News Is A Stress Test

According to the Mayo Clinic: “A stress test shows how the heart works during physical activity. It also may be called a stress exercise test. Exercise makes the heart pump harder and faster. A stress test can show problems with blood flow within the heart. A stress test usually involves walking on a treadmill or riding a stationary bike.”

Anything that forces you to interact with the unpredictable world beyond yourself easily becomes a stress test. A common way that people do this is by following the news.

Dealing with the news is a good test of your mental health because if you are not in reality, if you don’t know your limitations, if you are not clear about the things you cannot change and the things you can, then you’ll get upset by the news. There is no way to avoid feeling hurt by the news (if you are a Democrat, then Trump’s 2016 triumph must have hurt, and if you are a Republican, Joe Biden’s 2020 victory must have hurt), but feeling hurt and losing your mental health are two different things.

The way I consume news now (I subscribe to Apple News Plus, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal) is largely a pleasure. I enjoy the challenge (particularly of interpreting the news on my near daily livestreams) and I don’t see how it is hurting me. The news doesn’t consistently diminish my happiness, and I don’t lose friends or money over it. I don’t make bad decisions over it. I deal better with the news these days because my primary goal is understanding, not activism. If you have any other primary goal with regard to the news beyond understanding, you’ll get upset.

Prior to 2016 (and my entry into various 12-step programs and seminars), I would regularly get upset by the news because the world refused to conform to my expectations.

Live streaming is a stress test. If you regularly talk publicly for hours on controversial issues without self-harming, you are probably on solid psychic ground. You might argue, what about the social harm you could be creating? In my experience, if you harm others, they inevitably harm you. If there’s not significant pushback to your choices, you are not harming others. If you get out of touch with reality, in my experience, you get humiliated. If you are not experiencing regular humiliation, you are living in reality with an accurate understanding of your own relative importance as you navigate your day (sometimes in your day, you will be in charge, and at other times, you will take orders, and at other times you will cooperate).

Do you feel assaulted by the news? Here are some of the ways that I see people getting unhinged by the news:(1) They overestimate their ability to change the world. (2) They overestimate the importance of news. (3) They overestimate their ability to understand the news. (4) They are blind to the fictional reality of their hero system. (5) They are blind to their own limitations. (6) They rage against reality. When man and reality conflict, reality always wins. (7) They deepen their pathologies, such as feeling superior to or inferior to others, becoming hopeless and desperate, identifying too strongly with winners or losers in the news, getting their sense of importance from the news, and then feeling desperate to make the news (feeling as if they don’t count if they don’t get on TV). (8) They sell out who they are to gain respectability. (9) They damage what should be most precious to them by making impolitic reactions to the news. (10) They fail to wisely navigate between reactions #8 and #9. Feeling anxious, they either sell ourselves out to get along with others or they ignore the repercussions to their relationships by following their heart.

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Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers

From this 2021 book:

* Gerald Levin: “There were cultural differences as well. I wasn’t a Time Inc. type. Time had few Jewish people. I didn’t dress the way they dressed. I didn’t talk about closing advertising deals on a golf course in Connecticut. I wasn’t getting shit-faced on martinis at lunch.”

* The 1960 rematch between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson was the first such [PPV] broadcast accessible from the comfort of a viewer’s own couch. Subscribers mailed $2 to access the match. HBO had shattered the PPV record with “Rumble in the Jungle,” but that record crumbled with “Thrilla in Manila.”
Jerry Levin secured “Thrilla” by once again making a selling point out of HBO’s modest subscriber base. It was a visionary move. HBO carried the Ali–Frazier fight live on October 1, 1975, scooping the competition by inaugurating its continual satellite feed. (Regular TV stations had to wait for videotapes of the fight to arrive from the Philippines, which took days.)

* But cultural challenges sometimes got in the way. In certain parts of the country, people weren’t happy about R-rated movies and other HBO content coming into their homes. Some cable operators worried that when they went to the local municipality to renew their franchise, they’d hear, “You’re the people bringing that filth into our town.”
When we would do weekend promotions, where we’d be showing up for free on everyone’s TV, we tried to be really careful. We didn’t want to be showing an R-rated movie when somebody didn’t invite us into their home. One cable operator in Mississippi said, “No worries, it won’t be a problem,” and insisted on taking the regular HBO satellite feed, which was playing The Exorcist and had a fairly graphic masturbation scene. He got a lot of complaints, but the real surprise was they weren’t about the explicit scenes. This was the Bible Belt. People weren’t happy about a movie that had the devil showing up unannounced.

