Time to Refocus, Rise Above the Noise, and Daydream

What the heck am I doing, anyway?

I’ve never been a huge fan of MSNBC. In the years since I cut the cable I have not even bothered to learn how to watch it live. Why? Because it is largely programming, not coverage. Significant news or views appearing in that network can be found in clips on social media and/or YouTube.

With the exception of Mehdi Hassan, who was shown the door after being contrarian about the Gaza war, I’ve rarely felt challenged by commentary on MSNBC. More often I’ve ended up with eyes glazed over, thinking “so what?”

So I was pleasantly surprised upon reading Chris Hayes’ preview of his own book “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” in the New York Times.

• My mind is too restless and unsettled to be quite comfortable with true idleness. But anything worth doing in life requires a bit of work and struggle and intention. It may seem a paradox to train yourself to do less, but Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing” offers a starting point. She proposes a “plan of action” that includes a kind of “dropping out not dissimilar from the ‘dropping out’ of the 1960s” as well as “lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us” and a “movement downward into place.”

• Millions of people use prayer and meditation and other forms of spiritual and psychological practice toward the same ends. What these practices have in common is the cultivation of an inner discipline to resist that feral desire to distract oneself. Kierkegaard called it the “principle of limitation, which is the only saving one in the world.” He added, “The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.”

• We’re trying various solutions to this problem, which is both new and a version of a very old remedy. There are mindfulness apps and endless self-help gurus beckoning from Instagram Reels and TikTok, promising ways to soothe our itchy minds. Together this does little to settle a restless and uneasy public, one that’s been conditioned to be easily bored by the constant thrum of diversion. We’re stuck in the king’s paradox. We’re chasing diversion with ever more ferocity, conditioned over time by the content slot machines in our pockets to need more and more to pay attention to.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my writing, namely the difference between what I’m actually accomplishing versus what I set out to do. A dozen years back my thinking was that I’d be serving as a warning beacon against reactionary schemes so informed readers could act to mitigate, prevent, or derail the right wing agenda.

With the election results in, and the public largely resigned to whatever happens (or not), I’m thinking perhaps I should shift focus. These kinds of thoughts surface when one steps away from the political clatter, as I have done with the past two weeks in Asia. I religiously went through and deleted all my email newsletters and publications, focusing on the challenges and opportunities presented each day. Nothing mattered but what was in front of me.

Believe me, if you’re not planning on how to get from a Japan Airlines plane to accommodations in Tokyo, your day will be negative in ways you’ve never conceived. You’ll also be missing out on the most important part of traveling, namely enriching your life through cultural and personal encounters. And what Politico, etc. say will likely be irrelevant shortly.

Shifting my writing purpose does not foreshadow giving up. I write because it’s my voice, and after five decades of existence in assorted environments, there are observations that could be of interest to others. There’s also the matter of not being able to speak/vocalize in the course of interacting with others, and how those interactions keep people sane.

One thing I won’t change are my underlying assumptions about politics being a manifestation of class struggle. Billionaires are bad. And “we” is always better than “I”.

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So here we are, awash in Trumpian group-speak, and it has occurred to me that adding to the noise may not be productive.

I think back to MAGA plotter Steve Bannon’s observation:

• The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

And, indeed, we’re living in an era where legacy media’s “coverage” has largely been reduced to responses to prior lies told by Donald Trump, and details of the application of parts of the Project 2025 agenda.

Today the “news” is about who can further the incoming administration’s actions via the election for Speaker of the House. Regardless, the out-of-the-gate agenda is to make suppressing or denying trans rights their “marquee fight” of 2025. While they’re putting poison pills in legislation directed at 1.4% of the population, we’re supposed to be ignoring the benefits accruing for the .01% who really matter in impacting our existence,.

• Also being covered is the Sixth Circuit Court’s decision to end Net Neutrality, meaning what Facebook et. al., accomplished by burying commentary will now be happening on AT&T, etc.).

• There’s another migrant caravan headed our way through Mexico, which is “news” since no other convoy has succeeded in reaching the border in over 5 years. Crossborder incidents with migrants are now lower than they were at the end of the Trump administration.

• There is apparently no conspiracy concerning recent tragic terror events, according to lying Joe Biden’s authorities, Everybody knows that open borders are…blah, blah, blah.

