Monthly Archives: March 2011

Baby Joseph Maraachli now in St. Louis

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Baby Joseph has been moved to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri where he should receive a tracheotomy this week in the hope that he can be moved into nursing care close to the family’s home in Windsor.

From here:

The London hospital, where Joseph was treated since October, had refused to perform the tracheostomy and sought to remove his ventilator against his parents’ wishes.

Dr. Paul Byrne, a fifty-year veteran in the field of neonatology based in Ohio, however, has said that Joseph should have had a tracheostomy “a long time ago.”  He also insisted that he has never seen a need to remove a child’s ventilator.  “If a baby has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway,” he explained.

The LHSC continues to denounce the move as being “against medical advice”.

Here is an interview with his father and Fr. Frank Pavone:

[flv:https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/babyjosephinterview.flv 640 360]

Christian florist refuses to arrange flowers for same-sex wedding

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From here:

A florist in Riverview, N.B., is refusing to provide wedding flowers to a same-sex couple, according to the event’s planner.

After agreeing to provide the flowers for a wedding, Kim Evans of Petals and Promises Wedding Flowers sent an email last month to the couple, saying she didn’t know it was a same-sex wedding and would have no part of the ceremony.

“I am choosing to decline your business. As a born-again Christian, I must respect my conscience before God and have no part in this matter,” the email said.

Evans has not returned calls from CBC News to explain her decision.

Mario Bourgeois Leduc, wedding planner for the couple, who didn’t want their names released, said he was appalled by the florist’s email, especially since “you’re celebrating love and you’re going against all of the odds to celebrate what is important in your life.”

“This is going to stay with them for years, because they were again told that their lives are not OK.”

Eldon Hay, a United Church minister in Sackville and a well-known gay rights advocate, said he still sympathizes with the florist.

“The shopkeeper has every right to her own convictions as long as she is a private citizen in her own house,” Hay said.

“But if she opens her doors to sell flowers, then she must be prepared to meet and deal with the public.”

According to the New Brunswick Human Rights Act, anyone doing business in the province cannot refuse customers based on race, religion or sexual orientation.

I suspect that this type of incident is likely to become more common as the decade grinds on.

While, like the United Church minister, I can feign sympathy for what I disagree with – the law in my case – I do wonder whether, in this situation, the law is being misapplied.

Making it illegal for a homosexual couple to walk into, say, a tobacconist and be refused cigarettes, is a little different from compelling a Christian florist to tacitly condone – almost take part in – a “marriage” ceremony which violates her beliefs.

The law usually acts as a blunderbuss, of course, and is indifferent to fine distinctions, so Christians beware: we appear to be entering a time where we have to pay a social and financial penalty for our beliefs.

Internet Explorer 9 not much use for photographers

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I wanted to like IE9, I really did: it is very fast and has a number of useful built-in security features.

Unfortunately, it is next to useless if you are a photographer and want to see images on a wide-gamut monitor – something photographers usually have – with anything like accurate colours.

All wide-gamut monitors come with colour profiles that Windows can use to correctly display colour information. Unfortunately Microsoft has never used these profiles in any of its version of Internet Explorer; instead it uses a default sRGB profile – IE9 is no exception. This results in every image appearing super-saturated on a wide-gamut monitor. Ironically, Microsoft trumpets IE9’s ability to correctly extract  embedded colour profiles from images – but it then proceeds to nullify its efforts by displaying the image using an sRGB profile, regardless of the monitor.

Firefox has used monitor colour profiles for some time, so it’s back to Firefox for me.

For example. This is what Ava should look like:

 

And this is how IE9 displays her on a wide gamut monitor:

Update: I just installed Firefox 4.0 RC1 and it seems to be as fast – or almost as fast – as IE9. And the colours are right. Lot’s of other improvements, too.

Celebrating the murder of children

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After the terrorist butchering of an Israeli family, residents in Gaza celebrated the fact by passing out sweets in the street.

While war is horrible and the death of children in war even more horrible, it doesn’t compare to the especially insidious evil needed to deliberately murder your enemy’s children – particularly at close range.

