3/18/24

 Wednesday, December 18, 2024

D+43

2023 Pope Francis allowed priests to bless same-sex couples, though not when connected to a civil or same-sex union

In bed at 8:45, awake at 12:50, and up and out at 1:15, unable to sleep.   Lights out at 2:30 but unable to sleep, back on at 3:40.  

Prednisone, day 218, 7.6 mg., day 33.   Prednisone at 5:00.  Regular meds at 10:30, wondering why I religiously take my diabestes, blood pressure, and daily full-strength TIA aspirin if I don't want to grow older, feebler, and more miserable day by day.  Why do I wear an AppleWatch on my wrist and a medalert device around my neck?  Who am I fooling?  Why?  Resumé by Dorothy Parker:  Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp.  Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

"Women are better than men."  I've often said this because I believe it.  My dear departed friend David Branch used to get worked up when I would blithely say this.  He would point out what a gross generalization it it.  Cordelia Munroe laughed at the two of us.  But I do think that, overall, men are much less admirable than women.  I don't know to what extent this may be different in different cultures, but I think it holds true in the U.S.  Men are more competitive than women, more into machismo, less stupid, dangerous sports like boxing, football, and rodeo events.  They're more into needing to signal that 'my dick is bigger than your dick' with things like cowboy hats and muscle cars.  Thomas B. Edsall has a column in this morning's NYTimes on gender differences, titled "If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause?  Some excerpts support my bias against my own gender.

The reality is that on many measures, some negative, others positive, men tend to dominate the extremes, a phenomenon known as the greater male variability hypothesis.

Take, for example, violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2022 men committed 78.6 percent of violent crimes, nearly five times the 16.5 percent of violent offenses committed by women. (In the remainder, the sex of the offender could not be determined.)

In 2023 men committed 14,127 homicides, women 1,898. Men committed 35,304 aggravated assaults, women 10,866. Men committed 16,230 robberies, women 2,407. . . .

“Across many real-world domains, men engage in more risky behaviors than do women,” Christine Harris and Michael Jenkins wrote in their 2023 paper, “Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks Than Men?”

Women, they found, reported a “greater perceived likelihood of negative outcomes and lesser expectation of enjoyment,” factors that “partially mediated their lower propensity toward risky choices in gambling, recreation and health domains.”

One consequence of men’s lower level of risk aversion, they wrote, is that “men are three times as likely as women to be involved in fatal car accidents.” 

[T]his research has proved consistently illuminating, including from a political perspective. In contemporary America, the more one learns about male and female propensities, the more one understands partisan hostility — the currently male-heavy Republican Party, today’s female-freighted Democrats and the understandable but increasingly hopeless impossibility of reaching productive compromise or finding common ground. 

"Abundant Life"  In this morning's WaPo:

There have been 34 school shootings this year, according to a database maintained by The Post; 13 people have been killed and nearly 50 injured. They account for just a small fraction of the country’s gun violence epidemic, but they occupy a particularly terrifying place in the national psyche, as tens of millions of children have been subjected to lockdowns and active-shooter drills since Columbine in 1999.

The Post, which tracks shootings on K-12 school properties during class hours, has tallied 426 incidents since 1999. Just 4 percent of the suspected shooters have been female.

Agard, the county chief executive, whose son attends school in Madison, said many of the area’s campuses were forced into lockdown Tuesday after several false threats. That jolt, coming so soon after Monday’s tragedy, made the day even more difficult.

“The world our kids are in now,” she said, “is very different than the one I grew up in.”

 There is something so wickedly, perniciously and incisively ironic about the name of the school where the doomed girl abruptly ended two lives and her own - Abundant Life.

USA, USa, u

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Anniversary thought.  Pope Francis and same-sex couples - pathetic.