The Rogue Scholar

SOPA & PIPA: The Basics

SOPA/PIPA: What You Need to Know, from Political Hotsheet.

That is all.

Books, Sex, and Salesmanship

Disclosure: I love books, I'm into sex, and I worked a sales floor (including phone sales, a stint in PR, and another in ad work) for the better part of two decades. So I like to think I have at least a passing familiarity with all three subjects. Mostly, it means that I'm difficult to offend. At least, I was. Equinox, a company that operates a number of fitness clubs (aka, gyms), managed to do so. A recent ad from them . . . well, words don't do this thing justice:

On reflection, offend is the wrong word. If I was offended my reaction would be different. Erin Gibson was offended, if her blog post was any indication:

[...]as a former member and a health conscious feminist, I fucking LOATHE this new ad campaign. At over $150 a month, you must know that the type of women who can afford your gym are probably professionals who aren’t thrilled to get e-mails from you guys that include photos of under weight models looking dead inside while being rag-dolled around by a buff shirtless dude. Me included.

That's offense. What I feel is a sense of raw disgust. It's insulting to the intelligence. I suspect what the ad guys were trying to do here was link "fit" with "smart".  The trouble is they insisted on using a crude sexual image to do so. That just confuses everything.

Sex and intelligence are not exactly old buddies in American lore, but they can be linked successfully. Just take a gander at Naked Girls Reading if you don't believe me. No less a hottie than Marilyn Monroe carried around books and wore glasses in half her movies. On the other hand, using sex to sell stuff is as old as ads for cars, cigarettes, and alcohol. 

If you must use sex in an ad there's a simple formula you're supposed to use: buy the product, get laid. That's it. If you're ancient like me, you remember those Charles Atlas ads from comic books in the 1970s, where the nerd gets abused by the jock and disrespected by his date, gets into shape care of the Charles Atlas program, then beats up the bully to win the fawning admiration of the girl. Similar aim, same message: buy the product, get laid.

Here, the nerd is already buff because (I guess we're meant to assume) he spent a year at Equinox getting ripped like Jesus. Hell, in this ad the nerd is already doing the chick. ("Thanks, Equinox!") So . . . what's the point again?

The message Equinox used doesn't help: there are textual references in the caption to "get[ting] schooled with invigorating group fitness" and "learn[ing] a thing or two about relaxation". I suppose that's okay as far as forced metaphors and crappy copywriting goes, but look at their faces: neither looks like they're having fun. The girl looks doped up and the guy looks like he's on a mission from the government. Worse, the chick is (un)dressed in what could easily be a school uniform. Her empty stare could just as easily be a plea to the viewer to "Don't just stand there . . . do something!"

What should I do? Joining a gym is one possibility . . .  but I feel like I should pick up the phone and dial 911.  (Statutory rape, anyone?)

Disturbing as the soft-core porn is, what really pisses me off is the bookcase. Take a good look at the books. They are massive, badly piled tomes that have no titles. They're not real books any more than buff guy or his date can be confused with real people. They are stock shells of books, the kind of books that bored, lazy film students use when they need a shoot a scene in a room with books but can't be bothered to actually go out and acquire the books themselves. That would take thought as it would imply character--hey, that's real work.  If they were real, they'd probably be 19th century reference books. Books with outdated content, devoid of personality or relevance. Books with an inch of dust on them from misuse and neglect.

 So, instead of "Get ripped! Get laid!" we end up with "Get ripped! Rape a dead-eyed blonde in an abandoned library!" Yowza.

The only place this ad really might belong is in a sex ed class for 10th grade girls, with the caption "Don't let this happen to you! Buy ACME pepper spray!"

So, while I agree with John Waters' suggestion that we need to get back to associating reading with sex, ads like this one are not the way to do it. (Not that this ad was meant to.)

Stay classy, Equinox.

Merry Christmas, Jews!

