8/19/2025

 Tuesday, August 19, 2025

D+284/212/-1250

1944 Catherine Monica Clausen, God's gift to her family and so many others was born

In bed at 9:30, up at 5:20.  69°, high of 77°, cloudy day. 0.9 inch of rain in last 24 hours.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 6:30.  All fingers very stiff and painful/sore.   

CovCovid!  Geri has been congested and unwell for a couple of days.  She tested herself for COVID when we got home from the airport and tested positive.  Her second case.😰  She has a call into Dr. Baugrud to get a prescription for Paxlovid.  

Scattered thoughts from a scatterbrain.

(1) India's prime minister Modi is meeting today with a top Chinese diplomat to discuss rebuilding ties between the two huge countries, including resolving the multi-year standoff between the two countries over a disputed border in the Himalayas.  What prompted this rapprochement?  Trump's huge tariffs on India.  Mazel tov, Donald!

(2) Why is Donald Trump suddenly willing to sign on to an "Article 5-type" security guarantee for Ukraine?  Because it's really no guarantee at all, witness its language: 

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

For Trump, "such action as [he] deems necessary" could be  a diplomatic note protesting and regretting another Russian attack on Ukraine: "Too bad, so sad, strong letter to follow." 

(3)    Excerpts from "Canada is Killing Itself" by Elaina Plott Calabro in the September 2025 issue of The Atlantic:

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it. 

. . . . . 

Autonomy, choice, control: These are the values that found purchase with the great majority of Canadians in February 2015, when, in a case spearheaded by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the supreme court of Canada unanimously overturned the country’s criminal ban on medically assisted death. For advocates, the victory had been decades in the making—the culmination of a campaign that had grown in fervor since the 1990s, when Canada’s high court narrowly ruled against physician-assisted death in a case brought by a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. “We’re talking about a competent person making a choice about their death,” one longtime right-to-die activist said while celebrating the new ruling. “Don’t access this choice if you don’t want—but stay away from my death bed.” A year later, in June 2016, Parliament passed the first legislation officially permitting medical assistance in dying for eligible adults, placing Canada among the handful of countries (including Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) and U.S. states (Oregon, Vermont, and California, among others) that already allowed some version of the practice. 

 Mortality.  According to Grok, approximately 1,351,500 males were born in the United States in 1941, and approximately 550,000 or 40% are still alive today.   According to Chat GPT, approximately 1,380,000 males were born in the US in 1941, and only 26% of them, or 360,000, survive to age 84.  The latter numbers are based on Social Security life tables, whereas the Grok numbers are based on a 2021 Chicago Tribune article and CDC life expectancy and mortality tables.  The numbers suggest that I have outlived between 60% and 74% of my male contemporaries.  I wonder why.  I smoked cigarettes most years between ages 15 and 53, paid no attention to eating a healthy diet (quite the opposite), regularly drank alcohol (mostly wine) most of my adult life, and avoided regular exercise, spending much of my life sitting on a chair or lying in bed.  Genes?  Vaccinations?  Luck?  My grandmother Catherine died at about age 40, my grandmother Charlotte at age 95.  My mother at age 51. My father at age 86, my grandfather Dewy at age 69, and my grandfather Dennis at an unknown age, because available records give him varying years of birth: 1880, 1883, 1886, and 1887.  He was somewhere between the ages of 65 and 72 when he died.  Where will I fall?  Please God, nowhere near Grandmother Charlotte!  At my age and in my condition, my fear is not death, but prolonged life.  I have outlived my life expectancy at birth by more than 20 years.  I have outlived more than half and perhaps as many as 3/4th of my birth contemporaries.  It's not true that I have nothing to look forward to.  I love my wife, my children, my grandchildren, and my friends.  I still experience wonder and awe at Nature and Life, the animal kingdom, and our own remarkable if flawed species.  In some very real ways, I have become more sensitive to and appreciative of life in my old age, but I know life will not improve in the coming days, certainly not in the coming years.  If I were to die today, no one would say, 'Oh, but he was so young!' or 'How tragic.'  I'm in dying time, the dying season of life, and so many terrible ways of living out future years are possible, maybe likely, better that I go now rather than end up like Grandmother Charlotte or my Aunt Mary Healy, with dementia, chronic diseases, and in nursing homes. 

The photo is the only one I have or have ever seen of my grandmother Catherine O'Shea Healy, about whom I could discover little in my genealogical research, other than that she was probably about 35 when my mother was born and 41 when she died from pernicious anemia, leaving my grandfather with four young children to raise without their mother.