Category Politics

It’s amazing what a difference 24 hours can make.  Yesterday I was feeling very angry, frustrated and defeated about the presidential election.  The idea that Florida went harder for Trump, courtesy of non-stop radio ads in spanish making Cubans think Biden was the next coming of Castro, made me feel very pessimistic about how the rest of the outstanding swing states would go.  Trump was ahead in almost all of them and based on how Florida accelerated towards Trump as more votes were counted made me feel like all hope was lost.  However, the reverse has happened.

What I hadn’t really thought about was how Florida handled the mail in vote logistically compared to the rest of the swing states.  Florida for once is proactive and allows mail in ballots to be tabulated before election day.  This meant that the results were front loaded with mail in votes that had already been tabulated, the majority of which are democratic.  This is why the numbers slipped for Biden in Florida as the day of voters were more in the Trump camp.

However in other states the rules restrict mail in votes from being counted until election day and in dumb PA’s case, not until the polls close.  The end result of this has been the walk up vote, which was more Trump based got counted first and what we now have been seeing is the tabulation of all of the mail in votes which have been trending much more heavily towards Biden. When the day started yesterday Biden was getting crushed by 12 points in PA.  By the time I went to bed it was down to a couple point deficit with over 10% of the vote yet to be counted.

I won’t recap all of the scenarios for you as there are millions of other places doing that already but the cliff notes version is Biden should actually win this election when it is all said and done.  If he manages to take PA it would be sweet as the margin of victory would be better but even if he just gets Arizona and Nevada he can seal the deal.  I bet Trump regrets talking so much shit about John McCain now. Hell Biden could even grab Georgia, which would be a huge upset.

The path to closure on this is going to be a long one.  Trump is already trying to get lawyers involved to challenge the close races but I am confident it is all just dog and pony show to support his fabricated narrative of the election being rigged.  I think the most telling thing was President Big League was almost silent all day yesterday which was a wonderful preview of what life without a cartoon character as President could be in a couple months.  If Trump’s defeat does indeed come to be, it will be difficult for me to hide the joy I will feel to have the self proclaimed greatest President since Lincoln get booted out after one term, something that has not happened in nearly 30 years.  Adios to the extremely stable genius.

Last night after work I met up with the guy I contacted about trimming my trees several weeks ago.  The reason there has been such lag in getting him to the house is he contracted covid.  He had no idea how he got it and he said when he first tested positive he was not feeling all that bad.  However a few days later it hit him like a truck.  He is an ex-smoker which made things worse.  He was in the hospital for a total of three days.  He said it was the worst he had ever felt in his life, a description I have heard echoed from several people I know that have had Covid 19.  He seemed like a good guy and said he thinks he can get the work done next Wednesday.  I’m not having him trim the trees that I can still easily do myself, I’m not that lazy.  Getting him involved will cut the job from an all day affair with multiple very dangerous moments to a couple hours that should be very easy in comparison.

So like most of America Cindy and I watched election coverage for a good chunk of the night.  When we went to bed there was still a lot of uncertainty although it did seem pretty clear that Trump was going to win Florida, again.  When I got up this morning I saw this was indeed the case.  When I discovered that he actually won Florida by a wider margin than he did in 2016 it made me sick to my stomach.  Sure, in 2016 some people thought they would take a flyer on Trump, with it being more of a vote against Hilary than anything else.  But after witnessing the events of the last four years, to see that support in the state bolstered instead of eroded is beyond logical explanation for someone like me that assumes that bad behavior is supposed to have consequences.

So as I looked at the tallies for the states that have not been called yet, which I see as seven right now, Biden is ahead in three and Trump is ahead in four. The margin in most of those states is very close. Ever since 2000 when Bush was elected I have been disappointed repeatedly when the election results are tight so my gut reaction is to assume the pain train is on it’s way again.

My home state of PA is going to be key.  The state has taken the mantle from Florida as being the most inept when it comes to the voting process.  Thanks to illogical rules that don’t allow them to start counting mail in ballots until the polls close, 25% of the states votes are yet to be tallied.  However the current numbers give Trump a big lead in the state.  The fact that the election is even close is damning enough of American society.  It’s a clear indication that a huge portion of the population adore being lied to.  As long as it is what they want to hear, they just don’t care if it’s the truth or not.  Joseph Stalin would be proud.  I’ll continue to assume the worst about the election results and be happy to call myself an eternal pessimist if I am proven to be wrong.

So the day we have been waiting for has finally arrived.  I recall after the shocking and sobering election result in 2016 I tried to have an open mind and expressed some degree of hope that Trump would not be as awful as the lead up to the election revealed him to be.  I clung to a faint idea that maybe he would actually be grounded by the massive responsibility that was being entrusted to his care.  I thought perhaps this reality would sink in and he would at least try to act like a President.  Instead Don decided to double down on his super power, feasting on the ignorance of others.  Every single day since he stepped foot in the White House there has been something he said/did or tweeted that was an embarrassment to the office of the president.  That is sadly not an exaggeration.

