Sunday, November 5, 2023
In bed at 11, awake at 12:30 with bad CPP, unrelieved, back to sleep and awake and up at 4:41. 36°, high of 55°, cloudy day ahead, AQI=109 (PMm Unhealthy for sensitive groups), wind WSW at 5 mph, 2-16/29. Sunrise at 6:31, sunset at 4:38😱, 10+7. The longest daylight was 15+23 on June 21.) Solar noon is at 11:35, altitude 31°.
LTMW at an 8 a.m. feeding frenzy at the seed and suet feeders and underneath. Mostly red-bellied and downy woodpeckers, house finches, chickadees, and mourning doves. Despite the forecast of cloudy weather, the sun is shining brightly in the morning. Why is it that the downy woodpeckers seem so very tiny to me, leading me to wonder if they are adolescents? Have they always been this size or am I just comparing them to the great big red-bellies? The birds swoop in at such speeds and in such numbers it looks like we should have an air traffic controller on duty to prevent aerial collisions.
“Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.”
And I think of Mary Oliver's When Death Comes: "I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,
Each of the billions of leaves so perfect, so well made and functional, so beautiful, so plenteous, so common and so singular.
Pain during the night and again in the morning, walking like a 90-year-old with a stick up his butt. I laid down for some time on the bed with my tinnitus "Relief" app running 'Soundscape 6,' underlying 'brown noise' with subtle underwater and train sounds on top.
Teen solves Rubik's Cube while skydiving. From JSOnline: "17-year-old Sean Sierwacki claimed the Guinness Book of World Record for fastest time to solve a Rubik's Cube in freefall while skydiving. " My thought: what fools these mortals be. A thought from Annie Dillard: “Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.” To which we say: thank God
Nate Cohn's data shows Trump leading Biden in key states by 4 points, 48% to 44% in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — most likely more than enough to win the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Biden led in the sixth state, Wisconsin by 2 points. Cohn writes:
The survey finds that Mr. Biden enters his campaign as a badly weakened candidate, one running without the strengths on personal likability, temperament and character that were essential to his narrow victories in all six of these states in 2020. Long-festering vulnerabilities on his age, economic stewardship, and appeal to young, Black and Hispanic voters have grown severe enough to imperil his re-election chances.
On question after question, the public’s view of the president has plummeted over the course of his time in office. The deterioration in Mr. Biden’s standing is broad, spanning virtually every demographic group, yet it yields an especially deep blow to his electoral support among young, Black and Hispanic voters, with Mr. Trump obtaining previously unimaginable levels of support with them.
What does it say about America that, knowing what we all know, that 48% of the electorate supports giving the keys to the Oval Office back to Donald Trump? What does it say about Joe Biden that, knowing what we all know, that 48% of the electorate prefer Donald Trump to him?
Hitler - A Career is a 150 minute, 1977 documentary by Joachim Fest that I watched on OVID yesterday and today, noting (1) his 'failure' as a painter, wondering what would world history have been if he had succceded in his first calling as a painter; (2) the Beer Hall Putsch on 8-9 November, 1923, a hundred years ago; (3) the combination of circumstances that led to his appointment as Chancellor; (4) the phenomenal theatrics of the Nuremburg and other rallies; (5) his powerful oratory, unlike Trump's; (6) his masterful scape-goating of Jews and Leftists for the loss of WW1 and all the woes that besset the populace, who were only too ready to blame scapegoats; (7) the huge, cheering crowds of supporters in Germany, the Sudetenland, Austria.; (8) color films of Hitler, Eva Braun, Himmler, Albert Speer, and others at the Eagle's Nest Obersalzburg, where Sarah and Christian took me almost 75 years later, up the same elevator, Christain feeding the birds where Hitler dreamed of Lebensraum; (9) on September 1, 1939, the Schleswig-Holstein fired the opening shots of WWII; (10) Hitler's carelessness about work, not working very hard, dreaming of glories and conquests.
It's the most complete documentary I've seen on Hitler's life. It's not an enjoyable viewing because I was only too aware of the terrible price the world paid for his pathologies and wickedness. I can't help comparing Trump to him but watching the film persuaded me that Hitler, for all his weaknesses and abnormalities, was a more powerful leader by far than Trump is, a better orator and avatar surely. I'm wondering whether Trump will finally crack under the pressures of the legal trials he is facing. I'm also wondering whether he will be the next president of the U.S., and in some sense, the last president of the U.S. What will remain of the U.S. I grew up in and live in after another 4 years of Trump in power? "I am your vengeance." All that he and his thugs learned during his prior administration will be put to use destructively in his next administration. He will surround himself with his own form of brown shirts and black shirts, and thoroughly corrupt the government and change the world for the worse. Woe.
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