The Offline Report

This letter to the editor appeared in today's San Francisco Chronicle. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Without getting their endorsements, Trump campaigned to voters who watch the debate with the sound turned down by appearing with bling celebrities since mid-October: Ice Cube , NOT Ice T , Kanye, Kim Kardashian (Mrs. Kanye), 50 Cent, Lil' Wayne, developing ... Is this having any traction? The New York Times today, on October 30 reports: Racial and ethnic divides? Actually, Biden is making gains with white voters, and Trump with nonwhite ones. Link to full story is here . The Washington Examiner reported yesterday October 29 that Nearly one-third of black voters will vote for Trump, Rasmussen report finds . The onset of evidence this effort was underway appeared in what must have been Don Trump Jr.'s attempt at a deceptive retreat, doing his best Ferris Beuller impression under a blanket on Instagram , crying 'Hey guys hope you’re doing well. Just watching my algorithm get crushed. I guess I did something to p** off the Instagram gods. Hopefully you’re seeing this stuf...

March 13, 2020 It's only March 13th. Yet the 2020s are adhering to (my) prediction this would be a turbulent decade. Resilience science is practically a field of study now—hat tip to Chef Jose Andreas and World Central Kitchen for being early practitioners in this burgeoning discipline. Terrestrial, regional news can orient, calm and lift the spirits. It took weeks-long wildfires in 2017 for this chord-cutting household to buy a TV antenna. Tuning into the daily CALFIRE updates was incredibly calming during the mornings we dashed around to get ready for work. We didn't listen to every word, but it was reassuring knowing *someone* was monitoring and responding to events. Flipping the pages of a reliable newspaper is the best way to consume news for people who know how to navigate the medium. But there is a hump for a reader, who first feels overwhelmed and stupid for not knowing which headlines to skip. For supplemental news updates throughout the day, a quality, reliable te...

(April 8, 2019) Leaving the screen on occasion is not enough to build a truly individuated mind. But it's a start. Only touching autonomous media -- leaving the internet hive and entering another world -- will break temporarily the infantalizing umbilical chords of the social media silos owned by Facebook media group. And individuating on a habitual basis is vital for maintaining a democracy. Until one is individuated from one's parents, he or she always will be dependent on them for opinions and thought. That's the healthiest version. Individuating from cult leaders also is important. A cult leader-like offer from who appears to be a mere friend says "turn all your decisions over to me, I'll make them for you." It's a tempting salve to a stressful ambiguous and chaotic time. A blog post plugin could solve a problem. A blog article, a news article, is not the final word on any subject. But when we're in the habit of consuming a finishable snack ...

A lively discussion of Aristotle's "Poetics" broadcast on the BBC podcast "In Our Time" years ago so struck me that I've replayed it and saved the transcript and youtube link (which frequently expires). Aristotle was the son of a physician, and he himself was an excellent dissector and biology "classifier" while also being a protege of the mathematician, Plato. I'm writing about the treatise "Poetics" now because of the new comedy " Everything is Fine " which I saw on Netflix last night. Unlike his mentor Plato, who published several "dialogues" with a re-created Socrates for the purpose of immediate public consumption, Aristotle wrote from self-imposed exile several seminal works in his 62 years to be published poshumously including "Politics" and "Poetics". Aristotle felt plays were important for the public to attend, with the full public understanding they were mere representation of life...

This April, when all of America had caught up to the early shelter-in-place cities and implemented their own "lockdown" rules to fend off the new coronavirus, our president tweeted a trio of "LIBERATE" commands to three states , then stopped. Two of those states' governors have since been talked about as kidnapping targets before their would-be abductors were foiled. (SNL had a really funny sketch about this two nights ago that I cannot find now.) Moreover, mask mandates have become not only partisan, but recently so. Republican state legislators in Wisconsin on Oct 5 went to court to stop their Governor from issuing tiered lockdown measures to flatten their Fall curve of novel coronavirus infections . Mississippi's governor ended that state's mask mandate on Sept. 30 and infections have risen. Political operatives, oddly, were mocking contact tracing and calling it "communist" on cable news this August and September. It all appears to b...

A story is out today that cites an organization called NewsGuardTech that claimed to measure a sample of Facebook Twitter and Pinterest stories. Using these measurements the organization claims misinformation is more widely shared now than it was in 2016. Journalism science is an under-developed field. But this is a step in flushing it out. NewsGuardTech has a website here . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .