Goodbye, Abbey

 I've just returned from the veterinarians, where one of our cats, Abbey, was euthanized. 

Flannery O'Connor: canceled

At Commonweal, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, a Flannery O'Connor scholar at Fordham, mourns what recently happened at Loyola in Maryland:

A week after the decision by Loyola University Maryland to remove Flannery O’Connor’s name from one of its buildings, the cherry-pickers arrived on the school’s bucolic campus in northeast Baltimore and, letter by letter, the name of one America’s most iconic Catholic writers disappeared from the dormitory that had been known for more than a decade as Flannery O’Connor Hall.

DeSantis: It Isn't What It Is

From the coronvirus story in today's Palm Beach Post.

...Still, with the growth in cases slowing, one metric that has stubbornly refused to drop is the percentage of people testing positive.

While the positivity rate has declined in recent days, it is still higher than the 10% sought by state health officials, much less the 5% recommended by the World Health Organization.

In an abrupt reversal on Tuesday, DeSantis broke ranks with health experts, saying he no longer believes the positivity rate is a good way to measure the prevalence of the disease.

His change of heart came after the American Academy of Pediatrics said schools shouldn’t be allowed to reopen unless the positivity rate drops below 5%. DeSantis is an ardent believer that schools should reopen but online classes should be available for parents who don’t want their children to mingle with teachers and classmates.

DeSantis acknowledged that he was once a champion of the positivity rate.

“I was religiously hyping the positivity in March, April, May,” he acknowledged at a press conference Tuesday in Jacksonville. “The problem is the way these test are reported. Some labs don’t report the negatives religiously, some do data dumps.”

“I’d be very cautious of tying a child’s future to the efficacy of some lab dumping positives,” he said.

Top health officials, including the White House Coronavirus Task Force, have said that a 14-day drop in the positivity rate or a 14-day drop in new cases indicate that it is safe to allow businesses and entertainment venues to reopen.

DeSantis cited the positivity rate in May when he lifted restrictions on businesses throughout the state even as the number of cases grew.

Dr. Matt Lambert, an emergency room physician who lives in Washington, D.C., and is chief medical information officer for the HCI Group, said the positivity rate is a key metric decision-makers should use.

“The higher the positivity rate, the more cases you can expect to see in a population,” he said in an statement. “If your goal is to make decisions about schools based on science, the positivity rate is a good marker. However, it is irrelevant if you are making decisions based on economics or politics.”

He predicted that schools will suffer the same fate as Major League Baseball if they reopen. Baseball’s efforts to launch a short season have been plagued with many players and staff, including more than 20 on the Miami Marlins, testing positive for the virus.

(A letter writer today asked, If six women are pregnant, and you test only one of them, does that mean the other five are no longer pregnant?)

Pope Francis on Medjugorje

Jim asked several posts ago what Francis thought about Medjugorje.

John Allen wrote a fine answer yesterday.

Medjugorje message expresses Pope Francis’s ‘Marian Classic’

The only thing I thought was missing was the explicit link to popular religious culture. That is what is implied by "classic" and the preference for well established devotions rather than novel ones and "messages." 

For example he likely sees the devotion surrounding Our Lady of Fatima as much more important than all the speculation over the  years about the messages. The devotion comes from the people, the speculation more from the media and religious entrepreneurs promoting themselves as much or more than genuine faith. 

An interesting aspect of the article is that both Benedict and Francis share the notion that simple people often have a better appreciation of the faith than the learned, and that often finds expression in Marian devotion.

After a lot of investigation by the Vatican it looks like they (including Francis) have accepted that the initial visions, whatever their authenticity, have sparked some genuine religious renewal. They seem to be trying to grow that renewal while maintaining some critical distance from the visionaries. 

 

The Oracle on the Potomac predicts ...

... who will win the presidential election.  Again.  Allan Lichtman of American University (the headline may be taking liberties with the geography; on Google Maps, the college looks to be a couple of miles away from the river in Washington DC) has a system of 13 keys which has correctly predicted the outcome (with one asterisk; watch the video for an explanation) of every presidential contest since 1984.  He's fitted the keys to the locks again to show us what's behind the door for 2020:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/opinion/2020-election-prediction-allan-lichtman.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20200805&instance_id=20990&nl=opinion-today&regi_id=87407961&segment_id=35292&te=1&user_id=7bba122dbc8acf5289c69a5c9f2867a2

NB: I was going to refer to him in the headline as "Nostradamus".  And whoever narrates the video calls him Nostradamus.  But Nostradamus was a sham and a fraud.  This guy seems like the real deal.

Stuff We Are Reading

I just finished the book "Nomadland" (https://www.amazon.com/Nomadland-Surviving-America-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0393356310/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Nomadland&qid=1596493290&sr=8-)1 by Jessica Bruder.  I was expecting an expose of the "dark underbelly" of temporary itinerant labor in the 21st century, many of whom are senior citizens who can't afford to actually retire. It actually is an expose, however it is an engaging and interesting one. 

Many of these people view their transient status as a lifestyle choice. Their most expensive cost was housing, so they elected not to have a permanent dwelling, but to live in motorhomes and travel trailers, and follow temporary employment around the country.

How are we doing with the virus?

If folks don't mind, I'd like to ask us to check in with how we're doing.