 

Rich White Guy To Poor Black Kid: Get Technical

Gene Marks, a contributor to Forbes Magazine, (herein known by the phrase Rich White Guy, or RWG) offered some advice to an archtypical Poor Black Kid (PBK) last week regarding how to educate himself out of the ghetto by means of modern technology.  I'm not going to discuss his qualifications for giving advice of this type (none), nor the possibility that he has no idea what he's talking about (significant), nor the barely concealed privilege and racism of his remarks. That's been done very well elsewhere.

I want to talk about his advice to "get technical."

If I was a poor black kid I would get technical.  I would learn software.  I would learn how to write code.  I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online.  I would study on my own.  I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.

Okay. That's a pretty general account of technical work. I'm not sure what "learning software" means: Learning to use Office 2010 well? Learning to write HTML? XML? Perl? Javascript? C++?  All have different applications, and learning to code competently in one won't necessarily help you with the others. High school (and college) classes in these subjects are limited by the quality of the slowest student--I found that out for myself studying XML at Queens College while pursuing my MLS. I got the concepts and the structure, but many of my classmates didn't. We stopped well short of where I'd hoped we'd be and I finished the studying on my own outside of class.

So, Poor Black Kid (PBK) will need textbooks and a lot of time to sit down in a quiet place where he won't be interrupted to study. That such places in urban settings can be few and far between doesn't seem to have occurred to RWG. The same goes for PBK's polishing his written communication skills. Want to learn to write well? Read several hundred books, several thousand articles, and write a thousand words or more a day for a year. That's how it's done. Time, space, and solitude are what's needed. Public libraries would be good spaces to do this in if they weren't being de-funded left and right.

Part the second:

And I would use the technology available to me as a student.  I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays.  That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home than on the streets.  And libraries and schools have computers available too.  Computers can be purchased cheaply at outlets like TigerDirect and Dell’s Outlet.  Professional organizations like accountants and architects often offer used computers from their members, sometimes at no cost at all.

At first glance this is not bad advice, but again, it misses the point. Three things stand out to me as a guy who sold computers and the components that went into them for years. First, schools and libraries (not to mention school libraries) in neighborhoods where Poor Black Kids go to school are likely to be poorly funded, staffed and maintained. The value of the equipment they have is directly proportional to the amount of money spent, which, as I said, is not likely to be high. So the equipment this kid is meant to educate himself on is likely to be old and semi-functional, or non-functional at least part of the time.

Second, what he calls "cheap" computers generally don't last more than a couple of years. That's why they are cheap. If you spent several thousand dollars at Dell to get the good stuff, then pay for a top-tier service contract on top of that, you get real customer service. If you didn't, you get sent to Dell Hell where you get to spend a fortune in phone charges listening to some guy with an ESL accent insist that you should turn your PC off and then on again. Third, yes, professional organizations often offer perks to their members but Poor Black Kid is obviously not a member of these fraternities yet, so this tidbit falls a bit flat.

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study.  I’d become expert at Google Scholar.   I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books.  I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy.  (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.)  I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

Now we get serious. It's time for Tech Talk.

"Free" is a relative term. Air and water are free until you need someone (say, the government) to guarantee it's safe to breathe and drink, or unless you want to take it with you in a big tank. That takes money. Technology in all its myriad forms, applications, and performances, takes real money to make happen. What RWG doesn't seem to get is this: what he calls free technology is only available because thousands of people who produce it worked long hours with no pay then made a conscious choice to give it away it for free. Textbooks--the mainstay of higher education in the industrialized world--are never free, and they are what the education industry thrives on: text book sales. (Forbes, being a publisher of some note, surely understands this.)

So. Does PBK have to pay for the software? No. But will he have to scrape up $80 for a 6-inch Kindle or more for a Netbook or laptop to make use of this online material? You bet your booty.

