Editorials

We make rules and look to rulebooks to help us manage our interactions in games and in life. There are even rules for war. Of course, getting everyone to comply with all the rules all the time can be challenging and in many cases impossible. Yet we try. Order in society entails our support for institutions, laws, the rules of a game. Our lives in society are structured to such an extent that we follow different scripts in a variety of circumstances; those scripts guide our actions and communications in restaurants, stadiums, casinos, churches, hospitals, banks, battle-zones.

In the latest encyclical, "Laudato Si'" [1], Pope Francis delivers theology with consequences, though apparently not the theology many of his critics espouse, and not the consequences those critics want to see derived under any circumstances from any source—earthly or supernatural.

Now that the Boy Scouts have accepted the policy of admitting openly gay members, the organization should just focus on all the other aspects of its mission and move on. Forget the debate. The arguments in favor of discrimination against gays are weak and will, we hope, begin to fade away.

There have been many mass shootings and several bombings that have received considerable attention from the media. A few are mentioned here.

In a Century 16 theater in the Town Center at Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, a shooter killed ten people and wounded many others, including two who died later in hospital. James Eagan Holmes, the man charged with this crime, had acquired hundreds of 12-gauge shotgun shells and thousands of rounds of ammunition for handguns and semiautomatic rifles in a few months before the massacre.

Robots are playing more and greater roles in industry, entertainment and everyday life.

They are already performing some menial tasks, retrieving items from a stockroom, for example, and supporting sophisticated manufacturing for the automotive, aviation and electronics industries. They are assisting surgeons performing delicate operations, and they are helping police and military forces, where they keep humans at a distance from dangerous environments. Some robots are exploring other worlds.

Confession
"I believe that at my age, I am well past the time for facing a certain fact. And the world might as well know about it. I don't want to avoid the truth; I don't want to live a lie. I am now willing to tell everyone about a preference that springs from the very core of my being, without embarrassment or apology: I don't like Wonder Bread." -- William Rossiter, 2012

Some countries allow the parents of an unwanted child to deposit it in a box or hatch at a building where attendants care for it and arrange for its eventual adoption.

The motivation for instituting baby boxes ('Babyklappe') is humane: the arrangement protects an abandoned child from many of the adverse effects of living with people who have no love and little regard for its life and health.

Baby boxes beat murder. And yet this way out of responsibility for rearing a child has some very undesirable consequences: