunReporter
11:25 PM 01/09/2018
The bus creaked along a worn-out road as I stared at the Polish countryside, happy to sit. Our group had spent a long day walking the winding paths of the Jewish Quarter in Krakow.
I never noticed the bus was slowing until it had come to a stop. The driver announced our bus had broken down, and people around me slung bags and backpacks over their shoulders. We made our way back into the night and hugged our bodies as we trudged along the route to our motel
“Nazi! Nazi! Nazi!” a group of men yelled at us. They greeted us with sieg heil salutes, and we put our heads down and hurried across a bridge.
As a Jew, I truly had no idea that I would be spending Christmas among neo-Nazis. Our group was filled with Jewish students and young adults on an educational trip “focusing on the Holocaust experience in Poland.” In the span of seven days, we visted the German death camps Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Birkenau as well as Jewish ghettos in Warsaw, Krakow, and Lodz.
I expected the blistering cold and the horrific Holocaust sites. I did not expect open anti-Semitism. In fact, there was commerce around it.
On the morning before our bus broke down, we arrived at a plaza with a marketplace in the Jewish Quarter. There was an enclave of small stands with a wide variety of merchandise. While looking through the wares on a table, a merchant held out a button and urged me to buy it. My eyes focused on a swastika. I told the man in Polish that I was Jewish and the pin was extremely offensive. In response, he shooed me away from his table.
While stopping in souvenir shops in Krakow the next day, we found a wide variety of demeaning merchandise depicting Jewish people. Figurines of Jewish men with large noses and coins glued to their body, magnets depicting Jews as beggars, and a wooden paddle of a Jewish man who will guard your money are some of the anti-Semitic items we encountered in the market.
The visit to the marketplace was jarring, but the anti-Semitism we encountered was tame compared to what we would ultimately come across. As we headed back from Shabbat service in the Jewish quarter, a young man attacked Moti Leibman, a former IDF combat solider. We had only returned from Auschwitz-Birkenau a few hours earlier, underscoring the surreal nature of the whole experience.
“I felt a sharp kick in my back right as I finished tying my shoe. I stood up confused, and all I could mutter was ‘what’?, Leibman said. “The man that kicked me turned around, walked straight to me and without saying a single thing, punched me straight in the face. Shocked, I was ready to fight back and defend myself, but as I lifted my hand, this guy was held back by his friends, six men, and I had a perfect shot. In half a second, I realized, run.”
Down the same street, a passerby shoved and cursed at the wife of a rabbi and told her to leave the country. Our traveling security had the evening off for Shabbat, but there were plenty of onlookers. No one took any steps to help us.
The next day students from the trip asked our security to notify authorities, but they told use that from past experience, they didn’t believe our concerns would be taken seriously. Being foreigners on a short trip, we didn’t pursue the issue further.
“I am not surprised that anti-Semitism is still prevalent and strong in Poland, but I am surprised the this occurred in the radius of the Jewish Quarter where there is a police station, and no one around seemed to care,” said Leibman.
Later that week, we traveled to the Jewish Ghetto in Lodz, 75 miles from Warsaw. Nazis forced 160,000 Jews to live in the area in 1940 while waiting for deportation. Over 70,000 Jews were deported to Chelmno extermination camp in 1942. The surviving Jewish residents in the ghetto were then deported to Auschwitz- Birkenau Death Camp in 1944.
Despite the horrific history, the Jewish ghetto still faces anti-Semitism. The picture below is a small building with the name of the Lodz soccer team, ŁKS, spray-painted on it. Over the team name is graffiti of circumcised penises, cross-outs, and Jewish stars. The team is associated with Jews due to the rich Jewish history in the area.
The visit to the marketplace was jarring, but the anti-Semitism we encountered was tame compared to what we would ultimately come across. As we headed back from Shabbat service in the Jewish quarter, a young man attacked Moti Leibman, a former IDF combat solider. We had only returned from Auschwitz-Birkenau a few hours earlier, underscoring the surreal nature of the whole experience.
“I felt a sharp kick in my back right as I finished tying my shoe. I stood up confused, and all I could mutter was ‘what’?, Leibman said. “The man that kicked me turned around, walked straight to me and without saying a single thing, punched me straight in the face. Shocked, I was ready to fight back and defend myself, but as I lifted my hand, this guy was held back by his friends, six men, and I had a perfect shot. In half a second, I realized, run.”
