Adoption is Complicated....

 Lately I have come across several articles pertaining to adoption.  Most of them discuss the trauma felt by an adopted child as a result of their perceived rejection by their birth parents, particularly their biological mother.  I don't have a horse in this race, being neither adopted myself, nor having any adopted children. However I do know several people who are adoptees, and some adoptive parents, as do most of us.  

The best article that I have read was this one by NCR's Heidi Schlumpf.  As someone who placed a child for adoption when she was young, and also someone whose children are adopted, she is a credible witness:

The social benefits of not getting COVID tested

Beneath one of the posts below, I commented that I recently got myself tested for COVID.   It wasn't as easy a decision as it seems: it struck me that I'd be making life easier for myself and everyone around me by keeping the cloak of ignorance of COVID infection wrapped cozily around us.

Christmas recap

 Hi everyone.  Not a lot to report about our Christmas this year.  We had all the kids home and/or over to our place on Christmas Day.  

How Many Books Does It Take?

 

How Many Books Does It Take to Make a Place Feel Like Home?

There’s a reason that some people won’t let go of their physical books — and a new term for it: ‘book-wrapt.’

Mr. Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.

So how many books does it take to feel book-wrapt? Mr. Byers cited a common belief that 1,000 is the minimum in any self-respecting home library. Then he quickly divided that number in half. Five hundred books ensure that a room “will begin to feel like a library,” he said. And even that number is negotiable. 

“What’s five times 40?” Alice Waters, the chef and food activist, recently asked. (The question was rhetorical.) “Two hundred, 400, 600, 800,” she calculated, apparently scanning the bookcases around her and adding up their contents (she was speaking on the phone). “And then probably another 800,” she said, referring to other rooms in her Berkeley, Calif., bungalow.

“Any large room looks wrong without the appropriate number of people in it,” Mr. Byers writes. “An unused living room looks empty. An empty ballroom is absolutely creepy; it looks as if it is waiting desperately for something to happen. A library, on the other hand, is delightful when full but still especially attractive when empty.”

And masses of books, he said, represent “delights that we hold in possibility” — the joy of being able to lift a hand and tap unexplored worlds. (Because who among us has read every single book in our libraries?) “I like to be in a room where I’ve read half the books, and I’d like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years,” he said.

This was a delightful article.  However, it confuses the idea of one's collection of books with a room that supposedly houses that collection.

Most of my rooms have bookcases in them, so I have always wondered how many books I have. They used to be rather well organized, but since I retired about twenty years ago, I have not kept up with the organization. So perhaps this will be the year to get things organized, and in the process to count them. 

Case-Western University has an annual book sale of donated books. They will even come out to your house and pick them up if you have enough books.

Since I like to underline books, I should also be able to count the number of books that I own that I have read.  Of course, over the years I have read a lot of books that I have borrowed from various libraries.    

Omicron, Projections and Mysteries

 The University of Washington prediction has just come out:

140M new COVID infections to US in the next two months, model predicts

They found the U.S. may see a total of about 140 million new infections from Jan. 1 to March 1, 2022, peaking in late-January at about 2.8 million new daily infections.

Total infections in the U.S. we forecast are going from about 40% of the U.S. having been infected so far, to having in the next 2 to 3 months, 60% of the U.S. getting infected with omicron.” 

While meta-analyses have suggested previous variants cause about 40% of cases to be asymptomatic, Murray said more than 90% of people infected with omicron may never show symptoms.

What is the worst Christmas song? - UPDATED

Photo from theguardian.com via Google

UPDATE 12/27/2021 8:38 am CST: I came across this belatedly: it turns out that my wife's view of All I Want for Christmas, while original to her, is not unique.  Unbeknownst to both of us, by the time she voiced per opinion about the song, Kyle Smith of National Review already had unintentionally initiated what turned into an international social media kerfuffle regarding the song.  Smith's post about the incident is amusing and worth a read, but in brief: he had visited a bar in Dallas and noticed this sign on the establishment's jukebox:

Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You will be skipped if played before Dec 1.  After Dec 1, the song is only allowed one time a night.

Smith snapped a photo of the handwritten sign and tweeted it out.  Somehow, through the magic of tweets being forwarded by other tweeters, Carey herself (or her publicists) became aware of it, and replied via Twitter.  I'm pasting an image of her reply here, as the photo is necessary to fully appreciate it:

I say "fully appreciate", but I may be missing the point of it.  I take it that it's tongue-in-cheek: I think she (or her publicists) photoshopped her head onto a Xena the Warrior Princess photo.  I am reading it as a good-humored response.

