So a while back, I read and wrote about an article about an increase in maternal mortality in the U.S., and its woefully higher rates than other developed countries. Turned out, the U.S. numbers were not meaningfully comparable to the rest of the world, because their definitions were different: the CDC deemed any maternal death within a year of the child’s birth as “maternal mortality” while the WHO (that is, the rest of the world) uses a 42-day standard. Why,... Read more
Three choices. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t need to. She isn’t able to. As background, after the observations on Clinton’s speech that I wrote up on Friday morning, I thought I had a great idea for a post. I would take her platform, as found on her campaign website, and see what offered “triangulationability” or even was more moderate than she gets credit for in the first place. I didn’t get very far, as it was slim pickin’s. Abortion? She... Read more
Finally getting around to posting some pictures from the vacation, where the Holy Year added another dimension to the various stops at churches. Our first Holy Door stop: the stumbled-upon St. Nicholas in Amsterdam, where, when we visited on a Monday and they advertised mass in English on Tuesdays, I realized I should have looked a little harder for English-language mass times in the area, the day before, as it seems like the Roman Catholic church(es) in Amsterdam and elsewhere have... Read more
You can’t help but notice the European roads — smooth as a baby’s bottom. Well, except for a stretch of roadway on the former East German island of Rugen, 10 years ago, which was paved in brick, not as a bit of a decorative touch for the downtown, but as a cost-effective rural road. It’s also the case that the Germans, anyway, build their roads in asphalt rather than concrete, and I’d never understood why. So based on a reader... Read more
Yeah, this is more of an annoyance than anything, but I observed the other day that “Asian-American” had become, in media stylebooks, a racial descriptor rather than an identification of an ethnicity (which it couldn’t be, in so far as there is no one single “Asian” ethnicity). (To be clear: the official Census racial label is just “Asian”, which means, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including,... Read more
Side note: I go back and forth between writing “Hillary” and writing “Clinton.” In general, it’s appropriate to refer to men and women in the public sphere consistently, and using “Hillary” would ordinarily be a bit insulting, but for the fact that he herself, and her campaign, emphasize it. So anyway: I watched Clinton’s speech, or much of it anyway, and I’m going to give you my reaction as a “first thing in the morning” commentary, before reading the text itself... Read more
Would you say, of the friendly Patheos Catholic blogging team, “they’re Catholic-Americans”? Would you refer to Bernie Sanders as a “Jewish-American”? Is Donald Trump a “Presbyterian-American”? “That’s dumb,” you say? Then why are we using the term “Muslim-American” to refer to our Muslim neighbors? An example, today, from the Daily Beast: [Nida] Allam, a recent college graduate and Muslim-American progressive activist, had come to Philadelphia this week to support Bernie Sanders’s final stand in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s party.... Read more
The Russians did it, because they want Trump to be president, because he’s said he won’t necessarily defend NATO countries or other victims of Russian expansionism. The Russians did it, because they want Trump to be president, and they know he’ll be beholden to them, because Russian investors hold large stakes in his real estate projects. The Russians did it, but as a warning shot to Hillary that they have lots more dirt they’re capable of releasing; they’re blackmailing her... Read more
So lots of people are upset that Tim Kaine is a professing Catholic who has a 100% abortion-rights voting record. Nothing new under the sun, really, though. What I am more interested in, however, is the pairing of “personal opposition” to abortion, and to the death penalty, for instance in a campaign ad from his 2005 gubernatorial campaign, as linked to by Ann Althouse. And that’s interesting to think about. We’re quite used to the claims of being “personally opposed” when... Read more
The French had their “Je suis Charlie” moment, followed by Bataclan. Then we changed our Facebook profile pics to show the Belgian flag. The Orlando killings saw a flurry of rainbow avatars. A few people, on principle, adopted Afghan flags, protesting the fact that bombings there seemed not to “count”. (Personally, I think there is a difference between a place that’s nominally at peace and a country that’s a war zone.) I suppose there was no San Bernardino avatar because... Read more
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