My first stop (when I FINALLY got to it) was Obsidian Butte.
Obsidian Butte is one of five lava domes in the Salton Sea Geothermal Field.
The part of it that is exposed above ground is about 90 feet tall, but it goes much, much deeper underground.
MORE INFO HERE FOR GEO-GEEKS.
Here (left) I am parked part way up it.
The thing that drew me to Obsidian Butte was the obsidian–and the pumice.
The National Catholic Reporter Distorter has sent a note of condolence to homosexual clergy on the occasion of the Vatican instruction about the ordination of homosexuals.
"To all those in positions of leadership in the Roman Catholic church [sic] who also happen to be homosexual, we offer our commiseration and sorrow that once again you have been forced to hear your sexuality, an element intrinsic to your humanity, described as an objective disorder.
"This time the phrase appears in the document with the ridiculously unwieldy title: ‘Instruction concerning the criteria of vocational discernment regarding persons with homosexual tendencies, considering their admission to seminary and to Holy Orders.’ In other words, the document on gays and seminaries.
"The description is repugnant, of course, to all those in the church [sic], gay and straight, who understand that homosexuality is, in the overwhelming number of cases, not a chosen orientation but as essential a part of one’s nature as heterosexuality is for others."
(Nod to Envoy Encore for the link.)
Yesterday’s trip out to the Salton Sea region was quite eventful.
Rather than just doing a simple lap around the sea, this time I was going to certain specific points of geological interest. This meant getting off the main road and onto some really tiny ones.
The area I needed to go into was farm country, so what I was driving on were basically unpaved access roads designed to let the farmers have access to their fields.
On roads like that, you generally go pretty slow because they’re rough and you’re kicking up a ton of dust and pebbles.
It’s interesting when two drivers meet coming in opposite directions, because you’ll have to drive in his dust wake and he’ll have to drive in your dust wake. You approach each other carefully, too, because the roads are so thin.
Almost nobody who isn’t a farmer is out on these roads, so if you happen to be wearing a cowboy hat and driving a pickup then you get a friendly wave of recognition as a member of the local community as you pass the other driver–even if you happen to be a visiting apologist who’s here for the geothermal anomalies.
These roads are so deserted that some of them are one lane. In fact, some of them are one lane MUD PATHS.
What’s more, some of them (or parts of them) DON’T EVEN EXIST.
Y’see, I discovered that what the roads actually ARE and what the maps SAY THEY ARE ain’t quite the same.
It seems that a planning commission or somebody laid out a nice square grid of roads to allow access the fields, but they didn’t take into account the canals and such that were already there. As a result, when the builders tried to impose the grid over the existing area, they hit some problems–like a street supposed to go over a canal where there ain’t no bridge for it.
As a result, the locals took some . . . uh . . . liberties with the way the roads were supposed to be laid out. After all, they knew where the canals and things were and these roads are so little used that anybody who could be expected to be using them would know how to get where they’re going.
There wasn’t even any need to . . . um . . . tell the planning commission about the exceptions that were made. So the maps got made as if the original grid exists.
That’s all fine until a visiting apologist shows up to see the local geothermal anomalies. . . .
Pro-life advocates were doing too well by comparing abortion to chattel slavery of the antebellum United States. It must have worried Screwtape to see such a powerful analogy on the pro-life side, so he put out a memo to Lower Management and the R & D department Down Below has finally come through with their spin. Their Father Below must be proud.
"I volunteer with a local group called the Haven Coalition that offers free overnight home stays to women who come to New York for late-term abortions. Adeena, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, is 24 years old and 24 weeks pregnant. She’d caught a Greyhound from Pennsylvania earlier that day, and spent the afternoon at a clinic in midtown getting part one of an abortion that will be completed tomorrow.
[…]
"’Can I ask you something?’ she inquires. ‘Why you doing this?’
"’You mean sharing my place with you?’
"I tell her I’m upset that people like her have such a hard time getting abortions, and besides, I remember being young and being (more than once) in a similar fix. I don’t tell her about the differences: how I always had Blue Cross Blue Shield and never went past seven weeks."
Surprisingly enough, since most groups like this take pride in their activities, I wasn’t able to find a web site for the Haven Coalition. (Screwtape and his minions must be getting better at instructing the hairless bipeds under their thrall to disguise some of their activities, although the guardian demon of the writer of the article for New York Magazine is probably in for a roasting later.) I did, however, find this tidbit about the group on a site that bills itself as protecting "choice":
"Haven Coalition: Haven Coalition is a network of volunteers who open their homes to low-income women forced to travel to New York City for abortion procedures. To find out more information or learn how you can volunteer, send an email here."
Oh, and be sure to check out the logo of ProtectChoice.org: an angry woman with an upraised fist. Says it all.