I am not what one would call a Mariah Carey fan-boy; frankly, her career blossomed after I had mostly lost interest in popular music, so I sort of missed out on her.  I did observe her during the one or two seasons she was a panelist on American Idol, and I kind of liked her: I thought she came across as sensible and well-grounded (or as sensible and well-grounded as a certified diva can be), and inclined to be kind to the teenage and young-adult contestants - which probably is why the show's producers didn't keep her around very long.  I think there was back-stage snippiness going on between her and the other panelists, but that seems to me more or less par for the course for that show, and those judges panels crammed together a lot of ego at one table, so I'm not going to assign fault one way or the other for that.

At any rate, after Carey or her publicists deigned to take notice of the tweet, media all over the world picked up the story.  But the incident, such as it was, never pinged on my radar until I read about it within the last few days.  I'm not one who tunes in DMZ frequently, or at all.

-----

A week or so ago, my wife announced that she can't stand the Mariah Carey insta-classic, "All I Want For Christmas (Is You)" (currently at 238 million views on YouTube, and apparently it has charted on Billboard every single year since its 1994 release).  I am happy to say that, while the song is impossible to avoid, it sort of flew under my radar for the last 27 years, except that it's sung by that tween girl in "Love Actually", a film I enjoy.  On the whole, it doesn't stir a strong reaction in me.

Then, a day or two ago, I heard Elvis sing Blue Christmas for about the trillionth time, and decided I hate it every bit as much as my wife hates All I want For Christmas.  I think it's those annoying "oo-ee-oo-ee-ooh"s that kill the yuletide joy for me.

But - Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and Feliz Navidad are two songs which would seem to be ripe for hatred (I've probably heard both of them even more than Blue Christmas), but whenever I hear them, I find myself singing along.  

Any other holiday song hating going on out there among the NewGathering crew?

Omicron and vaccines

 A New York Times weekend briefing enewsletter which landed in my email box yesterday contains this disquieting bit of news:

All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced with a booster, appear to have success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

The other shots — including AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines made in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows. The gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic.

More details here.  

Joyful anticipation

 This is my homily for today, the 4th Sunday of Advent, Cycle C.  The readings for today are here.

PEW: Christians decrease to 63%; Nones almost 30%

 

About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated

That is up from 16% in 2007

Self-identified Christians make up 63% of U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago, and from 78% in 2007

The recent declines within Christianity are concentrated among Protestants. Today, 40% of U.S. adults are Protestants, a group that is broadly defined to include nondenominational Christians and people who describe themselves as “just Christian” along with Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and members of many other denominational families. The Protestant share of the population is down 4 percentage points over the last five years and has dropped 10 points in 10 years.

By comparison, the Catholic share of the population, which had ticked downward between 2007 and 2014, has held relatively steady in recent years. As of 2021, 21% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Catholic, identical to the Catholic share of the population in 2014.

Overall, both evangelical and non-evangelical Protestants have seen their shares of the population decline as the percentage of U.S. adults who identity with Protestantism has dropped. Today, 24% of U.S. adults describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Protestants, down 6 percentage points since 2007. During the same period, there also has been a 6-point decline in the share of adults who are Protestant but not born-again or evangelical (from 22% to 16%).

MY INTERPRETATION

ADVENT ARTWORK

If you have windows 10, you probably have PHOTO which is the Microsoft app that enables you to manage your photos. It has gradually become more sophisticated incorporating some of the ability of Photoshop. 

This first picture is the original picture of some sort of interesting tall weed photographed against the sky. 

This next shot is what happens if you use the basic adjustments, much like the Lightroom part of Photoshop to contrast everything, making the colors deeper, and contrasting the elements. These are all in the basic Edit option.

Finally, this is what happens when you use the Edit in Paint option which is more like Photoshop

I used the bushes fill option which allows you to choose colors, either preselected or ones you choose by using the eyedropper to take a color already in your picture.

I first chose a yellow-gold from the picture to paint the deeper colors of the weed a lighter color. What was particularly important was that I set the opacity of the fill at about 25% which meant that it let the dark contrasted areas show through.

Finally, I changed the blue-sky background to a more Advent purple background, again by using the fill to change the blue parts, and also setting the opacity at about 25% which kept most of the cloud detail.  

I also used the two-dimensional geometric shape square option to put a back border around the edge.

So, if you have some photographs around and want to play with them without investing in Photoshop and spend a great deal of time trying to master its complexities, you likely have the tools already on you computer.

IF your computer works like mine, you can click on any of these to get an almost full screen picture that allows you to shift among the three photos. 

Fr. Don Cozzens RIP

 The Diocesan Obituary is interesting for what it does not say.

In remembrance – Father Donald B. Cozzens

The politics of Jussie Smollett

CORRECTION: The original post stated that the charges against Smollett were misdemeanors.  In fact, each of the six charges against him were for Disorderly Conduct, each count representing a separate instance of allegedly lying to police.  Disorderly Conduct is a Class 4 felony in the State of Illinois.  I've corrected and revised the post.

