In Fairness to Penn State,  the Baptism of  Certain Catholics Should be Vacated

by Tiger Tom

One of the many penalties  heaped on Penn State’s football program as punishment for university officials covering up child abuse was the “vacating” of several years of football victories.  The vacated victories were all football games won during the tenure of saint turned scumbag head coach Joe Paterno.  Paterno fell from grace when it was revealed that he kept quiet though he knew that one of his staff had been luring little boys into showers.  Fortunately for Paterno,  he died and was spared the heartbreak of seeing his victories vacated.

The Penn State situation is identical to the ongoing sexual abuse coverup scandals in the Catholic Church. It’s hard to say if the Church is like a Football Program or if a Football Program is like the Church. I don’t want to offend either.  It probably doesn’t matter because in both cases it’s about high officials in a powerful hierarchical organization protecting the organization’s sanctity by hiding the sins of underlings against those the organization is ostensibly set up to benefit. Something like that, anyway.

When I heard about the vacated victories I did some research to find out what, exactly, vacating consists of.   “Vacating, ” one sports expert explains, “does not have the same effect as a forfeit, which would award the victory to the other team. Instead it just leaves the game in a strange limbo in which it is treated as if it wasn’t officially played.”  Limbo may be the key word here.

The vacating of victories seems like a strange punishment to me.  In its effort to punish a dead coach, the NCAA vacated the result of games played by many hundreds of young football players who had nothing to do with covering up child abuse.  These young players, most of them still alive and proud to show their trophies, are, after all,  the ones who played and won the games, not dead Joe Paterno.

To a cleric, it would seem to me, though I confess to knowing little of such things, the equivalent of a football victory is the salvation of a soul.  That is the Ultimate Victory from the viewpoint of the Church.

Therefore, I, Tiger Tom, propose that in the many cases where clerics are found guilty of concealing the abuse of children the Ultimate Penalty be the vacating of the baptism of all those baptized  under the auspices of said cleric.  This is only fair.

In the recent (2012) case of Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former aide to the archbishop of Philadelphia who was found guilty of looking the other way while young boys were being abused, I think it would be fair to vacate the baptism of all Catholics in the area of his jurisdiction who were baptized and therefore saved from eternal torment during the time when the Monsignor knowingly withheld information.  Vacating their baptism, of course, would not mean that they were doomed to Hell.  It would be simply as if they had never lived. The Monsignor is the one who would really suffer, seeing his record as a soul saver reduced to the number of  baptisms that occurred before his fall.

If Joe Paterno can give up his victories, surely a few Catholics, especially if they are football fans, won’t mind giving up the salvation of their souls.  Sometimes collateral damage can’t be avoided,  as they would say at the NCAA.

Giant Sturgeon, Largest Freshwater Fish Ever Landed on a Rod and Reel, Caught and Released in British Columbia

 

A monster white sturgeon weighing an estimated 1,100 pounds and measuring 12 feet, 4 inches was caught and released on the Fraser River, a British Columbia waterway famous for its big sturgeon.

Catches of white sturgeon averaging 30 to 100 pounds are typical on the Fraser, even an occasional 250-pounder, but nothing as massive as this sturgeon, believed to be the biggest freshwater fish ever caught on rod and reel in North America…and possibly the oldest.

Estimated age of the fish is over 100 years old.

Read More, See More Pictures

When You Use Water You Use Energy, And Vice Versa

  Water Conservation Results in Energy Conservation, and Vice Versa

Energy depends on water.  Water is an essential ingredient in both the creation and delivery of energy.

Half of our water use every day is for cooling power plants. In addition, the oil and gas industries use tens of millions of gallons a day, injecting water into aging oil fields to improve production, and to free natural gas in shale formations through hydraulic fracturing.

In times of water shortage, power blackouts can occur simply because there is not enough water available to produce energy.  And the consequential  shortage of power can add to the shortage of water.

For years people have longed to make a car that runs on water.  All cars run on water.  Tremendous amounts of water are required to produce and process gasoline, to produce metals and plastics for car parts, and even to build the roads that cars are driven on.

More from the New York Times

The US Air Force Has Spilled  24 Million Gallons of Jet Fuel which is Making Its Way Toward Albuquerque’s Largest and Best Water Wells

 

It has been called the largest threat to a city’s drinking water supply in history.  As much as 24 million gallons of jet fuel — or twice the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill — is seeping into an underground aquifer and steadily toward  drought-stricken Albuquerque’s  largest and most pristine water wells.

Though the US military has a poor record for environmental protection, the Albuquerque fuel-spill case reveals  new levels arrogance and disregard for citizens’ health and well-being.  The spill was first discovered in 1999 when the Air Force noticed a pool of fuel coming up out of the ground at its old aircraft fuel storage center, which dates back to the 1950s. Air Force officials say the fuel was leaking from an underground pipe for at least 40 years as tests on elements in the plume — which contains the cancer-causing Benzene and other harmful toxins — show it dates back to at least the 1970s.

Initially, the Air Force estimated the spill to be about 100,000 gallons. But as more than 130 monitoring wells have been dug around the site, estimates on the size and severity of the spill have continued to grow.

In 2007, fuel was found 500 feet down in the aquifer that provides Albuquerque half of its drinking water. In the spring of 2012, the state geologist who initially estimated the spill at 8 million gallons said he now thinks it could be as much as 24 million gallons. And a new report from the Air Force indicates rising groundwater levels have further exacerbated the problem, swamping some of the spill beneath the water table.