Down the same street, a passerby shoved and cursed at the wife of a rabbi and told her to leave the country. Our traveling security had the evening off for Shabbat, but there were plenty of onlookers. No one took any steps to help us.
The next day students from the trip asked our security to notify authorities, but they told use that from past experience, they didn’t believe our concerns would be taken seriously. Being foreigners on a short trip, we didn’t pursue the issue further.
“I am not surprised that anti-Semitism is still prevalent and strong in Poland, but I am surprised the this occurred in the radius of the Jewish Quarter where there is a police station, and no one around seemed to care,” said Leibman.
Later that week, we traveled to the Jewish Ghetto in Lodz, 75 miles from Warsaw. Nazis forced 160,000 Jews to live in the area in 1940 while waiting for deportation. Over 70,000 Jews were deported to Chelmno extermination camp in 1942. The surviving Jewish residents in the ghetto were then deported to Auschwitz- Birkenau Death Camp in 1944.
Despite the horrific history, the Jewish ghetto still faces anti-Semitism. The picture below is a small building with the name of the Lodz soccer team, ŁKS, spray-painted on it. Over the team name is graffiti of circumcised penises, cross-outs, and Jewish stars. The team is associated with Jews due to the rich Jewish history in the area.
The trip was a chance for us to better understand the Holocaust — to try to understand something so incomprehensible. It turned out to be a glimpse of what Jews suffered on a daily basis.
Such a difficult yet revealing experience conjured a variety of emotional reactions from the group. For many, it was a way to connect with relatives lost to the Holocaust. For others, it taught them that anti-Semitism can even be found in a country that bore the brunt of Nazism. It was, at least for me, the first time I ever felt nervous and frightened to be Jewish. For most of the attendees, the trip gave them a stronger, more meaningful connection to Judaism.
“When I visited Israel before, I felt connected to Judaism as a religion. But in Poland, I really felt the connection to my heritage, said Sam Barak, a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student at the University of Central Florida. “All four of my grandparents are from this Poland/Belarus area. I could picture my ancestors living on the same ground I walked not even 100 years ago. I could feel what it must have been like for my extended family walking at the same train tracks at Birkenau.”
“The trip was as expected, sad and depressing, but the group we traveled with really supported each other. Dov, an Auschwitz survivor who had joined us on this trip, had the largest smile of them all. Just living and loving life made us all happy,” Barak said.
“Even with the Nazis trying to erase the Jewish race, we survived,” he added.
Another student said the trip stirred up pride in both herself and her history.
“As someone who travels a lot, this is the first time I have ever really felt a purpose in my journey. I have never been more proud of who I am and where I come from,” Rachel Kessler, a student at Santa Monica College, said.
Twenty feet from the electric wire fences of Majdanek is a housing development. From a window in the gas chamber, you can see Christmas advertisements in the distance. A statue from the Third Reich looms over the death camp, and a mausoleum called the “Mountain of Ashes” overlooks the city that lies down the hill. You can sense the horror, the shock, and the misery and walk in your ancestor’s footsteps, at least for a second.
TheDCNF reached out to the Polish embassy for comment but received none in time for publication.
Thank You Ms Okun and the DC.
Anyone want to guess how many more years its going to be before the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England etc. have to sign up, gear up, and go die, taking morons like these Neo-Nazis off other European throats again?
Amazing. WWII, and they've learned Nothing.
What the hell do they teach kids in school over there?
January 8, 2018
Daniel Greenfield
Lefty Shrinks and Hawaiian Gods Are Angry At Trump
In October, 125 psychologists and assorted mental health professionals marched to New York’s City Hall while wearing red tags warning, “DANGER.” Leading the march was Peter Fraenkel, author of Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage, mournfully beating a drum in a solemn march. Fraenkel, a psychologist and “professional drummer” was able to combine his love of drums and hatred of Trump.
The ‘Duty to Warn’ march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of Fraenkel’s drum in what they insisted was a “funereal and dignified” procession.
"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat, ‘DANGER’ tape, and flashing warning lights.”