Here’s Steven Beschloss, explaining that those events should serve as a warning about the future::

• This deranged, vengeful man—who is determined to blame Democrats, the Justice Department, the FBI and migrants crossing the border for all of the nation’s ills—will make snap judgements that fit his narrative. He will rely on sycophants ready to pursue his hateful agenda, even when it means ignoring or burying knowable facts that contradict his narrative. We also have every reason to expect that he will concoct events to justify his dark plots.

• Imagine an FBI led by someone like Kash Patel. Do you think he will pursue the truth wherever it leads? Or will he seek scapegoats to appease his boss? Suffice to say, this strategy will make us all less safe.

• This story is also a warning for all the ways that we rely on data to understand our world and its challenges. Can we count on accurate information if the crime rate rises under Trump? Can we rely on—indeed find—climate data from a regime pushing the lie that climate change is a hoax? What about credible public health data during another deadly virus outbreak or after the removal of a vaccine?

What I can do with these newsletters is to call out deviations from the official narrative, encourage people to reflect on the totality of their existence, report on science, and instances where humans have actual (and opposed to induced) positive interactions. It’s a newish mode for me, but I’ll be trying.

One thing Chris Hayes addresses in the Times essay is a need for time away from the maddening crowd. Fear of boredom is what we’ve been conditioned to act on. All these diversions are like a drug in that their effectiveness can deteriorate over time, so escalation in emotive prompts is needed. It’s a vicious cycle, tailored to whatever favored media we engage with.

Believe it or not, the absence of drama (or other types of triggers) doesn’t have to be dreaded. The alternative to external stimulation is simple, but not as easy as you might think: daydream. Activities connected with maintaining your existence –be they chopping wood, jogging, or simply playing games– are your best shot at recovering from the shock and awe diet.

This doesn’t mean putting aside activism, but being more creative and experiential in public displays puts the desired results in a context where cooptation and confrontation are less likely to be effective. I would say that people flooding airport terminals in response to Trump’s Muslim ban was one such idea.

Literally repeating such actions won’t have the same impact because they require an organizational/leadership structure vulnerable to authorities’ counter-measures (see: Gaza encampments). And because the experience of the event itself won’t promote human-to-human connections. In San Diego, experiences at the airport led to the formation of Indivisible chapters.

Let’s be creative. And smart. And willing to daydream as a tool to self reliance and victory over the forces of darkness.

Dingus of the Year: JD Vance by Lyz at Men Yell At Me

(The whole thing is quotable, but here’s a taste.)

• In the months since, Vance was elected vice president, bringing to the Trump Vance ticket such bold ideas as making all abortion illegal and making a lot of humans illegal too. He opposes same-sex marriage and universal childcare and believes a woman’s role is to take care of children.

• Vance ascended to the national office because he took one look at what happened to Mike Pence and was like, “Oh yes, I want that.”

• But in the days since the election, Vance has been mostly out of sight, with Elon Musk becoming a de facto vice president, which feels like a lateral move. Vance and Musk are both businessmen obsessed with the birth rate and have faces that look like they were generated by Grok when asked to make a man so off-putting you’d cover your drink in his presence.

***

Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Powerful - When you’re a star, people let you think you're smart by Paul Krugman

• Sure, tariffs could pay for a government without Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at a time when even the military was tiny. But the constituency for returning to that kind of small government consists, as far as I can tell, of a couple of dozen libertarians in bow ties. And the kind of government we have now needs a lot more than tariffs to pay its way.

• Which brings me back to what is likely to happen on tariffs. You might think that it’s obvious that Trump’s announced plans, or concepts of plans, are unworkable. But it’s probably not obvious to Trump — and who’s going to tell him?

• So he may really try to go through with this stuff.

***

Meta's AI "Users" Are the Last Thing Social Media Needs by Parker Molloy at The Present Age

• A company that supposedly exists to help people connect with each other thinks what we really want is to interact with fake people created by algorithms. This is the same company, mind you, that just months ago had to pull the plug on its celebrity AI chatbots (remember AI Snoop Dogg? No? Exactly.) because nobody wanted them.

• But rather than learning from that failure, Meta is doubling down. According to the Financial Times, these AI entities will have "bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content." Because if there's one thing Facebook definitely needs more of, it's artificial content generators, right?

• This comes at a time when Facebook is already drowning in what's commonly known as "slop"—AI-generated images of everything from nonexistent landscapes to Jesus Christ himself, usually posted by content farms trying to game engagement metrics. Meta's response to this problem? Apparently, to add even more AI-generated content.