Deep Fresh Insight on Mike Flynn

If you enjoy the Slog, it's likely because you strive to navigate a little deeper; to understand beyond lazy snark. "This sucks!" is an adolescent trope, and we've devolved into a society of adolescents. Cynical snark offers scant nutritional value, but media is now wall-to-wall junk food, leaving some of us starved for more enriched fare. Please, someone, tell me what's actually happening here, rather than spewing talking points, clichés, spin, and groupthink. Just the mere repetition of it all can be horrendously numbing.

There's so little fresh thinking. I'm seldom surprised by anything anyone says or writes, and I thirst for insight; for anything provoking rumination; for anything that doesn't merely leave a sweet or salty taste in my mouth.

But powerful forces drive media to preach to choirs. I wasted the first two years of the Trump administration watching endlessly agitated MSNBC pundits endlessly discuss and debate whether Donald Trump is a RACIST (spoiler alert: why, yes he is!). Audiences line up for their dopamine hit, tightly glued to the teevee box soothing them with predictable tribal patter rife with angry fear and outrage. The game is to resonate with the belchy toxins sloshing in people's guts. Forget insight or truth; the real money is in interminably "giving voice" to trendy viscerality, as if it weren't already being voiced absolutely everywhere. Media's finally become a true echo chamber.

But I found one gem of bona fide insight this week. A fresh, surprising, insightful, and enriched consideration, from 2016, of exactly what might have happened to Mike Flynn. You've never thought of things this way, so it's like entering a new world. And there's no snark, tongue-clucking, cliché, or dopamine-milking amygdala squeezing.

It's good. It makes sense. And it's something you've never considered in your whole life. A fresh perspective on a fresh perspective, with the power to shift your own perspective. You'll find yourself watching for this phenomenon everywhere, which is delightful given that it's all about the unusual ways in which some of us watch for certain phenomena everywhere!

Above all, it hammers home the little-recognized fact that every awesome gift comes with a built-in (and highly unpredictable) rebound/backsplash/downside. It's zero sum all the way, baby. This is one of the few things of which I'm unshakably certain.

Without further ado, here's "Making Sense of Mike Flynn" by Yoni Appelbaum, from The Atlantic.


The Atlantic offers fresh insight perhaps 1% of the time. That's world record territory, which is why I bought a digital subscription.

Oh, and do follow the links down the rabbit hole re: fossil hunter/UFOlogist Ray Stanford.