Another Theory of Spam

I have come to the conclusion over the past few years that day-to-day news is almost completely irrelevant. This is possibly supported by the statistical theory labelled The Black Swan, which posits that most important events and discoveries are unexpected....and the endless babble that has become the 24-hour news media is hard enough to deal with in separating signal from noise the way it is. Therefore, I need only wait for the important to occur, and if it's important enough, it will make itself manifest.

I have therefore concluded that "news" as it is understood in the early 21st century, as regurgitated by media in any form, is almost all identical to what is branded "spam" in e-mail, only different in that it pretends to information rather than advertising.

In the past three months, I have performed the experiment of having Google's News Reader perform the sole function of channeling news to my laptop, and the Tragic Lantern stays OFF. TV was a part of the familar everyday world to me for around 50 years- but I can't say that I miss it. It is now used for the sole function of prerecording shows or movies for entertainment, or showing same on DVD.

This in no way applies to local news, but "local" to me also has a very limited definition, and it's surprising how fast it falls off beyond Sangamon Township, where I live in what used to be a rural environment, but where those of us who moved here for reasons of our own have been joined by large numbers of city dwellers, who carry most of their urban predelictions with them as they fashion their estates -complete with drywall barns- in what they deem "rural splendor."

As far as "thinking globally," that was just another passing hallucination. Human beings are capable of dealing ethically with an absolute maximum of about 150 people; the rest is a mathematical abstraction.

I can have no impact on the fate of the dolphin or snail darter, the Amazon rain forest or the coming engineering of the human genome.....nor, as T.S. Eliot said, "-was meant to be." This attitude would no doubt horrify much that is embodied in fashionable ethics. I don't give a damn.

Moral obligations to distant others falls off fairly directly, and logarithmically, as the distance. I have the highest degree of obligation to my own beliefs and principles, followed by my friends and family. I have only to acknowledge the humanity of the inhabitants of Sulawesi or Central Park West. Although I have apparently omitted any connection to my nation, that, of course, is a convention. At my age, I consider my duties to society discharged (and more), and any ongoing reckoning I make, per formula, every April 15th.

Before I made this transition, I was like a happy man with a persistent deerfly buzzing around his head. Now the fly is gone.