I remember growing up and being taught about world history.  I recall hearing about the stories of Nazi Germany and saw the video of a man that by the outside world was seen as nothing but pure evil yet to his supporters, he was a deity that they chanted madly and blindly for at every opportunity.  I recall wondering just how human beings could support such a man but felt comfort that it was long ago and society had progressed to the point where this sort of extremism was no longer possible and certainly never in America.  Well these last four years have smashed that theory into a million tiny pieces.

The embracing of racism, greed, environmental sabotage, fear mongering, stupidity and infinite lying over the last four years has been sad and disgusting.  I see people that I interact with routinely fall into the net of the false prophet, which angers and frustrates me time and time again.  The amount of hypocrisy on display in our world is staggering.  Somehow it has now become cool to call people losers.  The way to handle facts is to redirect the narrative.  The way to hide the truth is to try to disparage those that are reporting it.  It’s a full blown circus in Washington DC and needs to end.

We can only hope today we wake up to a brand new day in America, a world where the President doesn’t get aroused from seeing his name on every media outlet day in and day out.  I fear that even if the outcome of the election is favorable, the damage inflicted upon this country by Donald Trump will be a long lasting wound that will not heal anytime soon.  His zealots will never accept any reality that doesn’t include his visage at the head of it.  The rest of the world is right there with us, hoping America wakes up from this awful spell it has been under.  Well the rest of the world outside of Putin of course.  He loves a good American shit show.  If you haven’t already done so, please vote.

My lower back has been really problematic for the last several months.  The consistent problems started when my left knee was screwed up due to parking garage running.  Well yesterday at the gym I did lower body and noticed no specific moment where I reinjured myself but I definitely did something.  The rest of the day and all of last night my back was just awful, I can’t bend at the waist at all currently.  In retrospect I assume the leg press machine was the culprit.

So I figured instead of coming up with new stuff to say about American politics I would include some commentary I have been making on Facebook recently.  Generally speaking I avoid political posts on FB as I have learned a long time ago they typically serve no real purpose.  People that share your political feelings will “atta boy” you and those that don’t will castrate you.  No real opinions are normally changed.

However with the most important election of my lifetime now on our doorstep I have dipped my toe into a few discussions which I will include here.

One of my friends posted a link to this article that talks about the psychological factors that turn someone that you may normally like and respect into a Trump supporter.  I found the article pretty fascinating and shared it on my feed.

One of my ex-running club associates who is sadly a Trump voter questioned the article and one of the questions he asked was what determines a Biden supporter.  My response was below.

There is duplicity for sure on that list regardless of the political party you support. The simplest way I describe a Biden supporter is someone more concerned with the greater good. In my own sphere, it may benefit me more financially for things to remain status quo. However I care about the environment, health care, science, and supporting men that have morals that I at least would not be embarrassed for children to emulate.

There was no further response.

This same person started his own thread about the election where he tried to justify why he supports Trump.  One of the reasons he gave was the familiar, Democrats want to spend money we don’t have to give everyone free stuff, line.  My response there was:

You do realize the federal budget deficit has smashed all prior records over the last 3 years? Governments spend excessively, it’s a matter of if that spending is for the greater good or for the narrowest of narrow elite subsets of American society. The disinformation and distraction used in modern US politics is staggering and carefully executed so the masses are too busy fighting each other to focus on the bought and paid for politicians that do their dirty work for them, happily.

Finally, this morning I posted a picture of this insanely ignorant sign that was posted in the Naples area, only a couple miles away from my work.  In the newspaper article the sign owner proudly boasted how he paid $750 to have this sign created.  There was no extensive additional commentary needed by me to accompany the picture of the sign.  It said all you need to know about the corrosive, hateful, and raging ignorance that has been incubated by our current president.  Even if the election does go Biden’s way, can you imagine the reaction from the MAGA hat wearing mob in a post-Trump world?  The backlash will be staggering.

Last night Cindy told me that was she able to check the status of her mail in ballot online which I didn’t know was a thing.  We all know how the prospect of mail in voting has been one of the various false flags Donald has planted in order to lay the groundwork of misinformation that his campaign relies upon.  Some states evidently had not had robust or established mail in ballot systems in place so they have been scrambling to do so in our new covid era reality.  Florida, which has an infamous history of bungling elections for the last 20 years at least has had a well established mail in voting system in place.