Anyway, here's an experiment for you: send your application to harvard with the words "Self educated by means of free technology" scrawled on it instead of a high school transcript, and then call them a week later and see how you did. If you're accepted, I'll eat a bug.

 I don't have a problem with Google Scholar per se (I'm unsure if it will ever live up to the hype but that's another post), but in my experience both as a teacher and student, services like Spark Notes and Cliff Notes do more to wreck kids' ability to read a book than anything else. You won't understand the book any better, you just get exposed to a slim cross-section of it. That's not reading. That's cramming for an exam. Not a habit PBK should be cultivating this early in his academic career. Sources like TED and KhanAcademy are worthwhile, or one could be really ambitious and take a look at MIT's Open Courseware website.

I love Project Gutenberg. How can you not like a source of 36,000 free ebooks for download to a PC or portable device? The books are high-quality items all produced by bona fide publishers, and are made available through the effort of thousands of volunteers. The trouble is that these books are not generally textbooks. Classics, yes, and lots of them (here's the top 100 titles by download), but Business, Science, and Math classes don't use the classics. They use textbooks. Those are expensive and not generally available on line except in the most expensive universities.

The CIA World Fact Book, also isn't a bad resource. It's not the most easily accessible almanac in the world but, yes, it is complete, as long as you remember that its data are limited to descriptions of countries. Wikipedia, on the other hand is not a primary resource. For anything. Ever. Why? It's written and edited by absolutely everyone regardless of background, education, or research. Some articles are clearly better (or worse) than others, but using Wikipedia as a primary source is a sure ticket to an F from any competent teacher.

That said, one thing Wikipedia can be extremely useful for is to show you where else to look for source material. Scan the article, then go to the reference links. Those will lead you to better sources.

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates.  I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school.  I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

I won't argue with any of this on a point-for-point basis, as they are good suggestions for people who make continual and substantive use of online files. But--and you knew there'd be a but--Diigo,  Backpack, Evernote and all those other good suggestions require all participants to have a PC of his or her own. In poor families, you're more likely to see one device shared among several people, or none at all. Again, Poor Black Kid is more likely to be relying on crappy equipment and spotty online access than not. These well-meant ideas don't work so well under those conditions.

I don't know what exactly our Rich White Guy thought he was thinking when he wrote this. None of it this is bad advice as far as it goes. But it seems inappropriate to me. It assumes that Poor Black Kids go to schools that are equally well funded and equipped as Rich White Kids' schools. That is not the case. It hasn't been the case for decades. Up to date textbooks, equipment, competent and well-paid teachers, and the time and opportunity to study are what make mediocre students into good ones and good students into great ones.

So . . . yes. Medicore White Guy is technically correct even as he misses (or obfuscates) the larger point: Poor Black Kid can use technology to help educate himself out of the inner city. Possibly even into a job in Big White Sky Building. But the tech he probably has access to will break often, take a lot longer to work, and the experience will suck.

But hey, at least it's possible, right?

Library Janitor Discovers Silver Coin Cache

I'll merely point out that this is why you need an archivist on your staff:

A curious library caretaker in the Bavarian city of Passau has discovered a treasure trove of ancient silver coins and medals that went overlooked for more than two centuries. The surprise find is reportedly worth as much as six figures.

Janitor Tanja Höls had often passed by an unassuming wooden box stowed away in an archive in Passau's historic state library, but it wasn't until about two weeks ago that curiosity got the best of her and she was decided take a look inside.

What she found were dozens of coins, most of them made of silver. "I had no idea that I'd found a treasure," the 43-year-old told the German news agency DAPD on Wednesday. But when she told the head of the library in the Bavarian city what she had seen, he soon realized their value.

"This find is a real bonanza," Markus Wennerhold said, adding that it happened to coincide with preparations for the library's 400th anniversary.

The library believes that the collection of 172 well-preserved coins likely belonged to Passau's prince-bishops. Wennerhold suspects that they were hidden there around 1803 during Germany's secularization, when such church assets were transferred to the state. They may have wanted to keep them out of the hands of tax officials.

