The Offline Report

Americans are in a strange situation. We have to make backup plans for our backup plans. Defensive-only living takes our attention away from moving forward. Hey Zeus, can you steer for a while? -------------------------------- Further Reading: "If the outcome of the election is not clear by Jan. 6, the decision goes to the House. But the vote is not as straightforward as Democrats having the majority of seats overall. Each state would get a single vote, which would be determined by the party that has the majority of members from that state."    npr.org This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

This LTE appeared in the September 9, 2020 edition of the Los Angeles Times. Modern dictators manged to transform democracies into "democracies" with one real candidate on the ballot. If all people talk about is the incumbent, really, enough voters will only see one candidate on the ballot. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

At the end of Lab Rats the author describes something like this, investments of the future. The future is apparently now. While the rest of the state and country cries that we're in the middle of a pandemic earthquake wildfire dictatorship apocalypse, they're missing the good news. Story here . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Dr. Timothy Snyder: So I, too, am hopeful that Americans and others have learned some things in the last few years and the last few months and that 2021 can be better than 2020, but it's not automatically going to be so. The fact that we've suffered doesn't mean that we've learned. We actually have to do learning from the suffering. There's an automaticity about it. And that's where we get to Hegel and the notion that history is dialectical , and that history is a slaughterhouse, and that first you have the suffering, and then you have the higher stage of history. That, of course, is all nonsense. There are no stages in history, there's no automaticity, there's no mechanism, and there's no world spirit. None of that's right. We can learn from suffering, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. And that's the part which is up to us. Dr. Timothy Snyder in coversation with Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa , hosts of the Gaslit Nation

This is a no-brainer. If the tables are far apart, you don't need a mask because you're outside. The waiter should be wearing a mask. Aerosoles drift down. I was jogging an empty street and a woman shamed my unmasked self from a block away. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .