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“Self-care can sometimes mean turning off my phone and watching YouTube videos of unlikely animal friendships for a few hours. It’s not sustainable to be tapped in 24/7, and it’s okay to give yourself a day of eating cookie dough while being wrapped in a million blankets before getting back out there to fight the good fight.” Writes Katie Wheeler at WaPo. The rest of what’s there is a very simply drawn comic showing a woman hearing about the news, despairing (“Nooooo!”), and running home to sit, wrapped in a blanket, in the dark. I’m calling attention to this not because I think the drawing is particularly good but because of the open awareness — at The Washington Post — of the natural, predictable human response to the excessive and unbroken negativity of the news. And yet the denial is there: the woman who turns away from the news media’s ugly hysteria will only withdraw for “a few hours,” and after which she will “get back out there and fight the good fight.” She won’t really chang...

Meade sings, "He is strong/He is invincible/He is Donald" (to the tune of "I Am Woman), as I click on Drudge's link. It goes to that WaPo article "Trump’s Ukraine call reveals a president convinced of his own invincibility." That's the headline I mocked yesterday — in "WaPo's groping for bad news about Trump stumbles into the double vinc " — for the ham-handed repetition of "vinc" in "con vinc ed... in vinc ibility." Drudge, amusingly, took the "invincibility" that WaPo intended only as an insult to Trump — who supposedly thinks he is invincible — and turned it into a reality — the idea that Trump is invincible. This reminds me of something I've heard Scott Adams say a few times. If we see a word next to a person's name, it gets connected to that person, and it doesn't stay put in the precise meaning it had where we first saw it. The original user of the words can't control them after they ...

This is the top headline at WaPo right now , and I don't think it's even news. At best, it's a clumsy sketch for an opinion column: I say it's not news because what is it saying just happened? The call, which we heard about days ago, is just evidence, lying there. The action verb is "points," but it's not as though the thing we already knew stood up and extended an index finger directing us to the complete abstraction of Trump's assessment of his own powers. And it's not as though WaPo just learned that Trump has this particular belief about himself. It doesn't even know that he does. It's just that the call suggests that Trump has this belief. The top news story of the day, according to The Washington Post, is a guess about what a piece of evidence might mean about how things look from the inside of the President's head. But what points to a newspaper that has lost its bearings is the utter badness of writing "con vinc ed" ...