politics

An alzheimer's treatment.

I can't the clip handily, but it was on the Majority Report and they started a calendar after a nurse called in about a specific treatment, which requires regular and repeated MRI's to verify effectiveness, thats on just about a 28 day schedule, specifically for amyloid plaques. It needs to be done intravenously and apparently, they go for the hand or the forearm. The MRI's are to keep track of and look for monitoring progress of the disease, treatments. Sam started what he calls the "Trump period calendar" to keep track of it.

So Trumps had like 3-4 MRI's in the past 4 months? Each time its for his "annual" physical and its the "best they've ever seen", as well as being given a battery of extremely basic cognitive tests. Each time Trump starts to slag/ slide, within about 10 days we get news of walter reed visit, an MRI, and suddenly Trump is protecting their right hand from visibility.

I mean none of it is concrete and all very circumstantial, but look for the ~28 day cycle of Trump having pep, being more aggressive, then sliding there being reports of decline, then back to pep in his step the next week.

As someone who just lost one grandparent to dementia and has another entering treatment (and in the process of being moved into a care facility) he definitely has dementia or a similar cognitive decline. If you watch him now when he's publicly speaking and compare it to his 2016 campaign he's just not the same person anymore. He's now seeming to not remember what he was to be speaking about, going on random unexpected tangents, needs to be led around by someone else when anywhere other than the White House (and may also need to be led around within the White House, but that's not as visible) occasionally walks completely a different direction from where he should be going, and he's lost his talent for remembering names, mixing people's names with associations when he speaks ("Tim Apple" of Apple CEO Tim Cook, or "Tim Minnesota" of Tim Walz) or occasionally naming someone who hasn't held the position in a very long time, looking directly at the solar eclipse while the eclipse glasses were in his hand (or pocket? I can't remember now) its all really clear dementia behavior. Also the tests he's described taking, he describes them exactly as coherently and in an extremely similar manner to my grandmother's descriptions of probably the same tests. She also knew she had an MRI (and named the wrong thing it was for) and kept saying it was tomorrow for a week, which is pretty comparable to how Trump has been talking about his MRIs.

Like, for a normal person in an assisted living facility, I'd say with his mix of ailments he might not even make it until the end of the year, but he has quite frankly the best access to healthcare of anyone in the entire world. We're going to watch this poor man regress until there's no sign of him left because his team refuses to publicly admit that their guy is dying. Honestly it feels like elder abuse, letting him act like a toddler on the world stage (which is what dementia does, its like the person regresses in age) instead of publicly announcing his decline and how his team will be reviewing his work and slowly taking over his duties as he becomes less capable, letting him decline not in the spotlight but in privacy. It'll be an interesting next few years for sure, because I'll be shocked if he survives to the end of his presidency

I'm skeptical of what your parent is saying...sounds quite like the adenochrome conspiracy theory. But at the same time, it's quite likely that the POTUS would get on medical trials if something seemed both promising and relatively safe.

With this particular president...I wouldn't put it past him to obtain some unethical treatment (such as proposed in the adenochrome conspiracy theory, but probably not actually adenochrome).

Speed.

Yup. Equality is unhelpful in the real world past a certain point. It’s better to think of equitability instead. Colour blind people can become pilots, but their rating is limited according to the extent of their condition, such as being banned from night flying, or not being given a commercial licence. So they have equality in being allowed to train and to take the medical assessment, and equitability in being treated differently due to their specific circumstances rather than in general terms.

As there are already restrictions on who can be president, it’s not too much to ask that they also be of sound mind. The equitable (indeed only sane) thing would be for anyone with dementia to be immediately removed from the military chain of command.

Yeah I agree.

Cognitive/psychological disabilities are a bit different than physical disabilities.

We can acknowledge that.

Someone without the ability to think or plan or even be aware of where they are shouldn't be in charge of other people's lives or livelihoods.

As far as I'm concerned, disabled folks should be able to be hired to do any job that a normally-abled person can do, if they can do it with reasonable accommodations. But I'm going to have some questions if a blind person wants to do color grading, or if a nonverbal person is applying to be a live interpreter. The answer isn't no, but I do have some questions.

Those questions grow with the number of lives that are at risk. A potential surgeon who has a motor control disability is probably going to need a longer interview. An air traffic controller with sensory processing issues, even longer. A nuclear bomb technician with uncontrolled hallucinations, let's block out most of the day.

A really old guy with memory, processing, and concentration issues wants a job running a decent chunk of the whole world? A job that takes heightened focus and quick decision making, and that regularly burns out people half his age? A job that has a lot of handles on foreign and domestic policy, and the nuclear codes? I think we should probably spending a couple of months talking about that, and poring over his medical records.

And then we should hire someone else instead, because come on

differently-abled

Taught this term as a kid, in recent years saw complaints from the referenced community, wonder if choosing “disabled” is best for balance these days 🤷‍♂️

By the transitive property, Trump ate the report.

First event is a civics test.