The paperwork urged, “Bring a drum if you have one” and, “come as your solemn, concerned self.”
If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, “Trump is psychologically unfit to lead this country.”
There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yale’s ‘Duty to Warn’ conference showed up on Capitol Hill to “brief” Dem politicians about Trump’s mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert on the prison system, apparently isn’t even currently licensed to practice.
But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been "licensed on two continents," has "excellent credentials," a "flawless ethics history" and speaks "four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him “resorting to violence”. Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.” Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”
All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.
Around the same time that Fraenkel was beating his drum in Manhattan, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released by Macmillan. The book contained unsolicited accusations and diagnoses from “27 psychiatrists and mental health experts”. It was edited by Bandy X. Lee.
Contributors included Tony Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter who had worked on the Art of the Deal with Trump. His mental health qualifications are unclear. Also included is Gail Sheehy, a former New York Magazine writer, who had written a Hillary biography. The epilogue features Noam Chomsky, whom Lee describes as a “linguist and philosopher-historian”. Not to mention leftist genocide denier.
What makes Tony, Gail and Noam, mental health experts? In a movement that diagnoses the President of the United States over Twitter and then insists he be removed from office, that doesn’t really matter. And it’s why none of the media accounts have even bothered to note that some of Lee’s mental health experts are actually members of the media with no apparent mental health credentials.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz diagnoses Trump with a risky “sense of self-worth”. Gail Sheehy accuses him of “narcissism and paranoia” and a “trust deficit.”
In a book already dedicated to violating the professional ethics of the Goldwater Rule, Lee manages to include amateur armchair diagnoses by writers who are even more unqualified than her to make them.
But it’s not as if the professionals are any better.
Bandy X. Lee boasted, “In the book we have as authors Phil Zimbardo, Judith Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton, who are notable not only for their contributions to mental health but for their amazing ethical record. These are living legends who have also stood on the right side of history.”
Lifton is a “leading psychohistorian” who accuses President Trump of "malignant normality" and urges other "psychological professionals" to confront "the malignant normality of Trump and his administration." He appears to define “malignant normality” as behavior he disapproves of for political reasons, but that isn’t actually a form of mental illness. That undermines the whole theme of the book.
And it’s in the book’s foreword.
Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword accuse Trump of being a “present hedonist.” And this is “based on Zimbardo’s time perspective theory.” Zimbardo is both the inventor of the theory and the guy writing about it. Rosemary doesn’t seem to have a degree, but as “part of her Hawaiian heritage, she was trained in the Hawaiian psychology based on forgiveness known as ho’oponopono.”
Ho’oponopono was derived from appeasing the Hawaiian gods. The Hawaiian gods must hate Trump.
Zimbardo and Sword claim “that Trump qualifies as among the most extreme present hedonists we have ever witnessed comes from the plethora of written and recorded material on him, including all his interviews, hundreds of hours of video, and his own tweets.”
So there’s a practitioner of the Hawaiian art of ho’oponopono diagnosing Trump over Twitter. And her colleague, a living legend, is accusing him of a condition that appears to emerge from his own theory.
Everyone in the book agrees that Trump is bad. They just can’t agree on a diagnosis.
Michael Tansey claims it’s a delusional disorder. Laurence Dodes blames sociopathy. Craig Malkin argues it’s narcissism. David Reiss pushes for dementia and cognitive impartment. Steve Wruble claims he has daddy issues. That is, he claims that both he and Trump have daddy issues.
Thomas Singer believes Trump mirrors “our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy” and we must “recognize our own pathology.” Not only is Trump crazy, but we’re crazy for electing him.
Everyone except Singer is probably nuts.
“Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even to a layman that “something is wrong with him,” John D. Gartner insists. But nobody can diagnose him because “Trump’s is a genuinely complex case.” Even though “many writers have tried to analyze and diagnose Trump, and have gotten pieces of the elephant right. What is missing is the whole elephant.”
What’s the whole pink elephant? According to Gartner, possibly, malignant narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, the bipolar spectrum, hypomania and also maybe, pure evil.
What are his medical sources for these claims?
"Insight into this question comes from, of all sources, Joe Scarborough, host of the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe," he writes. Then he mentions, "David Brooks is not a mental health professional, but he astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trump’s increasing hypomania."
