The Questioning Librarian

If there was any doubt that American media has become the equivalent of a babbling idiot, the past month should have thoroughly erased it. The coverage of the outbreak of Ebola, and the small number of cases that have been diagnosed in this country, should prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our news outlets have lost their minds . In the face of this disease, novel and thus frightening in this country, the public needs facts rather than intense speculation, but what they have been given by our media can hardly be considered the level headed presentation of facts that we need. Instead, we've been treated to ridiculous speculation about how a larger outbreak could happen, like conservative darling Dr. Ben Carson being given a platform on Fox News to spread his idiotic ramblings: Little better, CNN brought on fiction author Robin Cook to hype fear about the disease, calling his fiction work Outbreak  " prophetic " and giving him a forum to question whether the ...

And we intend to remain here for quite some time, thank you very much. The world keeps going, much as it has for several billion years, much as it will for millions more, long after I and everyone reading this are dead, long after humanity itself as a species ceases to exist. The world will keep going after that, until the sun expands and consumes it, far into the future. To say anything else (other than a chance collision with an asteroid) is a strange form of wishful thinking, the need to see ourselves, the times in which we live, as special. In the meantime, religious doomsayers will come and go. And they will all, inevitably, be proven wrong given enough time. How about a listing of such dates? In 1914 the founder of what would come to be the Jehovah's Witnesses predicted the end of the world, and the outbreak of war in Europe seemed to confirm his view. Until the end didn't come, and a religion was organized around the idea that 1914 had marked a transformation in heaven...

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned the "end of the world" in 2012. It seems like "everyone" knows that the world is supposed to end on December 21, 2012, at the end of the Mayan Calender when asteroids will ravage the earth, Planet X will collide with us or the sun will go mad and burn us to a crisp. Or there will be some sort of giant flood a la Roland Emmerich. Take your pick. Or Jesus will come back, or something like it. These are all false, for various reasons, and as if it isn't enough that I keep hearing this from self-appointed prophets on the History Channel I've now been warned of impending doom from the GOP. Yes, that's right, the GOP. I routinely receive emails from an organization called GOPUSA, dedicated to "bringing the conservative message to America." Turns out that they're just a pack of fear-mongering scoundrels. Once again, it says, the government is "lying to us," about something that cou...

Welcome to Apocalypse Theater, where you can load up on popcorn and soda as you view the end of the world and the destruction of all of evil mankind, or at least watch the very Apocalypse-minded go insane finding "signs and portents" pointing to the imminent return of the deity, the end of the Mayan calender, Planet X, etc, etc... Alright, down to the business at hand. This post was prompted by comments made by an unnamed family member this morning pointing to the ongoing revolution in Egypt, a relatively peaceful one I might add when you consider the American, French or Haitian Revolutions, as a sign of the "birth pangs" of the apocalypse. It is, this person believed, yet another sign that we are indeed the terminal generation living in the "End Times." This belief that we are the final generation, based on some creative readings of Biblical passages, seems like a tune that has gone on forever. I've heard it all of my life, and doubtless others ol...