And it takes an especially odious religion – Islam – to fuel the impulse to celebrate such an atrocity.

From here:

Do you think the State Department noticed that no one in Arizona, Mexico, or even Mars took to the streets to celebrate the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords? No one seemed to think it was a “natural” act — the Islamic term du jour to rationalize the throat-slitting massacre of a sleeping Jewish family: 36-year-old Udi Fogel, his 35-year-old wife, Ruth, and, yes, their three children: 11-year-old Yoav, 4-year-old Elad, and Hadas, their 3-month-old baby……..

Muslims, in fact, are more often exhorted by their scriptures to brutalize non-Muslims than Christians are urged by the gospels to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Yet, though we assume the latter are meant to take the message to heart, we are somehow sure Islam doesn’t really mean what it says — that when Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, it must be Israel’s fault, or America’s, or something, anything, other than Islam, the only common denominator in these attacks.

The absurdity of A. C. Grayling

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From here:

One thinks with sorrow of the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been horrendously lost or affected by the great Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which will put a black mark against this year 2011 in the annals, coming so soon after the earthquake that hit Christchurch in New Zealand. The events are almost certainly linked tectonically, reminding us of the vast forces of nature that are normal for the planet itself but inimical to human life, especially when lived dangerously close to the jigsaw cracks of the earth’s surface.

Someone told me that there were to be special prayers in their local church for the people of Japan. This well-intentioned and fundamentally kindly proceeding nevertheless shows how absurd, in the literal sense of this term, are religious belief and practice. When I saw the television footage of people going to church in Christchurch after the tragic quake there, the following thoughts pressed.

In the rest of the article, Grayling goes on to point out the absurdity of believing in a God who does one of the following:

  • Creates a world where earthquakes have “awful outcomes”.
  • Creates a world which he subsequently abandoned and left to fend for itself.
  • “Inflicts violent and agonizing sufferings arbitrarily on sentient creatures” and is, therefore, “vile”.

The one possibility he doesn’t cover is the one claimed by Christianity: when God created the world it was good, without death and suffering. Both were introduced at the Fall by Man’s rebellion. God still did not abandon humanity, but sent his Son to redeem us; although suffering in this life still exists, God will eventually remake the universe and restore it to its original state – without sin, suffering or death.

Grayling would probably claim that this is absurd, too – yet it is significant that he chooses to demolish that which Christianity does not claim for God rather than what it does.

Other than that absurdity, Grayling’s railing against what religion doesn’t claim for itself is not rendered less wrong-headed by his evident belief that human suffering is in some way bad. A not particularly logical – one could even say absurd – view for a person who believes that sentient life is merely an accidental collection of interacting molecules – some of which conspired to write an article with A. C. Grayling’s name attached.

Beauty tips for the human bomb

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From here:

Would-be female Islamist extremists Sunday were awaiting copies of Al Qaeda’s newly-launched women’s magazine, which mixes tips on skin care with articles on marrying suicide bombers and waging electronic jihad.

Al Shamikha magazine — its title means “The Majestic Woman” — features beauty and fashion tips alongside articles on “marrying a mujahedeen” and carrying out suicide attacks.

Everything for the modern female Islamist who doesn’t want to be blown to smithereens with a rough skin.

 

 

Anglican, Lord Blair, says conflict means progress

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From here:

Lord Blair, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, will say rebelling against the status quo is “triumphantly admirable”, in a speech for Lent to be broadcast on Radio 4 this week.

The practising Anglican emphasises conflict as an “essential part of natural and human progress”.

Anglicans are testing this theory so enthusiastically that, in the West, they have almost progressed to the state of non-existence.

Baby Joseph Maraachli flown to the U.S.

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From here:Add an Image

The baby who was hours from being pulled off life support at his Canadian hospital has been rescued by the national director of Priests for Life and taken to the U.S. for treatment……

Priests for Life says it represents a family of ministries that “reach and enrich every aspect of the pro-life movement,” according to its website. The group has been strong advocates for the boy’s release and critical of his treatment in Canada.