Read the whole article here.

The Perfect Christmas Gift

Press Release: ALA Alarmed at Seizure of Occupy Wall Street Library

From the website of the American Library Association:

NEWS
For Immediate Release
November 17, 2011

Contact: Macey Morales

ALA alarmed at seizure of Occupy Wall Street library, loss of irreplaceable material

CHICAGO -The People’s Library, a library constructed by the New York Occupy Wall Street movement, was seized in the early morning hours of Nov. 15, by the New York Police Department during a planned raid to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park. The library held a collection of more than 5,000 items and provided free access to books, magazines, newspapers and other materials.  According to ALA members who visited the site, the library reflected many of ALA’s core intellectual freedom values and best practices—a balanced, cataloged collection, representing diverse points of view, that included children’s books and reference service often provided by professional librarians.

City officials assured library staff that library materials would be safely transported to a sanitation depot, but the majority of the collection is still missing and returned items were damaged, including laptops and other equipment.  The likelihood of recovering all library materials is bleak, as witnesses reported that library materials were thrown into dumpsters by police and city sanitation workers.

Longstanding ALA policy states: 

“The American Library Association deplores the destruction of libraries, library collections and property, and the disruption of the educational purpose by that act, whether it be done by individuals or groups of individuals and whether it be in the name of honest dissent, the desire to control or limit thought or ideas, or for any other purpose.”

American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael released the following statement regarding the destruction of the People’s Library:

“The dissolution of a library is unacceptable. Libraries serve as the cornerstone of our democracy and must be safeguarded. An informed public constitutes the very foundation of a democracy, and libraries ensure that everyone has free access to information.   

“The very existence of the People’s Library demonstrates that libraries are an organic part of all communities. Libraries serve the needs of community members and preserve the record of community history.  In the case of the People’s Library, this included irreplaceable records and material related to the occupation movement and the temporary community that it represented.

“We support the librarians and volunteers of the Library Working Group as they re-establish the People’s Library.”    

The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 60,000 members. Its mission is to promote the highest quality library and information services and public access to information.

To comment, share, or see related resources and images, go here.

The Ultimate Zuccotti Park Raid Video

From the enterprising souls at BoingBoing:

 

You're welcome.

The Book Dumpers by Kathleen Peine

I came across this article by Kathleen Peine at the CounterPunch.org website, and I'm posting this excerpt as a follow-up to my post from yesterday regarding the destruction of the #OWS People's Library by the NYPD:

Here’s a little trick brought to you by a lover of simplicity: did you know that you can look at any political group or entity in power…then look at how they treat books. Do they value or destroy them? This will allow you to figure out who the good guys are! Pretty simple, huh? Decent entities do not fear sunlight or the free exchange of ideas. It’s a certain truth. Folks who burn books or tear down libraries are never who you want in charge. But they always seem to find their way there, don’t they?

It’s obvious when a nation has reached a dangerous time -when books are targeted as dangerous trash to remove. Hey, that’s sort of how they treated the OWS protesters themselves. They are full of ideas and open horizons – the Bloomberg billionaires don’t want that sort of thing to dwell in the minds of the staff (or would be staff). And the first OWS encampment was a hotbed for the sharing of these ideals.

And let me get this straight….in order to improve on the hygiene of the park; they took items in trash trucks to redistribute later? Sure.

None of it makes sense because once again, they destroy to save, beat to bring order, and create filth to bring cleanliness.

Read the whole thing here.

NYPD Destroys #OccupyWallSreet Library

No, I'm not being facetious or hyperbolic. In their effort to "clean up" (Newspeak for "evict and intimidate") the Zuccotti Park OWS crowd last night, the police tossed over 5,000 books into dump trucks. Those books were private donations by people who happened to give a shit about educating their fellow men and women in the ways of the world. Thanks to what amounts to police state politics they are gone, and they are not coming back. If I had to assume a cost of the lost items I'd make it somewhere in the twenty-five to thirty thousand dollar range. I don't know about you, but for us that several semesters worth of book budgeting.

