29January25 - Intentional Chaos

I rage-quit the news yesterday after 3+ hours of trying to figure out if the latest insane EO was going to kill my brother's Pell grant and family's Medicaid. I got one story from the legacy media, another from sitting senators, another from the White House, and another from indie media.

In the end, all my scrambling didn’t matter, because a judge stepped in to temporarily block the EO, and I’m assuming that clarity on what is and is not included will be adjudicated, as well as the legality of the President crowning himself King Of The Money.

I am working to be intentional about where I put my attention, and how I interact with the news, but when chaos is the goal of this administration, none of the old means for staying

1) Accurately informed

2) Sane

are going to work anymore.

I've got got twice this week -- once on the Colombia tariff drama, and once on the Federal Spending Pause/Coup. On both of these I would have been served better by completely ignoring the whole situation for 24-48 hours, and getting the recap.

In Trump 1.0, I managed my attention by creating a nearly prescient news feed by strategically following trustworthy journalists on Twitter (pre-Elon).

In Trump 2.0, I haven't managed to fully rebuild that network on Bluesky yet, and even if I did, I don't know that it would stand up to the onslaught.

The reason I’ve been aggregating all these links by hand since election day is because I haven’t been able to find one place that seems to give me the bird’s eye view I’m looking for. I’m still looking, still trying to find the strategy that will allow me to put my time, energy, resources, and energy where they most need to be. But this is a marathon, and I’ll find it. Eventually.

In the mean time, only one link today: Trump’s Funding Freeze Awakens “Resistance”

Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash