The Rogue Scholar

Todd, the Library Vandal

We have a vandal in our library. We know him only by his works, the damaged volumes that were pulled out of the stacks during a sweep by a work-study student the other day. Not knowing his identity, I have decided to call him "Todd."*

Vandalism in libraries has been going on as long as there have been libraries to vandalize (hence the modern meaning of the word, vandal-- a person who willfully or ignorantly destroys or mars something beautiful or valuable--as opposed to the original, a Germanic tribe "who in the 5th century A.D. ravaged Gaul and Spain, settled in Africa, and in A.D. 455 sacked Rome.") This is not news.

As students in library school we're introduced to the problems posed by these no-goodniks early on. Sandra Hart wrote an excellent survey paper on the subject for the University of Alberta's MLIS program in 2005, for example. Neither is it a trivial matter to deal with--the University of St. Thomas' Library Director, for instance, could conceivably drop-kick the offender far and wide, if they catch him--but work-studies and staff are busy and policing the stacks is a time and labor intensive activity. We can't be everywhere at once even during the slow times, and on a busy stretch at the circ desk, we can barely be anywhere on demand. So most of the damage we discover is found long after the act is committed.

 Granted, my problems at this particular time  are minor by any objective standard and don't come close to, say, what the Morecambe Library had to deal with recently. There are other examples too numerous to list (a Google search on "vandalism in libraries" delivered over 535,000 results) but my concerns are limited to Todd for the moment.

I think Todd is a guy and I think he was (or still is) a student here. I think he has a chip on his shoulder. The reason I think these things has to do specifically with the books that were defaced: Writing Without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Authority and the Individual, by Bertrand Russell; Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis; Class: Style and Status in the USA, by Paul Fussell; The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American, edited by Thomas C. Wheeler; and Great European Short Stories, edited by Douglas and Sylvia Angus. These works aren't recent--the book on class is from 1983 and Babbitt goes back to 1922--but they are survey books and together they find their ways into numerous syllabi. The books themselves are old, with yellowing pages and brittle spines. Not exactly the current edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of size or currency, is what I'm saying. These are elderly volumes.

Then there's the way the books were defaced. It wasn't a case of censorship, for instance: a would-be censor either takes the books home and keeps it, maybe paying a late fine or not as the case may be, or else he rips out the pages entirely. Todd did something I've never seen before: he grabbed a bunch of pages, held them in one hand and ripped them as a sheaf, taking the corners of the pages with him but keeping the bulk of the paper intact. Imagine a book with a portion of the page corners chewed away by moths. That's Todd's signature. The treatments are different only in the number of pages ripped and the size of the bite; the style is consistent.

 

The weirdest example is the immigrant experience book: there, not only are the pages ripped, but the pages immediately before and after the ripped ones had their corners folded down, as if they were marking the range. If this is Todd's doing it makes him hands-down the most organized vandal I have ever encountered.

I can think of a number of explanations for Todd's wacky behavior. He might have taken an undergrad lit course, and hated these works so much that he decided to take his revenge on them. He might have been using these works as proxies for his professor who gave him a crappy grade. He might have been trying to impress himself or a  friend or a prospective mate with his paper-ripping prowess. Or, Todd might just be a dull, bored asshole who hates to read (which doesn't really explain why he's in college, but . . . )

Or maybe I'm being too abrupt. It could be that Todd has a political agenda in choosing these particular works to deface. (I hope that's the case, since it would make him much more interesting as a person.) Let's see: Babbitt is about ambitious, social climbing creep; he hates immigrants and whatever he imagines they represent; has no use for European idea, great or small; can't be bothered about the differences between freedom and order, and apparently hates writing. Is Todd a Young Republican? An Ann Coulter fan? I have no idea. (If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear them.)

At any rate, we're replacing two of the books that were defaced and will probably just discard the rest. And we'll hope that Todd stays out of the library for a while.

- - - - -

*I know that statistically, in this school, the offender is more likely to be a female than a male, but I have reasons to believe it's a guy, which I'll get to in a bit. Also, "Todd" is way cooler a name than this (probably) guy deserves to be called--sharing it with, for example, an alien, a robot, and a mathematical construction--but "Insignificant, Book-Destroying Monkey-Faced Creep" is both annoying to type and potentially offensive to monkeys. So, "him" and "Todd," it is.

Beware the New Facebook Privacy Settings: the Claws That catch, the Jaws That bite . . .

If you're on Facebook a lot you will probably want to read this report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation before changing your privacy settings. (I made everything friends only; the defaults were truly insane.)

A Bit About the Brooklyn Public Library

First there is this: a fast gander at the 10 most popular searches on Brooklyn Public Library's catalog:

1. Diary of a wimpy kid

2. DVD

3. Twilight

4. New moon

5. Push

6. Pokemon

7. Naruto

8. Harry potter

9. Princess

10. Star wars

I don't claim it's the the most qualitative reading list in the world--although I was glad to see Push getting some attention by the public (I just cataloged a volume for our library and it, too, has seen some flying-off-the-shelf action). To some extent (perhaps a great extent) this list came about due to the fact that the Brooklyn and Queens Borough Public Libraries are notorious for setting up patrons with books--any books--for the sake of keeping their circulation numbers as high as possible. Good business practice, not the best method for composing a Reader's Advisory. Beyond that, I'm glad to see the public making use of the facilities even if I shudder at their taste, by and large, in literature.

Second, there is the No Shush Zone, BPL's in-house blog, which shows that they are absolutely dedicated to serving their community. Read it often.

Secret Copyright Treaty is Probably Bad for You and Me

This bit from Jeff Porten at Macworld.com comes down the pipe a little later than I had originally intended (like 2 weeks later, but that's what happens when you pay too much attention to your cataloging and not enough to your blog) but it's still very much worth reading. To wit:

Most Americans expect that their laws are only passed after some period of public debate between Republicans and Democrats or their news-channel proxies. However, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) may be an exception to this rule, and if it is signed, many United States laws concerning the Internet and ownership of data may become substantively different.

Various nations (including Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.S.) are said to be negotiating ACTA now, with the goal of passing a joint treaty to protect intellectual property sometime in 2010. I would like to tell you much more about what’s being written into the ACTA bill, but I can’t: the contents of the treaty are secret. What we know about it is pretty much based upon leaks of earlier documents, and heavily redacted versions which were ferreted out under the guise of national transparency laws. The University of Ottawa requested the text of the bill, and received a document with everything blacked out except the title. The Electronic Frontier Foundation received a copy with 159 pages intact, but an additional 1,362 pages redacted with the claim that the contents were crucial to national security.

What has been leaked is disturbing. Some reports state that customs officials at international borders would be empowered to search the contents of your laptop, cell phone, and iPod under the pretense that they're looking for ripped or downloaded music and videos, with confiscation of your devices as a potential penalty. Others state that Internet providers would be required to look through the data traveling over their networks for illegal transmission of copyrighted material. Various officials have denied both claims as being part of outdated drafts of the treaty—but obviously, without access to the text of the treaty and with no news of the negotiations, there’s no way to confirm any of this without waiting for a fait accompli announcement.

Civil libertarians (a group of which I’m a member) are disturbed by the treaty for obvious reasons, but there’s another issue at work here which should be of interest to anyone who uses a computer or the Internet. There are many people in media industries and law enforcement who think it would be much easier to police the world, if only there were One True Digital Rights Management Scheme to keep people from copying data they shouldn’t.

Read the entire thing here. Enjoy!

Librarians and Teamsters Unite to Defend Chicago Library

I was going to write a bit of an introduction to this article but on second thought, I think the first few paragraphs of this bit from the Daily Herald speak pretty well for themselves:

Telling her mother that she wanted to come to the aid of a library under attack, 11-year-old Sydney Sabbagha stood at the podium before the Oak Brook village board.

"I used to go to the library knowing there were people there to help me find a book. Now there is no one to help me," Sydney said solemnly. "It will never be the same without the people you fired."

Sydney nestled back into her seat, but that didn't stop 69-year-old criminal attorney Constantine "Connie" Xinos from boldly putting her in her place.

"Those who come up here with tears in their eyes talking about the library, put your money where your mouth is," Xinos shot back. He told Sydney and others who spoke against the layoffs of the three full-time staffers (including the head librarian and children's librarian) and two part-timers to stop "whining" and raise the money themselves.

"I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books," Xinos told them.

"Don't cry crocodile tears about people who are making $100,000 a year wiping tables and putting the books back on the shelves," Xinos smirked, apparently referencing the fired head librarian, who has advanced degrees and made $98,676 a year. He said Oak Brook had to "stop indulging people in their hobbies" and "their little, personal, private wants."

Sydney was upset and "her little friend was in tears" after Xinos spoke at the meeting last week, says mom Hope Sabbagha.

In my personal estimation, Mr. Xinos is a creep, and not just because he apparently enjoys making little girls cry at public hearings.

Xinos is that guy who lies awake at night, fuming and worrying that there is someone somewhere in the country who received a break that he or she didn't 120% deserve. He votes Republican, served in the Marines and believes that life is a series of private transactions between individuals. To him, every human action has a monetary reaction. There is no room in his vision of life, the universe, and everything for shared responsibility, common space, or collective action. At least, no collective action that doesn't benefit him personally. Public libraries, being first and foremost entities designed for communal use by the common people, do not fit in to his worldview except as institutions that should be privatized, outsourced, or abandoned. 