No human group has a monopoly on sophistry. The tendency to rationalize what we want to do but know is wrong is universal among humans.
It’s no suprise, then, to find
According to it, a new law will go into effect next year that will hook timers up to people’s respirators. The timers will be equipped with (though the paper doesn’t call it that) a dead-man switch.
No really!
Periodically an alarm will sound, and if you DON’T override the alarm then it will turn off the respirator and the patient will be euthanatized. (That’s why it’s a dead-man switch. You’ve got to keep interacting with it or the device changes it’s behavior. Normally dead-man switches are used for fail-safe purposes, but in this case it’s being used for a fail-deadly purpose, making the name "dead-man" bitterly appropriate.)
The reason for this rigamarole is to circumvent the "Thou shalt not kill" (or "Thou shalt not murder") requirement. Certain strands of Jewish religious law forbid taking the life of a patient, and so a system has been devised to allow a machine to do the killing instead of a person.
It’s a way of having your euthanasia and eating it, too.
It’s also pure and simple rationalization.
It doesn’t eliminate the immorality of the homicide, it just changes the mode by which the homiciders do their work. Instead of them directly flipping a switch to kill the patient, they first install an egg timer on his life and then they refuse to re-set the egg timer. That doesn’t get around the problem.
Sure, the person who installs the egg timer can say, "Hey, I’m not killing him. I’m just setting up this egg timer." And then the person who refuses to re-set it can say, "Hey, I’m not killing him. I’m just not re-setting that egg timer."
But the situation is the same as if the first person wheeled the patient into an air-tight room and said, "Hey, I’m not killing him; he’s got some air in here for a while" and the second saying, "Hey, I’m not causing him to suffocate; I’m just not opening the door to let in more air."
Or, if you prefer a little more science-fiction in your example, it’s like one person setting up a GIANT KILLDROID in the patient’s room and another person refusing to keep hitting the DO NOT KILL switch on the KILLDROID.
I’m sorry, but these folks’ actions would STILL amount to homicide.
Nevertheless, I could see this kind of rationalization being used in the U.S. someday. Israel just got there first.
I do want to briefly treat something else the article mentions, though, that is more specifically Jewish: It mentions Sabbath timers. These are the same kind of timer (i.e., they activate if you don’t hit the dead-man switch), only they are used to do things like turn lights in a house ON during the Sabbath (rather than turning respirators OFF) since in some circles it is considered breaking the Sabbath to turn the lights on.
That’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT morally, and I want to point that out.
Now, I don’t agree with the severe interpretation of God’s law that would constitute flipping on a light switch as work and thus a violation of the Sabbath. Neither do I mind that there is someone at the power station who has to work on the Sabbath. Even the priests work on the Sabbath, and guys at the power plant is one of those functions that needs doing (whether you have a droid turning on your lights or not). It’s like if your sheep falls in a pit on the sabbath, it’s okay to get him out. (NOTE: Sheep do this ALL the time. They’re REALLY dumb and helpless.)
But there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between having a droid turn on you lights on the Sabbath and having a droid kill your patient.
The point of Sabbath legislation (however it is interpreted) is not to keep you from having light but to keep you from working so that you can rest. Doing the labor to set up a lightswitch droid on Thursday does not cause you to do work on the Sabbath. You get to rest when you’re s’pposed to and you work when you’re s’pposed to. You’re just doing a little extra work to make your rest more enjoyable.
But the point of anti-killing legislation IS to keep people from being killed, and so setting up a killdroid on your patient’s respirator DOES violate the purpose for which the legislation is given.
There’s thus a big difference between morally between using a killdroid and using a lightswitch droid–and not just in the gravity of the actions they perform (killing someone being a lot worse than turning on lights) but in the morality of SETTING THEM UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I didn’t want the mention of Sabbath timers to confuse this as a uniquely Jewish issue. Medical killdroids are just wrong no matter who is using them as part of a "La, la, la, la; I’m not killing you; la, la, la, la" gambit.
NOTE: For simplicity’s sake I have not broached the question of how the Jewish Sabbath relates to Sunday and what Christians are allowed to do on Sunday. Neither have I broached the question of whether the person on the respirator is required to be on the respirator in the first place. I’m assuming that the use of the respirator IS morally required in a particular case for getting at the morality of using a killdroid to shut it off. In other cases its use may not be morally required, in which case no killdroid would be needed to shut it off morally. That’s a separate debate that I didn’t want to have here.
When you hear of places closing for Christmas, you naturally expect those places to be businesses that are closed to allow employees to gather with family for the holiday. You don’t expect that place to be a church, which you would naturally think would be considered the gathering place for the spiritual family of God.
"This Christmas, no prayers will be said in several megachurches around the country. Even though the holiday falls this year on a Sunday, when churches normally host thousands for worship, pastors are canceling services, anticipating low attendance on what they call a family day.
