Monday, January 30, 2023
In bed around 9: 30, up at 4:25, thinking of Kitty, Tom, & my O&O Made some honey vanilla chamomile tea. Temp is 7 degrees with wind NW at 13 mph and wind chill at -9. A very cold day ahead with a high of 11, winds 9 to 16 mph and gusts to 23, and wind chills ranging from -19 to -9, never above 0. Sunrise at 7:09, sunset at 5:01, 9+51.
More and More, I Talk to the Dead; The Ordinariness of Grief Governs My Days is Margaret Renkl's regular guest essay in this morning's NYT. She describes the sudden, unexpected death of her mother and the protracted illness and death of her father, as well the deaths of other family members during her life. She reminded me of course of the thoughts with which I woke up this morning, of my beloved sister Kitty and my old pal, Tom. Kitty's death on March 3 followed a long, long decline with lung disease and close to a year of in-home hospice care. Her death occurred in a moment; her dying took years. Tom's death on January 18th was sudden and unexpected. Micaela, Saul, and the other passengers in the snorkeling boat they were on didn't even know that he had died until someone noticed he had been facedown in the water, motionless, for some time. I pause even as I write these words, thinking of it. Both Tom and Kitty were big presences in my life, Kitty for 78 years, Tom for 55. Each of them has died within the past year. Like Margaret Renkl with her parents, I find myself talking to Kitty now and then, as I so often did to my mother years ago during a hard time. Indeed, I talked to Kitty more than once preparing Tom's eulogy, asking for her help getting through it. My relationship with Tom was less intimate than the relationships with my mother and sister, but it was close and long. I wonder if I'll find myself chatting with him one of these days.
So beautiful, so strong, so true, so good
Sweet Sour Cabbage Borscht. I made a potful yesterday. I'm getting too casual in my soup-making lately, thinking that the recipes are mighty forgiving, that they allow a lot of personal variations. More of this, less of that, omit this, add that, etc. This time I didn't rely on my usual practice of setting the timer on my iPhone for the various steps in the process. With my memory, this is reckless, and sure enough during the final simmering, I forgot about the soup and overcooked it. Nothing tragic, the soup tastes good, but the cabbage in it is not as al dente as I prefer. Like the ancient moose turd pie joke I learned from my old fishing partner Doug Wenger years ago - "good though!"
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!", Puck to Oberon, Midsummer's Night Dream. There is an op-ed in this morning's JSOnline supporting the current Republican proposal scrapping Wisconsin's progressive or graduated income tax and adopting a 'flat tax.' At its core, it is simply a proposal to cut taxes on the wealthy and shift more of the state's revenue needs onto the not-wealthy, i.e., a classic Republican policy preference. "There's nothing surer, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," from Ain't We God Fun. The essay is accurate enough in one sense in that it points out the nasty competition between states to attract rich residents and employers with tax and other policies, e.g., homestead exemptions, that favor the very wealthy. Florida has no state income tax and relies on its sales tax for its revenue. If I recall correctly, Florida and Texas have no upper limit on their homestead exemptions, allowing the very rich to protect multi-million dollar palaces from the claims of judgment and other creditors, even in bankruptcy. The author of the op-ed, a 'policy director' for a right-wing think tank, accurately asks why a multimillionaire or billionaire would choose to be a resident taxpayer here rather than a Floridian or Texan. It's hard to argue with that, at least if one's focus is entirely on maximizing personal wealth rather than contributing to the society and economy in which one makes all that wealth. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization." Personal wealth maximization is not a universal value or goal by any means, though some economists, theorists, and Republicans disagree. Gloria Vanderbilt is reputed to have said "You can't be too rich or too thin." She was wrong of course on both counts. I also noted in the op-ed some slick arguments like "Earn $280,000 in Wisconsin and your marginal rate is 5.3%. Have a good year and earn $281,000, and your marginal rate jumps to 7.65%. It is an explicit penalty on success, a Progressive-era attempt to even out incomes. As the economic literature has long pointed out, it depresses upward mobility and wage growth." He slights the fact that the tax rate increase is a marginal increase, i.e., it is an additional 2.35% not on the $280,000, but only on the additional $1,000 of income, i.e., an additional $23.50. That is 0.00008363 of the $281,000 income. Hardly a sufficient reason to pull up stakes and move to the land of Greg Abbott or George DeSantis. Of course, it's not only income taxes and progressive tax rates that may discourage the wealthy from staying in Wisconsin, there's also the matter of death taxes. Since 2008, Wisconsin has had no estate or inheritance tax, a departure from a history of more than 100 years. So that inducement for the wealthy to flee to more welcoming climes no longer exists. Now if only the Republicans can get rid of that nasty relic of the Progressive Era the graduated income tax, all Wisconsin will have to compete with is the warmer winters in Dixieland (let's disregard hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning strikes and suchlike.)
I let Lilly out at 6:30 onto the snow-covered turf and 9 below zero wind chill. I think she set a personal speed record for getting her business done.