From Media Bistro:

The Occupy Wall Street librarians have been tweeting the eviction all night: “NYPD destroying american cultural history, they’re destroying the documents, the books, the artwork of an event in our nation’s history … Right now, the NYPD are throwing over 5,000 books from our library into a dumpster. Will they burn them? … Call 311 or 212-639-9675 now and ask why Mayor Bloomberg is throwing the 5,554 books from our library into a dumpster.”

From the NY Times:

The operation in and around Zuccotti Park was intended to empty the birthplace of a protest movement that has inspired hundreds of tent cities from coast to coast. On Monday in Oakland, Calif., hundreds of police officers raided the main encampment there, arresting 33 people. Protesters returned later in the day. But the Oakland police said no one would be allowed to sleep there anymore, and promised to clear a second camp nearby.

And, since a picture is worth a thousand words, from Animal New York:

Occupy Wall Street Getting Raided by NYPD

The one bright spot in all this mishegos is the fact that the courts are fimly on the side of the occupiers, at least when it comes to illegal random seizures of their belongings and space. Bloomberg is trying to nullify that, too.

So bite me, Mike Bloomberg. Bite me hard.

 

 

Happy Prime Number Day!

By which I mean of course that today is November11l, 2011, abbreviated in many parts of the world as 11/11/11 and I have arranged for this to post at 11:11:11 am EST. That won't happen again for twelve whole hours, unless you keep military time in which case it will never happen again.

Some quick and dirty properties of Eleven: obviously, it is a prime number, the 5th smallest prime number. It is the smallest two-digit prime number in the decimal base; as well as, of course, in undecimal (where it is the smallest two-digit number). It is also the smallest three-digit prime in ternary, and the smallest four-digit prime in binary, (who knew?) but a single-digit prime in bases larger than eleven, such as duodecimal, hexadecimal, vigesimal and sexagesimal. 11 is the fourth Sophie Germain prime, the third safe prime, the fourth Lucas prime, the first repunit prime, and the second good prime. Although it is necessary for n to be prime for 2ⁿ − 1 to be a Mersenne prime, the converse is not true: 2¹¹ − 1 = 2047 which is 23 × 89. The next prime is 13, with which it comprises a twin prime. 11 is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. Displayed on a calculator, 11 is a strobogrammatic prime and a dihedral prime because it reads the same whether the calculator is turned upside down or reflected on a mirror, or both.

Or, that's what Wikipedia tells me. For the moment, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.

George Takei on his FB status update said that it's "the one day when dyslexia has no power." One may also think of it as a pair of conjoined yet independent trilogies of prime numbers. I see the same prime number over and over again.

Happy 11:11:11 on 11/11/11! (See you in twelve hours. Or not.)

Armistice Day

Thank you, Fred. Your eye, as usual, is much better than mine.

Wall Street By the Book

Tom Englehardt descibes himself in his latest Tomdispatch.com post as having a thing for libraries and graduation speeeches. Here are the choicest tidbits from his speech to the OWS librarians and others at Zuccotti Park:

Let me fess up here to my fondness for libraries (even though I find their silence unnerving).  As a child, I lived in the golden age of your lost world, but as something of an outsider.  The 1950s weren’t a golden age for my family, and they weren’t particularly happy years for me.  I was an only child, and my escape was into books.  Less than a block from where I lived was a local branch of the New York City public library and, in those days before adult problems had morphed into TV fare, I repaired there, like Harriet the Spy, to get the scoop on the mysterious world of grown-ups.  (The only question then was whether the librarian would let you out of the children’s section; mine did.)

