Disappointed? What's The Next Level Worse?

      Right now, there's a pandemic raging in the United States with a death toll of one Antietam every day.  One 9-11 of Americans killed by it every twenty-four hours, yet people I know are still calling it a "fake" and scorning basic public health precautions.  It's looking like less than two-thirds of Americans will even consider getting vaccinated when a vaccine becomes widely available, along about the middle of 2021.

      Right now, there's a truculent segment of the Right threatening civil unrest over a fantasy spun by a real-estate huckster turned politician.  The Republican Attorney General and the Republican (former) Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency agree the 2020 election was fair and honest, but that doesn't make any difference to the folks who haven't seen enough blood.

      And there's a lot of overlap between the two groups.  Apparently, not enough of us are dead yet to suit them.

      Throw in another bunch on the Left who are all in favor of rioting in the streets and wouldn't take a vaccine delivered via a program run out of Washington under any circumstances, all the more so since it started under a GOP Administration, and we've got the potential for one hell of a mess.

      So much for gliding into my retirement years with a Hilton in orbit and vacations on the Moon.  Who needs a flying car when you can cough your lungs out in a frozen trench just like a WW I doughboy?  Who needs rationality and reason when you can get higher than a kite on rage and loathing?

      Our very good, good pals in government office in Moscow and Beijing must be laughing themselves sick.  At least there's a more than even chance they'll choke on it, but that's cold comfort at best.

      We were supposed to have built L-5 by now.  There were going to be colonies on Mars.  We got the stupid future instead.