Ash Wednesday, 2026

It's hard to believe we're talking about Ash Wednesday already. I should have read our pastor's meditation before I bundled up and went out to scrape ice off the car and move it slowly around the neighborhood. I needed this reminder,

"In a couple of weeks we will mark a Christian holiday called Ash Wednesday. For some of you this might be a new experience. For others, it might be deeply familiar. But whether this is new for you or a long-established habit, Ash Wednesday confronts us with a truth we have worked hard to forget. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It’s a stark and sobering reminder. And we don’t only hear these Biblical words, we feel them. We experience them as they are marked onto us in the sign of an ashen cross on our foreheads. Our mortal bodies are marked with the sign of Jesus’s cross. And it’s a reminder of a truth that our hearts so deeply need.

 
We need it because some of us are sick and dying, and we need to know that Jesus has gone ahead of us. We need it because it helps us make sense of the ridiculousness and tragedy of the world around us. We need it because it reminds us to live for the eternity that lasts and not for the trivia that fades. We need it to remind us that earthly power is so often corrupt, but God’s power is infinitely different and greater. In this and many other ways the Holy Spirit applies the truth of the cross to each of us individually, applying the same profound truth to each different moment of need in each of our hearts.

We need this reminder because we never really do forget. Our mortality and deep need will not always be at the front of our minds, but the ache is always there. And Ash Wednesday speaks to us with merciful candor. The crosses on our foreheads are there to name the problem we know we have. But crosses are not just crosses. They are Jesus’s empty cross. They are the sign of the death which has been put to death, so that life might triumph and go on forever and ever and ever." Senior Pastor Steve Turnbull, Upper Arlington Lutheran Church, Feb. 5, 2026.

I will be rereading this many times.

Your mom was right—eat all the colors, and a lot of them

Research shows Mom was right. Eat all the colors. This is a meta-analysis. Fruit and Vegetable Intake and Mortality: Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies of US Men and Women and a Meta-Analysis of 26 Cohort Studies (ahajournals.org)  Free, original research article. Print it and read between the food commercials on TV.

• A higher intake of fruit and vegetables was associated with lower total and cause-specific mortality in a nonlinear manner in both an original data analysis in 2 prospective cohorts of US men and women and a meta-analysis of 26 prospective cohort studies.
• The lowest risk of mortality was observed for ≈5 servings per day of fruit and vegetable intake, but above that level the risk did not decrease further.
• The thresholds of risk reduction in mortality were 2 servings daily for fruit intake and 3 servings daily for vegetable intake

My favorite vegetables, peas, corn and potatoes, are not associated with lower mortality. Too starchy. Darn. It's just hard to eat this much of anything.

Despite recommendations in dietary guidelines for decades to increase fruit and vegetable intake, the current average intake among US adults is 1 serving of fruit and 1.5 servings of vegetables per day. Not good. There have been many campaigns (cited in the article) to change this because poor nutrition contributes to the burden of disease and premature death.

BTW, this is a premiere, peer reviewed journal. When I was a librarian, Circulation and its many numbered series, was the bane of my existence.

Covid19 stats for Ohio

April 26 COVID-19 snapshot:
Data provided by ODH as of 2 p.m. April 26
Confirmed cases in Ohio: 15,360 
Number hospitalized in Ohio: 3,178 
Number of confirmed deaths in Ohio: 687 
Number of cases in Franklin County: 1,942
And about 28,000 deaths a year from cardiovascular problems.

David Meyers comments:

There is a lot of half-baked science being touted right now. I say half-baked because it’s being put out for public consumption before it is ready. Even in the absence of a major health crisis, it is not uncommon to make claims that turn out to be wrong. The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to Johannes Fibiger in 1926 for the discovering that a roundworm caused cancer in rats. Only it didn’t. It was an honest mistake.

Good science usually takes time. It should be devoid of politics and independent of outside influences, i.e. money and fame. But good science takes money. That’s the dilemma researchers find themselves. Right now, there are real scientists—someone said about ninety teams—working hard to diagnose and solve a problem in a few months that would normally take years. They are no doubt feeling pressure to skip steps. The test groups are often small and the controls are possibly lacking. Some scientists are bypassing peer review because that takes time. Others seems to be motivated by a need to draw attention to themselves.

In the meantime, our economy is taking a shellacking. Only time will tell if it was worth it, although many people have already made up their mines.

I decided to take a look at the CDC website to see if I could learn anything more from it that we were being told. The first thing that struck me is that the CDC is lumping Covid-19 together with influenza and pneumonia.** Apparently, anybody who dies of influenza or pneumonia is per se a Covid casualty, now. The death rate for this group is (according to the most recent data) 18.6 people per 100,000 and declining. It had been over 21 just a couple of weeks earlier. I don’t know what it is, now. But on a yearly basis I would expect it to decline.

