Okay, hear me out.
Right now, all the good and righteous people of the world are worried about all the terrible things Trump promised to do.
But that’s where the ray of hope emerges, because look at those two words :
Trump promised. And we all know that, as with all sociopaths, promises mean absolutely nothing to him. They are just words you say to get people to do what you want them to do. The idea that they should have any existence past the point where the person did what you wanted them to do is absurd to them.
And his people did what he wanted them to do : they voted him into office. And now they have absolutely no hold over him because he can’t ever be re-elected.
Luckily, changing THAT would requite a constitutional amendment.
So maybe Trump will do the terrible things he promised them he’d do. But maybe not. We know that he’s even more senile, childish, and impatient now than he was when he won in 2016.
Who knows if he will even remember what he said on the campaign trail when it comes time for his inauguration on January 20th.
So that’s it. That’s the slender ray of hope I have come up with today.
It’s not a lot but so far it’s been enough to stop the spread of the cancerous despair that has been fomenting in my soul since I read the news he had won last Wednesday.
Assuming he really did win. Not that I suppose it matters now as it’s not like anyone is going to be investigating this election once it’s faded from the public’s mind, but I still think there is strong chance that he and his cronies cheated to get the win.
That would be straight from the fascist playbook he has apparently been following. Rigged elections are a favorite of dictators all over the world because they want people to think their people love them but don’t want to leave it up to the people to decide that for themselves. So they cheat.
Hence the “elections” where there’s only one party to “choose” from. And the unspeakable obscenity of fascist dictators celebrating their election “win”.
And we know that his supporters are perfectly willing to rig things in his favor. That’s why they have been infiltrating election boards and other similar bodies for the last four years. They wanted to make sure their guy won.
Because right wingers have never ever truly believed in democracy. Democracy is too complex and chaotic for them. It has doubt and uncertainty built right into it, and they hate both of those things.
After all, the people might pick the wrong party!
Which brings me to my other bridge of potential hope, which is, believe it or not, the members of the Republican Party.
Look, I never said it was a particularly good bridge.
But we will see if the Republicans in the House and Senate and the Supreme Court are as obedient as we fear they will be.
Hopefully we will find that there are some things they just won’t do.
Heck, we know from his first term that his own staffers will absolutely refuse to follow blatantly insane or evil orders.
Now I don’t know what kind of mental defectives he will hire this time around. I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to work for or with him.
But if we’re lucky, the only people who will work for the second Trump administration are either deranged idiots like RFK Junior or, god willing, true patriots who actually do believe in democracy, sanity, and freedom.
And that’s all I’ve got for now.
More after the break.
The Purple Menace
I was all ready to record a video for today. Basically I was going to talk about all the things I talked about in part 1 today.
But in video form!
However, I remembered my purple problem from yesterday, so I prudently recorded a test video to see if the same thing would happen again.
It did. It was perfectly normal when I recorded it but the moment I switched over to editing mode, the purple was back.
And that really pisses me off. I mean, it’s a brand new webcam and these days, recording video is one of the simplest things a computer can do.
I mean, I am not even asking it to stream anything anywhere.
And it’s such a weirdly specific problem that Googling it did me no good. As is almost always the case with me, nobody else in the known universe has had the problem I am having and so I am SSOL.
Ask you father what that stands for.
Eventually, I gave up on Google and decided to take my video capture business elsewhere (grr) by trying out an el cheapo freeware video capture app I downloaded several geologic epochs ago.
And it worked! Sorta. Not really.
The audio was out of sync with the video and it was capturing maybe twelve frames per second so it was janky as yesterday’s fuck too.
So, no video for today. I will try again tomorrow. I am not quite ready to commit to some specific number of days and/or minutes yet, but once I get the technical issues ironed out, I might just go for it.
My suspicion is that this purple bullshit is not there by accident but that it’s something that was deliberately programmed into my video editing suite by Corel so that I couldn’t keep using Video Studio 2020 and would have to pay to upgrade to CVS 2024.
If so, it’s only $25 or so, and I can spare that. So whatever.
But if I pay them that money and the purple shit doesn’t go away, I am going to be SUPER pissed off.
I mean, as errors go, it makes no sense. I could understand if the video turned into video noise, complete with awful sounds, when the program went to encode it. Or if it recorded nothing, or I saw an error screen or somesuch.
But WTF is with the purple?
That has to be a result of planned obsolescence, right?
It’s so hard to tell when my paranoia is justified.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.