I know most of you are sick of reading about Trump and his various plans, plots, and threats. Unfortunately, that’s really what the news has been during his administration’s first week, so that’s what I’m writing about.
That said, I’ll be trying to maintain a different attitude than a lot of the media, even the liberal media. My focus will be on what you need to pay attention to and what kind of attention you should pay. I’ll try to avoid both normalizing and the hand-wringing, isn’t-that-awful coverage we see so much of.
This week’s featured post is “Week One”, covering the inaugural address and some of the early executive orders. I’ll be pointing you to good sources of information and recommending some Substack blogs to follow. I wish I could do an exhaustive classification of all the orders, but there are just too many of them.
Sadly, the weekly summary will also center on Trump. Or, more precisely, people reacting to Trump: Greenland’s prime minister, Bishop Budde, and a few others. I’ll also discuss Elon’s Nazi salute, but from the point of view of how we should think about and/or respond to this kind of trolling.
I just started a cold last night, so I don’t know what to predict about my energy. Posts will appear when they appear, and be as close to complete as I can manage.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
RE: cold – please take care of yourself!
There are many of us who value your thoughts greatly. Especially these days! (thank you)
Repeating the above message – thank you for writing and take care of yourself!
Repeating the message above, thank you for writing and please take care of yourself!
Just to lay this down here where people might see it:
The attitude I am trying to take about following the news is to think of it as though it were weather. Weather can really mess you up. It can ruin your plans and create a lot of disappointment. Weather can kill you if you are really ignoring it, sometimes.
But nobody(1) gets wound up in drama over the weather. People don’t take the weather personally. The weather is what it is and you live your life in it. Nobody imagines harming other people, in order to make the weather be more copacetic, nor does anybody blame anyone for negligence about the state of the weather.
All of the people the news wants you to be mad at (including maybe the news orgs and their staffs) are doing what they know how to do. If they knew how to be better(2) they’d be doing that. I know, this is a prescription for coping and does not contain any theory of change about how to make things better. I haven’t got one of those, but I suggest that any usable theory of change that *does* make things better will come from people who are not constantly wrapped around the axle with outrage about what’s in the news.
(1) To a good approximation. There probably are people with personality disorders who are not good at coping with the changeability of the weather.
(2) This is, granted, in many cases equivalent to “if they had any ethical or moral sense other than selfish ambition.”