I was able to log into our county election web site and verify that my ballot was not only received but already counted.  That is one of the hang ups with some states, they have some dumb rule that they can’t count mail in ballots until the day of the election, which makes no sense.  Why create an artificial log jam when it’s not necessary?  Anyway, I was happy to see I at least did my minuscule part to help bump the needle towards sanity in 2021.  The early voting lines have been long down here as they have been at many places across the country.  High turnout is normally the formula for democrats to win, let’s hope that trend continues.

Last night I filmed my first video regarding the Oculus Quest 2.  I tried to combine my normal footage with video streamed from the headset to my phone.  It was only mildly successful but at least I think I got some of my excitement for the device documented.

The new high power custom PC I am having built should be ready today or tomorrow.  I look forward to it but not the process of migrating all of my stuff over to new hardware which is always an arduous task.

I just bought a new PC a couple years ago, an HP Omen which was tagged as a serious gaming rig.  I have been less than thrilled with the purchase as the system had cooling issues which required me to install a liquid cooler as well as a flaky video card that has failed not once, but twice.  With adding the 360 camera to my arsenal the Omen’s ability to crunch video files, which is very CPU intensive, has been a bottleneck.  I’ve decided to relieve some of that pressure with a custom built PC by a local company.  For the first time I will not have an Intel CPU at the heart of my system.  I am going with the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, which when paired with 3600MHZ memory should chew up video editing significantly faster than my Omen does.  As has been the case in the past, my Omen will then get transformed into Cindy’s PC which will be a sweet upgrade for her.

For some reason I have found myself thinking about the state of America and specifically the state of people that steadfastly, unconditionally, and lustfully support Donald Trump.   I’m not sure why I even decided to think about it. At this point I have just written it off as a sad fact of life in today’s society, greedy, verbally aggressive liars are the new hot trend.

Still, I thought about this further.  To pretty much every single person in the United States, Kim Jong Un is viewed as a ruthless and evil dictator that has moved North Korea back into the dark ages.  His time in power has resulted in infinite amounts of misery for the population.  However despite all of this whenever he is seen in public he is surrounded by wild enthusiasm by the same people he loves to oppress. Sound familiar?

I have absolutely no doubt that the the majority of the civilized countries beyond our borders look at the current state of the United States with similar levels of confusion and concern. How in 2020 racism, suppression, division, bullying, and minuscule vocabularies has become the accepted status quo in America is bewildering to me.

To imagine that we have a sitting president that would send this out over social media is embarrassing yet not surprising based on the prior four years.  I would love to ask Trump supporters that are also parents a very simple question.  As you are raising/raised your child, would you have encouraged name calling, bullying, lying, sexual predator, racist, or egotistical behavior in them?  Of course you wouldn’t.  If that is the case, why would you support a man that exhibits all of these behaviors in spades, as your president?  It’s one of life’s mysteries to me.  I can only hope the book of horrors can be closed in a few weeks.

In my most recent edition of AARP magazine, (don’t laugh), they had Q&A with both candidates.  It was a crystal clear reflection on the mentality of Donald Trump, the ONLY thing he thinks that matters is a high stock market number.  No matter what question that was posed to him, even a question about the racial conflict that has blossomed under his leadership, his answer was basically the same. We had the strongest economy in history before the “China Virus”.  I kid you not, that was the gist of his answer.

That is the one word I would choose to describe how the American populace as a whole should feel that we elected Donald Trump as president.  The debacle in the first debate last night was only the most recent of countless examples of how incapable he is of functioning as an adult, it was like Chris Wallace was trying to control a tantruming child.  The absolute void of decorum was expected but vile nonetheless.  Repeatedly Chris Wallace would carefully construct a question and pose it to Don.  If it was one of those fever blister topics like his intentional misleading of the population regarding covid, his income tax evasion, or asking him to denounce the actions of white supremacist groups such as the “Proud Boys”, he would totally ignore the topic and spin off into another scattergun attack.

I heard a lot of people criticize Chris Wallace as the debate moderator which I really don’t agree with.  Short of having the button for an oversized shock collar that would be around Big Don’s neck, I don’t think there was anyway to get Donald to stop interrupting, blurting, and stepping all over what Biden was saying.  He simply refused to abide by the rules of the debate which was very symbolic of how he has approached nearly everything he has touched as president, the rules don’t apply to him.

Biden repeatedly tried to step out of the tsunami of insults to talk about actual issues and plans but overall I think at best he was average.  To be quite honest the format is a joke, especially with Trump involved.  Nothing of real substance can be gained by voters that are somehow undecided at this point.  There has been a wave of opinon that after seeing that first debate they should cancel the remaining two.  I would be happy with that decision as all it does is further embarrass the country while serving no practical benefit whatsoever.  If you are a Proud Boy you are still voting for Trump and if you were voting for Biden you still would be after that debate as it just reenforced that when the choice is anyone but the raving orange lunatic on the other side of the stage, anyone has to win.