With the outcome in doubt, the fate of a city seems to hinge on the Air Force’s questionable ability to remedy the problem.  At this late date, there may not be a solution.   The Air Force has spent heavily on expert advice from consultants, but the amount of spilled fuel actually recovered to this point is not impressive.

More information about the spill.

Water Does Not Necessarily Cost More in Areas Where It Is Scarce.  Seattle Tops the List of Ten Cities with the Costliest Water.

Camp Lejeune’s Water Was Poisoned by Cancer-Causing Chemicals for Three Decades

In response to the decades-long efforts of Sgt. Jerry Ensminger, a retired U.S. marine drill sergeant of 24 years, the U.S. Senate has passed a bill that will provide medical care for the estimated 200,000 people who lived on the military base Camp Lejeune during the three decades when water on the base was poisoned by cancer-causing chemicals. His popular campaign on Change.org gained more than 135,000 signatures in less a month.

Ensminger’s petition called on the U.S. Congress to provide medical care for the families who were stationed at Camp Lejeune between 1957-1987, a 30-year period when water on the base was contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals. The contamination at the base has been well-documented through the years, though Ensminger says the U.S. government has been slow to respond to calls for medical help for affected veterans and their families.

Ensminger’s daughter, Janey, was one of the victims.

More details.

 Evidence of a Tool Using Fish Was Photographed in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef

A professional diver swimming in the ocean off Australia snapped the picture below at a depth of sixty feet.

 

The fish, a blackspot tuskfish, is carrying a cockle in its mouth.  The fish swam to a nearby rock and repeatedly bashed the shellfish again the rock to get at the edibles inside.

A recent study in the journal Coral Reefs says the picture—snapped  in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2006—is the first ever taken of a tool-using fish in the wild.

It took six years to publish this research, because reviewers argued  about whether it was a true example of tool use or not. At issue is whether the tuskfish behavior fits the classic definition of tool use, which requires an animal to actually hold or carry the tool and use it to manipulate another object.

Cracked and empty shells lie in heaps on the seafloor at the site of the smashing incident, indicating that the practice is common.

More Pictures, More Details from National Geographic.

 

 Texas Land Commissioner Has Plans to Desalinate Brackish Water

Thirsty for new water sources,  Texas has stepped up plans to tap into abundant supplies of brackish groundwater. Brackish water is water with a high level of dissolved solids that is normally considered unusable.  But as conventional water sources become harder to find, the possibility of treating brackish water to make it usable becomes more and more feasible.  Treatment of brackish water is commonly called desalination.

Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson believes that harvesting and treating the large amounts of brackish water under Central Texas may be the solution to the water shortage.    “We can’t plan on taking any more fresh water from the Edwards Aquifer. It takes 30 years to get a new lake permitted and filled. Pipelines cost a fortune,” Patterson said. “If we want to keep growing, we need water and I think [desalination of brackish water]  is a common-sense part of that solution.”

 

More details from the Texas General Land Office.

More about brackish water.

Saltier Than the Pacific, California’s Inland Sea’s Salinity Increases by About 1% Per Year

Deep in the desert of southern California sits one of the worst environmental sites in America, a former tourist destination that has turned into a toxic soup: the Salton Sea. The sea is one of the most unique bodies of water on earth.

Located directly on the San Andreas Fault, the Sea was created by a flood in 1905 in which water from the Colorado River flowed into the area. While it varies in dimensions and area with fluctuations in agricultural runoff and rainfall, the Salton Sea averages 15 mi (24 km) by 35 mi (56 km). It is the largest lake in California.

The lake’s salinity, about 44 g/L, is greater than that of the waters of the Pacific Ocean (35 g/L), but less than that of the Great Salt Lake (which ranges from 50 to 270 g/L). The concentration increases by about 1 percent annually.^[1]

The sea was born by accident 100 years ago when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal.  Then,  for the next two years the entire volume of the river flowed into the Salton Sink, one of the lowest places on Earth. The new lake became a major tourist attraction, with resort towns springing up along its shores. Yet with no outflow, and with agricultural runoff serving as its only inflow, the sea’s waters grew increasingly toxic. Farm chemicals and ever-increasing salinity caused massive fish and bird die-offs. Use of the sea for recreational activities plummeted, and by the 1980s its tourist towns were all but abandoned.

The skeletons of abandoned structures are still there; ghost towns encrusted in salt. California officials acknowledge that if billions of dollars are not spent to save it, the sea could shrink another 60 percent in the next 20 years, exposing soil contaminated with arsenic and other cancerous chemicals to strong winds. Should that dust become airborne, it would blow across much of southern California, creating an environmental calamity.

In the picture below, dead tilapia float in the Salton Sea near Salton Sea Beach, California, in January 2011. Erosion and high toxicity levels from farm runoff has left the Salton Sea increasingly contaminated, causing massive fish die-offs, and lake-side towns to become all but deserted.

 Pennsylvania City is Carrying Out an Ambitious Plan to Remove Acid Wastes from Water Draining into Creeks

In the 1950s the mining industry was booming in northern Pennsylvania, but when the industry moved out of the area it left behind abandoned mines that have caused a variety of water problems.  In Sykesville, PA, an abandoned mine has been discharging acid mine drainage into local streams for years.

There was no wildlife in the streams because of the drainage and water from the creeks receiving the discharge was unusable.

County officials are now planning an ambitious water treatment facility that will not only clean up the pollution but will also make the water usable.  Proposed uses include drinking water for the town of Sykesville and possible sales of water to the fracking industry.

For more details on the Jefferson County water reclamation plan.