-----

A jury in Chicago has found actor Jussie Smollett guilty of all but one of the criminal charges against him, all of which are Class 4 felonies.  It was politics, most of the way down:

• His criminal act, staging a fake hate crime and then lying to police about it, was motivated by his politics, probably coupled with a desire to raise his public profile
• When his hoax unraveled, the original decision by the local State's Attorney (that's what Illinois calls its district attorneys) not to pursue criminal charges against Smollett never has been explained to the public, but it may also have been a political calculation on the part of Cook County's progressive State's Attorney, who was preparing for a re-election bid
• The subsequent decision to reinstate the charges against Smollett, following an independent review of the case which was initiated in the wake of public outcry after charges had been dismissed, almost certainly was politically motivated.  The Chicago police, local and national media, and local public opinion all lined up against Smollett
• The State's Attorney's office didn't prosecute Smollett with one of its staff attorneys; it brought in former US Attorney Dan Webb, a very big gun to try a defendant facing a handful of minor charges.  The decision to hire Webb also seems to have been politically motivated, as the State's Attorney didn't want to bungle such a high profile trial
• The trial and verdict ... well, they don't strike me as particularly political.  From what I can tell from this distance, the jury probably came to the right decision

As for the sentencing, I guess we'll have to wait and see.  According to sentencing guidelines, Smollett could be facing anything from probation to three years in prison.  A lawyer friend tells me that your everyday, run-of-the-mill first time defendant found guilty of minor charges almost certainly wouldn't be given jail time.  

But there is practically nothing about Smollett's case which is run of the mill.  But I hope the judge treats him like any other defendant, slaps him on the wrist once or twice, perhaps levies a fine, and lets him get on with his life outside prison walls.  His career already has been wrecked.  I hope that suffices for angry Chicagoans who have been demanding a pound of Jussie Smollett's flesh.  It's enough for me.

Chaos Theory

There is an article  from TheWeek news site entitled, "If you want Americans to act like liberals, govern like a conservative". 

What prompted the discussion is that despite efforts by the Biden administration to end the policy known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), "Remain in Mexico" is back.

Argument against meat eating

 Is it time for Catholics to stop eating meat?

The carnivorous cravings of a world of almost eight billion people have radically changed the definition of life on this planet. As societies get richer, they get more meat-hungry, building up industrial food chains to put steaks on every plate, bacon on eggs, and chicken breasts on buns. The movement of a billion people in Asia into a modern middle-class lifestyle in the last few decades has amplified our consumption of domesticated animals.

The upshot: There are now some 25.9 billion chickens alive, a billion cattle, and about a billion sheep and a billion pigs, all numbers that have been rising and challenging our environment and resources. They are also crowding out wild animals. The biomass of domesticated animals is now dozens of times more than that of wildlife.

Our meat habit has also changed human agriculture and our consumption of resources. The amount of water needed to produce a calorie of beef is 20 times that of a calorie of a plant-based source. Over a third of global grain output now goes to feed farmed animals.

Current food systems are arguably just as damaging to ourselves and our planet as heavy industry is. The reworking of food systems around meat production has made the human diet change more in the last two centuries than in the previous million, say food historians. Soy, for example, was domesticated in China thousands of years ago. It was obscure outside of Asia until the 1970s, but now it has become one of the world’s most traded agricultural commodities, prevalent as a meat substitute and animal feed, and a cause of deforestation.

In human history, “of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three—rice, wheat and maize—provide 50 percent of all calories,” writes Dan Saladino in Eating to Extinction. “Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 percent of all the calories that fuel our species.” The dependence on just a few types of food has been catastrophic for our diets and for the quality of our agriculture because aggressively harvesting the same crops in the same fields depletes soil quality.

A Vaccine Resistant Variant by Spring? Omicron Updates!

 UPDATES

Vaccine Demand Grows in US and so do wait times

It is good that more people are getting vaccinated

Britian has detected about 160 Omicron cases

Omicron could dominate our caseloads by January

Georgetown medical professor and immunologist predicts there will be a fully vaccine-resistant COVID variant by the spring

He noted that since the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. has lagged about a month behind Northern Europe and Israel, areas that are highly vaccinated but still experiencing rising rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths. On the bright side, the U.S. is offering booster shots whereas those regions are not—so we might catch up, but the forecast for the holiday season doesn’t look great.

“The faster we get boosted, the better off we’ll be for the next couple of months,” he said. “Sadly, every prediction I’ve made has pretty much come true. I hope I’m wrong this time, but I think by March, April, May, we will have a fully vaccine-resistant variant. There’s simply no way you can have such low rates of vaccination around the world with the virus ping-ponging between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. I’m an immunologist. The probability of us seeing a vaccine-resistant strain is very high.”

