I Hate Hypocrisy

I was flipping channels last night sometime after midnight and landed on a news program. The reason I stopped, I don’t normally watch news, was because it showed a clip of Bush talking about his veto of some stem-cell research bill based on saving the morality of this country. In order to educate the lay-man who doesn’t really even know what stem-cells are, much less why it’s important to study them, he interviewed a scientist from Stanford. She was very good at explaining with out big scientific words the basics. One thing she mentioned was the possibility of using embryos that are left over from invetro-fertalization processes. Which Bush already allows. When a woman can’t get pregnant on her own she goes to a doctor who harvests her eggs and her partner’s sperm and combines them outside of their bodies. They make a bunch of embryos and implant some back in the women’s uterus and save others incase those few don’t take. Sometimes they have to do it more than once and sometimes they don’t. Either way, there tend to be some extra embryos.


Now, according to this anchor, who said himself that he believes conception is the start of life, it seems immoral to create life in order to destroy it which is what stem-cell research is aiming to do. But what about this process of creating many embryos in the hopes you get pregnant with one child. What happens to these other embryos which, according to conservative Christians are still human life. Do we keep them frozen forever? What about the “inferior” ones that the doctors don’t think are going to survive in the womb anyway and so never bother to even consider implanting them in the mother?


There are people in this world who are so Pro-life that they will picket a women’s health clinic because they refer patients, or perform abortions, but I’ve never heard of them standing outside an infertility clinic crying out for those embryos right to live.


Further hypocrisy that makes me sick is the idea of the number of people, many Christians, in this country who vote Republican purely because they are “Pro-life,” yet completely ignore the fact that Republicans are for the death penalty. Or how about the “Pro-lifers” who vote based on abortion, and therefore voted for a President who sent us to war that has caused hundreds of deaths?


According to Bush, and many others: "my view that human life is precious, and should not be exploited or destroyed for the benefits of others." —Bush, March 22, 2002
Yet he says: "I was asked, 'Do you support the death penalty?' I said I did, if administered fairly and justly. Because I believe it saves lives." —Bush, Oct. 17, 2000
Apparently life is only sacred and shouldn't be destroyed until it’s out of the womb. Then it can be murdered or tested upon with no side effects to the conscience.


“If War is Right, Jesus is Wrong”—bumper sticker (thanks to a friend for telling me about it)

What is Net Neutrality?

Here is a funny video from the Daily Show that has the "PC" guy from the engaging Apple comercials explaining Net Neutrality in easy to understand terms.

All jokes about tubes asside, the explination is fairly accurate. Enjoy.

Thirty Books to Read before you Die, and my opinions on them.

Librarians around the UK have come up with a list of the Thirty books you Must read before kicking it.


A poll was conducted through the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA--not to be confused with the thousand's of other associations this acronym can stand for) and published in the Guardian.

Topping the list is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Personally, I've read 9, and quite a number of them, I hadn't even heard of. My favorite book of all time 1984 by George Orwell made it into 4th place. It should have been third, in my opinion, kicking The Bible off the list all together. Nobody sits down and reads the bible like it's a real book unless you're a crazy-christian (non-crazy-christians are a completely different group of Christians all together). It's like a dictionary in that way. You dip into it when you need to know something in particular, or if you're studying it. Let's face it: The Bible is a reference book, not a reading book.

Another book I'd bump: The Lovely Bones. It's interesting, it's imaginative, in that, it's written from the point of view of a dead girl. But beyond that, it's nothing special. I certainly wouldn't go telling people they have to read it before they die.

A good number I noticed were young adult books. I love young adult books, but I don't think it applies to everyone that they must read them. The same goes for the Lord of the Ring trilogy. Not everyone is into fantasy novels (though admitedly, these ones do seem to capture the fancy of non-fantasy readers unlike many others in the genre. I chalk it up to it being a 'classic.') In the future I think that MLA should conduct a number of different surveys for different libraries. What do children's librarians think are the must read books? And what about academic, or special librarians?

I am starting my perusal of this list of must reads with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Glancing through the pages, I'm a little disturbed by the strange mathmatic- and geographic-looking illustrations. But the title was in-arguably the most intriguing on the whole list.

Did anyone notice that Charles Dickens made the list 3 times. And 2 of the Bronte sisters were also included. Jane Ausen is only represented by Pride and Prejudice. Which I think is a shame, it may be her most well known book, and it has been made into a number of charming movies, I don't think it's her best.


The List

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

If it's that private, stay home

Randomly found this:

http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=2128

As someone who has worked in libraries since 1997 I've seen my share of inappropriate on-line behavior from patrons. We always wonder...why the heck come to a library to look at that stuff? Buy your porn at the local adult store and take it home.

At least this product protects the rest of us. But really...if what you need to do is that private...just stay home already!