Safety

[mallorys_camera]

The recent meteorological pattern of thaw & freeze, freeze & thaw, has turned the field in back of the house into a plate of ice. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before.

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I’ve gotta figure out some way not to get massively depressed while I’m Remunerating.

I mean, I’m lucky to have the work. I know that.

But the work is excessively dry, which means I write, say, 200 words & then my mind goes dry.

To tap the well again, I watch bad TV, or restlessly scroll social media, or—worst of all—read news stories.

Bad TV is bad TV. Meaning that if I’m in a good mood, it is diverting along the lines of Lord, what fools these mortals be!

But social media is just awful. I mostly do FB & Reddit. Reddit is more tolerable, probably because posters are free from accountability—you don’t have to use your own name or give any clue as to your real identity—so what they say is more authentic.

FB is just one soapbox after another. Frightened people regurgitating URLs with very few intelligent observations of their own. Very disheartening.

The news stories, though, are the most depressing of all.

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Trump’s strategy has been to throw fusillades of executive orders at bewildering speed—and then back down from many of them. Muzzle fire, Steve Bannon calls it.

The result is that one never knows what one should be looking at. Some of the orders are important, but many are not. It’s disorienting—and, of course, that disorientation is the point.

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One of the biggest Trump firestorms is over the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

I am well aware of USAID’s history, thanks to my love for John LeCarré. It was a CIA front; may well still be a CIA front. The Cold War’s rallying cry, after all, was Hearts and minds.

However… It also funds a number of humanitarian initiatives, not only overseas but also at home.

For example: USAID funds Catholic Relief Services. Catholic Relief Services funds Catholic Charities, a network of agencies that function as a domestic relief arm.

Catholic Charities has branches in approximately 4,000 U.S. cities. These agencies do everything from food banks and emergency financial assistance (rent, medication) to providing transportation for seniors (to doctors' appointments, grocery stores, etc.) who no longer drive.

When I was doing TaxBwana in Poughkeepsie, we used to meet in Catholic Charities’ decrepit downtown building.

There's considerable synergy here, too. The popular Meals on Wheels program, for example, may only be partly funded through Catholic Charities (the rest comes from grants, state and local governments, the Administration on Aging, etc.), but in many communities, Catholic Charities provides the kitchens where these meals are assembled.

And I don't know what the homeless population of the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley is going to do once Catholic Charities is out of the picture. Once Photoshopped pix of mass deportations lose their ability to shock or delight, I fully expect Trump to go after the homeless—three squares, a bed, and a fabulous view of Guantanamo Bay! But till then, they are a population with needs, and whatever you may feel about them, that population is going to be a lot more visible & disruptive when those needs aren't met.

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I can’t do a fucking thing about any of it. So reading about it is just like picking a scab: Should stop, don’t know how.

Reading the news makes me feel very unsafe, and, of course, I am unsafe. But if I have to think about how unsafe I am for very long, I get monumentally depressed. Because there's very little I can do right now to make myself safer.

Comments

[bill_schubert]

In the none of my business department.

I stopped reading Reddit because the AI was feeding me my echo chamber. Now I use it as a tool if I need something. But I found as I was reading I COULD NOT STOP. Just one more entry, one more, one more. One day I just stopped and took it off my phone.

FB is and always has been a pathetic joke. Twitter became the evil twin of FB.

As for the news. I've also stopped. I gloss through the headlines when I used to spend hours reading.

If the US were a huge freighter, the wheel has been thrown over and we are turning to a new direction that is far away from anything I want to see or, fortunately, will be alive to see.

The next major iteration will be when Trump defies the courts, which he will. One day he's just going to say they are invalid when they try to stop him, they are unpatriotic, just like the constitution. And there will be no one left to support them. There is no reason for this NOT to happen. It is just a matter of time. Half the country is in favor of it.

All we can do is is echo their anguished cry, as the Airplane said.

[mallorys_camera]

Reddit is by far my favorite social media. You're right: I feel like a fat girl with a doughnut when I'm reading it. 😀

It is just a matter of time.

Just like climate change? 😀

I half agree—and I half disagree. To me, Trump is the distraction, and Vance is the actual threat. It still feels to me that there's stuff that can be done to stop it—only I'm not sure what that stuff is, and the communication networks are all compromised, so it's difficult to plan.

[bill_schubert]

Great image re: Reddit.

I agree about Vance but without Trump none of it would be happening. We're moving beyond democracy now and no idea where it will lead. I just saw a poll with 53% approval rating for Trump. The only reason I could imagine that is people are so bored with their lives they need entertainment like Trump. Meanwhile we're moving towards and executive branch that will create an authoritarian government. It will all revolve around whether the executive will bend to the courts. They don't have to. Trump can just pardon anyone and everyone, including himself, who finds themselves in contempt of court. There is little to stop him especially when over half the country agrees that authoritarianism is better than democracy.

[mallorys_camera]

53% approval rating for Trump

That was a CBS poll. Please note that (A) Polls are meaningless, and (B) even if they weren't, CBS is compromised because they are in high butt-licking mode due to corporate terror that the Feds won't approve of Paramount's proposed merger with Skydance Media. (That's why they're paying Trump off for that "60 Minutes" Kamala Harris interview.)

Most other polls have him around 47% approval rating—-which, of course, is still incomprehensible to me.

We'll see what they think in a few months.