David > Recent Status Updates

She and Marco have (finally?) made some kind of personal connection. Just their holding hands seems to have made things shake, literally.

Bailey was able to meet the mystery girl and her brother, Poppet and Widget, afterbseeing the seer, and things seem to click with them as they share food and time exploring the circus. Poppet gives him a pass before they part so he can comeback as much as he wants.

End of part 1. Back to Bailey, who took the dare to retrieve something from the circus and received a glove from a girl with the circus. He's fighting with his dad about grandma's request for him to go to Harvard, which she will pay for, but dad wants him taking over the farm. And now suddenly the circus has returned.

We've gotten a sense of the kind of skills Celia has, and they are impressive. Her competition saw her audition, and he seems both worried and impressed, because who wouldn't be, given the things she did?

Given a choice, would (white) Americans choose democracy or whiteness/white power?

Some thought American exceptionalism would somehow protect us from the COVID virus...but it didn't, did it. It did expose how vulnerable we were/are, and how unprepared we are for such calamities, and how the low caste people dominate the "mudsill" vocations required on the front lines of society, allowing others to stay home, safe.

In the US, it really is like the Confederacy won the war, with the statuary commemorating their major generals and the other memorials, with all the streets and schools that are named after Confederates, all the appearances of the Confederate flag. Compare to Germany, where displaying a swastika is illegal, people are reminded of the terror, and no Nazis are memorialized. Huge differences.

Stomach-churning examples from present-day America showing how "lower caste" (ie black) members of society are unfairly treated because of their perceived caste membership. Even flying first class leaves one open to mistreatment.

These inequities have medical repercussions, and not just for POC: dominant caste members who face discrimination suffer similar health effects and have shorter lives, too.

Ch. 21 described how new scapegoats were sought in Germany during WWII when nearly all Jews had been removed. Having dark wavy hair made a girl a target.

Ch. 22 about the Stockholm Syndrome had disturbing examples of how subordinate caste members are expected to forgive dominant caste transgressors in ways hard to imagine if the roles were reversed, eg a black judge comforting a just-convicted white female officer.

The Inevitable Narcissism of Caste includes several good examples of dominant caste members disregarding feelings or needs of lower caste members. Several descriptions fit Rs and former guy "to a T," you might say. :-)

Each of the future contestants has their issues with their guides, as the guides strive to have them prepared for the future challenges, whatever they will be. We witness mind reading, physical manipulation of broken objects, even the repair of bone fractures.

The Euphoria of Hate ushers in a new part, The Consequences of Caste, by describing a video from Nazi Germany around 1940, after the Germans have taken France, with a sea of humanity cheering and waving swastika flags everywhere. "...The threat...is not one man, ... it is all of us...."

Reviewing the case if phenom pitcher Satchel Paige, whi did not first pitch in the majors as a rookie until he was 42 and last pitched in the majors at 59. That last was to be a stunt, but he threw 3 scoreless innings against the BoSox.

Reviewing the case if phenom pitcher Satchel Paige, whi did not first pitch in the majors as a rookie until he was 42 and last pitched in the majors at 59. That last was to be a stunt, but he threw 3 scoreless innings against the BoSox.

This last chapter on the early front lines of caste covers a case of 2 Harvard-educated couples, one black one white, moving to a town in Mississippi to embed themselves in the population to study both sides of the caste hierarchy. Further illustration of the caste divisions came from how their study, with a black primary researcher, contrasted with smaller studies done by white researchers.

Last Place Anxiety tries to illustrate how members of the lower caste compete against each other, to avoid being the bottom of the bottom. E.g., immigrant POC striving to keep their foreign accent so it's clear they're not from here.

The Urgent Necessity of a Bottom Rung has more wrenching examples, such as soldiers mistreated (eg blinded) at home after returning from WW1, or a store owner lynched for out-competing his white competition. Even to the modern day POC are assumed to be trespassers and criminals by white police. It seems there is nothing more riling than a successful POC.

Clearly the two budding magicians have met, and are intrigued with each other. Tarot cards, a notebook returned, and transport from London to a forest in winter without leaving town.

The kind of premise that makes me skeptical: people who do "real" magic in a way to make people believe they are illusionists, like regular magicians. And now there will be some competition between two such who train magicians of this type. Trying to focus on the descriptive writing and not so much the plot and these conditions.

The Intrusion of Caste in Everyday Life includes examples where "dominant caste" Americans (ie whites) make assumptions about people based solely on seeing skin color. Mail carrier? Nope, college professor picking up his mail after a bike ride. Kidnapper who needs to be followed? No, a church youth pastor babysitting 2 white children. Drug runner? Wrong again, NYT reporter in town on a tight one day trip.

Just reading about insecure alphas and the role of the underdog/omega in dog or wolf packs. Alphas, at least good alphas, don't lead by bullying and fighting but through quiet confidence upon which the rest of the pack relies. Interesting that in wolf packs when they lose their omega/underdog, the pack will lie around like there is no reason to go on for some amount of time.

Assessing aspects of the miscasting of caste while attending a conference on caste in London. Meeting an upper caste Indian who had rejected the hierarchy of India's caste system.

The section The Tentacles of Caste begins with a short description of the blue eyes vs. brown eyes experiment done in an elementary classroom in Iowa in the late 60s. The effects were evident there in a matter of minutes. The teacher wondered when later interviewed how such suppression would affect a person over a lifetime.

Pillar 8, inherent superiority vs. inherent inferiority:
"[A] sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest [at her Columbus, OH public school] with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.”

More examples that are difficult to read, and to comprehend: a man whipped 400 times and left to die or recover; a man whipped within an inch of his life for suggesting corn would grow just as well in a crooked row as in a straight one; applying salt and red pepper in a slave's wounds after a whipping; and of course lynching in a public square, making his friends and family watch.

Ominous start to pillar 7, Terror as Enforcement...

"The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing."

This sentence gets the tone of the book:
"A presidential election system that ignores 100 million voters [because they live in states that won't be in question in the election] and lets the loser win is not the way to [strengthen the world's oldest continually functioning democracy]."