Joe did deliver some funny moments such as telling Trump to “Shut up, man.”, calling him a liar repeatedly as well as the worst president in US history, not that any of those statements are not already well established.

We actually watched the debate on BBC which was quite interesting.  Once the fireworks ended their reaction to American politics was priceless, they were dumbfounded by what they just witnessed.  They found it hard to believe that THIS was what American politics has mutated into. I agree wholeheartedly.

I forgot to mention that Florida’s governor without warning declared Florida was magically now in “Phase 3” last Friday which basically meant business as usual.  The timing of this seems odd as the majority of regions in Florida still have mandatory mask orders in place till the end of October.  The other contradictory item is the calendar which is about to flip into October which marks the beginning of typical flu season.  There are numbers already escalating around the world and I have little doubt that trend will be seen here as well, it’s just a matter of to what degree.

I have the feeling Desantis did this for political reasons, likely pressure to use it as a campaign talking point.  “Look, Florida is FULLY open, we beat Corona”  Unfortunately I think the reality is the Desantis announcement will have the same trajectory as George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” proclamation on the deck of that aircraft carrier, prematurely signalling the end of the Afghan/Iran conflict.  Of course we know how that all played out.

Tonight is the first presidential debate.  I am sure it will be disgusting and depressing to witness.  I have not decided if I want to see it live or just rely on recaps.  The world is dark enough without seeing President Very Stable Big League Genius putting his lack of vocabulary, responsibility, and intelligence on display for the world to cringe at.

So Hurricane Laura, which was originally forecast to impact Florida instead smashed into the northern gulf overnight.  Having been through several hurricanes now I am familiar with the fear and anxiety a strong hurricane brings before it even arrives, the terrifying sound of 130mph winds battering your property, and the zombie-like state when you finally step outside to see the carnage the storm has left behind.  I’m curious if the storm surge numbers were the crazy 15-20 feet they predicted or not.  Residents of that area have a long road ahead of them.

I haven’t talked about the latest case of police violence on here.  To be quite honest the depth of my disgust of what American society has morphed into makes not even want to discuss it.  As everyone else, I saw the video of Blake trying to get into his vehicle while an officer was holding onto his shirt with one hand while having a gun drawn in his other hand.  My assumption was the officer for some reason thought Blake was reaching for a weapon, despite knowing he had multiple armed officers around him.  The end result was not one but seven shots being fired at point blank range into the guys back.

I’m surprised Blake survived but at this point he is paralyzed from the waist down from his injuries.  His shooting sparked a fresh wave of protests that had it’s own disgusting outcome when a 17 year old armed with an AR-15 shot three protestors, killing two of them.

I remember when I was younger thinking about atrocities throughout history and feeling relieved that we as human beings had evolved into more rational, intelligent, accepting, and peaceful individuals for the most part.  The new reality is the de-evolution of American society that has been fostered and cuddled by the most divisive president in US history.  When I try to recall just how many horrible, racist, ignorant, fraudulent, and flat out dangerous situations have come out of the self appointed Stable Genius’s mouth/actions, I lose count quickly.  Every single day he gives us something fresh to be ashamed of.

For the last few weeks our street has been getting these monster sized metal utility poles which will be replacing the conventional wood poles that are on the other side of the street, I assume.  The wood poles are not all that hurricane resistant as after Irma there were a bunch of poles leaning at steep angles.  Even so, usually massive poles like the new ones are normally relegated to major roadways, not side streets.  I’m not exactly thrilled with their addition from a visual standpoint but if the end result is more stable and reliable power in our area I am ok with it.

We did luck out in one way, we don’t actually have a pole on our property.  Both of our neighbors on either side were not quite as lucky as one of them got poled yesterday and by the time I get home today I expect a matching pole will be erected on the other side.  It’s amazing thinking how much things have changed in our area now.  When I first moved out there in 2001 we couldn’t even get cable TV.  Now the amount of homes off our street have at least doubled with more and more being started every month.

During my adult lifetime there have been somewhere around six presidents.  Obviously I have liked some more than others.  Some of the negative words I have used in the past were unflattering for sure, ignorant, idiotic, puppet, and dishonest were applicable to many of them at one point or another.  However I was thinking to myself that I never would of characterized any of them as a tyrant, not until present day that is.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like tyrant was the perfect word to describe Donald.  For him it is nothing new, if you read accounts of his business dealings throughout his lifetime, the word tyrant would be thrown about generously.  What is sad and surprising is how quickly the boot lickers in the Republican party embraced this lunacy.  I can only hope when karma comes around it smacks them in the face, hard.  Hell even Kelley Ann-Conway is jumping ship, whose lips have super glued to Donald’s rear end this entire time.  I can only hope that more people are seeing the writing on the wall and want to get out of the way before our rotund, big league leader comes crashing to the ground.