Categories
People Weather

A return to normalcy

We’ve been through two major weather events in the last few months in Savannah: Debby and now Helene.

Our home didn’t flood during Debbie, and didn’t lose power in either system since our subdivision has buried lines. We did have several hours of power cycling and had to turn major appliances off at the breaker but power never went completely out for more than 1/2 hour.

We also lost roof shingles and the emergency repair on them was a bite out of the wallet, but we could pay it. We have lost internet access, first because of the power loss, and after power was restored, because AT&T Fiber had a break in the line and is still waiting on a permit to dig to repair it.

We’re retired so we haven’t suffered loss of wages. And by having power, we haven’t had to throw anything away in our refrigerator.

We, individually, and generally throughout the Savannah area have not suffered the devastation that communities in Florida, south-central Georgia, and especially Tennessee and North Carolina have suffered. In particular, the floods from Helene have taken out entire towns in North Carolina, and isolated communities throughout the western part of the state. Sadly, over a hundred lives have been lost in several states, both because of Debby and now Helene.

Each community impacted by these storms has suffered as a consequence of them, though the amount of impact can be drastically different in each. But, big or small, impacts because of natural disasters leave everyone feeling vulnerable. And the solution to that vulnerability is normalcy.

Categories
People Political The Democratic Difference

Goodbye Joe, Hello Kamala

A whole lot changed since my last defense of President Biden. Last week he decided to step down from his re-election attempt and put all his support behind his VP, Kamala Harris.

Democrats came together behind Kamala Harris in enthusiastic numbers I haven’t seen in a long, long time. Within two days, she had enough delegation support to win the Democratic primary. I suspect by the time the convention rolls around, she’ll have everyone’s support.

I am sad that President Biden had to end his campaign, but ultimately, he sacrificed his ambitions for the country, and he did the right thing: he gave us a candidate we can ALL embrace.

And I want to go down on record as saying I want to be adopted by the Harris/Emhoff family.

Categories
People Political

Biden is our President. Biden is our candidate. This isn’t going to change.

To whom it concerns:

Biden is the President of the United States. Biden has done. and continues to do, a good job as President of the United States.

Biden is also our pick as candidate for a second term as President of the United States. The people made this selection. Not some quisling Congressional members, and definitely not the media. We, the people.

Biden will be our Presidential candidate this November. This is not changing. You are either with Biden, or you’re supporting Trump.

Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

Joy Ann Reid, on Threads

‘As you think about the media and how as a collective my industry is behaving in this moment, it’s helpful to understand that other than purely infotainment media (like Fox, Newsmax or OANN) mainstream media only has two real biases: toward change and conflict. They will almost always lean toward a change agent, whether that change is hopeful and historic (Obama) or horrific (Hitler, Trump). And they will almost always lean into conflict, whether that means wars or internal political destruction.’

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board;

At each stop there will be no margin for error. The media is tracking Biden’s every move with an obsession greater than the 2016 focus on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The rules have always been different for Trump. Recall when seven members of Trump’s team used private email accounts, including his daughter and son in law, it barely caused a ripple.

A similar imbalance has taken hold in the coverage of Biden’s debate performance. For example, in less than a week, The New York Times published 70 news stories, 20 opinion columns, four podcasts and one editorial about Biden’s shaky debate. Cable TV and social media piled on as well, according to Heartland Signal, a digital news site in Chicago.
But little attention has been paid to Trump’s incoherent debate performance because he is often incoherent. Trump told more than 30 lies in 90 minutes during the debate like it was another day at the office.
In discussing abortion, he falsely claimed Democrats want to execute babies in the ninth month of pregnancy. Trump also claimed migrants were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” — whatever that means.
During a discussion about the environment, Trump — who rolled back more than 100 regulations and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement — said: “we had H2O, we had the best numbers ever.” Huh?’

 

Categories
Media People

Roseanne Barr vs. Joy Reid: When the Media Dumpster Dives

I hadn’t planned on writing another piece on the Joy Reid old weblog posts. I made the point that the Wayback Machine doesn’t guarantee authenticity, which too many people mistook to mean that I was undermining the Wayback Machine’s integrity. Then I made others unhappy when I agreed with the Daily Beast’s take that it was *unlikely Joy Reid’s posts were hacked.

Discussing the topic is just a lose/lose, and frankly, I felt it was much ado about nothing. Yes, nothing. Twelve year old weblog posts, published back in a time when we were all much more casual about our weblog writing  pales as a subject compared to, say, discovering that Hurricane Maria killed over 4,600 people in Puerto Rico.

But in the wake of the Roseanne Barr Twitter implosion, publications feel they have to find some form of ‘balanced’ news coverage, so they dumpster dived, yet again, into Reid’s weblog, which is back online at the Wayback Machine.

Categories
Media People

The Daily Beast Investigation of Joy Reid’s Claims

The Daily Beast investigated the claims of Joy Reid’s ‘cyber expert’ and found that most could not be substantiated. I, myself, am less than enamored with Jonathan Nichol’s claims. For being an expert, he doesn’t seem to know very much.

And therein lies, I suspect, the seeds of this whole event: lots of writing over the years, memory, and bad tech advice.

At the end of the Daily Beast writeup, Kevin Poulson wrote:

If she wasn’t hacked, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Reid is lying. Her decision to hire a security consultant to investigate the posts, and a lawyer to demand the access logs for her blog account, suggests she genuinely believes at least some of the posts were planted. After 12 years and tens of thousands of written words, Reid simply may not remember.

It’s possible that in the end Reid will discover her adversary isn’t a determined hacker, but a far more dogged foe: The Joy-Ann Reid of years past, writing in a voice she can no longer recognize as her own.

I’ll have more to say in a later piece on what it means to be a writer putting yourself online, especially over the years. For now, I think that the Daily Beast has an accurate read on what’s happened.

I’ve had considerable pushback on Twitter related to my writing about Reid, the Wayback Machine, and authenticity. What I find ironic is that so many who condemn Reid the loudest post anonymously on Twitter. They want to hold Reid accountable for her past writing, while they, themselves, hide behind a bush.

In the meantime, Library of Congress has a backup of some (not all) of Reid’s past posts. BernieBros and the far right gleefully pick and choose snippets they can post in the most damning light, but if you want to know the Reid of long ago, you need to read all of her writing. Then maybe you’ll drop that stone you hold so easily in your hand.