Ho’oponopono looks a whole lot better than a shrink who watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times and then tries to diagnose a man he never met based on media rants. And that is what all these diagnoses are reducible to. They originate from the media and then the media reports on them.
Do we even need psychiatrists to diagnose Trump over Twitter and television?
“We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years,” Gail Sheehy insists.
That’s quite a turnabout in what was supposed to be a book by psychiatrists and mental health experts proving their case. Instead Sheehy, who isn’t a psychiatrist, insists that we don’t actually need psychiatrists because we’ve seen Trump on television.
But does that mean Sheehy’s readers can start remotely diagnosing her?
James Gilligan insists, “If psychiatrists with decades of experience doing research on violent offenders do not confirm the validity of the conclusion that many nonpsychiatrists have reached, that Trump is extremely dangerous—indeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our lifetimes—then we are not behaving with appropriate professional restraint and discipline. Rather, we are being either incompetent or irresponsible.” And so psychiatrists must back up lefty biases against Trump.
It’s not medical science, but leftist politics, that’s calling the shots here.
[Ed; We've been making that exact point about the entire Industry for years. Look at the Psychiatrically Diagnosable Behaviors these Shrinks are exhibiting themselves.]
Many of the essays don’t even attempt to diagnose Trump. Instead they self-diagnose the political trauma that Trump inflicted on them. Jennifer Contarino Panning even invents a “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” The strangest essay belongs to Steve Wruble who attacks his Orthodox Jewish father for supporting Trump in an essay, titled appropriately enough, “Daddy Issues.”
He moans that when he told his father that “Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of winning the election” his father dismissively replied that a Hillary win would be bad for Israel.
"Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only commented on what was important to him," Wruble whines. "Donald and I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being seen as special."
Steve Wruble’s essay is in its own way the most honest of the bunch. Because it’s not really about Trump. It’s what Wruble and the other mental health professionals and amateurs project onto Trump.
Wruble blames Trump for the conflicts with his father. And identifies with him. These aren’t essays, they’re Rorschach inkblots. The ‘Duty to Warn’ movement tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the sort of people who take to the streets beating a drum against him.
Trump isn’t crazy. But his accusers often don’t seem too sane.
Noam Chomsky concludes the book by suggesting that Trump would perpetrate “some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act.” The epilogue of a book accusing Trump of mental illness ends with a crazy conspiracy theory by one of the accusers.
Thank You Mr Greenfield and FPM.
dailycaller
Justin Caruso Media Reporter
11:56 PM 01/06/2018
Yale psychiatry professor Bandy Lee has been raising concerns about President Trump’s mental health for over a year and suggested in a new interview that Trump should be physically contained for an “urgent evaluation” to determine his mental state.
In a Vox interview published Saturday, reporter Eliza Barclay asks Lee, “Okay, so you’re calling for an evaluation; you’re serious about that. How could he possibly be evaluated, since it seems like he wouldn’t voluntarily do it?”
Lee responded, “We encounter this often in mental health. Those who most require an evaluation are the least likely to submit to one. That is the reason why in all 50 states we have not only the legal authority, but often the legal obligation, to contain someone even against their will when it’s an emergency. So in an emergency, neither consent nor confidentiality requirements hold. Safety comes first. What we do in the case of danger is we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons, and we do an urgent evaluation.”
She continued, “This is what we have been calling for with the president based on basic medical standards of care.”
Lee then said that doing this would look too much like a “coup.”
She said, “Surprisingly, many lawyer groups have actually volunteered, on their own, to file for a court paper to ensure that the security staff will cooperate with us. But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.”
The professor has been promoting the idea that Donald Trump needs a psychiatric evaluation publicly and has been boosted by prominent mainstream media outlets like CNN and MSNBC. She has met with a number of prominent Democratic lawmakers about her claims. (RELATED: How The Media Mainstreamed A Democratic Conspiracy Theory)
Thank You Mr Caruso and DC.
You Should be feeling the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. If they're not you Need to pay closer attention.
If this Psychiatrist believes it's legal and its Their Duty for her and her confederates to 'Contain' the President of the United States to subject his future to Their OPINION, where do you think you and everyone else rate, in their OPINION?
That's right. You understand it perfectly. The Law doesn't apply to them. They're above it.