A positive aspect to the pandemic, he said, is that technological advances are reducing the cost and difficulty of producing mRNA vaccines: “There’s a lot of investment now in the making of the product that could really disrupt everything so that you could have production all over the world relatively easily in the next couple of years. That could have a significant disruption in the whole biotech pharmaceutical industry. Because if you don’t need big global pharmaceutical companies anymore to solve these problems, we could see a really exciting disruption that could radically change where we’re going. That’s one silver lining in all of this potential.”

To sum up his thoughts on the future of the pandemic, Dybul offered three scenarios. The first is that it “peters out” like the Spanish flu of 1918–19. That’s a long shot because, unlike then, the world is so mobilized and transmission is exponentially easier for the virus. The second is that advancements in therapies and prophylaxes will help the wealthier areas of the world, while the virus remains in poorer nations. “Rich countries are going to do just fine because we’ll have all these products available, and then we’ll have endemicity in lower-income countries, and that’s what’s really going to drive constant variants,” he said. “It’ll become like influenza. We’ll have every year or twice a year therapies, vaccinations, prophylactic treatments, and we’ll be fine. We’ll have some people dying and getting sick and breaking through, but we’ll be fine.” 

Dybul saved the most dire hypothetical outcome for last. “The third possibility is that it’s a mess for the foreseeable future everywhere because the virus will mutate so much that it will even get around therapies,” he said. “That’s really unlikely. I think we’re probably headed towards the middle scenario, but it’s gonna take two to three years to get there. In between could be pretty rough.”

Note that this was in Fortune, obviously aimed at CEOs who have to plan for worst cases. It was published on November 16 before all the news about the highly mutated omicron variant.

Honoring the wishes of those who have died

How bound are we to honor the wishes of the dying?  For example, if the person who is dying expresses a wish to be buried, is it bad form for the survivors to decide to cremate?  Or if the dying wife begs her husband, "Please don't ever sell our home", is it wrong for the husband to sell the house shortly after the funeral?

Where my wife grew up, one of the neighboring families had a special-needs child.  He grew to adulthood living with his parents, who worked very hard to care for him - much harder than would be the case for children who do not have special needs.  When the parents died, the parents left the house with his sibling, and the understanding seemed to be that they wanted the sibling to continue to care for him.  Instead, the sibling had him taken in by a residential place that could care for his needs. 

I recently attended a funeral where the children cremated their mother's body.  I am pretty sure (but not certain) that wasn't her desire.  But is it really her decision to make?  

What do you think about this sort of thing?  Here is my take: if I've promised to do something, or not do something (e.g. not to cremate), then I'd consider myself bound by the promise.  But if I've made no promises, then I wouldn't necessarily consider myself bound by the wishes of the deceased.  I'd do what makes the most sense for the survivors.

Dorothy Day on Sainthood

 “Don’t call me a saint,” she once said, “I don’t want to be dismissed that easily”

Dorothy Day said we are all called to be saints. So why didn’t she want us to officially name her one?

 Some of Dorothy’s followers fear that by naming her a saint the church will turn her into “a pious cutout—shorn of her prophetic and radical edges—or use her to promote some agenda that was not her own. Others question the investment of resources that might better be used for the poor.”

Part of Ellberg’s reasoning for supporting the cause—beyond his conviction that she was indeed a saint—came from his study of her own writings. “We are all called to be saints,” she had once written, “and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.”

Furthermore, she recognized the sad reality that many people no longer sought holiness in their lives: They, “if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the ‘whole man,’ the integrated man. We all wish to be that.” That is some food for thought for anyone who thinks a life of Christian discipleship is a hindrance to becoming a fully integrated person.

Dorothy also spoke truth to power—which is certainly why powerful men have stooped to calling her loathsome—and her targets were sometimes the princes of the church. “In all history popes and bishops and father abbots seem to have been blind and power loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them,” she once wrote. “It is the saints that keep appearing all thru [sic] history who keep things going.”

In 2020, Mike Mastromatteo wrote a review for America of Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, a new biography by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. “The same woman who attended Mass every day of her adult life, refused to hear any criticism of the Pope, and accepted Vatican teachings on all matters concerning sex, birth control, and abortion,” he quotes the authors, “could be blistering in her remarks about priests who lived in well-appointed rectories and turned a blind eye to racial segregation in their own parishes, bishops who were allies of the rich and powerful, and Catholic writers who viewed patriotism and faith as equivalent virtues, who were more concerned with the threat of ‘godless Communism’ than the needs of the poor.”

Diligent readers of America may recall that official recognition of Dorothy Day’s saintly life came from the mayor of New York City before it came from the Vatican: On March 25, 2021, Bill de Blasio announced that a 4,500-passenger boat on the Staten Island Ferry line will be named for Dorothy Day. It’s fitting, isn’t it—the Staten Island Ferry is that most communist of plots: a free public amenity.