Musings & Thoughts for Saturday, January 2, 2021, or: Meet the New Year…Same as the Old Year

Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s Saturday, January 2, 2021, and it is early afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida. Right now, the temperature is 81˚F (27˚C) under mostly cloudy skies. With humidity at 66% and the wind blowing from the south-southwest at 8 MPH (13 KM/H), the heat index is 83˚F (28˚C). Today’s forecast calls for partly cloudy skies and a high of 83˚F (28˚C). Tonight we can expect light rain and a low of 65˚F (18˚C).

Well, here we are on the second day of 2021 and the first weekend of the New Year. So far, the situation in the United States is the same as it was when 2020 – the Year from Hell – ended. Donald Trump, objectively the worst President in the nation’s history, still refuses to concede defeat in the recent Presidential election and continues to pollute Twitter with such absurdities as:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

·2h    Why haven’t they done signature verification in Fulton County, Georgia. Why haven’t they deducted all of the dead people who “voted”, illegals who voted, non Georgia residents who voted, and tens of thousands of others who voted illegally, from the final vote tally?

Donald J. Trump  @realDonaldTrump

·2h….Just a small portion of these votes give US a big and conclusive win in Georgia. Have they illegally destroyed ballots in Fulton County? After many weeks, we don’t yet even have a judge to hear this large scale voter fraud case. The only judge seems to be Stacey’s sister!

And the worst thing about these tweets isn’t just that they are false – Twitter even goes to the trouble of adding disclaimers – such as Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election. – beneath any tweet Trump posts with false claims about voter fraud. Trump’s lies are bad enough. But what really matters is that Trump’s supporters (around 60-70 million Americans) profess – at least in public – their belief that the President’s claims are true.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, some ambitious Republican politicians, especially Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and incoming Congressman Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) have announced that they will try to contest the 2020 United States presidential election results when Congress counts the Electoral College votes in January, echoing Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.

Then, of course, there’s still the rising death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic, which as of this writing has killed 1,831,857men, women, and children worldwide, including 348,617 in the United States.

I’ve already written extensively about the pandemic and its death toll, so I shan’t repeat my thoughts about the selfish, entitled yahoos who still deny that the pandemic is a major public health crisis[1]. I mention it here merely to explain why I am not talking about the New Year’s celebration I participated in (there wasn’t any party here, for one thing).

 Yesterday I spent much of my day writing a review of the compact – and more affordable – edition of Paul Duncan’s The Star Wars Archives: Episodes IV-VI, 1977-1983, a recently published oral history of the creation of the first three Star Wars films. After that, I didn’t do anything New Years-like; I attempted to play the Cold Waters scenario Junks on Parade,[2] then I watched Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens in my room till I got sleepy and went to bed.

As for today…I don’t have anything planned. I might try to watch something later, or I could probably read a couple of chapters of The Two Georges: A Novel of an Alternate America, 1996, a novel by actor Richard Dreyfuss and alternative history writer Harry Turtledove, author The Guns of the South and Ruled Britannia.  Or I might try the Junks on Parade scenario again and see if I fare better than I did yesterday afternoon.

Since I don’t have anything special to add, I’ll end this post here. As always, Dear Reader, I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and that you will be kind to others. I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things!  

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[1] Here’s a typical comment from a conservative COVID-19 denier that I came across on Facebook. This guy, a man named Bob, posted this on his profile page on December 31, 2020:

So…here we are almost one full year of TERRORISM against the American people.

In 2019, there was NO Covid-19: The number of TOTAL USA deaths: 2,854,838

PER THE Center Of Disease Control

As of Dec.29, 2020, a supposedly catastrophic virus pandemic raging the past 10 months, the number of TOTAL USA deaths stands at: 2,882,500

less than 28,000 more dead than last year, which is only reflecting the population increase of .35%.

time to PUT UP OR SHUT UP!!!

or should I say….CATS OUT OF THE BAG!!!

[2] I didn’t do well this time around; the scenario takes place in the Taiwan Straits, in an area where the water is quite shallow. Attack subs are ill-suited for combat in shallow coastal waters, and even in the best of cases where I’ve beaten Junks on Parade, my boat almost always suffers one or two torpedo hits, usually from the Chinese helicopters that accompany the surface fleet in the scenario. Yesterday I sank all of the Chinese warships and one of the “merchies” that I had to destroy, but a single enemy torpedo struck my boat – USS Seawolf – amidships. It didn’t destroy me outright, but the flooding caused by the torpedo hit sent my sub to the bottom and I got stuck there.