Regulate behavior, Not clothing

Recently I’ve been reading about various countries attempting to ban Muslim clothing such as headcoverings and burkas.
I believe these kinds of bands unnecessarily humiliate conservative Muslims while doing nothing to improve security or uphold values of toleration in Western Society. Additionally, it provides powerful ammunition to those who espouse the idea that the West is [...]

Thanks Austin!

Voters of Austin Texas, home of my alma mater recently passed a bond issue for a new central library.
Thank you and good luck with the building process. It would have been so sad if a town with an ALA accredited MLIS program couldn’t pass a library issue. Major irrelevance!
Now if my school would put the [...]

Congressional Office finds Abstinence programs lack support

Recently, the Congressional General Accountability Office found that while $567 million dollars have been spent on Abstinence-only programs since FY 2001, these programs are unproven and lack evaluation criteria.
The report:
ABSTINENCE EDUCATION
Efforts to Assess the Accuracy and Effectiveness of Federally Funded Programs
October 2006
GAO-07-87
Found in part:
Efforts by HHS and states to assess the scientific accuracy of materials [...]

Don’t toss that book once you’ve digitized it!

Karen Coyle over at Coyle’s Information recently posted some good examples illustrating why you should not rely on Google Book Search as a backup or replacement for a paper item. It mostly boils down to problems with optical character recognition (OCR) and other scanning problems. I think it’s a worth a read.
From what I’ve [...]

The People Have(n’t) Spoken / Catholic Worker Digest

1) Awhile back, I asked my six Bloglines subscribers and anyone else who might have been reading to tell me if they use the del.icio.us powered browse by topic feature of my blog. After more than two weeks, I’ve gotten no responses. So I assume you (if you’re out there) don’t mind if I ditch [...]

Mushing Lawyers, Prison babies and Family Law Self Help

The latest podcast of AK focused on law and order and carried what I thought were more interesting than usual stories. They talked to a lawyer-musher from Nome. It highlighted a program in Nebraska that allows women who give birth in prison to keep their babies for up to 18 months. In Nebraska, this program [...]

US and Russia – gun runners to the third world

This new report from the Congressional Research Service:
RL33696
Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1998-2005
October 23, 2006
Confirms that the main source of weapons for third world nations continues to be the United States, followed by Russia:
Recently, from 2002-2005, the United States and Russia have dominated the arms market in the developing world, with the United States [...]

Resources on SecDef Nominee Robert Gates

This week the University of Colorado at Boulder library documents blog ran a few suggested resources on Robert Gates, the man that President Bush has nominated in place of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In addition to the resources they offered, I wanted to add a few of my own:

Floor Discussion from 1991 Congressional Record [...]

God can provide, IF we share and trust

On Sunday, November 12, 2006, the Catholic (and likely Episcopal) lectionary gave this reading from 1 Kgs 17:10-16:
In those days, Elijah the prophet went to Zarephath.
As he arrived at the entrance of the city,
a widow was gathering sticks there; he called out to her,
“Please bring me a small cupful of water to drink.”
She left to [...]

What would authentic bipartisanship look like?

I was in Anchorage when I happened to hear the President’s Rose Garden address where he spoke about bipartisanship. As he talked, it seemed like he was simply wanting the Democrats to adopt his agenda without revision, including legalizing his warrantless surveillance program, pass his energy bill, and support his current Iraq policy. At least [...]