Texas School Boards Do It Again

Ok, I’m not going to go soft on this next topic, to put it bluntly, the not only disturbs, but it outrages me, and almost pushes my tolerance of things of this nature to the limit. As you can see in this article from time (will post url at the end), there was just a resolution passed by the Texas Board of Education that their social studies books (in particular, world history books), teach more about Islam and it’s practices then Christian studies. I find this down right disgusting, first thing, why does it matter? I’m sure that if the students were as conservative as the majority of the board, they would know more about Christianity then they would about Islam, and it should be more important that they learn about other cultures and their practices then ones that they are already familiar with. For two, I think it ridiculous that this type of thing isn’t getting more coverage on the news, I found it on the US section of Time at the very bottom with a one sentence link and no other information about it, and it would have been easy to miss if you were just checking for daily news stories like I usually do. I think that the word about this type of ignorance should be brought to the light, and hopefully put to an end (however it most likely will not) if you agree with me that this type of thing should be going on, type to me in the comments. This has once again been Toshi.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2021277,00.html

Stem Cell Money Cut Off

I was reading in the newspaper the other day, and I saw an article about a judge who deemed that Stem Cell research was illegal because of a law saying no government funded research projects should destroy human embryos. Later in the article it names certain pro-life people who have agreed with this ruling, and who are saying that we should use left-over umbilical cords and after birth materials to study because it wouldn’t “destroy” the embryo’s life, and it would be a better research tool. First off, in my personal opinion, I find nothing wrong with using cells from aborted fetuses to study, since the abortion already occurred, and at least it will now be put to good use instead of just being discarded. (Side note, I’m not going to go into why or why not abortion should be allowed to happen, if I was going to, I would create an entire new post for it as there are multiple viewpoint and a lot of evidence for both sides) Secondly, using embryos that are in the middle of development is a much better research tool, as they have a much higher percentage of cells that haven’t been designated into their future states like umbilical cords and such already have. As you may or may not know, a stem cell is a cell that hasn’t been designated as to if it will be a heart cell, a nerve cell, etc. While there are ways that we now know (thanks to stem cell research) about how to convert cells that have already been designated into their final states, it is a very long and difficult process, that takes a substantial amount of money and time that could instead be used for actual research into the multiple fields of research being done on stem cells.

Going off from my first point in the paragraph above, there is actually an extremely small number of fetuses actually being “destroyed” by the stem cell process, almost 95% of samples they use are from aborted fetuses that would have just been discarded, and the rest are from artificially inseminated embryos that are becoming even less and less common as public outrage about them has increased. This basically denies the claim that stem cell research is bad because of its “destroying” of life, and I think we can all agree that the potentials for stem cell research are so great that we shouldn’t completely ignore it. With the potential to heal diseases such as Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and even the chance that it may be used to treat cancer, I think that it would be reckless, no idiotic, not to look into it at all, especially if there isn’t any actual embryos being specifically created to “kill” am I saying that the stigma about this topic will ever go away? It probably won’t, but it’s not like this is the only topic that this is true about, I can think of several off the top of my head. All I’m saying is, get your facts straight before you try to combat an issue, and don’t rush to conclusions because of one single source telling you something, do your own research about the topic, and don’t be rushed by people to change your viewpoints, or to create yours based on there’s.

-Toshi