Barbra, The Pope, and Other Quick Opinions

3/2/2013

Ever since last Sunday night, I have been thinking how cool it was that Barbra Streisand sang “The Way We Were” in tribute to Marvin Hamlisch. She had not sung at the Oscars in 36 years but showed up with immense energy for her friend.

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Having covered one conclave and a few papal trips, I’d like to express my admiration for the way Pope Benedict XVI resigned. I am sure he was giving an intentional signal that the human part of his organization is not working so well. He showed the world that six centuries of tradition did not have to continue – a good reminder in our lives, public and private. .

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I never thought I’d see the day when the Yankees would not spend money to improve their team. With Curtis Granderson out for a few months, The Boss would be trying to buy an all-star level outfielder, no matter the cost. He was insatiable. I’m not a Yankee fan, but I got used to his zeal for perfection. His sons want to cut the payroll. They must not be making money in their theme park in the Bronx.

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As a huge fan of The New Yorker, I was interested when a saw a long piece by the estimable Ryan Lizza with a photo of Rep. Eric Cantor, but the current article is mostly about the mechanics of ominous politics and economics. I wanted to find out how somebody so low in personality could possibly get elected to public office, but the article gave no clue. What produced this sour and inarticulate human being? The only thing I learned was that he gets along with his mother-in-law, apparently a liberal Democrat. That’s nice, but in his public appearances, lurking behind the shoulder blades of John Boehner, there is no trace of a mensch.

Charlie Accetta link

3/2/2013 07:30:19 am

George - Better that Baa-Baa should sing "The Way We Were" in St. Peter's Basilica to all the ghosts of Cardinals past. It's telling to me that you would cook a philosophical stew utilizing Streisand, Pope Benedict, the Former Secretary of Burying Papal Garbage, along with the not-so-musical Cantor, who sings the off-balance tune of the Eastern Orthodoxy of Buckley-ism. Barbara should be appalled. Benedict? Not so much. I don't see how the Pope Emeritus merits any more consideration than the snarky snake from Virginia. As far as I know, Eric isn't hiding any pedophiles from the view of higher authority, which is exactly the manner in which Cardinal Ratzinger served John Paul. We need that lady from The King of Comedy in the ears of people like these two gentlemen: "You should get cancer!" Maybe we can get Barbara to put that to music.

Brian Savin

3/3/2013 01:50:22 am

While I'm still waiting for the Sunday Times to be delivered up here in the boondocks, I got a Sunday breakfast treat of sports, religion, politics and entertainment this morning from your blog! Thanks, George. Charlie, your commentary was quite creative, but you forgot the sports section!

Charlie Accetta link

3/3/2013 02:43:58 am

Brian - I'm not allowed a peep on sports in these climes until the other knuckle drops on the R.A. Dickey deal. George is hoping I'm wrong so he doesn't have to hear me crow.

Roy Edelsack

3/3/2013 04:29:10 am

I heard Phil Hughes on the radio last week describing the Yankees strengths as, "pitching and defense." That sort of made me feel light-headed. If he had added "team speed" I think I would have fainted dead away.

george vecsey

3/3/2013 06:50:19 am

Charlie, I think I was alluding to all those Vatican issues. My point was, so was Ratzinger, however obliquely. GV

Charlie Accetta link

3/3/2013 08:13:27 am

Very well, George. As an occasional blogger, I understand the vague charm of the oblique. As a constant litterer in the Comments sections of others, I am opposed to the fog that it generates.

Brian Savin

3/3/2013 12:32:56 pm

Charlie, I don't mean to be an interloper....but in my opinion George was not criticizing at all, but merely pointing out his own read on the "last" Pope's resignation as basically acknowledging the points you made. I've thought about his blog today. I would like to think George is right because of the still monumental importance of that Church to so many of the world's people, but we likely will never know. I'll say this much: Moral-based "faith" needs to be respected and held sacrosanct, especially by those who essentially demand it. Betraying it is not an option and is not forgivable. Maybe that played into the resignation. I, for one, hope so.

By the way, I'll need to research past blog comments here re the Mets to appreciate fully why you felt obliged to leave out the "sports section" and not go for the quadfecta!

John McDermott

3/4/2013 10:27:08 am

I'm not usually a believer in what the Italians call "dietrologia"-a term which more or less means believing there is usually "the real, true story behind the story". But I can't help but think that Ratzinger was blackmailed into resigning.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Barbra, The Pope, and Other Quick Opinions

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