click a pic
Feb 5, 2025
More Storm
Understandable.
But we have to find ways to deal with both the shit-shoveling itself, and our reactions to the shit-shoveling.
Here's some new shit that they're dumping on the schools.
And remember - their project is not to improve the public school system, but to fuck it up as much as possible, knowing that'll push most of the richer parents to pay Coin-Operated Private Academies handsomely to teach their precious little Nazis how to rule and dominate, while most kids will be stuck in "government schools" learning practically nothing but obedience and jingoistic bullshit.
Social media can be a great tool for connecting with friends and extended family. However, it can also be hard to disconnect from things we may rather not see, like traumatic events, natural disasters, politics and more. While it’s convenient to check every notification and read every headline at our fingertips, it’s probably not the best strategy to care for our mental health.
Here are four things you can do if you’re feeling overwhelmed by social media or current events.
1. Set a time limit
Allow yourself to take a break from social media and the news. Limiting how much time you spend on social platforms and news sites can help you manage feelings of stress and anxiety. It can also help free up some of your time, so you can focus more of your energy on activities and hobbies that help you feel actively engaged (rather than passive consumption).
One way to decrease your time on social media is to designate phone-free spaces. For instance, you may decide that areas designated for studying or working are phone-free zones. This could include your dining table, office, desk or other study and workspaces. By keeping your phone out of reach, you may find that you’re able to focus more on class or work tasks more easily.
Connecting with friends is another great way to take a break from online updates by focusing on the people you’re with. Spending meaningful time offline can help you disconnect from your feeds and reconnect with loved ones in your life. Try to keep in mind how you use your phone when spending time with others. For instance, you may want to silence your phone or put it in your bag if you’re meeting a friend for coffee, so you can avoid getting distracted.
2. Set boundaries
We all have different expectations for how we interact with people and how we want them to interact with us. Boundaries are a helpful tool to give us agency over our physical safety, communication, emotions, energy and time. They can also help us live by our values and determine what is and isn’t okay.
Setting boundaries online may look different for everyone. That’s why it’s important to create boundaries that reflect your personal values and protect your well-being. Here are a few examples of boundaries you can set for yourself and others on social:
- Give yourself permission to not read the news. Remember that posts will still be there tomorrow, so you won’t miss out on anything by skipping the news cycle for a day or two. You can always go back to read it if it was something really important or that you need to see. It may also be helpful to seek out short-form news outlets from credible sources, such as 15- or 30-minute podcasts or daily written summaries, to set natural limits on how you engage with the news.
- Avoid arguments and trolls. Arguments made through comments or messages online are unlikely to change anyone’s opinion, especially if the other person is committed to engaging with people in a rude, disrespectful or hostile way. It’s also important to keep in mind that some people post comments just to rile others up. That’s why it may be best to not engage. If you do find yourself stuck in a loop of comments, know that it’s okay to let someone have the last word to spare your mental energy.
- Practice enforcing limits. When traumatic events happen, it’s common for people to ask questions or request updates that may feel invasive or triggering. If this happens to you, give yourself permission to say no or walk away from situations that make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe. You can also ask to change the topic of conversation away from current events or other topics that negatively impact your emotional health.
3. Focus on things within your control
Just like we can’t control what other people say or do online, we can’t control what the news chooses to report on. If we get too absorbed by the news, we may start to feel overwhelmed. When we engage with news in this way, we may also lose our sense of control.
If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by news stories, updates, details or outcomes, it may be time to take a step back and refocus your attention on things that are within your control. Sometimes it can be helpful to create a list. Here are a few examples of things that you can directly control:
- What time you go to bed and wake up
- How you spend your free time (hobbies, interests, etc.)
- Daily activities like spending time outside, eating regularly, staying active, etc.
- How much time you spend on social platforms
- Notification and privacy settings
- What accounts you actively follow
- What posts and stories you read
- How you use your own social media accounts
- Instead of focusing on what is outside of your control, focus more of your time and energy on the things in your life that you have a say in.
It’s important to remember that you have the power to control what appears on our feeds. If your social platforms feel hostile, overwhelming or are negatively impacting your mental health, it may be time to turn off notifications, mute or unfollow.
Muting can be a great tool to hide disturbing posts or rescue yourself from heated debates and discussions. If you don’t have a close relationship with someone, unfriending or blocking them can also be good options. This will remove them from your view entirely and stop any notifications about their posts, comments and messages. Remember that muting and unfollowing don’t have to be permanent. You can always refollow or unmute people in the future as things change.
Muting can be a great tool to hide disturbing posts or rescue yourself from heated debates and discussions. If you don’t have a close relationship with someone, unfriending or blocking them can also be good options. This will remove them from your view entirely and stop any notifications about their posts, comments and messages. Remember that muting and unfollowing don’t have to be permanent. You can always refollow or unmute people in the future as things change.
- Pick 2 or 3 key issues to concentrate on, and see if you can connect with others who've picked 2 or 3 different issues. Get together once in awhile and compare notes.
- Use aggregators and trusted knowledgeable friends for synthesis.
- Take breaks. Walk away for a bit and see if you can find a little sunshine outside.
- Take some time processing. Go slow, even tho' it all feels urgent. Urgency can cloud important aspects that we need time to consider.