* There were sensitivities even on non-free weekends. I was in the master control room in December 1975 when we were playing the movie Groove Tube , and after one particular sexy part, Jerry called and said, “Pull it off the air.” I said, “But we’re in the middle of the movie,” and he told me, “I don’t care. Put a slide up.” I took it off, and we put up a note that said the program was being interrupted.

* Michael Fuchs: “You get to William Morris and they lie to you. They tell you you’re coming in to eventually be the president. You should never take a job waiting for old Jews to die.”

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Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book by Katherine Rundell:

* The power of John Donne’s words nearly killed a man. It was the late spring of 1623, on the morning of Ascension Day, and Donne had finally secured for himself celebrity, fortune and a captive audience. He had been appointed the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral two years before: he was fifty-one, slim and amply bearded, and his preaching was famous across the whole of London. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, 1 wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. He often wept in the pulpit, in joy and in sorrow, and his audience would weep with him. His words, they said, could ‘charm the soul’. 2
That morning he was not preaching in his own church, but fifteen minutes’ easy walk across London at Lincoln’s Inn, where a new chapel was being consecrated. Word went out: wherever he was, people came flocking, often in their thousands, to hear him speak. That morning, too many people flocked. ‘There was a great concourse 3 of noblemen and gentlemen’, and in among ‘the extreme press and thronging’, as they pushed closer to hear his words, men in the crowd were shoved to the ground and trampled. ‘Two or three were endangered, and taken up dead for the time.’ There’s no record of Donne halting his sermon; so it’s likely that he kept going in his rich, authoritative voice as the bruised men were carried off and out of sight.

* His poetry is wildly delighted and captivated by the body – though broken, though doomed to decay – and by the ways in which thinking fast and hard were a sensual joy akin to sex. He kicked aside the Petrarchan traditions of idealised, sanitised desire: he joyfully brought the body to collide with the soul.

* Donne lived under a state which both censored and spied on its citizens, and his letters are largely – though not solely – practicalities. Will you come for dinner? I am ill. Might you give me money? Can you find me work? (Or, more accurately, because a significant portion of the letters are outrageous pieces of flattery: you are so ravishingly exquisite, can you find me work?)

* Donne is the greatest writer of desire in the English language. He wrote about sex in a way that nobody ever has, before or since: he wrote sex as the great insistence on life, the salute, the bodily semaphore for the human living infinite.

* St Paul’s Cathedral. He was born in sight of both his future job and his final resting place, which must be rare.

* no women were allowed in the Inns [of Court], except for the ‘laundresses’ who cleaned, and who had to be under the age of twelve or over forty in order to prevent romantic entanglements.

* the Inns of Court wielded against their students a litany of sumptuary regulations, to keep the men looking as serious externally as they were presumed to be internally. All gowns were to be ‘of a sad colour’, and there was a formidable list of forbidden accessories and styles, including ruffs, hats, boots, spurs, swords, daggers, long hair, beards, and ‘foreign fashions’ generally; overall, the Inns’ legislation stated that each student should ensure ‘his apparel pretend no lightness, 1 or wantonness in the wearer’.

* when we get dressed we ask something of the world. All clothes speak: they say desire me, or oh ignore me, or endow my words with greater seriousness than you would were I not wearing this hat.

* He understood that presentation, voice and look are not frivolities to be dismissed, but weapons to be harnessed.

* Performance, and the clothes that accompany it, remained an interest all Donne’s life. From his youth, when he posed exuberantly for images, until his death, before which he demanded that he be sketched for his statuary dressed only in his winding-sheet, Donne knew this: that to get dressed is to make both a statement and a demand. There’s no such thing as neutral clothing: to attempt neutrality is itself a statement of style.

* Donne lived through a plague with mortality rates at sixty per cent and higher. (Covid-19 has a global mortality rate of about three per cent.)

* Between Thomas More’s execution in 1535 and Henry’s death in 1593, we can count eleven members 1 of Donne’s family who died in exile or in prison for their Catholicism.

