New York Botanical Gardens

Instead of starting off the day doing work like a good student I ditched my desk and drove up to the New York Botanical Gardens in the bronx with two friends from Hillel. It was really weird to be in a car after taking the subway for so long and it was shocking how much faster the car got us places :-P The garden was pretty and the weather was nice. I'm a big Coleus fan and they had dozens of species all growing side by side. Very cool. There was also a special exibit on Momijigari, the Japanese Autumn Garden. Lots of species of Japanese Maple, some bonzais, lily pads, blood grass, etc...Very peaceful. The coolest part had to be the falconry demonstration. The bird guy had a really beautiful owl too. Anyway he did demos with a hawk and then with a falcon and it was pretty cool to watch them attack fake animals in a mock hunting simulation. I came home to a tongue lashing from the Law School Student Body President who accused me of vandalizing Qanun flyers. I denied the allegation since I didn't do it, though I did witness the "vandalism". A student crossed out the word "wall" on one flyer and wrote "fence". The flyers were all taken down within the hour anyway because the event they were advertising was over. The whole thing was pretty dumb. This is what I get for standing up for Israel I suppose. Anti-Semetism sucks. After ironing out that mess I worked on my HRIP application to get funding to go abroad on a human rights internship this summer. I also did my reading for all my classes for a change. Very productive.

In response to the comment posted yesterday on my abortion entry: The question of whether or not abortion is murder is not a scientific one. Murder is a moral crime and as such science has very little to do with who or what can be murdered and who or what merely is killed. When one pricks their finger, lots of blood cells escape from the body and die. We don't consider them murdered. When we have an appendix removed, the appendix is not murdered though the tissue dies. Murder is the killing of another person. What is defined as a person is not so much a matter of science as personal conviction. Many people view a fetus as part of the mother's body. It is not self sufficient and if removed it dies. It is not a rational being and has no experiences in the usual use of the term. Whether or not it has a soul is a theological question and not up to science (though my personal stance is obviously that it doesn't have a soul). Religions have varying positions on whether or not fetuses have souls. Judaism holds they do not until they are born and take their first breath. People can act on their religious beliefs and have abortions or not as they choose, but I maintain they do not have the right to restrict the rights of others based on their own religious views. Personhood and murder are not scientific questions. They are moral questions. Furthermore I know many moral scientists, doctors, and developmental biologists who are pro-choice and (obviously) opposed to murder. If science declared that abortion was murder they would be contradicting themselves. I don't believe that they see their views as inconsistent and neither do I.