It’s pouring down as I type this. We’ve had showers every day for the past few weeks, and the forecast that I just saw for the next week is more rain, every day, with heavy falls up to 45 mm early next week. Our weather is broken and I want some new weather.
Also, the USA is broken, can we have a new one? I don’t want to go into any details, but I had an interaction today which almost broke my brain about how far gone the USA is under Trump. Reasonable people are actually fearing for their lives under this regime. It’s horrible, and terrifying, and exhausting. Ugh.
On the bright side… I managed to complete marking of all of my assigned student project reports for Data Engineering. This is the experimental planning report. In two weeks we get the final results report and their presentation videos to mark. And I’m happy to report that this year’s crop of students appears to be better at planning their experiments and writing their reports than last year’s. I was prepared to disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised.
Perhaps it is only my opinion, but “reasonable” people are not fearing for their lives in the USA. For over twenty years, our legacy media has stoked every kind of flame imaginable with their biased reporting. The only people who live in fear right now are illegal immigrants who committed crimes to enter this country and receive Democrat-backed handouts, and people with alternate sexual lifestyles who watch too much CNN. There are no pogroms against law-abiding citizens. There is no jail for public speech (though a woman was recently arrested in Britain for silently praying too close to an abortion clinic.) The foundations of my country have been eroded for decades by activists, and we have only recovered a tiny bit of the freedom we once had.
As for opinions about Trump …
Trump was being vilified as the second coming of Hitler before he officially announced his candidacy for the first term. His (embarrassing) posturing and tweeting notwithstanding, everything he said or did was picked apart by news anchors as fascism, despite the fact that he has never made an official position that compares to any fascist policy in history. Hitler supported suppression of religious belief in favor of the government. Hitler supported statewide gun control. Hitler approved of dehumanizing groups of people with pejorative labels (Trump does this to singular individuals, but his political opponents have been playing that card my entire life.) And Hitler approved of large destructive mobs laying waste to cities to spread fear.
In every point, these are not the tactics supported by Donald Trump. Democrats created bail funds for imprisoned rioters from large cities where millions or billions of property damage occurred, but jailed January 6th protestors without trial for years. Democrats create confusing and contradictory gun laws, making it difficult to even own one. (Whatever your opinion about guns, if the government outlaws guns, it’s so only the government has guns. Hitler loved the idea of a disarmed populace.) Democrats call anyone who disagrees with them racists, bigots, hateful, misogynists, or supremacists, no matter what the original argument was.
(Frankly, my family spent years trying to scrape money together while I read news stories telling me I was entitled and priviledged because of my skin color. This is the first year I’ve been married and above the poverty line.)
Our media perpetuated numerous hoaxes and misrepresentations about Trump (claiming the Hunter Biden laptop, with videos of him doing drugs with hookers didn’t exist until after Trump lost the election; claiming that Trump’s immigrant detention centers separated children from parents, when they were started by Obama two years before; that Trump called Nazis and KKK “very fine people” when watching the entire clip easily showed that he condemned both groups harshly before saying that other “fine people” were on both sides of the argument; and recently, that only Trump could be so uncouth as to wear blue to the Pope’s funeral, when the same photo *uncropped* showed at least twenty people in frame wearing blue suits (even Joe Biden attended in a blue suit). In many cases, you can find supercuts where news anchors shared a story using almost identical language, as though someone had given them a script to follow or keywords to use in describing Trump’s decisions.
Our media is full of liars and bad faith actors, including a CNN anchor writing a book “informing” the public about the Biden administration covering up his increasingly apparent dementia, when a minority of news outlets were raising concerns about his fitness to run before he was even elected. Biden stumbled through campaign speeches, mispronounced notable names, awkwardly greeted people who weren’t standing nearby, and stumbled numerous times while walking or climbing stairs. (The forthcoming book has published excerpts claiming that if Biden had succeeded his reelection bid, his aides would have given him a wheelchair to avoid those embarrassing moments.)
Before the Twitter controversy, Elon Musk was hailed as one of our great forward thinkers. When he decided to buy Twitter because people were being shut down over political opinions, suddenly he became an enemy. When he decided to run DOGE for Trump, he became Hitler-adjacent. Now that he’s being replaced, his replacement is being touted as even worse than Musk just for believing that taxpayers deserve to know their money is spent wisely.
On top of all that, the Biden election was rife with controversy because of the number of questionable activities at polling locations across the country. Polling places were mysteriously shut down, but continued counting after half the counters were sent home (violation of election law). Some locations (I have seen video) plastered posterboard over the windows so viewers couldn’t watch the votes be counted (violation of election law). One state had a district that suddenly appeared with thousands of votes at 3am, claiming it was a computer glitch that they all appeared at once. Other states had reports of out-of-state vans (seen videos) appearing late at night and taking mysterious boxes inside the polling places.
To top everything off, when certain states tried to sue for discovery on these many cases, federal judges (some appointed by Trump, true) claimed that other states aren’t affected if corruption outside their jurisdiction causes a candidate to be illegally elected.
The tl;dr version is that if there’s a problem in my country, it’s because bulldogs like Trump didn’t get elected sooner. Congress is full of old geezers and can’t pass a budget, our military wasn’t worried about being attacked and couldn’t pass a budget either, and we had dozens of government offices all claiming to work toward similar goals, when a single office would be more effective. I voted for Trump the second time, but only because I couldn’t believe anyone else would be concerned with ensuring my country existed when I retired.
I understand that you and I will disagree on many things, but if you don’t already, please find news from non-legacy outlets. WND.com and notthebee.com both have their share of crazies, but you can at least find dissenting opinions to what AP and ABC are telling you.
trump has done nothing legal since being sworn in. The Constitution of the United States is being violated every FUCKING TIME HE OPENS HIS MOUTH! Take your hero worship to some deep abyss, and join it in being destroyed by logic and truth.
Sorry David. but i am so sick of this idolatry bulls hit being propagated by hate filled bigots that refuse to see that the country they claim to love is being taken over by assholes!
No worries. I’m not deleting any comments because I think they speak for themselves.
I consider myself a reasonable person, and I was born in the USA.
I estimate the chance I’ll be imprisoned for being a vocal anti-Trumpian at 25%. I would likely not survive that, because I’m old and have health problems.
I really hope it doesn’t come to that.