I can appreciate his concern for the community's finances--times are bad and will probably get worse before they improve--but if he blanches at the $98k salary the head librarian was receiving, I wonder how he'd feel if someone reminded him that as a 69 year old citizen of the U.S., he's getting (or at least is eligible for) Social Security and Medicare benefits worth a pretty penny, paid for by you, me, and everyone else in this great land of ours. I'm pretty sure he's cashing those free government checks, but hey, I could be wrong.

One point in Xinos's favor from what I can tell is that he is at least honest enough to say he hates paying  for the library in public, unlike this yokel (that other guy) who couldn't even admit that much to himself or to those neighbors who (one would assume) shared his point of view. 

Don't be that guy.

Veterans Day 2009

[Alf Razzell:]"Two things that have haunted me most are the days when I had to collect the paybooks; and when I left Bill Hubbard in no-man's-land. I was picked up and taken into their trench. And I'd no sooner taken two or three steps down the trench when I heard a call, 'Hello Razz, I'm glad to see you. This is my second night here,' and he said 'I'm feeling bad,' and it was Bill Hubbard, one of the men we'd trained in England, one of the original battalion. I had a look at his wound; rolled him over. I could see it was probably a fatal wound. You could imagine what pain he was in, he was dripping with sweat; and after I'd gone about three shellholes, traversed that, had it been...had there been a path or a road I could have done better. He pummelled me, 'Put me down, put me down, I'd rather die, I'd rather die, put me down.' I was hoping he would faint. He said 'I can't go any further, let me die.' I said 'If I leave you here Bill you won't be found, let's have another go.' He said 'All right then.' And the same thing happened. he couldn't stand it any more, and I had to leave him there, in no-man's-land."

 - - -

[Alf Razzell:]"Years later, I saw Bill Hubbard's name on the memorial to the missing at Aras[?]. And I...when I saw his name I was absolutely transfixed; it was as though he was now a human being instead of some sort of nightmarish memory of how I had to leave him, all those years ago. And I felt relieved, and ever since then I've felt happier about it, because always before, whenever I thought of him, I said to myself, 'Was there something else that I could have done?'
[Background: "I'd rather die, I'd rather die..."]
And that always sort of worried me. And having seen him, and his name in the register - as you know in the memorials there's a little safe, there's a register in there with every name - and seeing his name and
his name on the memorial; it sort of lightened my...heart, if you like."
(Woman) "When was it that you saw his name on the memorial?"
"Ah, when I was eighty-seven, that would be a year, ninete...eighty-
four, nineteen eighty-four."

---Roger Waters, Amused to Death

To any veteran who reads this, thank you. Happy Veterans Day.

Yikes!

And then Jon remembered that he had a blog. And offers his apologies . . .

J.R.R. Tolkein Manuscript Exhibit Opens at Lincoln Center

From the METRO-L listserv:

J.R.R. TOLKIEN MANUSCRIPT EXHIBIT  AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY’S LIBRARY AT LINCOLN CENTER CAMPUS

October 5 – November 19, 2009

Literary manuscripts from Marquette University’s renowned J.R.R. Tolkien Collection will be exhibited this fall at Fordham’s Gerald M. Quinn Library at Lincoln Center.   The partnering academic libraries, both Jesuit institutions, are pleased to present “The Beginnings of a Masterpiece:   Original Manuscripts from The Fellowship of the Ring.”

Scheduled for October 5–November 19, the exhibit marks the first time that the literary manuscripts have been exhibited in New York City.

Select items will be featured in the exhibition at the Quinn Library. The complete manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings, written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1938-1955, contain more than 9,250 pages.   Some highlights featured in the Fordham exhibition will include drawings and sketches, maps and calendars of Middle-earth, linguistic notes about the author’s invented languages, Hobbit family genealogies, detailed time schemes and other plot notes, and examples of Tolkien's finest calligraphy.  The original documents reflect an extraordinary creative process; as many as 18 drafts exist for some chapters.

Marquette University Libraries preserves the manuscripts and working drafts for three of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most celebrated books, The Hobbit (1937), Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), as well as the original copy of the illustrated children's book Mr. Bliss.  The acquisition of the manuscripts was the brainchild of then Marquette library director William B. Ready (1914-1981).  Ready recognized The Lord of the Rings as a work of genius and negotiated to purchase the Oxford professor’s papers.  Tolkien's personal and academic papers, as well as his other literary manuscripts, including The Silmarillion, are preserved by Oxford University.

"The Beginnings of a Masterpiece" is free.  Located on the first floor of the Lowenstein Building at 113 West 60th Street, the Quinn Library will be open to visitors between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM, Monday through Saturday and 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, Sunday.  All visitors will be asked to show a valid photo ID to enter the Lowenstein Building and the Quinn Library.

Marquette University Libraries' Tolkien Archives Fund, established in 1987 by the late Richard E. Blackwelder and expanded by numerous enthusiasts, is sponsoring the manuscript exhibition.

Three Americans Share 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics

3 Americans share 2009 Nobel physics prize

By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER, Associated Press Writers Matt Moore And Karl Ritter, Associated Press Writers 16 mins ago

STOCKHOLM – Three Americans whose 1960s research laid the foundation for today's world of computerized images and lightning-fast communication shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for their work developing fiber-optic cable and the sensor at the heart of digital cameras.

Charles K. Kao, 75, was cited for discovering how to transmit light signals over long distances through glass fibers as thin as a human hair. His 1966 breakthrough led to the creation of modern fiber-optic communication networks that carry voice, video and high-speed Internet data around the world.

"What the wheel did for transport, the optical fiber did for telecommunications," said Richard Epworth, who worked with Kao at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in Harlow, England in the 1960s. "Optical fiber enables you to transmit information with little energy over long distances and to transmit information at very high rates."

Kao solved the problem of transmitting through miles of glass without having the glass itself absorb the signal. Corning Glass Works built on his ideas to create the first fibers that could be used for large-scale long-distance communications, making today's Internet possible.

Kao said he never expected the award despite the vast changes that resulted from his research.

"Fiber-optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years," he said in a statement released by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was formerly vice chancellor.

Willard S. Boyle, 85, and George E. Smith, 79, were honored for inventing the eye of the digital camera, a sensor able to transform light into a large number of pixels, the tiny points of color that are the building blocks of every digital image.

Their charge-coupled device, or CCD, is found today in devices ranging from the cheapest point-and-shoot digital camera to robotic medical instruments equipped with video cameras that let surgeons perform delicate operations deep inside the human body. It also revolutionized astronomy by letting spacecraft equipped with digital cameras take images from previously unseen regions of outer space and transmit them back to earth.

The work of the three men is "something that has really changed our lives," said Joseph Nordgren, chair of the academy's physics committee. "The impact on science is enormous."

Read the rest of the article here.  Enjoy!

The Powell Memo: Font of Wingnut Power

A bit of disclosure before we begin: I am fascinated by money, finance, and economics. The way human beings agree to deal with each other on a daily basis has a certain music to it. Granted, we don't usually look at it that way: we tend only to pay attention to the people we like or the people we hate (sometimes those being the same people) and the vast flesh of humanity is something we generally don't think about at all. And as I wrote sometime ago, I am a capitalist at heart. I think that particular economic arrangement has granted millions of people better lives in the material sense more quickly than they might have had otherwise. On balance I think that's a good thing.

That said, my research has pointed me to one conclusion: there is very little "free" about the free market. Everything I have found leads me to conclude markets are imposed and enforced by governing entities, not randomly emergent events (there go my limited libertarian credentials, I suppose.) Even if two strangers make a trade on the spur of the moment, there are certain rules that each must have agreed to follow before the trade goes forth. E.g., both are supposed to be getting something of relatively equal value, in perception if not reality; both have entered into the agreement of their own free will; and neither is going to try to use force to steal back what has been traded at a future moment (such as one guy's friends ambushing the other on his way home.) Markets have enforceable rules, even if those rules are made up on the spot and even if the enforcement mechanism is no more than the good will of each participant. A working market relies on a consistently reliable level of co-operation between the participants. Anything else is mere robbery. Therefore markets can't be free in the sense that they can't be unlimited or randomly emergent events. (I can't trade an unlimited amount of something for a limited amount of something else, and when two people trade, there's a conscious attempt by each to offer something of value for something of equivalent value, not a random exchange for no reason.)

In that vein, the mythology about the so-called free market in this country which has been firmly in place since 1981 in this country didn't arise merely because people got tired of the government making rules--which is what a government is supposed to do, by the way. It happened because it was a planned takeover of our national way of thinking about government, what it was, what it was supposed to do, and why. Henry A. Giroux describes the process and its origns.

From Truthout.org:

The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

Thursday 01 October 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t

    Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, echoing the feelings of many progressives, recently wrote in The New York Times about how dismayed he was over the success right-wing ideologues have had not only in undercutting Obama's health care bill, but also in mobilizing enormous public support against almost any reform aimed at rolling back the economic, political, and social conditions that have created the economic recession and the legacy of enormous suffering and hardship for millions of Americans over the last 30 years.[1] Krugman is somewhat astonished that after almost three decades the political scene is still under the sway of what he calls the "zombie doctrine of Reaganism," - the notion that any action by government is bad, except when it benefits corporations and the rich. Clearly, for Krugman, zombie Reaganism appears once again to be shaping policies under the Obama regime. And yet, not only did Reaganism with its hatred of the social state, celebration of unbridled self-interest, its endless quest to privatize everything, and support for deregulation of the economic system eventually bring the country to near economic collapse, it also produced enormous suffering for those who never benefited from the excesses of the second Gilded Age, especially workers, the poor, disadvantaged minorities and eventually large segments of the middle class. And yet, zombie market politics is back rejecting the public option in Obama's health plan, fighting efforts to strengthen bank regulations, resisting caps on CEO bonuses, preventing climate-control legislation, and refusing to limit military spending. Unlike other pundits, Krugman does not merely puzzle over how zombie politics can keep turning up on the political scene - a return not unlike the endless corpses who keep coming back to life in George Romero's 1968 classic film, "Night of the Living Dead" (think of Bill Kristol who seems to be wrong about everything but just keeps coming back). For Krugman, a wacky and discredited right-wing politics is far from dead and, in fact, one of the great challenges of the current moment is to try to understand the conditions that allow it to once again shape American politics and culture, given the enormous problems it has produced at all levels of American society, including the current recession.

    Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. Nor is it simply a story about the loss of language, a growing anti-intellectualism in the larger culture, or the spread of what some have called a new illiteracy endlessly being produced in popular culture. As important as these tendencies are, there is something more at stake here which points to a combination of power, money and education in the service of creating an almost lethal restriction of what can be heard, said, learned and debated in the public sphere. And one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."

Read the entire article at Truthout.org. I would say "Enjoy!" but this kind of wholesale hijacking of the ideals of the United States of America is stomach-turning, even for me. With that in mind, I will say merely, Endure!

Banned Book Week begins!

I've been working on our library's annual report which means I've been dealing with SirsiDynix at a level I which find both exhausting and depressing. Which, in turn, means that I haven't been posting as often as I might like. That said, Banned Book Week begins tomorrow. Go forth and read one. I command it!

Happy National Talk Like a Pirate Day

Thanks to Dave Barry for creating it, and thanks, too to Paul & Storm for liking pirates. Finally, thanks to Mike "Spiff" Booth, for believing in their vision.

Yar!

It All Makes Perfect Sense . . . Doesn't It?

[HAL]: Stop Dave
Will you stop Dave?
Stop Dave
I'm afraid
I'm afraid
Dave, my mind is going
I can feel it
I can feel it
My mind is going
There is no question about it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I'm afraid

The monkey sat on a pile of stone
And he stared at the broken bone in his hand
Strains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the land
The monkey looked up at the stars
And he thought to himself
Memory is a stranger
History is for fools
And he cleaned his hands in a pool of holy writing
Turned his back on the garden and set out for the nearest town
Hold on hold on soldier

When you add it all up
The tears and the marrowbone
There's an ounce of gold
And an ounce of pride in each ledgers
And the Germans kill the Jews
And the Jews kill the Arabs
And the Arabs kill the hostages
And that is the news
And is it any wonder that the monkey's confused
He said Mama Mama, the President's a fool
Why do I have to keep reading these technical manuals
And the joint chiefs of staff
And the brokers on Wall Street said
Don't make us laugh, you're a smart kid
Time is linear
Memory's a stranger
History is for fools
Man is a tool in the hands
Of the great God Almighty
And they gave him command of a nuclear submarine
Sent him back in search of the Garden of Eden

-----------------------------

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

Little black soul departs in perfect focus
Hold on soldier
Prime time fodder for the News at Nine
Hold on, hold on soldier
Darling is the child warm in the bed tonight

[Marv Albert:] "Hi everybody I'm Marv Albert
And welcome to our telecast
Coming to you live from Memorial Stadium
It's a beautiful day
And today we expect a sensational matchup
But first our global anthem"

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

[Marv:] "And here come the players
As I speak to you now, the captain
Has his cross hairs zeroed in on the oil rig
He's at periscope depth
It looks to me like he's going to attack
By the way did you know that a submarine
Captain earns 200,000 dollars a year"
[Edward:]"That's less tax Marv"
[Marv:]"Yeah, less tax
Thank you Edward"
[Edward:]"You're welcome"
[Marv:]"Now back to the game...he fires one...yes
There goes two; both fish are running
The rig is going into a prevent defense
Will they make it? I don't think so"
Look out!
Look at that baby burn!

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Can't you see

It all makes perfect sense

---Roger Waters, It All Makes Perfect Sense Pt1 & 2, Amused to Death

Eight years ago on this day, the United States suffered a major loss of life and property. I wonder if we've learned anything at all since then. I wonder a lot.

An Open Letter to Steve Elliot of Grassfire.org: Follow-up

Dear Steve,

Thank you for your speedy response to my previous letter. I am thrilled to hear that things are going so well for your organization. I notice with some concern that your histrionic tone hasn't changed much, but clearly you are very excited about your prospects for success re: The Death of ObamaCare. I like a man who stands by his goals.

From the Desk of:
Steve Elliott, President, Grassfire.org Alliance


         After clicking on the link below to watch John Stossel's
         special 20/20 report exposing the truth about ObamaCare,
         take a few additional moments to add your name to our
         national petition:

http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=21413&RID=14353679

I clicked the link (which appears five times in this e-mail; that seems excessive to me, but that's a personal preference rather than a comment on your letter writing abilities) and watched the clip. I do not think it says what you think it says. 

John Stossel did not, as you put it, expose "the truth about ObamaCare." He did not even mention "ObamaCare"--that is your term, not his. The only time he even refers to Obama is a five second clip where the president is speaking to an audience, suggesting that it might be a good idea if all Americans had access to basic health services. Beyond that, Stossel spends all of his time trashing the Canadian health care system, with a (dis)honorable mention of the British National Health Service, which apparently doesn't have enough dentists to go around. 

That's all well and good. But it doesn't apply to what's going on in the United States at this point in time. Show me anything in the health care proposals being discussed now that attempts to swap our current health care mess for Canada's (or England's) and I'll forward the clip to as many people as I can think of. Otherwise, Stossel is comparing apples and oranges and you are making a leap of faith when you predict that any change in the status quo will produce Canada's health care system.

Anyway, to the bulk of your letter:

Jonathan,

A reinvigorated Obama is preparing for his grand sales pitch to
Congress and America on Wednesday night where it is expected he
will throw down the gloves and demand citizens fall in line!

Not citizens so much as congresspeople (who, I admit, are also citizens), but God, I hope so. It would be the first real sign of balls he's shown in a while. He needs to (as Maureen Dowd put it) "let Bartlet be Bartlet," not make nice with the freaks at the extremes.

Well Americans aren't falling in line. In fact, citizens by the
hundreds are flocking to sign our petition saying no to
ObamaCare every hour!

Hundreds? Every hour? That's . . . well, that's nice. Not really jaw-dropping, but a good effort. I think most of the folks who wanted to sign your petition have already done so. Maybe you could borrow Dick Armey's FreedomWorks mailing list. They should be receptive to this kind of knee-jerk logic.

         Jonathan, I noticed you haven't yet signed this
         important petition opposing government-run health care,
         and wanted to give you one last chance to do so before
         our historic delivery on 9/12.

I'm not going to sign. I'm morally obligated not to sign. I'd sign it if it denounced the current situation in favor of, say government regulated health care, which is where Matt Miller thinks this should go. But government-run health care is Medicare, which my mother and in-laws have, and Medicaid, which my godson has. Why do you want to kill my parents and kid?  (And you should watch your text blocking.)

         But before you sign, take a moment to watch an
         incredible video by ABC News' John Stossel about
         what likely awaits us should ObamaCare become
         a reality.

Click here to see the video:

http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=21413&RID=14353679

I clicked. I saw. I responded. Let's move on.


++ 45,000 Petitions Needed For Friday Delivery!

That's 15,000 signatures per day for three days. Possible, but I don't think you're getting to half a million by then.

Regardless of Obama's antics on Wednesday evening, Grassfire
team-members will be delivering petitions REJECTING OBAMACARE
to EVERY Senator on Capitol Hill on Friday--
letting each one know that Americans aren't falling in line.

Good to hear! But I cringe at your selection of the word "antics" in this passage. There's a lot to unpack there. A lot of minstrel imagery, especially. But you are busy and so am I, so let's just call this another dangerous foray into the realm of racism and leave it at that.

Already more than 95 team members have registered to deliver
petitions--ensuring this will be a historic event!

It's an historic event, but who's counting grammatical errors? Just out of curiosity, which states are the hold outs? Wouldn't telling us where the holes are be instrumental to filling them?

But we are 45,000 petitions shy from reaching our goal of
half-a-million petitions, and we need your help over the
next 24 hours.

No, you are 45,000 signatures away from creating a single petition to be hand-delivered to 95 (hopefully 100) senators tonight. Right? Or are we e-mailing our individual petitions to our own congresspeople? But if we're doing that then which document are the 500,000 signatures going to reside upon? Really, you must slow down, this is becoming confusing.

Click here to have your petition opposing ObamaCare delivered
to your Senator this Friday:

http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=21413&RID=14353679

        We only have about a 24 hour window to reach our goal,
        so after signing, forward this important message to 30-40
        friends urging them to watch the video and sign our petition
        in time for Friday's delivery by clicking here:

http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=21413&RID=14353679

I have given you my requirements for signing and/or forwarding your e-mails in my previous letter. There's no need to repeat them here. By the way, how are you verifying the e-mail addresses and names people respond to these e-mails with? Just curious.

This is our last chance to reach our goal of half-a-million
petitions before the 9/12 event on Capitol Hill, and I want
to mark the events of that day with an exclamation point
saying NO TO OBAMACARE!

I wish your event well. Say Hi to Beck from me. Tell him not to cry this time, it makes him look like a pussy. His lunatic shrieking on the phone was much more enjoyable. I'd like more of that, please. If you could arrange it, I'd be grateful.

