Tuesday, October 3, 2023
In bed by 9:20, CPPR night spent mostly on brr, awoke about 4:15, back to bed but unable to sleep, let Lilly out at 4:30, Venus shining brightly, solely, at @ 90°E, 63°, clear skies, high of 77°, AQI=44, wind SW at 5 mph, 3-12/20. Sunrise at 6:51, sunset at 6:29, 11:38.
LTMW. The first bird arrived at the sunflower/safflower feeder at 6:45, shortly before sun-up, but I couldn't ID it, probably a chickadee. Definitely chickadee, more showing up one after another for the 'early bird awards.'
Yesterday's start
Workspace
Freehand from midpoint dot, colored chalk sketch
the paint in the reference photo is lush, wish I could use oils instead of acrylics
Worst Health Care System, Not Best. The WaPo, with many expert, knowledgable collaborators, conducted an extensive and comprehensive study of life expectancies around the globe, focused on premature death among those aged 35 to 64. In the U.S., these ages have the greatest number of excess deaths compared with peer nations. "The portrait that emerged shows a nation beset with chronic illness and saddled with a fractured health-care system that, compared with its peers, costs more, delivers less and fails at the fundamental mission of helping people maintain their health" and specifically: (1) It is a chronic illness that looms as the paramount threat to Americans in their prime. Chronic illnesses erase more years of life among people under 65 as all the overdoses, homicides, suicides, and car accidents combined. (2) The divide in life expectancy between the nation’s poorest and wealthiest communities is dramatically wider than it was in the 1980s but people in wealthy communities in the United States live shorter lives than their peers in Canada, France, and Japan. The same is true for people in the poorest communities. (3) Big surprise (not!): states controlled by Republicans have significantly higher excess death rates than other states. Negative correlation with public health regulations and spending.
The WaPo coverage includes a graphic that provides the average life expectancies based on age, gender, and state of residence. A male Wisconsin resident at age 82 on average will live another 8 years, to age 90. Same end age for a family Wisconsinite aged 79. Jimmy A. will be 90 next June and he'll probably make it. Is he happy about this? Should we be? Or is this a devastating probablity? Decrepitude, disability, dependency: movement from cane, to walker, to wheelchair, from independent living to assisted living to nursing home? Eskimo, The Ballad of Narayama, Zeke Emanuel, , . . .
Joe Biden and his German Shepherds (and his mansion and his Corvette and his reelection bid.) Joe Biden lives in a mansion, not just the Executive Mansion known more commonly as the White House, but also his personal mansion in Delaware. He 'has a thing' for mansions. He also has a vintage Corvette that he keeps at his Delaware mansion, next to his wrongfully-garaged classified documents. He also has 2 German Shepherds, guard/attack dogs more properly known as Alsatian wolfdogs. One, named "Major," has attacked and bitten so many people at the White House, mostly Secret Service agents, that he has been banished to the Delaware mansion. The other, named "Commander," has bitten Secret Service agents in the White House 11 times but Joe and Jill (read: Joe) keep him at the White House under a "leash protocol" presumably developed to forestall the 12th attack. Commander replaced another of Biden's German Shepherds named "Champ" who died in June of 2021. What is it about Uncle Joe that makes him think he can keep in the White House attacking his help an aggressive dog that in most situations would be euthanized? What is it that makes him think he should keep himself in the White House until age 86? What sense of Entitlement?
I confess to many biases, one of them being against German Shepherds. In the 1970s, I represented a 9-year-old girl who had been attacked without provocation by a neighbor's German Shepherd. She required 41 stitches. She was the second little girl the dog had mauled, both girls being on the sidewalk off the property where the dog was kept. Cieslewicz v. Mutual Service Cas. Ins. Co., 84 Wis. 2d 91, 267 N.W.2d 59 1978). I learned in that case that the dogs were originally marketed as "Alsatians" or "Alsatian wolfdogs" but did not sell well until they were rebranded as "German shepherds." There are reasons these dogs are used by law enforcement and the military for guard and security work. Queen Elizabeth II loved her Corgis, which BTW are herding dogs, and Joe Biden loves his German Shepherds. Why does Joe choose the German Shepherds rather than corgis, or labradors or golden retrievers, beagles, or Portuguese water dogs? Is this a fair question to ask? What, if anything,s does this tell us about Joe?
In 1996, Biden purchased four acres of secluded, lakefront land in Greenville, an upscale suburb of Wilmington, Delaware, and built their 6,850-square-foot home. In the summer of 2017, the Bidens bought a house on the Delaware Shore for $2.7 million. Upon moving out of the vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory at the end of his term in 2017, the Bidens began renting a house in McLean, Virginia, the upscale suburb outside D.C. where Jackie Kennedy grew up. Sprawled out over 12,000 square feet, the five-bedroom mansion has a gym, sauna, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a driveway big enough for 20 cars. In 1974, as a young senator and recent widower, Biden purchased a 10,000 square feet, former DuPont mansion in tony Greenville for $185,000. Is it a fair question to ask why Joe throughout his life has splurged on opulent real estate?
I wonder about questions like these because I don't trust Joe Biden. I like his policies as president but I don't buy the persona he has worn throughout his political life, Uncle Joe, just a middle-class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, with ancestral roots in coal mining. I'm inclined to think of him like Cassius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. Such men are not to be trusted." Cassius won over Brutus to his perfidious cause by convincing him that Caesar was overly ambitious, dishonest, and greedy, qualities that Cassius himself possessed and which I attribute to "Uncle Joe" Biden. Like most politicians, he is very willing to sacrifice a lot to advance his own advancement in power, prestige, and the trappings of wealth. I think he's doing it now, running for a 2nd term at his age, freezing out any competition from any younger, potentially more popular candidate who might have a better chance of defeating Donald Trump and preserving whatever form of democracy we have here in America. Is Joe's need to be surrounded by opulence,and adulation, to be the most powerful guy in the room, his ambition boundless? We'll never know for sure, but, in any event, sorry, Joe, I'm just not that into you, your mansions, your Corvette, or your dogs.
I wanted the music to play on forever
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
I wanted the clown to be constantly clever
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
I bought me blue ribbons to tie up my hair
But I couldn't find anybody to care
The merry-go-round is beginning to slow now
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
The music has stopped and the children must go now
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
Oh, mother dear, I know you're very proud
Your little girl in gingham is so far above the crowd
No, daddy dear
You never could have known
That I would be successful, yet so very much alone
I wanted to live in a carnival city
With laughter and love everywhere
I wanted my friends to be thrilling and witty
I wanted somebody to care
I found my blue ribbons all shiny and new
But now I discover them no longer blue
The merry-go-round is beginning to taunt me
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
There is nothing to win
And there's no one to want me
Have I stayed too long at the fair?
McCarthy's out as Speaker of the House. A bit of schadenfreude but what does it mean?
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