* There was the power of his ambition, and his understanding that promotion and success would not be compatible with open Catholicism, but there would also have been new books and new conversations, drinking with Protestants, flirtations with Protestants. There would have been the pull of other allegiances over denominational ones – to the monarch and to the idea of nationhood, which slowly took on the shape of national loyalism and led him towards the Church of England. His priorities shifted, realigned, took on new shapes.

* Was, then, the young Donne a great tumultuous lover: a conqueror of swathes of women? After so much time and so much entropy, we can only guess: but, almost certainly, not. 12 Women of his class would have been hard to seduce – they were fiercely and carefully protected. Make a mistake, they knew, and you could be punished for life.

* The idea that Donne’s poetry would give you, of a beautiful young man cutting through swathes of London’s finest female population, would have been difficult – though not impossible – to pull off.

* Because of this devil-may-care attitude to his own work, when you quote a Donne poem, you are in fact quoting an amalgamation, pieced together over four hundred years from an array of manuscripts of varying degrees of scrappiness.

* The poems we know as ‘by John Donne’ have in fact been constructed by editors, piecemeal, from the best of the manuscripts and the seventeenth-century print editions: the title page should, were it to be bluntly literal, read, ‘Poems, by John Donne and by educated guesswork’.

* the more you read Donne’s verse, the more you love him, and the more you read Donne’s prose, the less you can bear him.

* If he took her to bed like he wrote – if he knew how to render bodily his poetry – then he was worth sacrificing all the wall hangings in England for.

* Everything that made him so spectacular a poet made him ill-suited to being a father: having a parent whose mind is riddling, intense and recalcitrant of easy comfort is rarely what a child dreams of.

* For a man so emphatic, and capable of such fervent enthusiasm, he never did manage to enthuse very emphatically about his offspring while they were alive.

* The difficulty of history is that we must, to some extent at least, take men at their word; we must assume that they planned to do what they said they planned to do, and for roughly the reasons they said they did. We cannot read disingenuousness into every single speech, or the whole of history would be eaten alive by scepticism.

* generally sermons, in Donne’s day, were heard hungrily: they had breaking news in them, politics, entertainment, theatre; people gossiped about them and picked over in the week that followed.

* Donne’s sermons almost all follow the same structure, as was common to the vast majority of preachers. He would begin by laying out what was to follow, which usually was formed in two or three parts, and each part would have branches running out from it, and each branch further branches. Donne preached without a text in front of him; he would write the sermon out in full, take notes, and memorise it. He used the classical trick, employed by orators for thousands of years, of imagining a speech as a physical structure – a memory palace, a temple – through which he could move in his imagination. He was explicit about it: he compares the sermon to a ‘goodly palace’ through which he guides his audience.

* ‘marriage is but a continual fornication sealed with an oath.’

* The world is made up entirely of things that can kill you. Scarcely anything exists, Donne wrote with relish in the Devotions , which has not caused the death of someone once: ‘a pin, a comb, 1 a hair pulled, hath gangrened and killed.’

* Poets and playwrights, meanwhile, were killed and killing at a far greater rate of frequency than their percentage of the population seems to merit: Thomas Wyatt killed a man in an affray, Ben Jonson stabbed a man in a duel, Christopher Marlowe was murdered, probably in a tavern brawl, though possibly in an elaborate intrigue.

* and a woman without a dowry would have to be spectacularly beautiful or lucky.

* he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die.

* The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource.

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The Fall of the Silicon Valley Bank and the Rise of the New Fascism (3-12-23)

01:30 The New Fascism (1-2-23), https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=146667
13:00 Israel’s new right-wing government, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos
23:20 Howard Kurtz on the Twitter Files
33:00 When Did Intellectuals Stop Supporting The Free Market Of Ideas?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143526
47:30 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about the Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy

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Silicon Valley Bank Crash – The Next Enron? (3-10-23)

01:00 NYP: Silicon Valley Bank meltdown sparks contagion fears: ‘We found our Enron’,
15:00 Israel’s new government, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos
24:30 Rodney Martin joins
44:00 NBC: Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank in biggest collapse since 2008 financial crisis
1:05:00 Donald Trump vs Ron DeSantis
1:07:45 Dominion lawsuit vs Fox News

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