“The medical board overseeing his case is apparently convinced that giving proper care to ‘Baby Joseph’ is futile,” the website reads. “They don’t mean that the medical care won’t help him. They mean his life in its current condition isn’t worth the trouble.”

The LHSC – where baby Joseph was being treated – has its version of the situation:

Despite the strongest possible medical advice to the contrary from medical experts in Canada, the United States and Europe, the parents of Baby Joseph Maraachli have accepted an offer to transfer him by air to the faith-based Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

His parents exercised their legal right to have him discharged after LHSC exhausted all its legal options in attempting to deliver to Baby Joseph the best possible and most appropriate medical care, given the progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease from which he suffers. An LHSC medical team transported Baby Joseph to London International Airport in the presence of his father.

The private plane carrying Baby Joseph, and any care to be provided in the U.S., will be paid for by U.S.-based interests and not by LHSC. The plane took off from London at approximately 10:20 p.m. on Sunday, March 13, 2011.

“As one of Canada’s top teaching and medical research health care centres, LHSC physicians make their medical judgments in the best interests of every patient, based on experience, fact and scientific evidence. LHSC continues to be proud to stand behind their judgments and the care given to Baby Joseph. The judgments were sound, both medically and ethically, and the care Baby Joseph received from our staff was second to none anywhere in the world,” says LHSC CEO, Bonnie Adamson.

The medical judgments about Baby Joseph made by LHSC physicians remain unchallenged by any credible medical or legal source. Those judgments remain supported by 9 pediatric specialists in Ontario as well as pediatric specialists in the U.S. and Europe, Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, and the Superior Court of Ontario, as being in the best interests of Baby Joseph.

The “best possible and most appropriate medical care” that the LHSC wanted to deliver was to remove the baby’s breathing tube, allowing him to die – by choking.

There seems little doubt that, without a miracle, baby Joseph is going to die in the not too distant future: the questions are, how long should his life be prolonged, how will he die, where will he die and who should decide?

The LHSC doctors think they know what is best for baby Joseph, but to judge what is best for a person, when it comes to life and death, is to weigh the worth of a person’s life – something which science is unable to do. That leaves the subjective biases of the doctors which, in this case appear to be dominated by the utilitarian: how much it is costing to keep the baby alive.

Only parents have a natural right to judge what is best for their children: they may not always make the right choice, but it is still theirs to make.

The spectacle of the power struggle over baby Joseph’s fate, in which the doctors of the LHSC are embroiled, has exposed the arrogance that seems to beset many in the medical profession. An expert in a technical field – and that’s all medicine is – is not, by virtue of that, an expert in making moral judgements.

R.I.P. Joe Morello

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One of the great Jazz drummers of the last century.

From here:

Legendary jazz drummer Joe Morello, from the Dave Brubeck quartet, has died aged 82.
With the quartet he played on some of the best-selling jazz records of all time, including Take Five.
His family said he died at home in New Jersey on Saturday.

I attended a drum workshop by Joe Morello in the early ‘60s. I was flabbergasted by the elegance of his technique. As I recall, he had a rather dim view of rock drummers – something I was aspiring to be.

Vicar dons miniskirt and gold tights

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From here:

A vicar who outraged his parishioners when he dressed as a ‘tart’ for a fundraising costume party has retired from the Church.

The Reverend Martin Wray left his position at St Lawrence the Martyr Church in Horsley Hill, South Shields, after being on sick leave for several months following his part in the charity bash.

The 59-year-old was photographed at the  ‘vicars and tarts’ party wearing a mini-skirt, gold leggings and high heels at the town’s Steamboat pub on the Mill Dam in August last year.

What was meant to be a fun event though caused a stir at the church, with some of the congregation believing the published photograph of the vicar as a ‘tart’ brought his  parish into disrepute.

But friends of Mr Wray, who entered into a gay partnership last May and who continues to live in the town, said the whole episode had ‘a whiff of homophobia’ about it.

 

 

It brings home just how muddled the Church of England has become when a vicar has to don a miniskirt and gold tights in addition to having a homosexual lover before his parishioners suspect something untoward is going on.