1213

 Tuesday, December 13, 2022

In bed by 10, awake at 3m yo at 3:15, thinking of Geri's absence over the long weekend, the house like a tomb, coming out of a long dream with Geri on General Eisenhower's staff in Europe during the Big War, me a hanger-on, allowed to be present only as her spouse.  35 outside with a brisk wind blowing in from the SE over the lake, wind chill 25, windier conditions supposed to start around 5 a.m., continue throughout the day and evening, part of big storms to the WNW and down S.  Rain expected.

Cedar Waxwings are back  Always a happy day to look through the kitchen window and see waxwings cleaning out every berry on the mystery berry trees in our side yard.  Alas for the gray, overcast day making it hard to see their magnificent plumage and their nifty mullets.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.  We watched it last night, clearly not for young children with images of Jesus crucified, Pinocchio being burned on a crucifix-like stake, a nasty figure representing Italian fascism, another representing Mussolini, a nasty circus owner, a horrible sea monster, a lot of cricket squashing, etc.  It seemed like an anti-war, anti-fascism, anti-capitalist film, one that I should enjoy, but I didn't particularly.  I wondered who the film was made for, the intended audience.  I would not take a young child to it and wonder how many adults will be drawn to it.

A Shanda fur die Goyim?  Stephen Miller, Trump's speechwriter and anti-immigrant czar, is hard at work fighting "anti-White bigotry."  According to this morning's WaPo, his America First Legal conservative organization has successfully blocked a number of federal programs designed to remediate past discrimination against minority citizens, i.e., favoring white male citizens.  Miller clearly believes our public life is a racial zero-sum game: if Blacks win anything, Whites lose something.  It's the same problem we see in affirmative action policies generally and affirmative action college admissions specifically.   Any program designed to benefit only minority people necessarily disadvantages non-minority people by design, i.e., racial discrimination in reverse.  In his theory, race-based remediation for yesterday's sins is impossible; it can't be effected without illegally and unfairly discriminating against today's White people.  It's an extension of the "I never owned slaves and shouldn't have to pay to remediate the lasting effects of race-based slavery (and Jim Crow America.)"  It's not unrelated to the claims of  Palestinians that they didn't create Hitler's program of exterminating Europe's Jews and they shouldn't have been made to give up their homeland to Jews after the Holocaust.  These arguments cannot be ignored.  They underlie much of the bitter race-grounded partisanship in the country today.  They gave rise to Trump's candidacy in 2015 and winning of the presidency in 2016.  And it can't be ignored that after watching him in action in the White House for 4 years, his share of the 2020 vote increased from 46% to 48%.  For millions of White Americans, the Democrats are identified with and controlled by Blacks, Hispanics, and other other minorities (including Jews) out to take whatever they can legally get away with from White America which has so grievously discriminated against them in the past.  They believe it is unfair and they deeply resent it.  They fuel the January 6th crowd.  Trump knows it; Stephen Miller knows it.  Let's see what the "new and improved" Supreme Court does with the affirmative action cases before it this term.

The Electrician and the New Oven Make that 2 electricians and a bill of $303.

Looking out the front window at a beautiful whitetail doe and her beautiful fawn.