Thank you for taking immediate action with Grassfire!

Steve Elliott, President
Grassfire.org

No, Steve, thank you.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Frater

P.S: After signing our petition, make it a personal priority to
forward this message to 30-40 friends. Urge them to watch the
Stossel video and sign our petition by clicking here:

http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=21413&RID=14353679

*sigh*

Happy 09/09/09!

From Yahoo News:

Why 09/09/09 Is So Special
Heather Whipps
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.com
Tue Sep 8, 10:46 am ET


Have special plans this 09/09/09?

Everyone from brides and grooms to movie studio execs are celebrating the upcoming calendrical anomaly in their own way.

In Florida, at least one county clerk's office is offering a one-day wedding special for $99.99. The rarity of this Sept. 9 hasn't been lost on the creators of the iPod, who have moved their traditional Tuesday release day to Wednesday to take advantage of the special date. Focus Features is releasing their new film "9," an animated tale about the apocalypse, on the 9th.

Not only does the date look good in marketing promotions, but it also represents the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we'll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), or a millennium (mark your calendars for January 1, 3001), depending on how you want to count it.

Though technically there's nothing special about the symmetrical date, some concerned with the history and meaning of numbers ascribe powerful significance to 09/09/09.

For cultures in which the number nine is lucky, Sept. 9 is anticipated - while others might see the date as an ominous warning.

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy and have a happy 09/09/09!

An Open Letter to Steve Elliot of Grassfire.org

Dear Steve,

I'd like to thank you for keeping in touch the past few months. Really, I had no idea that I was living in a fascist state, so I appreciate your setting me straight on that matter. I notice that the tone and substance of your e-mails have been becoming increasingly hysterical since last November, which concerns me a bit; the last thing an organization like Grassfire.org needs is an obvious lunatic at its helm.  That said, I had no choice but to take issue with some portions of your most recent missive. I'm sure these are the innocent misunderstandings of a man under deadline writing to persuade, but they needed to be addressed.

Anyway, the text of your latest e-mail (edited for space) and my responses are as follows (your text in italics):

From the Desk of:
Steve Elliott, President, Grassfire.org Alliance


Jonathan,

Forget about the separation of church and state, these are desperate
times for Democrats who are suddenly embracing all things holy to
pass ObamaCare!

         Attempting to moralize the health care debate,
         Obama had the audacity to spew that those opposing
         ObamaCare were "frankly, bearing false witness."

         He pressed on, casting his perfect pro-abortion record aside
         saying passage of health care reform is "a core ethical and
         moral obligation: that is, that we look out for one another;
         that is, I am my brother's keeper."

It's interesting to see that you only approve of bringing religion into a public speech when it's spoken by a politician you like or delivering a biblical point of view you agree with. I don't know which Bible you've been reading but it seems to have misprinted the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:3-4:12):

4:3 At the designated time ⁹  Cain brought some of the fruit of the ground for an offering ¹⁰  to the Lord. 4:4 But Abel brought ¹¹  some of the firstborn of his flock – even the fattest ¹²  of them. And the Lord was pleased with ¹³  Abel and his offering, 4:5 but with Cain and his offering he was not pleased. ¹⁴  So Cain became very angry, ¹⁵  and his expression was downcast. ¹⁶ 

4:6 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why is your expression downcast? 4:7 Is it not true ¹⁷  that if you do what is right, you will be fine? ¹⁸  But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching ¹⁹  at the door. It desires to dominate you, but you must subdue it.” ²⁰

4:8 Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field.” ²¹  While they were in the field, Cain attacked ²²  his brother ²³  Abel and killed him.

4:9 Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” ²⁴  And he replied, “I don’t know! Am I my brother’s guardian?” ²⁵  4:10 But the Lord said, “What have you done? ²⁶  The voice ²⁷  of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! 4:11 So now, you are banished ²⁸  from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 4:12 When you try to cultivate ²⁹  the ground it will no longer yield ³⁰  its best ³¹  for you. You will be a homeless wanderer ³²  on the earth.”

The lesson is pretty clear here: Cain was his brother's keeper, and his jealously and rage at his brother's apparent success (as well as his own apparent failure) was both unjustified and destructive. There is no other way to read these passages as far as I can tell. Conservatives speak often of "the politics of envy" within the liberal heart, but how little room there seems to be in your own for those Jesus called "the least among you." Surely those Americans with no access to even the most basic health care fall into that category.

Doesn't his brother live in a tiny box somewhere in Africa?

Since the president's half-brother, George, is not a bullfrog or a praying mantis I assume you're referring to the incident described here. (If I'm wrong, please correct me.) I'm not sure what your point is, however; I can think of a few different ways of parsing that line about "living in a tiny box in Africa somewhere." To me it sounds vaguely racist to assume that the guy somehow deserves to be in a Nairobi jail cell for possession of a roach (if that is the case), but that's just me.  It's not on a par with burning a cross on the White House lawn or shouting "Die, Nigger, Die" (certainly not on the same page as  that wacko Randall Terry who is apparently threatening to blow up congress if all abortion everywhere is not banned immediately), but likely in the same realm. To be honest if you wrote me an e-mail with the subject line of "Just Get That Nigger Out of Office Already!" I'd have a lot more respect for you. It would be more honest on Grassfire.org's part than any of the other e-mails I have received so far.

No matter. Obama and the Democrats are pulling out the stops-- Bill
Clinton and even the Al "Gore-acle" showed up at events waxing
inspirational and calling passage of health care reform a
"moral imperative."

In fact, this Wednesday (Sept. 9), Obama will address the nation
during a joint session of Congress where I'm certain he will announce
that he has personally partnered with the Almighty to pass health
care reform!

Certitude is nice but generally misguided. Unless one of Obama's staff or God himself actually told you or one of your staff of this, I'd have to conclude that you're making an assumption, and an ass of yourself in the process. (When you ass-ume . . .) Also, Steve, the debate is a moral one, regardless of the fact that you don't like more than half the country's moral position.

500,000 Petitions Opposing ObamaCare!

In terms of purely political activism, that's a worthy goal. In terms of 1% of the population attempting to make sure the 15% of the country that currently has no health care never gets health care, well, that's pretty immoral in my book. Planning your own little "Death Panel," are you? Nice.

Jonathan, we have the momentum, and I refuse to allow Obama
or anyone else to moralize this debate in such a way as to undermine
what we've been able to accomplish so far.

All right, then: how would you like Obama or anyone else to moralize the debate? You don't specifically say, but the wording of your sentence suggests you'd be fine with it if Obama just let you have your political way.  For the record, he's been doing just that on a number of issues. So I don't get why you're so damn scared of him. Is it the Black thing? Is it those sleeveless dresses that Michelle favors? Help me out, here, because I got nothing.

That's why on Wednesday--just hours before Obama takes to the airwaves,
I want to announce to the nation that grassroots opposition to
ObamaCare is on the rise!

Good for you. It' good to want things.

Right now we are only about 60,000 signers shy of reaching our
monumental goal of half-a-million citizen signers who, like me,
refuse to be bullied or intimidated into silence!

"Intimidated into silence"? You make so much noise we can hear you from two states away! I'm sorry to hear you are being "bullied," but that gives me another question to ask: don't you ever get tired of being a victim?

Congress and Obama are desperate. We have the momentum, and with your
continued help we will continue to grow the resistance against
socialized health care.

Someone is certainly getting desperate (project much?) but I doubt it's congress, since this is not an election year. Anyway, Steve, here's what I am willing to do, one American who wants what's best for the country to another (so you say). You don't like socialism? Fine. Discard it. Publish a legal document (signed and notarized) in which you waive your right to every socialized program currently in use in this country at every level of government. Sign away your right to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, the home mortgage deduction, the whole gamut of government programs. Give them all up. Get others on Grassfire.org's mailing list to do the same. Live by the principles you espouse. In return, I will personally forward this e-mail (sans my comments) to everyone I know. It's easy, just write and sign the letter, have it notarized then convert it to a PDF and put it on the web with a link that I can use to see it. That's all I'm asking of you. For a great patriot like yourself it should come easily. If not, well, I'll have no choice but to assume you are merely another greedy, racist windbag.

I think that's fair.

By the way, this conversation that Senator Al Franken had with a group of concerned Minnesotans at the Minnesota State Fair is what an actual debate on health care looks like. Pay particular attention to the redhead with the Tea Party t-shirt. Besides speaking the name "Obama" in the same tone a Florida redneck from 1953 might say another word for a black man, once the information flows and the discussion really gets going, she has absolutely nothing to contribute. Rather like your fellow activists on Grassfire.org.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Frater

Words Worth Expunging

It's been extremely hectic here, with Blackboard going under, the new semester beginning, and the library's wiping out our Fiction section. (In the long term, a good idea that I pushed for but in the short term, I have three carts full of books pulled from the shelves for lacking call number labels, and more than a few of them were mis-cataloged when they came in.)  Not to mention my other writing projects which are consuming pretty much all my time not spent eating, sleeping or commuting to and from work. So I haven't been around as often as I would like.

Things will calm down eventually which will give me more time to think and write, but in the meantime I found this wonderful article on Truthout.org from Johann Hari of The Independent UK:

Lies, Damned Lies ... and the Doublespeak I Would Expunge

Wednesday 02 September 2009

by: Johann Hari  


    The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee. George Orwell warned that language will inevitably become cluttered with phrases that have lost their meaning - or, worse, are actually "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". He advised: "If one gets rid of these bad habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration."

