Sunday, July 14, 2024
1570 Pope Pius V introduced a standardized Roman Missal (text of the Latin mass), a reform of the Council of Trent. It will remain unchanged for 400 years.
1789 The French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris.
In bed Lights out around 10, and up at 1:50 a.m. to let Lilly out, though she just turned around and came back in while I waited, holding onto my walker in considerable hip pain. Nodded off from 4 a.m. until 4:45 when I got up for a PS.
Prednisone, day 63, 10 mg., day 6. I took another 1,000 mg. of Tylenol at 2:00, although it doesn't provide any pain relief. 1,000 mg. at 3 p.m. yesterday afternoon, 1,000 at 2 a.m. today, and another 1,000 mg. at 1p.m. today after returning from the ER. At 4:50 a.m., I took 15 mg. of prednisone again followed by cottage cheese and berries at 5:30.
"Dear Dr. Chatt:
I sent the following message to Dr. Ryzka today:
I dropped from 15 mg./day of prednisone to 10 mg./day on Tuesday, July 9. On Friday, July 12, I had substantial pain in my right hip, making it painful to stand and to walk. I thought I might be a recurrence of the PMR. On Saturday, the pain had not abated and I increased my morning dosage to 15 mg, the last dosage at which I was not symptomatic. The pain continued throughout Saturday and into this morning, when I again took 15 mg. of the prednisone. I called the VA Triage Nurse and explained my uncertainty whether I should be reverting to 15 mg./day or going to the Emergency Department to have the hip pain examined. She advised me to go to the ED which I did. After an x-ray, CT scan, blood draw, and exam, I was advised that I had no infection or fracture and should consult with you and my primary care physician. I will coninue to take 15 mg./day unless and until you advise me otherwise. Thank you."
Politicians' sick joke: "There is no place in America for political violence." America is home to the Second Amendment and home to the Supreme Court that decided the Amendment protects gun ownership by individuals. In 2024, the number of firearms in America is likely over 466 million due to record-breaking sales during the pandemic, about 85% of them owned by ordinary citizens. The average gun-owning American has 5 firearms, while nearly 22% of gun owners only have a single firearm. We have the equivalent of 120 firearms per 100 citizens. There were approximately 18.8 million firearms purchased in 2021. This was slightly down from 2020, which set an all-time record for the number of guns purchased in a year with an estimated 21.5 million firearm sales. These numbers are calculated using the FBI’s background check records. During the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 American households purchased a firearm (March 2020–March 2022). 5% of U.S. adults purchased their first-ever firearm during this period. 46% of American households own at least one firearm according to a study by the University of Chicago. 32% of Americans say they personally own a firearm according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey. This means that more than 81.4 million Americans own guns. Around 19.8 million AR-15-style rifles are in circulation in the US, a nationwide tally that's surged from around 8.5 million since a federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. The more recent estimate comes from a November 2020 statement by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. In the statement, its President and CEO Joseph Bartozzi called the AR-15 the "most popular rifle sold in America" and a "commonly-owned firearm." And, it was the type of weapon used to shoot and kill 19 grade school students and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas, 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and Donald Trump at Butler, Pennsylvania.
David Frum has a piece in The Atlantic online entitled "The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator: Violence Stalks the President Who Has Rejoiced in Violence to Others." He wrote:
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.
. . . [C]onventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.
Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.
Anniversary thoughts: First, how well I remember that official missal and how pleased I was to have my own St. Joseph's Missal, with its red ribbon page marker, its "Proper" and "Commons", the parts that varied with the liturgical calendar and the parts that were common to all masses, the original Latin and the English translation. It was all so exotic, so historical, so well designed to be mysterious and to set us Catholics apart from other religionists who spoke and prayed in their vernaculars. Vatican II hit as I and millions of other Catholics were moving from youth to adulthood and its changes reduced much of the exoticism and mystery of the liturgy by requiring that the mass be celebrated in the vernacular, having the priest facing the congregation, having the congregation respond to the priests' call in the vernacular rather than altar boys responding in Latin, etc. Of course, it was inevitable that there would be resistance to all those changes and there was. It's still going on. In a long article in the Sunday NYTimes on July 10, 2024, entitled America’s New Catholic Priests - Young, Confident and Conservative" In an era of deep divisions in the church, newly ordained priests overwhelmingly lean right in their theology, practices and politics, it seems clear that the traditionalists opposing the spirit and the letter of the Vatican II changes are winning the battle within the Church. Perhaps this is not surprising in our world which seems to be generally moving away from reform and liberalism toward tradition, authority, and conservatism. Alas. I wonder what happened to my old missal. It probably stayed at my parents' home as I grew up and moved away and eventually got trashed. So it goes.
Second, it doesn't seem right to mark July 14th without acknowledging Bastille Day and the French Revolution which as much as a revolution and rejection of monarchy and aristocracy was also a rejection of the Church, theism, clergy, and hierarchy. The Church has been fighting the French Revolution from Bastille Day till today. So it goes.
Frustration. I'm out of raspberries, almost out of blackberries, and getting low on blueberries. I'm out of cottage cheese and we're low on eggs. I want to go to Sendik's while Geri naps after her long, exciting day yesterday and early morning today driving me to the Emergency Room, but I don't think my hip will hold up to get me from the parking lot into the store and through all the necessary departments and back out to the parking lot. Rats!
Biden's Oval Office Address. Pieties. "Happy horseshit"
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