Christopher Cotton, who teaches high school English in Illinois, wrote the following: 

It is all about the Id!

When people register their anger on Twitter, they are truly nasty. When the target is female, a large number of men become truly vile. It’s partly the anonymity. But many of the most despicable tweeters use their real names. It’s not just the rush of mob violence, ganging up on a defenseless victim, though that surely is a factor. Partly it’s because tweeting feels private; it feels like thinking. Partly it’s because of the quickness and off-the-cuff feeling of tapping thumbs at a tiny window. It’s often done standing up, on the move, multi-tasking: the superego is distracted; there’s no pause for reflection. This is the nature of the machine, of the interface of intellect and internet: it’s all about the id.

The power of Twitter is what it releases into the public sphere: the prehistoric reptile brain chained up by a thousand generations of human social organization. Now, much of this history has involved fierce repression—often cruel, sometimes stupid, and always changing. But as society progresses and the parameters change, what doesn’t change is the root idea that we need to control ourselves in order to coexist. We need a grown-up standing between the sudden thought and the spoken word. We need an armed grown-up between the impulse and the deed. That’s what Twitter tosses out the window: the very value of self-control….

Some people credit Trump for being some sort of genius: the first to see the possibilities, the game-changer of the internet. I don’t agree. He’s just your average dirty old man, just your run-of-the-mill scumbag megalomaniac narcissist billionaire. He’s just an oddly shaped peg that’s been swaggering through the world, bumping into people, knocking things over, and he just happened to tumble into a new and oddly-shaped hole in the universe.

So here he is, an avatar, but of the reverse type: he’s an avatar from the computer, now out in un-virtual reality. He’s a ragebot, lustbot, greedbot, egobot—released from the twitterverse and trolling the real world, looking for something to get mad at, to grope, to possess, to adore him.

Most of us never thought Trump had a chance to win the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency. He blew past mistakes that would have sunk any candidate in the past. But things are different now.

The world is a new place. We’re all strangers here. Except for the dirty old man. Turns out, he’s been living here for years. Hell, he bought property and put up hotels!

CNN and every other media outlet report that American intelligence officials released an analysis showing that Putin orchestrated a campaign to influence the American election so as to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.

The report said that Russia leaked hacked emails directly to Wikileaks and other sites.

Given what we now know about the cabinet of unqualified individuals that Trump is assembling, composed mostly of people who want to destroy the agencies they are expected to lead, it appears that Trump is just the man to undermine our nation and send it backward by a century. He is the Manchuria Candidate, or should we say the Siberian Candidate. He is Putin’s President.

I had lunch with my editor, the senior editor at a major publisher, and she said if somewhat had brought her a novel with this plot, she would have rejected it as too absurd. A candidate with three wives, five children, four bankruptcies, a long history of sexual assaults, bullying, and racial insults, a man with no relevant experience who is completely ignorant of foreign and domestic issues…no, too absurd. A man determined to ignore climate change and wipe out federal healthcare. A man hostile to science and knowledge. A man who lives in a gold plated penthouse and has a gold plated toilet seat in a gold plated private jet.

Who would believe it? Even science fiction has to have a shred of credibility.

This is all a bad dream.

Isn’t it?

No link. The article appears in the Washington Post. Google it to read it in full.

It it is very worrisome that the president-elect is smitten with the Russian tyrant. It shows Trump’s lack of judgement and knowledge. Remember in 2015 when he guaranteed an interviewer that the Russians would never invade Crimea? The interviewer informed him that it had already happen. Dumb Donald had no idea.

Eugene Robinson wonders about Trump’s crush on Putin:

“Coming from a presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s misty-eyed admiration of Russia and its autocratic leader was weird. Coming from a president-elect, it’s nothing short of alarming.
I repeat the questions I asked back in September: What’s the deal with Trump and Russia? Does he have financial entanglements with Russian banks, businesses or billionaires that color his views? If not, as he claims, then why won’t he release the personal and business tax returns that could put the matter to rest?
“The latest sign of Trump’s infatuation is his refusal to accept the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russian state-sponsored hackers meddled in our election — a risky and provocative operation that could have been authorized only by Vladimir Putin.
“It could be somebody else,” Trump told reporters on New Year’s Eve. “And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.” The president-elect added that “I know a lot about hacking, and hacking is a very hard thing to prove.”
“It is unclear how Trump could know even a little about hacking, since he rarely uses computers. Aides reportedly must print out news articles for him to read. In my experience, experts on cybersecurity know how to use a Web browser.”

At Senate hearings, the nation’s top intelligence officials testified that Russia interfered in our elections by hacking and propaganda. 

By testifying, they are almost certain to be fired by Trump.

Trump said yesterday that he plans to cut and reorganize our intelligence agencies. He prefers to get his “intelligence” from his friends and FOX news.