Cuba
I am extremely open about not following the news. Studies show reading the news is bad for mental health.
Why? In part because we generally speaking only call it News if it's bad news.
There are some legitimate practical reasons to pay attention to bad news. The lovely sunny day probably won't kill you. The tornado might.
But focusing too much on bad news and negative consequences we are expecting because of it does bad things to people mentally and emotionally, especially in the modern world with a 24 hour news cycle and global Internet where there's no END of apocalyptic levels of drama somewhere all the time and instant, constant access if you want to Doom Scroll.
We even have an expression for it: Doom Scroll.
When I was growing up, there was a daily newspaper and the TV showed News at like 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. You couldn't just DROWN yourself in it all day everyday the way you can now.
I used to participate on Hacker News and News there is more likely to be things like scientific studies and scientific discoveries. So it's not all bad news and that tells me it's not true that all news is bad news but perception skews that way.
Over the years, I've had multiple conversations online where people accuse me of being unrealistic or keeping my head in the sand or something like that and I've pointed out "X weeks ago, they predicted THIS dire outcome for this thing and it never got that bad and we ignore that people worked on it and mitigated it." And they still think I'm oblivious and whitewashing stuff and LA LA LA NOT LISTENING to me.
Y2K was supposed to result in a global financial meltdown with banks no longer functioning. Programmers fixed the problem and the result was more like "You can't program your VCR anymore because dates don't work on it anymore."
When Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, Iraq set a bunch of oil wells on fire on their way out. They were expected to burn for months or years or whatever and it was expected to be a GLOBAL climatic disaster.
They sent crack teams from around the world into Kuwait who invented new techniques on the fly to get this resolved. They put the fires out with breathtaking speed, dramatically shortening the timeframe involved and avoiding the worst, most dire predictions.
Afterwards, the combination of soot and water caused the desert to bloom like no one had seen in at least twenty years. This was a minor detail mentioned in passing in stories about dramatic, gut-wrenching events.
No, we did not globally CELEBRATE this victory on par with the previous global hand wringing about our obvious imminent DOOM.
We also didn't make a joyous noise about successfully resolving Y2K. Instead, programmers who were in the trenches and working overtime to MAKE this dire catastrophe go away tell tales of asshole bosses going "NOTHING happened. I WASTED all that money in paying you overtime for a fat lot of nothing."
My mother took Russian in school because that was required where she was growing up and once during the Cold War got upset about a translator in a News broadcast saying a Russian man said "That's a lie." In a huff, she said "That's NOT what he said. He said it's not TRUE."
I grew up listening to anecdotes about my parents having hilarious miscommunications because she spoke no English when they met. I've written a little about that here.
By all accounts, my father was NUTS about my mother and pursued her hard and before I was born, they routinely arranged daycare so they could go out together etc.
Then her English improved and they IMAGINED they understood each other and I grew up in an emotional war zone listening to them fighting about the same things over and over and not able to resolve their problems.
I generally view most News as basically "propaganda," either intentionally framing it inaccurately or just not really understanding something. Even if it's not politics per se, we FRAME a lot of stuff with a particular agenda or opinion or slant wholly unrelated to actual objective fact.
I read a piece once about high school or middle school drama rooted in a kid being dragged online by classmates because someone said something snarky about what they were wearing and it got uglier with each retelling and resulted in something terrible like attempted suicide. After that, you were allowed to only say objective things like "It was a red dress." without giving opinions about how attractive it was or how stylish or whatever.
Adults mostly can't get that right these days in so-called actual News stories, let alone social media comments.
I worked as a freelance writer for years and journalism is DEAD. Local papers are shutting down right and left and staff writers who are subject matter experts and paid adequately to properly research a story are largely a thing of the past, replaced by underpaid freelance writers who may have no journalistic training.
So the so-called News stories we do get are frequently TRASH. The person writing it doesn't really know what they are talking about and they pushed it out quickly to get on with the next underpaid freelance piece in hopes of eating this week and making rent.
I actually had a year of journalism in high school, was State Alternate for the Governor's Honors program -- a residential gifted enrichment summer program -- in the subject of journalism and my sister worked on the school paper in high school and majored in journalism in college. I wanted to be a writer from age eleven and participated in stuff like a poetry club or whatever in school and was getting stuff of mine published in school publications as a child.
I'm a writer. I'm a serious writer though no one has heard of me.
The Cuba and the U.S. have had a strained relationship for nearly seven decades, dating back to Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s overthrow of a U.S.-backed government in 1959.
Notice the grammatically incorrect THE at the start of the sentence. It's a SHIT article that was badly written and possibly edited only by the poor schmuck who wrote it who likely was not paid adequately to spend sufficient time on it to make sure it's not trash.
As a blogger making at best pennies per hour for my writing and unable to afford an editor, I do my own editing. Editing your own work is extremely hard.
You know what you meant. You reread the GARBAGE you wrote and mentally fill in the gaps with what you INTENDED to say but didn't ACTUALLY say.
Like with Iran, the US had a puppet government in Cuba at one time. And also exactly like with Iran, they threw us out and we continue to punish them for not wanting to be our bitch.
I wish I could meaningfully help the people in Cuba to make life work in spite of my idiot government keeping them under our boot out of habit simply because we've done it for decades and for no other reason.
I do write about topics like very basic water infrastructure, passive solar design and local food security on a site called Eclogiselle. I believe that could meaningfully help people in such a situation.
However, I don't believe anyone will take it seriously that a currently HOMELESS blogger has anything useful to tell anyone, much less people with serious problems. People seem to think I've never had those and are sure I'm a teller of tall tales when I speak of overcoming things.
If you are in political power in the US, let me suggest you do some research and try to find a means to walk back US abuse of Cuba. It's most likely actively harming our economy in ways not readily apparent.
What goes around comes around and then dumbasses trend towards saying "Wild coincidence!" instead of "Karma's a bitch."