I wanted to put this in perspective. Unfortunately, the most recent data for the leading causes of death in the United States is as of 2018. They are:

655,381 heart disease [163.6 per 100,000]
599,274 cancer [149.1 per 100,000]
167,127 accidents/unintentional injuries [48.0 per 100,000]
159,486 chronic lower respiratory diseases [39.7 per 100,000]
147,810 cerebrovascular [37.1 per 100,000]
122,019 Alzheimer disease [30.5 per 100,000]
84,946 diabetes [21.4 per 100,000]
** 59,120 influenza and pneumonia [14.9 per 100,000]
51,386 kidney disease [12.9 per 100,000]
48,344 suicide [14.2 per 100,000]

As you can see, the typical rate for influenza and pneumonia is 12.9 per 100,000. It will be interesting to see what it will be at the end of 2020, but we probably won’t know that until 2022.

Women who abort have higher death rates

Within the first 180 days, the risk of death from any cause is over twice as high following abortion compared to that following delivery. The risk of early death remains elevated for at least ten years.
Both abortion and miscarriage are linked to elevated mortality rates, but the effect is more strongly associated with induced abortions.
 
The largest portion of premature deaths following pregnancy loss are due to suicides, accidents, homicides, and some natural causes, such as circulatory disease, which are known to be associated with stress. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2050312117740490

Little risk of death

unless you are the baby, according to this Orlando, Florida, abortion clinic, which encourages its customers to combine the trip to their clinic with a nice vacation so they can enjoy the city.

“The risk of death associated with abortion increases with the length of pregnancy, from one death for every one million abortions at or before eight weeks to one per 29,000 at 16-20 weeks, and one per 11,000 at 21 or more weeks. The latter numbers have decreased significantly over the past 10 years due to advancement in abortion surgical procedure techniques and the new medications used to terminate pregnancy.”

This abortion website also notes:

Over 50% of the women who have abortions had been using a contraceptive during the month they become pregnant. 

Fifty percent of U.S. women obtaining abortion are younger than 25: Women aged 20-24 obtain 33% of all abortions, and teenagers obtain 17%.

37% of abortions occur with black women, 34% with non-Hispanic white women, 22% to Hispanic women and 8% to women of other races.

Despite the killing rate of the Democrat party approved abortion programs,  50.4% of children younger than 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011, up from 49.5% from the 2010 Census taken in April 2010.  But they are working as hard as they can at reducing the poor and minority population.

So dear reader, is it racist to point out the number of black babies being killed, or the number of clinics in their neighborhoods?  Is it hateful to point out that over 54 million babies have been killed in the 40 years of Roe v. Wade? 

Heath Ledger, Accidental poisoning?

Unless it's your pet Lab that will enthusiastically eat the wall board with a pillow for dessert, no one accidentally takes oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, tempazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine, all found in the system of Heath Ledger. Heath made choices along the way to anesthetize his brain and emotions.

I had a comment yesterday from someone who read an entry of mine about marijuana. He/she insisted that after using 20 years, it simply had no impact on his mind, and wasn't a gateway drug. Of course, he mentioned that the Iraq War had been running for 8 years, so it had impaired his math ability a bit, because that would mean President Clinton lead us into it--which he did sort of with all the hype about WMD, but that's another blog. He also had forgotten how to use capital letters. How hard can it be to use the shift key?

Most of these deaths aren't happening to star struck actors, they are happening to young white women. Poisoning mortality rates in the U.S. rose 62.5% during the 5-year period 1999 to 2004. 20,950 deaths in 2004 alone, up from 12,186 in 1999. The largest increases were among females (103.%), whites (75.8%), persons living in the southern U.S. (113.6%), and persons aged 15-24 years (113.3%). Among all sex and racial/ethnic groups, the largest increase (136.5%) was among non-Hispanic white females. So what's that include? Overdoses of illegal drugs and legal drugs taken for nonmedical reasons, legal drugs taken in error or at the wrong dose, and poisoning from other substances (alcohol, pesticides or carbon monoxide).

You can't slowly poison your brain cells with alcohol, marijuana or pain meds, and expect it to then indefinitely make the correct decisions on other drugs that become available, maybe because you lied to the doctor or the pharmacist to get a bigger high or low.

Malaria is a leading cause of death and illness worldwide.

(CDC)--742,000 child malaria deaths in Africa alone were estimated for the year 2000. The U.S. has contributed to this death toll by caving in to environmentalists' hysteria about DDT. Now we hand out nets soaked with pesticide.

In the U.S., about 6,000 teen-agers die in automobile accidents each year, 4 times the adult rate, and a lot of these could be prevented just by raising the legal driving age to 18. About 7,000 people a year die in hospitals from medication errors. It appears that more people in the U.S. now die from the mostly hospital-acquired staph infection MRSA than from AIDS, according to a new report from the CDC. Simple hand washing by staff could have prevented many of these. More people die in a given year in the U.S. as a result of medical errors (estimated at between than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516). (To err is human).

Drug intervention is saving the lives of many obese Americans from cardiovascular disease, allowing them to live longer with debilitating conditions--arthritis, diabetes, stroke, cancer--because it doesn't solve the obesity problem. (JAMA, Nov. 7, 2007). But it's still most dangerous of all to be an unborn child of a mother with a choice in America--at least since the beginning of the women's movement in the late 60s. The late 70s through the early 80s were particularly dangerous for the unborn. Johnson Archive