Not just because they're pissed off about losing an election, but because THEY have the Right and Duty to rule.
Except that according to Federal Statute, as Psychiatrists they don't.
This one's gotta be seen in its entirety and we're too lazy today to reformat these Hilarious, Outraged Liberal Tweets.
All you're getting from us here is the great Gracie Allen making her entry onto the stage. Just wait till she goes to work on George.
dailycaller
11:10 AM 01/05/2018
Liberals fell for a parody excerpt of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury”
book that claimed Trump was angry he couldn’t find “The Gorilla
Channel” on the White House cable package.
Pixelated Boat, a comedy Twitter account with over 100k followers,
wrote a hilarious parody of Wolff’s book on Friday. The fake passage
said Trump thought the TV in his bedroom was broken because it didn’t
have “the gorilla channel,” so aides strung together a number of gorilla
documentaries and broadcast it as a fake cable channel for the
president.
Read More, and you too will feel like sitting up straight, throwing your head back, pounding your chest with both fists and roaring with laughter.
dailycaller
6:40 PM 01/05/2018
One Washington, D.C.-based therapist’s clients have 99 problems, and they all seem to be about President Donald Trump.
Elisabeth Joy LaMotte,
a psychotherapist and founder of the DC Counseling and Psychotherapy
Center, writes in The Washington Post that a number of her patients have
been complaining that the media’s fixation on Trump is taking a toll on
their personal lives.
One couple that she works with (who she names Sally and Steve) have
been seeing LaMotte to “strengthen their communication and feel more
connected.” It seemed like they were making real progress. That is,
until Trump won. She quotes Steve:
Sally and I value that our political views are
compatible. We have always enjoyed discussing current events, and our
careers relate to politics, as you know. I initially took comfort in the
fact that we went through the shock of Trump’s victory together, but
something has changed. Sally is constantly reading news updates on her
phone and watching CNN, even in the middle of the night. It’s gone too
far. It’s no longer something that connects us; it’s now a wedge between
us.
Sally and Steve aren’t alone, apparently. LaMotte writes that this
“dynamic” is one she’s seen “with other couples and individual therapy
clients” she works with.
So, what’s fueling these issues? “Stress is, in my experience,
increase — the stress associated with news consumption,” according to
LaMotte.
“A surprising number of couples in therapy are fighting with each
other about their respective modes of news consumption. These couples
report less sleep, a growing sense of disconnection and less sex. And
this includes couples where both members share the same political
views,” she writes.
Her findings are backed by recent studies that show “increased levels of consumption of news” can compromise “emotional well-being over time.”
One of LaMotte’s clients complains that her boyfriend is “sick of me
screaming at the television. I’ve started watching Fox to branch out of
the so called bubble, and it’s all lies, I can’t stand it!”
Improved “sleep hygiene,” LaMotte writes, can help alleviate the
stress associated with the constant onslaught of news updates. By 10
p.m., she prescribes, all screens should be off. After all, “losing the
screens an hour or two before bed is conducive to better sleep and more
sex.”
Of course, if you need to see a shrink because of a couple of Trump tweets, maybe you have more serious issues.
Thank You Mr Simonson and Daily Caller.
These SJW Snowflakes are getting a taste of what they put the rest of us through, having to sit, watch, and be ground up by their Regimes' nonstop, feel good, criminal rampages.
Ask your Doctor honey. Just pose the $64,000 question to her and she'll fix you right up. No, wait up, using Gender Specific pronouns could actually get you in trouble, and you've got no one to blame for it but yourself.
You'd better ask Dr. 'It' instead.
Anyone want to bet PTSD takes on a Secondary heading in the DSM VI?
President Trump Stress Disorder?
retractionwatch
In March 2017, Christopher Blanford received an email from an editor at the Journal of Crystal Growth.
Blanford had been named as a suggested reviewer for a manuscript, and
the editor, Arnab Bhattacharya, wanted to verify that the Gmail account
the authors provided was legitimate.
It was not.
Blanford—a senior lecturer in
biomaterials at the University of Manchester, UK—thought it was an
“amusing coincidence” that he was chosen as a fake reviewer, given that
he has written about malpractice in academic publishing.
