9/18/23

 Monday, September 18, 2023

In bed     Fell asleep on tvr recliner watching something or other, went to bed later and was up at 6:40 with a nasty PITA, 51°, high of 66°, mostly sunny all day, AQI=26, wind NNw at 7 mph, 4-8/12. 0.15" of rain in the last 24 hours.  The sun rose at 6:34 and will set at 6:56, 12+22.

Sunrise at 7:40 over Pandlhaus, 87° ENE

Timeanddate.com tells us that by 7:20 a.m. in Milwaukee, the sun's direction was already 94.5° ESE at an altitude of 7.82°, moving south toward its meridian (180°S) at 12:45 CDT, 93.416 million miles away, and that our next equinox will be on September 23 at 1:50 a.m.  We ae spinning around the earth's axis at about 575 mph and orbiting around the sun at an average orbital speed of 66, 616 mph, or 18.5 miles per second.  Things to think about with my first cup of coffee.

What Americans can afford and can't afford.  A Marine pilot ejected from his F-35 fighter/attack aircraft over South Carolina, parachuting safely to the ground, but the aircraft can't be found.  Each F-35 costs $135.8 million; the F-35 program cost is $1.7 trillion.  The renovation plan for the Brewers' American Family Stadium is $600 million.  The U.S. provides about $4 billion in aid to Israel, a wealthy country led by a fascist apartheid government.  Since 1978, the United States has provided Egypt, led by dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi with over $50 billion in military and $30 billion in economic assistance, including $1.3 billion in military aid for its military dictatorship recently approved by the Biden administration.

The number of children living in poverty in the United States more than doubled in 2022, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Sept. 12, the biggest increase since it began using its current method to count them. In 2021, 5.2% of children were living in poverty. In 2022 that figure was 12.4%, or about 9 million children.  An uptick in the number of children living in poverty had been widely expected, because of the expiration of the enhanced version of Child Tax Credit program (CTC) that had been instituted in July 2021 as a means of defraying the financial burden that the stay-at-home measures had imposed on parents. 

The federal government provided states with nearly $24 billion in stabilization funds to keep child care services afloat as part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021.  That program expires at the end of this month.  More than 70,000 child care providers who benefited are likely to close as a result of lost funding, according to estimates from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank. That would affect 3.2 million kids and slash $10.6 billion in revenue from lost worker productivity as parents reduce hours or leave jobs in the scramble to find new care.

My FB post this morning re: A Photo Can Tell the Truth About a Lie. Or a Lie About the Truth.

Each Monday, the New York Times publishes another essay by Margaret Renkl and each Monday I am grateful for it.  Today she writes about the almost unimaginable cruelty of the South's history of racialized chattel slavery, cruelty the scope and inhumanity of which we cannot apprehend from our contemporary vantage points, but which is increasingly well-documented in so many historical studies.  Nazi Germany's slave labor camps were never euphemized as 'plantations' just as American Southern plantations are never accurately called 'slave labor camps.'  And few of us apply the term 'apartheid' to America's long history of racial oppression, preferring the softer term 'segregation.  'Many modern studies also reveal slavery's significant role in the development of American capitalism and of the predominating role of Race in our social, economic, and political life today.  Margaret Renkl was born and raised in Alabama and lives in Nashville, a Southerner through and through, but she confesses to a deep ambivalence about the South.  She has written: "People can hardly help loving the hands that rocked their cradles or the landscapes that shaped their souls, but I doubt there’s a single writer in the South for whom life here isn’t a source of deep ambivalence. . . What if being a Southern writer is foremost a matter of growing up in a deeply troubled place and yet finding it somehow impossible to leave? Of seeing clearly the failings of home and nevertheless refusing to flee?"   Its history is so dark and so bloody and its historic and contemporary politics so reactionary. perhaps one can understand why some Northerners almost wish the South had won the Civil War and gone its separate (and ultimately doomed) way.

Marriage is a 4 part mini-series on BBC starring Sean Bean and Nicola Walker.  It depicts the relationship between husband Ian, recently made 'redundant' at his long-term job, and wife Emma, a solicitor, and their daughter Jessica, a small-time singer-songwriter.  I watched all 4 episodes, in large measure because of Nicola Walker, of whom I've become a big fan, and Geri watched the first two, in part because she wasn't feeling well and went to bed early.   There isn't much of a plot and what there is of plat and dialogue moves very slowly, very slowly.  Ian and Emma love each other and love their daughter Jessie, and each reciprocates the love they receive, but there is precious little communication within the family.  Both Ian and Emma seemed pretty constipated emotionally, in part because of the hurt they experienced when their son Nickolas was born prematurely at 6 months and died, perhaps in Emma's arms.  They speak in shorthand, single words or sentence fragments conveying enough meaning to be read by the other.   Emma is wrapped up in her work at a law firm run by a very nasty 'senior', who is younger than she is, but her work is never seen as meaningful or satisfying for her, rather than simply a way of filling the hours in her otherwise empty life.  At the conclusion of episode 4, she and Ian are in bed and he says to her: 'I know I've been a bit dark recently' to which she sarcastically but not cruelly replies "Really, I hadn't noticed."  He says "It's all a bit pathetic, I know, when you've got your job and all your amazing ideas and ambitions --' and she replies "Oh, but, . . . God . . .it's all just . . .I keep scraping at the world, trying to find something, but there's only you."  Ian replies, "That a good thing, yes?" and she says "Of course", kisses him goodnight, and they fall off to sleep as the square dance theme music plays - 'to the side, to the side, and around, to the middle end.  To the side, to the side, to the side, around.  Through the middle end.  Allemande left and . . ."  which seems to define their way of dealing with much of the stress in their lives, certainly including the death of Nicholas.  At one point, daughter Jessica urges Emma to be more open about her life and her emotions and Emma nods compliantly but keeps her eyes on her laptop on which she had been reading and answering her work emails.  When Jessica asks about her reaction to Nicholas's death, Emma weeps into her hands but says nothing.  

    The story reminded me of my own birth family, and especially of my father and his side of the family among whom the family motto seemed to be "the less said, the better."