Thoughtful, insightful WaPo lead article on systemic racism. The article points out that systemic racism isn't binary; it isn't just a White supremacy or White superiority thing. It's a matter of how Black people can or should be treated. It's a matter of Black Inferiority. It's an important insight that helps us realize that it is still Racism at work when Black cops beat a young Black man to death on the streets of Memphis (or Los Angeles, New York, or Milwaukee) because Racism teaches us what is acceptable in terms of how Black people, especially Black men, especially young Black men, may be treated, whether by White people, or Hispanic people, or Asian people or by other Black people. Racism teaches us that you can get away with treating a young Black guy less respectfully than you would treat others. Correctly understood, Racism's focus is on the race of the victim, the abused, the denigrated, not on the race of the victimizer, the abuser, the denigrator. Some quotes in the article: (1) “In America we’re taught that racism is black and white,” said Owens, who now works with the Maryland Coalition for Justice and Police Accountability. “And we are not taught about institutional or systemic racism, even though we see it everywhere. We are taught that if a Black person kills another Black person, it can’t be racist. It’s ‘Black-on-Black crime.’” (2) Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state legislator and CNN commentator said "For many folks, the race of a cop is cop." (3) Jason Sole, a community organizer in Minneapolis and former head of the local NAACP, said he’s never felt a sense of relief when encountering Black officers. “I never had that feeling of ‘Oh great, it’s a Black cop, yay.’ No. I was born in ’78 and I never had that feeling, not once,” Sole said. “All your skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.”
The Mystery of the Tube Feeder. I've been wondering for a few days why I am not seeing the normal visitors on the tube feeder in which I stock black-oil sunflower seeds. On a normal day, we have an abundance of chickadees, sparrows, red finches, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers even an occasional Eastern bluebird. The last few days - zilch, leading me to wonder whether there is something nasty about the seeds I put out or whether there is a raptor hanging around. This morning the Arctic cold weather appears to have brought at least some chickadees back, dashing in, picking up a seed, and dashing away. Still no action on the suet cake which remains a mystery, especially in the bitterly cold weather. On the other hand, the goldfinches are covering the niger feeder and are filling up. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's only between 1/4 and 1/3 filled which means I have to bundle up and refill it. The lucky ones cling to the bottom of the tube where the neger seeds are. Others wait higher up, where there are no seeds. Also, there is one lone slate-colored junco on the ground under the niger feeder. I need to get on a stick, but brrr . . . It astounds me that the birds and other critters survive weather like this. (And finally, at 9:30, a red-bellied woodpecker has landed on the suet cake holder and pecked into it with vigor, followed by a female downy woodpecker, and a red-breated house finch is on the sunflower seed feeder)
TIA. I had one on November 24, 2020, or at least I may have. The neurology specialist at the VA thought it was probably a TIA but recognized, as did the ER doc and another examining neurologist, that it could have been an ocular migraine. In any event, I have been on 325 mg aspirin therapy ever since. This morning's WaPo has an article reporting that the American Heart Association is recommending that TIAs be treated as emergencies, not as "mere" mini-strokes. It recommends a CT scan within 24 hours of the onset and appropriate treatment thereafter. When I had mine, I thought it was related to an injection of avastin in my right eye to counter bleeding and macular degeneration. I couldn't read the right half of words on my laptop or see the right side of images on a tv screen. I called the retinologist's office and the triage nurse said it sounded like "more of a brain thing than an eye thing" and that I should call my regular doc. I called the triage nurse at the VA and she said I should hie me to the ER at Zablocki, which I did. This was all about 24 hours after experiencing the symptoms. They did a CT scan at Zablocki and it seemed like it took forever to get the results, waiting for a read by a radiologist in California if I'm remembering correctly. Dear Geri was with me for hours in the ER. Reading this article about the AHA recommendations makes me realize anew how fortunate I was to have access to such good advice and care from the 2 triage nurses and the staff at Zablocki's ER and the 2 neurologists I saw on follow-up. (I'm now recalling wearing the Halter monitor for a day or two before seeing the superspecialist neuro guy.)
Out and About. I was stricken with guilt about the 2/3rds empty niger seed feeder and the goldfinches waiting on the top of the tube for their turn to feed at the bottom of the tube. I put on my heavy winter jacket and my Nanook of the North winter storm hat with fur earflaps and went out to Wild Birds Unlimited to pick up a gallon jug of niger. I also wanted to buy a new supposedly squirrel-proof feeder to replace the one that we recently had to discard. Once I was out I noticed my gas tank was pretty low so I stopped at the Shell station and filled up to avoid gas line 'freeze up' during this week of cold weather. When I got home, Geri asked me to pick up some potatoes for the potato salad she wanted to make. First, I filled the niger feeder to assuage my guilt and then the new feeder with sunflower seeds, then back up to Senkik's for potatoes and other necessities, like vanilla bean ice cream, etc. Few people in Sendik's and at the gas station, but the bird lovers' store was busy, probably because of concern over the cold weather and the welfare of our feathered friends.
Brunch today consisted of my first bowl of yesterday's sweet-sour cabbage borsch which was certainly edible but bland. The solid ingredients are OK but the stock/broth needs some perking up.
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