This week has seen a lot of changes. First off, Joe Biden has effectively won the U.S. Presidential election. He won by the same margin that Trump one back in 2016, which, as much as Trump used the word “landslide,” it wasn’t.
Of course, we have to wait for the votes to be certified in each state, and electors need to be selected and sent forward to vote in the Electoral College. Lots of stuff has to happen between Election Day and Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021.
At the time of this writing, we’re looking at 62 days before Trump is out and Biden is in. A lot can happen in 62 days….
We have COVID-19, which is growing exponentially, because the Trump, the GOP and their followers haven’t taken this deadly disease seriously. You’d think we, as a country, would take the lead in stopping this virus by following facts and science, but I think the biggest legacy Trump will leave behind as POTUS was his ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people with his words. I read something yesterday that said we’re experiencing “a 9/11” (meaning, the number of deaths attributed to the 9/11 terrorist attacks) every two days. A 9/11 every two days. Oh, and with exponential growth, that’s increasing steadily day after day.
Here in Ohio, we were seeing 1000 cases a day just last month, now we’re almost at 10,000 cases a day. With cases come deaths, and we’re seeing a lot of deaths too. Living in a red state means we have to fight a lot of disinformation, and the safest thing to do is just stay home, wear a mask when you must go out for necessities, avoid all social gatherings, wash your hands, and don’t touch your face. You know, science, logic and reason.
So hopefully, with Trump out and Biden in, we’ll see stronger, safer measures taken across the country.
And, of course, Pfizer has that purportedly 90-95% effective vaccine. No idea if it’s real, if it’s truly safe, if it’s really effective, because it was rushed through the FDA under emergency measures. I guess that’s fine. I won’t personally take the vaccine until it’s proven safe and effective under Biden’s new teams, but I’ll let others take it first, to make sure it doesn’t have any major side effects.
Anyway, so, here we are, the middle of a U.S. Presidential transition, that’s being blocked by Trump-appointee and GOP partisan hack Emily Murphy, at the GSA because, apparently, she has the sole discretion to determine when there’s an “apparent” winner. Even though it’s numerically, factually clear that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, she’s holding up the transition, and it’s going to cost lives. How many lives? Here in Ohio alone, we had 55 people die of COVID-19 yesterday alone. We’ve already lost almost 6,000 people in Ohio – possibly more, based on reporting rules.
At a point when the President Elect would already be starting their transition, it’s being blocked by the sour grapes sore loser and his team of cronies. And this transition is more important than any previous transition due to the lives at stake. According to the 9/11 Commission, the transition delay in 2000 was one of the contributing factors that allowed 9/11 to happen. We are seeing the same number of deaths caused by 9/11 every two days. Trump, the GOP and the GSA are killing people for partisan reasons. They lost, they need to accept that loss, take their lumps, and allow the new team to start their work – and there’s a lot of work.
I’m writing this all on a day when I deactivated my Facebook account last week, on the road to fully deleting my account in three more weeks. I just received my Instagram data, because Instagram is owned by Facebook and I want to get rid of that account as soon as possible as well. After receiving my Instagram data, I went directly to the account deletion page. They really want you to temporarily deactivate, because that keeps your account around, so they can still sell ad space, hoping you’ll come back, get re-addicted, and keep giving them that yummy data of yours.
So there you have it. Facebook and Instagram accounts will be deleted before the end of the year, Trump out of office on January 20, and a lot of cleaning house will happen in 2021.
If Trump, the GOP and his supporters weren’t so selfish, we could have knocked COVID-19 out in a month or two, but as it stands, the growth is totally unchecked, and I hope we aren’t too late to fix things.
At least I’m doing my part: I voted in the 2020 election, and now, I’m thinking about the two Georgia senate run-off elections coming up in January, which will decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.
After writing about all that, I know I started this post with a picture taken with my window bird feeder camera. I have a new photography rig, and it’s keeping my mind occupied when there are so many things to worry about. Like the store shelves being empty of toilet paper.
But anyway, if panic buying isn’t something you want to stress out about, let’s look at my new window photography rig.
So there’s a Raspberry Pi 3 mini-computer running the show. Full networking, 128GB of storage on a MicroSD card, Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Linux, and a new Raspberry Pi HQ camera module attached via a nice long ribbon cable.
Hopefully, the birds will be plentiful today, so I can focus more on my hobby and less on the stress of the world.