Primate Brow Flash

I quit reading any newspapers, watching any TV news, listening to MPR, looking at any news Websites, at least until, I don’t know, November?
If a news item is important enough to bubble up into conversation, perhaps I’ll give it some attention.
I’m sick of the news cycle. I’m sick of endless repetition. I think without all the repetition, the news organs would have a deafening silence that would beg to be filled in with conversations about things that actually matter.

I’m reading Watership Down to my kids right now. The main characters encounter a community of rabbits that are fat, healthy and cultured. They have all kinds of great food dumped outside their warren every day, and they practice art, storytelling, and poetry. There are unwritten restrictions on their speech, though. They aren’t allowed to talk about the price they pay for all the good eats (which is being trapped by “the wire” and eaten.)
Frank said, “why aren’t they allowed to talk about the wires or where their food came from?”
I responded, “for the same reason we aren’t allowed to talk about the 100 people per day that die in car accidents.”
He said, “but we are allowed to tal…”
“SHADDDUP!”, I screamed.
No, I didn’t. I said, “well, not really. When someone dies in a car accident, we do not question it. When a kid can’t bike to school because there’s a 6 lane highway in the way, we don’t question it.”

As Noam Chomsky said,

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

I’m sick of feeling manipulated and restricted by the spectrum of acceptable opinion.

I sick of fixating on the morbidity. I even sometimes look at web sites that filter out all the good news! This is me being a zombie and needing to Eat Brains.
The Coming Global Shitstorm (CGS) is not coming fast enough anyway. I look at every article and try and force the CGS juices out of it. No, if I leave off of that for a while, if I skip the news for a month or two, I won’t miss anything.

Also, I simply don’t have time to be an informed citizen right now. So, excuse me for missing the murdered journalist in Russia, the drought in Spain, the murder rate in Minneapolis, the California resident who died of the flu. If you find this to be callous or avoidant, wouldn’t you rather have me focus on the problems in front of me than feeding on the disaster of the day?

Does this seem extreme? I don’t think it is. I think the amount of news coming at me is extreme. Actively chopping it out is a return to normalcy.

My former co-worker and room mate is shaking things up:
Hardcore policy reporting is paying the bills at a seattle web startup

With the state budget in dire straits, Washington’s 2009 legislative session was awash in red ink and in news. And the contracting newspaper industry was in no position to keep up: three of the statehouse’s top reporters had all left the business in the last year.

That left thousands of bureaucrats, lobbyists and activists parched for legislative scuttlebutt, including billions of dollars in state cuts. So two months after Publicola’s January launch, Feit became Olympia’s first credentialed online-only reporter.

Between February and April, Feit said, his audience jumped from 600 unique daily visitors to 1,500. “You start with your strength,” Feit said. “The audience was clearly political wonks, insiders, people in cubicles in Olympia.”