- Build some kind of community. I'm not talking about holding hands with 20 new friends and singing folk songs and shit (unless, of course, that's what turns your crank). What we need to do is fight the divide-n-conquer strategies.
I'm going to try to focus on these 3 issues:
- Ukraine
- Schedule F
- Immigration
Good luck to us all, and if you feel so inclined, lemme know what's up with you.
Leave a comment here,
or you can find me on most social media sites as:
@eVilleMike
Feb 4, 2025
A Quote For The Times
Sadness can be caused by intelligence. The more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn't understand them.
--Charles Bukowski
It Gets Worse
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio left El Salvador on Tuesday with an agreement from that country’s president to accept deportees from the U.S. of any nationality, including violent American criminals now imprisoned in the United States.
President Nayib Bukele “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said after meeting with Bukele at his lakeside country house outside San Salvador for several hours late Monday.
“We can send them, and he will put them in his jails,” Rubio said of migrants of all nationalities detained in the United States. “And, he’s also offered to do the same for dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States even though they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents.”
Rubio was visiting El Salvador to press a friendly government to do more to meet President Donald Trump’s demands for a major crackdown on immigration.
Bukele confirmed the offer in a post on X, saying El Salvador has “offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system.” He said his country would accept only “convicted criminals” and would charge a fee that “would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire working with Trump to remake the federal government, responded on his X platform, “Great idea!!”
After Rubio spoke, a U.S. official said Trump’s Republican administration had no current plans to try to deport American citizens but called Bukele’s offer significant. The U.S. government cannot deport American citizens, and such a move would be met with significant legal challenges.
But is it really a "deportation"? And is it actually illegal to farm out an American criminal to a foreign prison? This is Mr SmarmSpace we're dealing with. He'll have his beagles all over the thing looking for loopholes. If nothing says very specifically that he can't do some shitty thing, he's going to do the shitty thing. And sometimes he does a shitty thing even when there is a law against it.
Can you see how incredibly convenient it would be to have AG Patel railroad somebody - say, a mildly famous political opponent - and bury him in your Rent-A-Gulag 2,000 miles south of Dallas? That could make a lot of people eager to bow down.
The State Department describes El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons as “harsh and dangerous.” On its current country information webpage it says, “In many facilities, provisions for sanitation, potable water, ventilation, temperature control, and lighting are inadequate or nonexistent.”
El Salvador has lived under a state of emergency since March 2022, when the country’s powerful street gangs went on a killing rampage. Bukele responded by suspending fundamental rights like access to lawyers, and authorities have arrested more than 83,000 people with little to no due process.
In 2023, Bukele opened a massive new prison with capacity for 40,000 gang members and boasted about serving only one meal per day. Prisoners there do not receive visits, and there are no programs preparing them for reinsertion into society after their sentences and no workshops or educational programs.
El Salvador, once one of the most dangerous countries in the world, closed last year with a record low 114 homicides, a newfound security that has propelled Bukele’s soaring popularity in the country of about 6 million residents.
Rubio arrived in San Salvador shortly after watching a U.S.-funded deportation flight with 43 migrants leave from Panama for Colombia. That came a day after Rubio delivered a warning to Panama that unless the government moved immediately to eliminate China’s presence at the Panama Canal, the U.S. would act to do so.
Migration, though, was the main issue of the day, as it will be for the next stops on Rubio’s five-nation Central American tour of Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic after Panama and El Salvador.
His tour is taking place at a time of turmoil in Washington over the status of the government’s main foreign development agency.
Trump’s administration prioritizes stopping people from making the journey to the United States and has worked with regional countries to boost immigration enforcement on their borders as well as to accept deportees from the United States.
The agreement Rubio described for El Salvador to accept foreign nationals arrested in the United States for violating U.S. immigration laws is known as a “safe third country” agreement. Officials have suggested this might be an option for Venezuelan gang members convicted of crimes in the United States should Venezuela refuse to accept them, but Rubio said Bukele’s offer was for detainees of any nationality.
Rubio said Bukele then went further and said his country was willing to accept and to jail U.S. citizens or legal residents convicted of and imprisoned for violent crimes.
Human rights activists have warned that El Salvador lacks a consistent policy for the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and that such an agreement might not be limited to violent criminals.
Manuel Flores, the secretary general of the leftist opposition party Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front, criticized the “safe third country” plan, saying it would signal that the region is Washington’s “backyard to dump the garbage.”
After meeting with Bukele, Rubio signed a memorandum of understanding with his Salvadoran counterpart to advance U.S.-El Salvador civil nuclear cooperation. The document could lead to a more formal deal on cooperation in nuclear power and medicine that the U.S. has with numerous countries.
While Rubio was out of the U.S., staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development were instructed Monday to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters after Musk announced Trump had agreed with him to shut the agency.
Thousands of USAID employees already had been laid off and programs shut down. Rubio told reporters in San Salvador that he was now the acting administrator of USAID but had delegated that authority so he would not be running its day-to-day operations.
The change means that USAID is no longer an independent government agency as it had been for decades — although its new status will likely be challenged in court — and will be run out of the State Department by department officials.
In his remarks, Rubio stressed that some and perhaps many USAID programs would continue in the new configuration but that the switch was necessary because the agency had become unaccountable to the executive branch and Congress.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)