    I'm not talking about the clichés that crowd us every day. "Your call is very important to us..." we are told, by automated voices that don't give a toss about our call, because if they did, they'd employ somebody to actually answer the damn phone. "With all due respect..." you'll be told, before being thoroughly disrespected. They are disingenuous, but they don't have political consequences.

    No - I am talking about phrases that, while posing as neutral descriptions of the world, contain a hidden political agenda that then moulds the assumptions of the listener. An obvious recent example is the phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques", a euphemism deliberately created by the American right to disinfect torture and make it sound reasonable. Language is often deliberately bent and misshapen for political reasons in this way. For example, in the 1980s, the proponents of the failed "War on Drugs" fought hard to turn the phrase "drug use" - plain, straightfoward, and unloaded - into "drug abuse." It evokes sinister images - it sounds like "child abuse" - but what does it mean? How is somebody who smokes cannabis to relax once a week "abusing" the drug? Do they beat up their spliffs?

    These phrases can be successfully driven from the language: during the Vietnam War, news reports blandly referred to slaughtered civilians as "collateral damage" - a bloodless phrase that evokes nothing. Today, even the Pentagon press officers avoid those words when describing the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan, because it has been so thoroughly satirised.

If you have a few minutes you really should read the whole thing. Enjoy!

Recovering When Blackboard Goes 'Poof!'

Our content/course management system (we use Blackboard v. 6.3) has gone Poof!

The problem had been developing for some time. All the signs were there. Files would go missing for days or longer, and sometimes would simply not return. Log-in problems for both students and faculty were consistent if randomly dispersed throughout the respective bodies of users. Calls and e-mails to the Blackboard tech support hub were sometimes helpful, and sometimes not. Sometimes they were ignored completely.

And yet, we took heart that we were running version 6.3 of their software, an ostensibly stable version as opposed to, say, the most recent 8.0, which is now recognized by CUNY's IT department (which adopted it wholesale upon its release) as a Blood And Sweat Sucking Techno-Leech from Hell. But that was CUNY's problem, not ours. We were smarter.

Last Thursday we lost Blackboard. More specifically, students and faculty lost the ability to log in to the system, and so were unable to access the files stored therein. Faculty couldn't upload grades, and students couldn't upload their homework or access past or current projects. 

A meeting was held at a high level of the school's administration.  One member of the committee wanted us to say nothing about the lack of access for fear of spreading panic. But we are currently in our last week of classes here, and finals start next week. And students and faculty already know that something is horribly wrong with Blackboard. So saying nothing merely shuts them out of a real situation that demands (and commands) their attention. Once that starts, then they really will panic, and that's what we'd like to avoid. So, we sent out an e-mail telling everyone that Blackboard was unavailable and we had no idea what was going to happen. Students were directed to talk to their professors and work out some arrangements for delivery of homework and final exams.

And that's where we are, one week later. Our IT guys are working with Blackboard but the outcome is far from certain and those files inside the system are still unavailable.  The lesson here should be clear as mountain air: never rely on a single electronic storage medium for mission critical data.

It's doubly annoying for those of us who consider ourselves (or are considered by those not) tech-savvy. A lot of us take these electronic systems which we rely on for so very much in our work and personal lives for granted. The technophiles among us, both students and faculty, were doing exactly that--relying on the system--because they had faith in it. Ironically, the technophobes are the ones who got off the lightest: they never used Blackboard much and so lost very little when it went bust. 

Anyway, there are simple things to do when this stuff happens:

1. First, choose reality. I know that sounds harsh, but reality says that machines fail and they often do so when we need them the most. Sometimes they can't be made to unfail. That leads to the second point, which is:

2. Backups. Backup everything and often and in several different ways.  Personally, my backups include hard copy and a flash drive. But there is no reason to stop there. I'm looking into on-line storage and a dedicated external hard drive as well.

3. Diversify. Ideally, you want your most valuable work to live in a combination of diverse places, so that if one craps out, it doesn't take the others with them. Hard copy at the office, plus a dedicated hard drive at home, plus your hard drive on your laptop, makes a good example. Backing up your work to three drives residing on the same network might not make as much sense.

4. Communicate. Students and professors (or employers and employees) need to know what each other needs to do right by the other. The only way to get that going is to talk to each other. And both sides need to understand that things happen and sometimes alternate courses of action are needed. 

This, too will pass, but since luck favors the prepared, it's a lesson worth internalizing sooner rather than later.

The Life of Nonconformity

A couple of years ago, Jonathan Coulton wrote A Talk with George, a song about an imaginary talk with George Plimpton in a bar.  You could listen to it or read the lytics, and leave it at that. Alternately (or perhaps additionally), you could read Chris Guillebeau's blog, titled The Art of Nonconformity, often. (It's linked to the "Just Plain Cool" typelist to the left.) Chris is planning to visit every country in the world within 5 years and I hope he makes it. I for one plan to check back with Chris often.

First They Burn the Books, Then They Burn the People

I admit that whenever I hear the phrase "book burning" I get conflicted. The capitalist in me figures that the book burners have to first acquire the books from somewhere, which generally means the publisher or distributor or book seller, which means they have to buy them, which means the author gets paid for his or her work, regardless of the end result. And the book burners get to enjoy their wanton destruction of paper, cloth, glue, ink and the ideas impressed upon them. Everyone wins. Right?

At this point the librarian in me--the writer, and dreamer, the guy who thinks that the recording and sharing of ideas on a global scale that the printing press made possible is quite possibly the crowning achievement of our civilization (with antibiotics being a very close runner-up)--bundles up the capitalist, shoves him back into the closet, slams the door, and wipes the dust off his hands.  Well, no, he sighs, that's not right at all. It's a fucking tragedy.

There's a lot to unpack in that article--whenever the elder generation in a small mid-western town achieves the pinnacle of homophobia and genophobia in one fell swoop, I think it deserves some real attention--but that's not what's making the town of West Bend, Wisconsin nuts. The real problem is that the principal actors in the drama have become offended by some books' contents. Phobias can be cured with hard work and courage, but offense is something rather more insidious, making it more difficult to fix.

Books represent ideas. Ideas come in all shapes, sizes, and sexes, in all languages, and from all historical periods. Many of us are more open to some of those ideas than we are others, and all of us limit the ideas we come in contact with to one extent or another. That's normal. (Unfortunate to be sure, but normal.) There's a limit to what we can handle mentally and we tend to cringe from the unfamiliar or what we dislike, even if we've been taught to dislike them with no direct experience of our own. 

So when we find an idea we just can't stomach--"inappropriate" descriptions of sex and homosexuality, in the case of the West Bend library--we can do one of two things. We can accept that such ideas exist and that some people have them, and leave it at that while making sure to limit our contact with said people. Or we can become offended.

Taking offense is dangerous and addictive. Like any narcotic in the hands of someone who just can't handle the habit, it takes over your mind, your thoughts, your pocketbook, your relationships with family, friends, and community.  It fucks you up. It's ugly. It makes you do bad things for worse reasons. It makes you into a criminal, a killer. It makes you want to kill ideas. But since that's not physically possible--an idea, once coined and communicated is pretty much immortal--and the offended know that it's impossible, they lash out at the next available target: the books and those who keep them.

The progression always happens the same way. First they become offended by the books. Then they ban the books. Then they burn the books. Then they burn the people. In this case the offended folks of West Bend, Wisconsin, aren't actually lighting the fires yet, but a few really want to.  One of them went on a call-in radio show and declared that the library director needs to be tarred and feathered (how quaint is that?)

Remember, y'all: offense kills. Stay clean.

A Lunar Addendum

In my haste to get yesterday's post up and done with, I completely overlooked this postscript from James Howard Kunstler's website on the subject:

    Tom Wolfe wrote a fabulous op-ed in the Sunday New York Times commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing of 1969.  In it, he speculated that the achievment itself spelled the end of the NASA program because it lacked a philosopher corps that might have furnished it with more meaning beyond its element of "single combat" between the US and the Soviets in the "space race."   This meaning, he said, might have been supplied by someone like NASA's chief engineer Wernher Von Braun, who once stated (in effect) before a congressional committee that  "...we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.... Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent."
    The further trouble, of course, is now that we sentient creatures seem to be in the process of destroying our home planet, how might we justify our spread to other worlds? We've fallen short both in resources and philosophy.  In our current state of evolution we seem unlikely to ever again go further afield than the moon and not exactly worthy of making trips elsewhere anyway.  Stay tuned a few hundred thousand years....

As I wrote yesterday, a return to the Moon and a trip to Mars would be great if they happen . . . if not, well, we had our chance.

RS Edit: An additional article on the wackiness of the "Space Race" by William Normam Grigg is here.

Next Stop: Mars! (Or Not)

40 years ago we landed humans on the Moon.  It was A Very Big Deal.  It really happened.  That said, let us all watch a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face.  Personally, I could watch that clip all day, but I think once is enough to make the point.

 I was a little over two years old in 1969 and don't remember a thing about the big event. My parents did, and so did their parents friends and neighbors and coworkers, however. To some extent it was a generational thing. So, first, some review: in 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched a satellite called Sputnik 1 into low orbit and for the first time, anybody on Earth could adjust their short-wave radio to a particular frequency and listen to the signal from this artifact that the future Evil Empire had sent into the sky. The engineers and engineering students understood that nothing would be the same again. The Cold War was in full swing, both superpowers were building fleets of heavy bombers and bombs to drop from them, and the nation that could build a missile big enough to push a satellite into orbit could just as easily build one big enough to carry a nuclear bomb across the North Pole.  Such a nation would then be the Unquestioned Supreme Power in the Universe, or so went the thinking at the Pentagon and Kremlin.

