The Offline Report

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 .

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

We have advanced technology but little trust. And widened inequality. A virus that can kill crowds who sing and laugh together is bringing the country that launched the Tesla Roadster to its knees. That's not exactly true, is it? It's only bringing some to their knees. So far. ------------------------- Further Reading: "Millions of ordinary psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future." "Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future… [It] is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated change in society."     om.co "Of plant workers confirmed to be infected, 2.2% have died, according to the county. That’s significantly higher than the fatality rate among people infected with the coronavirus in the general population of Merced County, which is 1.3%."    latimes.com "The news came from a colleague — not a doctor but someone who works in the eme...

"If he is to switch his allegiance at exactly the right moment, he must either tell lies about his subjective feelings, or else suppress them altogether. In either case he has destroyed his dynamo ."   - George Orwell in "The Prevention of Literature". Full essay online at orwell.ru . This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

I flip-read the e-edition of the newspaper every day as my civic duty. I urge people to subscribe to newspapers as their civic duty. I cringe when I read of shrinking headcount at the regional newspapers across the country. BUT WHEN I SEARCH THE WEBSITE FOR AN ARTICLE I WANT TO SHARE, IT IS NOT THERE! The article, which I found in the e-edition (the paper edition, the "dead tree" edition, in pdf form) is in today's Business section. Its title is "Making technology do an about-face". Its author is Kashmir Hill. It's about scrambling facial recognition technology, a hot topic.  If I type the title in sfchronicle.com's search bar, I do not get the article. If I type the author in the sfchronicle.com's search bar, the site displays several articles by that reporter. But not the one I'm looking for. If I search the web for an article with that title, I 'll find it in a site called pressreader.com . At the sfchronicle.com website, if I click ...

If you notice yourself in convincing mode, it's a sign you've been there too long. Stop that chase. -------------------------- Further Reading: "There’s huge pressure to fit in, and plenty of benefits if you invest the time and stand out instead."    seths.blog This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A bar in San Francisco called "Pittsburgh's Pub" exploited the closed-off streets of quarantine by transforming into an outdoor beer garden. Circle "six feet" stickers rained the sidewalk. The masked bouncer milled the crowd pointing at the ground reminding couples and friend pods to keep to their cliques. Patrons lifted masks to sip pints and, semi-inebriated, conscientiously re-covered their faces. Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant called last Thursday for the federal government to pay all bars and pubs to stay closed. These are super-spreader environments, he contends. Enclosed spaces. And after a pint or two patrons talk louder to each other, spraying droplets into a concentrating air block of viral load. Wired: Maybe we should have done that months ago. Isn’t it too late for that? Larry Brilliant: It's less effective, obviously, when you have 3 million cases and 130,000 deaths in the US than when you had 15. But it’s never too late to stop a virus fr...