Oosty wrote:
Hi all - Some really good images during the couple of weeks I was away travelling some 4500 kms to, through, and back from the Kruger National Park. It was so good to get out to see our beautiful country and to be able to travel. Even though Knysna and the Cape Garden Route is beautiful it is possible to get cabin fever. Something like catching a fish on every cast and not being allowed to stop.
I've also been very busy with camera club competitions and polishing up my judging knowledge and almost all of my photography has been with (umm!) AF glass that I've neglected the sacred stuff for a while but I will be back. Also acting as administrator for an aging brother is time consuming and frustrating but necessary.
I hope you all survive what promises to be a hectic week! Appropriate that it follows on Halloween as trick for one will be treat for the next!
From afar the American electoral college system seems bizarre and outdated in that last time 70 000 votes determined the outcome despite a popular vote favoring the losing candidate. This despite the definition of democracy which the Oxford dictionary describes as "a system of government by the whole population".
I have no axe to grind and will watch the outcome with interest. For me the circus comes to town every four years and is an unending source of bemusement. Good luck to you all and to the United States.
Thank you Peter, regardless of the election outcome my biggest wish is for this country to become one people. We live in a time where our differences feel unsurmountable, we exist in a legal, not a real, union of very different people. I have witnessed as an engineer the loss of well paying manufacturing jobs and the resulting service economy that pays little, the high cost of housing in California, the blind eye to illegal immigration that allowed it to become a tragedy for the country and the illegal immigrants both, high levels of taxation that kills business, the end of mental health services largely driving the homeless crisis, the inability to control illegal drug trade and the legal opioid pain drug crisis, etc. etc. The USA is adopted country to three siblings from my family and we are both grateful and loyal, living safe and relatively prosperous thanks to opportunities available here and the ability to work productively in what was initially a foreign land and is now my homeland, accent and all,
I just want to look at the 2020's and not feel that the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s were better on a human scale. May this wish come true,