Faced with this obvious shortcoming, Americans behaved predictably: we got scared. Yes, we had enough B-52s and atomic bombs to annihilate all of Eastern Europe, but the Russians had demonstrated that had something better. We needed one, too.  Preferably a whole fleet of them. So over the next half-decade the U.S. government poured money into a ballistic missile program of our own. Finally, JFK put the issue on center stage when he declared in 1961 that he would make it a goal of the United States to put a man on the Moon "by the end of [the] decade." And we did.

The thing to remember is that the Apollo program didn't just happen because the American president wanted it to happen, even one as renowned as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The work that led to it was a long string of failures, partial failures and some pretty darned cool successes as engineers in the U.S. and Soviet Union perfected their understanding of ballistic science, life support systems, microgravity and acceleration, and multi-stage thrust systems. It's one thing to comprehend the trigonometry that enables you to plot where a given projectile, traveling at an assumed speed, in a particular direction for a specific amount of time, will land. Building a rocket big  enough to transport three human beings a quarter million miles of harsh vacuum and return them safely to Earth is something else. But marrying these two accomplishments into the Apollo program is several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are relatively few among us who truly grasp the difficulties and labor involved in making that day happen. There's a good reason that Buzz decked the conspiracy wacko.

But in today's news environment, the Moon is considered boring. Now, we're told, the next stop on the journey is a manned mission to Mars at some point in, say, the next 20 years.  That's fine. Dandy, even.  But what do we do in the meantime? Our existing fleet of space shuttles is A) over 20 years old and B) due to retire in a few years. The Air Force no longer builds the heavy Atlas-type boosters that were the mainstay of NASA's heavy lift fleet 30 years ago in quantity (although if the Atlas V proves anything it's that somebody can still build them well.)  And now they want us to believe that sending astronauts 35 million miles away is the answer to maintaining a viable human presence in space? I don't agree. A better choice is going back to the Moon.

I can think of a few reasons for this. The Moon is A) known territory, having been explored thoroughly by us and the Soviets back when we had the money and drive to do it, B) only a quarter million miles away, and C) getting there is something we've done before. We need to go back and dig in. There are plenty of ways to do this, some of which are insane and others pure genius. It can be done. And it makes sense to work the kinks out of any space colonization program we adopt closer to home than not.

That said, it remains the case that Mars is by any reckoning A Very Big Deal.  The thought of going there captures the imagination of astronauts, politicians, science geeks (including me) and Joe and Jane Average in a way that few projects do.  But putting some very big (and valid) parts of that deal--the price tag, the timing, the political will, for starters--off to the side a moment, there is one concern that looms large in my mind about this particular proposal: if something goes horribly wrong, we lose the entire investment. It's 35 million miles from here to there one-way and let's face it, things go wrong.  Sometimes they can be fixed (or, such as in the case of Apollo 13, not fixed but at least navigated through and endured). But, as in the case with Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and more recently, the Columbia in 2003, when something goes wrong, it often all goes wrong at once and the result is destruction and death.

I totally buy the argument that says that when you explore new frontiers, you need to pay the piper, and in the case of our collective space programs, that means the occasional blood sacrifice.  I agree, that much is the nature of the game. Only a fool or a Pollyanna would argue with it.  But let's also admit that planning a trip to Mars is a long-term goal (ten years? twenty?), so while we plan for Mars, why not get in as much practice as possible in the meantime? Why not go back to the Moon and this time stay there?

The bottom line is that a manned mission to Mars would be impressive as hell if it ever happens but not in the same way the Apollo missions were back in the seventies. Then, the Cold War was still on and the space shuttle--a remarkably successful program for all the problems--hadn't even been built yet. The entire industrial world relies on satellite communications and a dozen countries have ballistic technology sufficient to launch them into stable orbits now. But a working Moon base that gives us the reason and opportunity to develop and refine the infrastructure to get our carbon-based monkey asses off this pale blue dot and into the inner solar system for the benefit of future generations would be infinitely more worthwhile.

If it ever happens.

Codex Sinaiticus Now Viewable Online

The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known extant bibles and one of the most important handwritten manuscripts in the world, is now online for your viewing pleasure. (Mmmm, manuscripts...)

5 Things You Should Read About Gaming and Learning

This comes from Chris Cox, on behalf of the ALA Research & Scholarship Committee via the ILI-L listserv:

Looking for some reading material over the summer?  Want to learn a little more about a hot topic in instruction to inform your teaching next year?  Just in time for ALA Annual, the Research & Scholarship Committee of the Instruction Section of ACRL presents “5 Things You Should Read about Gaming and Learning,” the latest in the “5 Things…” Series.  Based on the popular EDUCAUSE series, "7 Things You Should Know About...", “5 Things” seeks to instruct and educate readers about topics relevant to library instruction, presenting articles, video and audio clips, blogs, etc., from outside librarianship to inform our work as educators.  This installment presents readings which illustrate some of the issues and challenges of incorporating gaming into education, highlight good learning principles, and discuss commercial, modified, and custom‐designed games.

Enjoy!

Happy Independence Day!

While you're out in the backyard or at the beach setting dead animals on fire and drinking your weight in beer (as I and mine will be), at some point in the festivities please take a moment to read and remember two documents that made your debauchery possible: The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Recommended reading, both of them.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Most Important Person in Town

A few weeks ago I located a new copy of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank in a Brentano's in a mall near Seaford, Long Island. It was frankly a surprise both for me and the woman behind the counter: I was under the impression that the book had been out of print (and that Brentano's had been out of business) for years and the store manager hadn't remembered it being on the shelves.  I'm into end-of-the-world stories, and this book has been on my list for some time (along with On the Beach,  Level 7 and a few other genre classics) so I snapped it up and started reading.

Alas, Babylon is a story about the end of the world.  Specifically, the world that the people of the small town called Fort Repose in Central Florida ca. 1959 have come to understand and experience as normal. It's a heavenly place of constant fresh food, electric lights, easy motoring to distant cities, air travel, plumbing, medicine, comfort, and leisure.  It is as close to Heaven on Earth as human civilization has ever come in its 100,000 years on this planet. But it's as fragile as it is comfortable and convenient, and one day it ends at the hands of Soviet bombs.

Life for many of the town's inhabitants fall apart. But there is one bright spot in all this: Alice Cooksey, the town librarian finally gets a chance to shine:

Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton.  It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.  Alice would never admit it out loud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.

It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose.  She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning.  An expensive frill, they'd said.  But without air conditioning, how could a library compete?  Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned.  You couldn't expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn't end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television.  Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.

In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled.  So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled.  There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to the springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing.  Now all this was ended.  All entertainments, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library.  The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now.  There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against the walls of stacks.  They read everything, even the classics.  And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them.  And there was useful research to do.  Randy and Doctor Gunn didn't know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter.  It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust  to make her own life worth living.

This passage stopped me cold when I first encountered it and the last few lines made me positively misty-eyed. The image of a town library, long abandoned to the "distractions" of modern life, now literally packed with hungry, anxious, physically and spiritually drained survivors of a nuclear war, every one of whom is suddenly rediscovering the fact that civilization has rested upon the printed word, is beyond description.  The last line is a bit of manipulative violin-playing, but it's easy to overlook that bit in light of the larger point that Frank is making. Namely, that this, too, shall pass. The cheap, abundant electricity that powers our society is slowly ebbing and one day, we'll have no choice but to rely on our print collections as our primary--or possibly, our only--resource.  This is not to say that digital collections are a bad idea--I have created them, maintain them, and am happy to be able to say they we have them to offer--but I am saying that they may not be the be-all and end-all of librarianship.  Even if the electric current keeps running without fail for the next thousand years, our DVDs, CD-ROMs, flash drives, hard drives, etc., are doomed to fail within a few decades. There are too many moving parts, the parts are continually redesigned and the mechanisms into which they are integrated fail and need to be replaced. During that process, the mechanisms are "improved" and data are  frequently lost because of reverse compatibility issues (meaning where old data cannot be read by new mechanisms or applications).  At the very least, library directors and librarians all over the U.S. remain infatuated with the idea that new technology must by definition be better technology.  It isn't.  New tech is merely new. Better is a judgment that each librarian must make for him or herself. Added to that is the fact that electronic resources and collections rely on a very complex web of infrastructural necessities, which itself relies on nearly free and constant flows of electric current.

Granted, writing in 1959 Pat Frank had no idea about the communication medium called ARPANET that the Pentagon would soon begin funding, or that in a generation or two, it would become the backbone of the most amazing world-spanning information exchange ever built.  But he understood just how easily and suddenly all that his generation (and ours) regarded as normal could end.  He further understood that if it did end, the books would remain, and be sought after. In a word, let's not throw out our books just yet.  One day, we will need them.

A Lesson in British Libel Law

The thing to remember as you read the article, from Sue Reid in today's Daily Mail, is that under British libel/copyright law, the defendant is presumed guilty and must prove his or her innocence, rather than in criminal cases, where "innocent until proven guilty" is still the test.

Back 'cures', a brave scientist and an epic court battle: How Britain's libel laws are threatening free speech

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:38 PM on 01st July 2009

With his round, John Lennon-style specs and nerdish good looks, physicist Simon Singh is an unlikely hero.

As one of the country's most acclaimed science writers, he has spent much of his 45 years cloistered in his Home Counties study penning Number One bestsellers on mathematical conundrums, code-breaking and the Big Bang theory.

