A Series of Tubes

The tree sitters issued the following statement with regards to the attack at a researcher’s house that occurred in late February:

To all those concerned,

As you may have heard, on February 24th, some kind of protest took
place at the home of a UCSC researcher who experiments on animals.
Hyped-up news articles and administrative messages on campus have led
some people to associate this protest with the Tree-Sit on Science
Hill. We wish to take this opportunity to make it clear that the
tree-sit is NOT affiliated.

The tree-sit uses civil disobedience as a way of drawing attention to
the issues of expansion, and physically preventing trees from being
cut down. While many of us are concerned with the University’s plan to
replace animal habitats with animal testing facilities, we are
focusing on the long term impacts that the university’s planned
construction will have on life in Santa Cruz and the forest in upper
campus.

Yours in resistance,
Science Hill tree-sit organizers and supporters

I had previously called on the tree sitters to distance themselves with people that pulled firealarms in the buildings around the tree sit as well as those that were spray painting buildings around the tree sit. Although no statement was made about those incidents the tree sitter’s distancing themselves from a violent and destructive attack is a positive step.  The UCSC response to date has been to try and sue some of the protestors.  Here is the most recent development in that case.

So in my previous post I mentioned the numerous books that I recently came across about Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Below is a picture from the book Jehovah’s Witnesses:  Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom.  It is a picture of the governing body of the Jehovah’s witnesses as of January 1992.

The first thing I noticed is that Milton looks an awful lot like Jean Luc Picard.  For comparison see the photo below: Read more

So on my way home I noticed a box of books that someone had put on the curb to give or throw away.  I had a free minute and decided to take a gander at these free offerings, and boy am I glad that I did.  I should have just tried to take the whole box, but instead I simply carried about 20 books back with me and almost dropped them going up the stairs because I didn’t have a bag or anything to put them in.  I was extremely excited when I got home and couldn’t decide which one to read first because every single book in the box was literature for Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Now most people would probably know Jehovah’s witnesses as a group that refuses blood transfusions because they have a literal view of Leviticus or perhaps as one of the religious groups that comes to your house and tries to talk to you about god (another major one is the Mormons but I already have a post about them).  I didn’t know a whole lot about Jehovah’s witnesses and the books in the pile had some captivating titles.  There is a ton of stuff to write about here including a book called Life-How did it get here? By evolution or by creation?, but for now I want to talk about one of the greatest books in the treasure trove of books that I found, Reasoning from the Scriptures.

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So if you read my previous post or have been following Santa Cruz news lately you will know that there was an attack at the house of a researcher by some animal rights activists.  I wrote earlier about the attack and briefly mentioned Peter Young, who is pictured at right.  Peter Young spent two years in prison for animal rights activities.  He advocates breaking the law in order to achieve animal rights but he also says that he opposes violence.  His response to the attacks at a researcher’s house that occurred three days after he made a speech in Santa Cruz as quoted by the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

He said the case seemed to be a “P.R. smear campaign by vivisectors to discredit the work of activists. I’m quite sure somebody didn’t try to break into the house. We’re against violence.”

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