Haven’t you always wanted a president bold enough to threaten obliteration to Oman? Yes, if they won’t do what we tell them to, Donald is going to huff and puff and blow them up. We win by numbers. Oman has an army of 45,000 and we have a military of approximately 1,300,000. We have over 300,000,000 citizens and Oman has just over 3,000,000 citizens. Almost 90 percent of Oman’s population is urbanized (the rest is, I guess, mostly desert), which should make it relatively easy to blow them up. After we blow them up, we can build resorts like the ones we were going to put in Gaza. Gaza turned out to be a little too complicated.

Now, as I understand it, the Omanis do not want to be blown up, and wondered if there was away to avoid their destruction. The answer is “yes, there is”, and Donald just told them how to do it. All they have to do is “behave like everybody else”.

Now pretend you are the Sultan of Oman. You don’t want to see your country blown up. You want to placate Big Don. You see his instructions and you order your citizens (and non-citizen residents, too, I guess) to start behaving like everyone else. Immediately, an important question arises. How does everyone else behave?

I asked ChatGPT. ChatGPT tells me: “There isn’t one way “everyone” behaves. Human behavor varies enormously by culture, personality, age, situation, incentives, stress, and biology……” Not much help.

Well, perhaps Donald simply means that Omanis should behave just exactly as he wants them, too, and perhaps he thinks that everyone else is behaving in that manner, with the sole objection of the Iranians, and, like potentially the Omanis, Donald is planning on blowing the Iranians up. Their entire civilization. Poof.

I read a really interesting article recently, based on an interview with psychologist and former Johns Hopkins assistant professor John Gartner, who seems to be clear that Donald is suffering from a particular kind of dementia, called “frontotemporal dementia” or, as the TV commercials would say, “FTD” (a term also used in connection with the delivery of flowers; you can, for example, send flowers to a person with FTD through FTD). I read the article carefully (not really), but John Gartner is only one guy, and it turns out that he has been talking about Donald Trump since 2015 and so far has failed to convince anybody that he is correct in his diagnosis of Trump. At least there seems to be no record that he has convinced anyone who didn’t think that something has been wrong with Trump from the beginning. So, I decided to put ex-Prof Gartner to the side, and go back to ChatGPT.’

After briefly describing FTD, Chat (I am going to call him Chat; he says it’s okay) describes the “Common Symptoms” of the disease:

BEHAVIORAL CHANGES

Acting inappropriately or impulsively

Loss of empathy

Poor judgement

Repetitive behaviors

LANGUAGE PROBLEMS

Trouble speaking or finding words

Difficulty understanding language

EMOTIONAL CHANGES

Apathy

Mood Changes”

The severity of these symptoms continue and worsen over time. While most people survive 6 to 10 years after diagnosis, some people have a much slower moving dementia and can live much longer.

In addition to observing behavior, neurologists look to the results of MRIs to look at brain activity. We of course remember that Donald did (or maybe did not) get an MRI at Walter Reed last year. He said he did, the realizing maybe he should not have said that, he said he didn’t remember what part of his body had the MRI, and then his medical team (or maybe his White House team) said it wasn’t an MRI after all, but at CT Scan. Who knows? He had another physical at Walter Reed this week. Did he have another MRI? Who knows?

I also read an interview with a nephew of Donald’s, Fred Trump (named after Donald’s father, perhaps,  or maybe just a coincidence), who said that there was quite a bit of dementia in the Trump family, naming a number of Trumps who had to deal with it, and said that, from his perspective, much of Donald’s behavior mirrors that of his father and other relatives. His father, I should say, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, not FTD, but I read that FTD diagnosis was first developed in Sweden in 1994 and, although Trump died in 1999, his dementia was diagnosed well before that.

At any rate, Chat told me that I had asked all the questions tonight that it was going to answer, but that it would reset at 2:55 a.m. if I had more. I am not planning on reconnecting, but if insomnia hits, I might ask Chat one more question, which is: is there any evidence that wanting to blow up Oman is a sign of FTD. (You may think you know the answer to that, but….you never can tell.)

In any event, we know that wishing to destroy Oman is a bad omen. Oh, man! (You can do better than that.)

On the other side of the world, things do look good in Texas.