The Conservative Cave

peggysue2 (10,891 posts)

Broken Brain Syndrome
I've seen this before.

Though I don't think Donald Trump's latest rally mishap was a McConnell-like freeze, Trump is definitely having increasing dementia problems. As one of the doctors from the Duty to Warn Coalition has noted, Donald Trump's brain is broken. His mental capacity is a mere shadow of what it was in 2016 and his cognitive functions are seriously impaired.

My father went through this as did my sister. You can have plateaus during the early stages of the disease where function evens out and a patient has moments of clarity. But as the disease progresses (and it always progresses), those moments become infrequent, and then disappear altogether.

Trump is very close to the abyss.

Stress worsens the symptoms and I truly believe that's what we're witnessing. Falling asleep in the courtroom is a good example of advanced dementia-related behavior. My father would sleep a lot during the day, and then be on the prowl throughout the night.

Sound familiar?

All the language glitches and slurs, the language of violence and paranoia? It's all part of it as the brain damage worsens. Even his body movement--that forward tilt, the leg dragging could be attributed to his neurological decline.

I recall watching my father as he went through this process comparing him to a diver. In the early stages, he would dive beneath the water and resurface, sputtering, making excuses, citing reasons for a poor or unexpected dive. As time went on, his inability to resurface entirely or even make reasonable excuses/explanations became painfully clear. Weirdly enough, my youngest son was having his own struggles after a traumatic brain injury. He started deeply submerged beneath the water, then slowly--in fits and starts--resurfaced, sometimes briefly, then permanently (but with what the medical community refers to as 'deficits').

I watched the whole process in reverse.

Agent Orange is at the point where normal families would seek care and medical advice.

None of this is normal. Not the man, the family, not his frenzied supporters (who are willfully blind to the evidence) and certainly not his enablers, those eager to use Trump as their vehicle to raw power.

Trump's brain is broken. We see it every day and will continue to see it in evermore harrowing dimensions because this is who the GOP is pushing to occupy the Oval Office.

Donald Trump has thus far outrun accountability. But he cannot, will not outrun this disease process.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218961667

East Palestine, Ohio, residents are expressing frustration after learning that the emergency response to the toxic train derailment last year was riddled with mistakes.

"We're just hanging in there. It's all we can do," East Palestine local Linda Murphy said on "The Bottom Line" Thursday.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is disputing whistleblower claims of mistakes and "no confidence" in early data collected from the site where a Norfolk-Southern train hauling caustic materials derailed along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border.

A person who said he helped craft the technology and interpret data from advanced radiological sensors on a high-tech EPA plane used to survey the damage and take hazmat readings told The Associated Press the aircraft was enlisted too late. In turn, the whistleblower told the outlet, it may have been unnecessary to burn off toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars in a controlled release.

The global, government-coerced transition into "green energy" has geologists scouring the Earth for new sources of lithium -- the element that's required for batteries, like those used in electric vehicles.

Now, in a cosmic practical joke on environmentalists, researchers say they've found a lithium mother lode -- in Pennsylvania fracking wastewater.

It turns out that the Marcellus Shale --  a long swath of sedimentary rock in the northeastern United States that holds huge amounts of frackable gas -- holds huge quantities of lithium too. Justin Mackey and other researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania were pleasantly surprise when they studied the contents of wastewater dredged up in the fracking process at 515 sites in the Keystone State, reports Science Alert.

Long before the frackers showed up, deep groundwater has been dissolving the lithium in the Marcellus Shale for eons. "It's been dissolving rocks for hundreds of millions of years—essentially, the water has been mining the subsurface," Mackey told the University of Pittsburgh's Brandie Jefferson.

When they analyzed the wastewater data, they were stunned by the volume of lithium. The shale "has the capacity to provide significant lithium yields for the foreseeable future" he says. Their detailed findings were published in Scientific Reports.

Lithium and cobalt mining in third-world countries is often a highly toxic and hazardous enterprise. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, militias have reportedly abducted children and brought them to dig away to fulfill leftists' green dreams.

Here's how Harvard's Siddharth Kara described the horror show:

"You have to imagine walking around some of these mining areas and dialing back our clock centuries. People are working in subhuman, grinding, degrading conditions. They use pickaxes, shovels, stretches of rebar to hack and scrounge at the earth in trenches and pits and tunnels to gather cobalt and feed it up the formal supply chain.

"Cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe — and there are hundreds of thousands of poor Congolese people touching and breathing it day in and day out. Young mothers with babies strapped to their backs, all breathing in this toxic cobalt dust."

Compared to that, harvesting Pennsylvania fracking wastewater sounds positively idyllic. Whatya say, Greta?

If by early, you mean CONSTANTLY, I agree with you.