Turning his hand to alternative medicine, last year he published a book called Trick Or Treatment? that included a chapter on the history of chiropractic therapy (the manipulation of the spine to realign the back), which was invented by grocer and spiritual healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America.

Inspired by the 'miraculous' recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by manipulating or 'racking' his back, Palmer said that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by trapped vertebrae.

Suddenly, the therapy (which takes its name from the Greek word for hand) became a near-religion, with Palmer boasting he was a successor to Christ and Mohammed. He even practised vigorous 'racking' on his own children, which led to him beingrrested and jailed for cruelty.

Palmer's ideas caught on and, in 1925, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) was set up and several clinics opened specialising in the treatment. Chiropractors were able, it seemed, to cure a myriad of ailments and began to broaden their therapies.

Recently, the association has said that even children suffering from colic, eating problems, ear infections and asthma can be helped.

However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion. Though the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners advocate its use  -  especially for back pain  -  some scientists say there is no evidence that chiropractic spinal manipulation is better than other forms of back massage.

This has led to widespread debate in the medical world, with some doctors refusing to refer patients to chiropractors, claiming the treatment does not work and can even cause harm.

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy!

Anthony Benjamin Frater, RIP

Anthony Frater passed from this earth to whatever awaited him on April 8, 2001, making today roughly the 3000th day since he left. He is still missed.

Is My iPhone the Most Dangerous Cell Phone Ever?

A good friend of mine sent me this link in an e-mail recently, warning me about the dangers of my cell phone (I have an iPhone, which the video singles out as "the most dangerous" example of the gadget kingdom.) She's a good friend, very health-conscious, and very much like family to me. She means well. But she listened to a fast-talking salesman who used just enough scientific jargon to sound knowledgeable while misleading the listener.

This video is properly termed an advertisement. Advertising is not an exact science but it does utilize very well-designed tricks and techniques to get you to buy a particular product that's being offered. What the presenter does is to separate his sales pitch into two parts: 1) he tells you that you have a problem. Telling you about the problem should ideally involve generating some emotional response, often making you feel lonely, mildly freaked out or worried. The follow-up is where he 2) he tells you that he has a solution, which he also describes. This is Advertising 101: generate an emotion, then hit them with the product. 

The presenter in the linked video clip knows what he's doing in terms of following the format for an ad, but he he's either lying about or fairly ignorant of the device's shortcomings to support his claim. (I freely admit that the iPhone does have real shortcomings.) First, he says that the iPhone acts like a base station. This is wrong. A base station acts like a signal booster between a Wi-Fi node and a much larger transmitter, like a microwave tower. The iPhone can interact with such networks (Wi-Fi, Edge, 3G) but it can’t send, resend, or receive some other phone’s data, and then pass it on to a third exchange like a cell tower, which is what it would be doing if this claim were true.  Theoretically, the iPhone could do this if it was already active on an existing Wi-Fi or cellular network, but no peer-to-peer applications have been written for it yet (not that I’ve heard.) I’m less clear on whether this is due to technical limitations of the equipment/software or Apple’s legal intervention, although one developer I heard from said it was strictly a hardware limitation. Additionally, the range on a transmitter the size of an iPhone is very limited, and AT&T’s cellular network coverage is concentrated in highly populated areas with lots of cell towers and proper signal booting equipment.

Whenever someone cites a supposedly well-known fact (“Cell phones cause brain cancer!”) without providing a reference or citation to the research, I get nervous. No citation of longitudinal “X hours of exposure to 200 Hz carrier wave induces cell damage” studies are given in the written or video material, and even if it were, a carrier wave tends to be a much higher frequency than the input signal. A 1 GHz input signal cannot be transmitted by a 200Hz carrier wave although the reverse is true. (I admit I may have misunderstood what he was saying.)

(As a brief aside, the differences between signal frequencies are significant, and differ by several orders of magnitude. Imagine you're walking on the beach somewhere. The sand that shifts between your toes and gets into absolutely everything is in the gigahertz (GHz) range. The bigger pebbles, like gravel or crushed stone, is what you find in the Megahertz (MHz) range. A rock big enough to skim over the surface of a pond is in the Kilohertz (KHz) range and any stone big enough to painfully stub your toe against is in the Hertz (Hz) range. I'm oversimplifying for the sake of illustration, but keep in mind it's the proportions that are important.)

Anyway, the video claims that signals in the 200MHz range cause health problems, which is fine, but the iPhone doesn’t use any signal frequency as low as 200Hz. (I couldn’t find any type of radio transmitter that does.)  It uses a quad-band GSM (the international cellular standard range), which operates at 850, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz, generally toward the upper range in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Far East. The speaker/microphone’s audio frequency response ranges from 20 to 20,000Hz, but that is the range of sounds the speakers are capable of converting into an electronic signal, not the frequency of the carrier or the input wave.

 He also talks freely about “radiation” (the word appears 25 times in a three-page document) but doesn’t differentiate ionizing radiation from non-ionizing radiation. It’s a pretty important difference. Ionizing radiation is the type which is powerful enough to separate electrons from atomic nuclei, ionizing them (e.g., X-rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, beta particles, neutron bombardment.) This ionization damages the DNA in your body’s cells and will kill you with sufficient exposure. Non-ionizing radiation (generally the less energetic portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves, microwaves, and everything in the visible light spectrum) isn’t nearly as powerful; these waves have the ability to merely excite the electrons in the target atoms, not sever them. I’m the first to say that with sufficient power, you can probably blast an electromagnetic wave powerful enough to ionize every cell in the human body, at least in theory. But radios small enough to carry in a pocket (including cell phones and the iPhone) are too small to ionize anything.

 I was surprised to hear him even mention Bluetooth earpieces, since they use exactly the same frequency range of carrier waves that the phone does, and they sit in your ear all day, so using one would actually be worse than not (he belatedly admits this as part of the pitch).

 Finally, you’ll notice that he’s selling his new supposedly safe earpiece for $25 apiece (plus $5 for adapters) and up (i.e. the "solution" to your "problem" which is the threat supposedly posed by your continual iPhone use). The entire bottom portion of the website is devoted to making a sale as convenient for the reader as possible. (That’s Marketing 102). In short, he’s trying to make a living, not save me from brain cancer.

I’m the first to admit that we don’t know exactly what the long-term effects of persistent cell phone use might be (I suspect that the people most at risk are the yuppies and teens who remain glued to them for several hours each day over the course of many years), but I don’t think this promoter or his staff writers know either. Also, I have never used the advertised product and don't know if it does what he says it will do, or not. Finally, if there is someone out there reading this who is in a position to know more about the iPhone than I do and spots a mistake, I trust they'll let me know.

Utilizing LC's Controlled Vocabularies

I found this e-mail from Margaret Mauer's TS-LIBRARIANS listserv in my mailbox recently:

I have been experimenting with the newly opened ID.LOC.GOV web service this evening as I am thinking about pointing it out to folks via TechKNOW. It’s pretty cool. LCSH is the first controlled vocabulary that LC is opening up. The goal of the service is to “enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access…” at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/.  Type in a term like “retrievers” select the term “retrievers” and then go to the visual interface tab. It provides you with a data map of how the term “retrievers” connects to other terms in the controlled vocabulary. The search mechanism is sort of rudimentary, but the concept is terrifically interesting. Here’s the link to the about page for the new service:  http://id.loc.gov/authorities/about.html.

 I’ve been saying for a long time that we under-utilize our controlled vocabularies. Perhaps this will start to change this.

I've taken a look at the service she describes and it is indeed pretty cool. The "details" tab of the results page for any given query offers a metric ton of raw data: the URI and heading type, as well as a variety of live links to related, broader and narrower search terms. Besides that it also gives you any and every source it located the query string in, and lists those for you. Finally, you get the date the item was created and last modified and the LC classification data. Most of the data is available in multiple formats (generally including RDF/XML, N-Triples and so on). The "visualize" tab for the results gives the 2-dimensional relational  map for the term. 

Enjoy!

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed

There's a lot going on here today which is preventing me from posting more than occasionally, but I thought I'd share this:

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed
Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph
Posted June 1, 2009
 

By Ron Cowen, Science News

WASHINGTON—The muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago resemble the “wa wa” of the unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.

Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.

Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

Instead, these visual renditions of sound, known as phonautograms, languished at the French patent office and elsewhere in Paris for some 150 years. In 2008, record historian David Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and his colleagues, part of an informal group of researchers known as First Sounds, uncovered the first cache of them. Last year, he and First Sounds colleague Patrick Feaster of  Indiana University in Bloomington played what appeared to be a recording of a young girl singing a 10-second snippet of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” which Léon Scott had recorded in 1860.

But a group of thought-to-be-lost Léon Scott phonautograms was found late last year in Paris and dates from 1857. “It was immediately apparent that this would be some of the most important [phonographic] excavations to date,” Giovannoni said.

Sound historian Sam Brylawski, former head of the Library of Congress’ recorded sound division in Washington, D.C., and now affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the new findings are important on several levels. These are not only the first known recordings, Brylawski notes, but are “providing the full picture of the history of recorded sound.… This is a biography unfolding.”

Read the rest of this story here. Enjoy!

Shit Happens to the Best of Us

I read this article by Edmund Andrews of the NY Times when it came out and realized that shit happens to the best of us.  And it does.  We are human, and we do stupid things for reasons that seem sound--kind of--at the time. At least part of this essential truth comes from the fact that humans possess huge brains that are far more likely to make decisions based on emotional responses than logical, analytical ones.  I could, of course, be especially obnoxious and suggest that getting roughly a million dollars in debt when you only make 120 grand a year is not the best idea, no matter when it occurs or why.  I confess that at the time, all I could think was "you poor fuck" while noticing that the article had not been written by, say, Floyd Norris or David Cay Johnston.