"Critics within the evangelical community, more accustomed to doing battle with department stores and public schools over keeping religion in Christmas, are stunned by the shutdown.
"It is almost unheard of for a Christian church to cancel services on a Sunday, and opponents of the closures are accusing these congregations of bowing to secular culture."
(Nod to the reader who sent the link and admitted to being "surprised/saddened to read it.")
I was saddened but not surprised.
It reminded me of a story a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor told my father many years ago. Every Easter the local pastors would ask the SDA pastor to lead the "non-denominational" sunrise service for the community. Eventually, he was tired of being pressed into service each year and curious as to why he was always being tapped. When he asked, the pastors told him, "Well, you’re the only one of us who doesn’t have to work that day."
They were referring, of course, to the fact that SDAs do not worship on Sunday. It was only many years later, once I was a Catholic, that I noted the irony of a Christian pastor not having to "work" on the day that commemorates the Lord’s Resurrection.
The difference now, I guess, is that there are some Christian pastors who don’t bother to look around for a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor to shepherd their flocks in their absence. (And, of course, the Christian pastors who asked the SDA to step in for them were busy tending other flocks at their own churches.) These Christian pastors who have chosen to shut down their churches for Christmas simply close the inn for the holiday and confirm for the flocks the message that Christmas is all about gluttony for food and stuff after all.
CHT to the reader who sent in THIS STORY from the Weekly World News:
VATICAN SPOKESMAN CONFIRMS …
PEACE TALKS UNDER WAY BETWEEN ANGELS & DEMONS!
War between good and evil has left Hell virtually bankrupt!By MICHAEL CHIRON
Vatican CityANGELS and demons have quietly entered into peace talks — and if all goes well, Heaven and Hell could sign a treaty normalizing relations within weeks!
That’s the mindbending assertion of a leading theologian who has sources privy to the highstakes negotiations.
"Just a decade ago, a peace pact between Heaven and Hell would have been unthinkable," says Mario Ongini of Vatican City.
"But in this era, we’ve seen many implacable foes, like Great Britain and the IRA, sit down at the bargaining table to settle their differences.
"Of course, this won’t be a cakewalk. The two camps remain miles apart on many issues — and there’s a lot of bad blood and distrust." It was reportedly Satan who first extended the olive branch, sending God the message, "Isn’t it time to let bygones be bygones?"
Automatic cameras have captured photos of the first new carnivore found on the island of Borneo since the Borneo Ferret-Badger was discovered over a hundred years ago.
Really!
According to Dutch biologist Stephan Wulffrat;
"We have consulted several Bornean wildlife experts. Some thought it looked like a lemur, but most were convinced it was a new species of carnivore…"
Now, biologists are discovering new species all the time. Not new like "fresh-out-of-the-box" new, but more like "previously unknown to us"-type new. New carnivores are comparatively rare, though.
What struck me is how much it resembles the dreaded Chupacabra!
‘Member our old friend, the Asteroid Apophis?
Fortunately, it ain’t gonna hit us in 2029.
But there is a small chance it may smack into the planet in 2036–seven years later.
How small a chance?
About 1 in 5,500.
But, like, one hit by an asteroid can ruin your whole civilization.
So 1:5,500 may be too much of a risk to accept.
Some scientists certainly think so.
That’s why they’re calling for THE FIRST REAL-LIFE ASTEROID-DEFLECTION MISSION!
YEE-HAW!!!
They figger that we’ve got till 2013 (8 years from now) to decide IF we are going to mount such a mission but then, given the time needed to develop the tech (which we don’t have; we only have ideas for how to do it at this stage) and given the time needed to actually DO the mission (which could take YEARS for us to accomplish even once we have the tech–given the astronomical distances and delicate orbits involved), we really shouldn’t wait past 2013 to decide.
I’m ALL FOR THIS.
Even if it turns out Apophis has next to no risk of hitting Earth, we NEED to have asteroid-deflection technology, because if Apophis doesn’t smack into us, something else WILL–and it could be something we DON’T spot with 31 years warning! The sooner we have anti-asteroid technology in our back pocket, the better off we’ll all be.
So even though I’m not normally in favor of high-cost efforts to counter low-risk dangers, THIS ONE I’m in favor of.
I’d hate to see anything bad happen to my favorite planet!
There are a bunch of different ways to deflect asteroids. (NOTE TO SELVES: Blowing them up is NOT a good idea; you’re likely to get hit with the debris.) Sometime in the next decade, the European Space Agency (ESA) is even planning on testing the tech needed for one method:
ESA plans to test this idea with its Don Quixote mission, where two satellites will be sent to an asteroid. One of them, Hidalgo, will collide with the asteroid at high speed while the other, Sancho, will measure the change in the object’s orbit.