He confirmed the Gmail account was not his, and the other two suggested
reviewers told Bhattacharya, a professor at the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, the same thing.
It turns out the author, Ahmad Salar Elahi, based at Islamic Azad University in Tehran, Iran, had already been under scrutiny by the publisher, Elsevier. And months before Blanford was queried about the email, one of Elahi’s papers had been retracted by another Elsevier journal. The reason? The editors of International Journal of Hydrogen Energy had found the article was accepted “based upon the positive advice of three illegitimate reviewer reports.”
In fact, the publisher had been
warned about Elahi’s alleged use of fake reviewers as early as 2015.
Still, in 2016 and 2017, 21 papers from this group were submitted and
published in Elsevier journals. Last month, we reported that Elsevier is retracting 26 papers affected by fake reviews; Elahi is corresponding author on 24 of them. Islamic Azad University also informed us Elahi has been suspended from all his duties, including teaching.
Blanford described part of the situation from his point of view in a recent editorial in the Journal of Materials Science (a Springer publication, where he is deputy editor-in-chief); he also tweeted about it. Blanford told us the publisher
discovered the authors had used him as a suggested reviewer in a dozen
other papers submitted to Elsevier journals. According to Blanford, only
four were published, two of which have been retracted.
Uncovering a “referee racket”
In March 2015, Bhattacharya received a
manuscript submission from Elahi, in which Elahi only provided Gmail
and Yahoo email accounts for the suggested reviewers. Concerned about a
possible “referee racket,” Bhattacharya decided to investigate.
That month, Bhattacharya sent the journal’s chief editor, Thomas Kuech, what he had found, explaining:
I have good reason to believe that most of these reviewers do not exist!
Bhattacharya had discovered that Elahi had suggested the same group of reviewers for the new submission and two papers published in the journal. When he Googled the suggested reviewers, he found that in some cases the authors had altered their real emails and affiliations, and none were experts on the manuscript topic. When examining the reviews submitted for the two published papers, Bhattacharya also found extensive duplication.
Bhattacharya said Kuech told him in mid-2015 he had been discussing the issue with Elsevier. Yet, in 2016 and 2017, the publisher accepted and published 21 papers from Elahi’s group.
We asked Elsevier why papers from this group were still being accepted after the publisher had been warned about Elahi; a spokesperson told us:
We were initially made aware of a potential problem with
these authors back in 2015, but short of Elsevier structurally
blacklisting authors across all journals in our editorials systems and
thereby risking undermining editorial independence, subsequent articles
were hard to flag for further review. Most of these submissions the
final authors were not actually named on the original submission (where
the most intensive checking takes place) but only added at revision. The
corresponding author used several different email addresses as well. So
the main author identifiers (name and email) were very hard to track in
this case.
The peer review manipulation may
affect other publishers as well. Blanford explained that he also found
multiple papers by Elahi published in Springer journals, and contacted
the editors on December 10 to investigate. He told us:
I thought that the author
had some real cheek to do this. I was pleased that Dr Bhattacharya
caught this. When I saw how widespread the fraud was… I was disappointed
by my fellow editors at other journals. A quick search on my name and
publication record would show that none of the articles were remotely
close to my field.
We emailed Elahi for comment, but he has not replied.
Suspended “from all duties”
After we reported Elsevier’s plans to retract 26 papers, Mahmood Ghoranneviss, dean and director of the Plasma Physics Research Center at Islamic Azad University (where Elahi works), sent us a statement regarding Elahi’s “unlawful activities,” and told us:
As soon as we learned what Ahmad Salar Elahi has been doing we introduced him to the disciplinary committee of the university.
Ghoranneviss was a co-author on several of Elahi’s papers:
As far as we learned from
“Retraction Watch” report, the authorship lists were changed and my
name was added later. … He, as the corresponding author of the articles,
should have had our approval beforehand.
Although the university has not made a
final decision, Ghoranneviss said he believes that Elahi will likely
“be sacked from the university with an immediate effect:”
Meanwhile, I personally
suspended him from all his duties and removed him from all his teaching
classes and from the supervision of post-grad students. His illegal
action has caused an angry backlash and very strong negative reaction
not only in our university but also in many academic institutes and
research centers in Iran.
Thank You Retraction Watch