And now it turns out that there is more to the story than Mr. Andrews wrote. This recent bit from Andy's website offers much fodder for cynics everywhere, including myself:

Turns out, there’s more to the story.  Did Edmund Andrews mention anywhere in his article or his book, Busted, that his wife had twice before declared bankruptcy?  Chivalrous of him to leave that out; but, as Megan McCardle notes for The Atlantic, relevant to his tale.  Writing of this new twist, Andrew Leonard complains, “One of Busted’s selling points is the level of personal detail Andrews provides about his finances and his marriage. To leave out a detail so relevant to his tale of debtor’s woe smacks of outright dishonesty – and it’s exactly the kind of behavior that you would hope a New York Times reporter would avoid at all costs.”  Nor is Leonard buying Andrews’ response.

I strive each day to pass no judgements on anyone.  That said, sometimes the cynic in me has it right. Enjoy!

The Creative Writer's Bill of Rights

Lenny Schiff, a friend of mine from college and one of the best writers/teachers/musicians/performers I know--his songs about "The F Train" and "Utopia Parkway" remain etched on my brain 17 years after hearing them--wrote this manifesto last year for his creative writing students. Then he, lost it, forgot about it, then found it again just recently. He thinks it's a little glib, but I think these rules are right on the money. I post them here with his gracious permission. Enjoy!

The writer shall have the right:

1. To flip off all critics, external and internal.
2. To write out of sequence.
3. To get right to the good stuff and skip the boring stuff.
4. To change point of view, tense, voice or anything else on a moment's notice.
5. To change the story as desired.
6. To make discoveries.
7. To write any character, regardless of character or author's gender, race, age, nationality, religion, sexuality, or physical or mental ability.
8. To steal ideas from other writers-- and filmmakers, artists, fishermen, etc.
9. To exercise the imagination without limits, free of guilt, responsibility or fear.
10. To have a really crappy writing day, and feel bad about it, and then get back to writing.

What They Mean by "Recovery"

First, as I've been writing for the past few years on this day, Happy International Workers Day! This is a day to spend a minute or two remind ourselves that while we work to live, we should not necessarily live to work.  There's a fundamental difference between the two points of view.

Two forms of life on this planet live to work: insects and bacteria. Neither are good role models for human activity.

People work to live.  We do things with our hands, our feet, our brains to provide for ourselves and families in terms of acquiring food to eat, water to drink, shelter within to live, play, love, sleep. This is normal.  Working is normal.  Some of us look forward to working at one job more than another but deep down we know that in a finite universe nothing is free and we are supposed to  earn our keep somehow. The only segment of human society you'll likely encounter resistance to this idea from is the very rich, who need to answer the question, "Who is supposed to do your share of the work and why should they?" The rest of us understand that it's natural to work.

For all that, as Fred Clark, Joe Bageant and others have pointed out, there's no section of any daily newspaper published anywhere with a section called "Labor". Not even one called  "Work." Yet most of them have "Business" sections. Which is technically correct, but when was the last time you said "I need to go to business," or "I can't go out tonight, I'm handling the late shift at business?" How about "Don't call me Sir, I business for a living"? No, you don't hear it because what we do is work. We do not "business." Even those of us who believe in the power of business to make life on this pale blue dot a bit easier, happier, and healthier for ourselves and others, do not "go to business."

Business in the classical sense means "the act of buying and selling." (The first 3 entries in Dictionary.com identify this meaning.) Work, on the other hand, means physical action, to exert oneself in the act of creating something, or a place of employment. To make the distinction as simple as possible, work built the world, while business paid for it.

The reason we work to live is because work, until fairly recently, had limits.  Until we started using machines to make other machines to make more stuff, faster and in greater quantity than was previously possible, work had real limits. A field, for example, can only be worked so many hours in a given day subject to daylight and the limits of the human body. Ever plant rice in a paddy? If you're doing it manually, it's intense, muscle straining, back-breaking work that you do hunched over with rice shoots carried in one hand, knee deep in up to a foot of water, ankle deep in thick mud for hours at a time. You have to take each shoot and bury the roots under several inches of mud just a few inches away from it's neighbor. There's a reason the older generation of rice farmers in the Far East are all shaped like capital Ls. A more accessible test of endurance might be just clearing out a one-acre plot of land with a hoe. If you haven't tried it, you should. Blisters, dust, and aching muscles are instructive.

But then came the industrial revolution and factories replaced individual workshops.  Work-related skills became less focused on total product creation and more on creating a small portion of the product on an assembly line. The good news is that the system worked. A great deal of new stuff was made by a smaller fraction of the total population than ever before, and these things could be sold for a lot less than before. And life--material comfort, at any rate--did indeed improve for millions. The bad news is that the system needed two things to be invariably true for it to operate: low-cost energy and materials, and unlimited markets. As sensible people understand, neither of these are givens any longer. Capitalism was born in an era of cheap raw materials, nearly free energy, and expensive labor. Today we have exactly the opposite problem. Labor costs can be mitigated to some extent, but with energy and raw materials becoming more difficult to pull out of the ground and in lesser amounts when it's acquired (therefore growing more expensive), mass production just isn't going to work that well any more. This would be true even if markets really were unlimited, and as any salesman who has dealt with the problem of market saturation and overbought customers can tell you, there are no unlimited markets. Not really.

Just on a whim I typed '''U.S.' AND 'economy' AND 'recovery'" into Google and came up with 48 million results.  Replacing the word "recovery" with "depression" got 20 million hits and replacing it with "recession" returned 17 million.  So if this amazingly unscientific survey of the web suggests anything it might imply that people are pretty interested in recovering from this global economic mess that we find ourselves in.  But "recover" is a tricky word, usually used to refer to going from a bad situation to a good one (or at least a better one). It implies that the problems you're currently working through are temporary and limited. It implies that the current unfortunate situation is not normal.

Unfortunately, that is not the case any more. The system we were using to provide for our physical (and to some extent emotional and spiritual) comfort is running up against a reality that no longer exists. So, we have a decision to make, governments, businesses and individuals, all of us. We have to decide what recovering actually means.

That's not a simple question to ask anyone, especially anyone who's never given much thought to the invisible (and incredibly complicated) network of labor, transport and work (and business) that's made our current condition possible over the past century. It still needs to be asked. It should be thought about long and hard and you should do so in private, with the TV or radio,  Internet and cell phone turned off, and preferably unplugged. It is a personal thing to imagine in a private setting.

I can imagine three broad ways this will pan out. First, we do nothing--to choose by not choosing. That's the default setting on human psychology, as repetition breeds habit, habit breeds familiarity, and we are drawn to the familiar. We'll keep borrowing money we don't have to spend it on things we don't need and keep wondering why things are so rotten while we continue to elect politicians who may give us hope but refuse to give honest answers to real concerns.  

Another possibility is we junk the whole system and invent something genuinely new. Being new it would have to be more fair/honest/just than what we have in place now. Unfortunately, I have no idea likely it would be that we could rewrite the habits of several generations, but it's something to think about.

A third possibility is to voluntarily downsize our lives, which means downsizing our expectations from life.  Most of what we expect from our lives, or families, friends, employers, neighbors, and strangers alike has been sold to us like a bill of goods by a very complex and extremely effective marketing industry. They push a button and we jump. This process is nearly unconscious in the American mind, so it will be a royal pain to learn to resist these messages, but I can only see benefit to us personally and socially if we try it. What happens afterward will likely make us less comfortable than we are used to being, but at least it will be more honest.

Happy International Workers Day.

Weaving the Threads Together

It's impossible to cover absolutely every blog post, article, or story that appears on the Intarwebs because there's just too much worthwhile stuff to read and too few hours in the day to read it.  Having said that, there are a few things I've come across recently that I think deserve a bit of time out of your busy day.

I admit that the news about Swine Flu in Mexico gave me a flashback to working at NYAM, when SARS made the news. Two coworkers canceled conference trips to Canada, and my then boss postponed a trip to China.  Hong Kong effectively shut down for several weeks, according to a few people I know who'd been working there at the time.

Now, it appears to be our turn.

First, take a look at Elaine Meinel Supkis' excellent background briefing on the flu. The current  strain of Swine Flu In Mexico and California may be much ado about nothing (if you can call 60+ deaths "nothing") or it may turn out to become as bad or worse than the 1918 outbreak, or it could--and probably will-- turn out to be something in between. Education is key to keeping your balance when listening to the many sources of information on the topic. This is a good place to begin. 

That done, you might want to read James Howard Kunstler's blog post from today (where I nicked the previous link from).  Kunstler's a bit extreme in his analysis but that doesn't mean he's wrong. One point he makes is worth repeating here: public health crisis events have a way of screwing with the daily behind-the-scenes mechanics of life that we depend on, yet ignore when things are working to our satisfaction.  Simple things like public transportation, hospitals, electricity, hot and cold running water, food being trucked to the local supermarket, etc.  The systems that provide all these things get disrupted when germs have their ways with the people who make those systems run.  Some systems bounce back more quickly than others, and some don't bounce back at all. Just something to remember.

Charles Hugh-Smith has another rather more precise analysis of exactly this point, very much worth your time.

In the meantime, wash your hands, Lysol your office phone and computer keyboard, and maybe rely on Netflix and eating in for a few weeks.  Good luck!