I remembering hauling home piles of books, including John Toland’s But Not in Shame, Isaac Asimov’s space operas, and Désirée (a racy pop novel about a woman Napoleon loved), often with little idea what they were and no one to guide me.  On the shelves in my small room were yet more books, including most of the Harvard Five Foot Shelf, a collection of 51 classic volumes.  My set had been rescued from somebody’s flooded basement, their spines slightly warped and signs of mildew on some of them.  But I can still remember taking them off my shelf with a certain wonder: Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (thrilling!), Darwin’s The Origins of the Species (impenetrable), Homer’s The Odyssey (Cyclops!), and so on.

Books -- Johannes Gutenberg’s more than 500-year-old “technology” -- were my companions, my siblings, and also my building blocks.  To while away the hours, I would pile them up to create the landscape -- valleys and mountains -- within which my toy soldiers fought their battles.  So libraries and self-education, that’s a program in my comfort zone.

Though my route seemed happenstantial at the time, it’s probably no accident that, 35 years ago, I ended up as a book editor on the periphery of mainstream publishing and stayed there.  After all, it was a paid excuse to retreat to my room with books (to-be) and, if not turn them into mountains and valleys, then at least transform them into a kind of eternal play and self-education.

All of which is why, on arriving for the first time at your encampment in Zuccotti Park and taking that tiny set of steps down from Broadway, I was moved to find myself in, of all things, an informal open-air library.  The People’s Library no less, even if books sorted by category in plastic bins on tables isn’t exactly the way I once imagined The Library.

Still, it couldn’t be more appropriate for Occupy Wall Street, with its long, open-air meetings, its invited speakers and experts, its visiting authors, its constant debates and arguments, that feeling when you’re there that you can talk to anyone.

Like the best of library systems, it’s a Self-Education U., or perhaps a modern version of the Chautauqua adult education movement.  Your goal, it seems, is to educate yourselves and then the rest of us in the realities and inequities of twenty-first century American life.

Still, for the advanced guard of your electronic generation to commit itself so publicly to actual books, ones you can pick up, leaf through, hand to someone else -- that took me by surprise.  Those books, all donations, are flowing in from publishers (including Metropolitan Books, where I work, and Haymarket Books, which publishes me), private bookstores, authors, and well, just about anyone.  As I stood talking with some of you, the librarians of Zuccotti Park, I watched people arriving, unzipping backpacks, and handing over books.

Of the thousands of volumes you now have, some, as in any library, are indeed taken out and returned, but some not. As Bill Scott, a librarian sitting in front of a makeshift “reference table” in muffler and jacket told me, “The books are donated to us and we donate them to others.” 

A youthful-looking 42, Scott, an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, is spending his sabbatical semester camped out in the park.  His book, Troublemakers, is just about to be published and he’s bubbling with enthusiasm.  He’s ordered a couple of copies to donate himself.  “It’s my first book ever.  I’ve never even held it in my hands.  To shelve the first copy in the People’s Library, it’s like all the strands of my life coming together!"

Think of it: Yes, your peers in the park were texting and tweeting and streaming up a video storm.  They were social networking circles around the 1%, the mayor, the police, and whoever else got in their way.  Still, there you all were pushing a technology already relegated by many to the trash bin of cultural history.  You were betting your bottom dollar on the value to your movement of real books, the very things that kept me alive as a kid, that I’ve been editing, publishing, and even writing for more than three decades.

That library -- in fact, those libraries at Occupy Boston, Occupy Washington, Occupy San Francisco, and other encampments -- may be the least commented upon part of your movement.  And yet, you set your library up not as an afterthought or a sideline, but almost as soon as you began imagining a society worth living in, a little world of your own.  You didn’t forget the books, which means you didn’t forget about education.  I mean, a real education.

This was both generous of you and, quite simply, inspiring.  Who would have expected that the old-fashioned, retro book would be at the heart of this country’s great protest movement of a tarnished new century?

When asked how the library began, librarian “Scales” (aka Sam Smith), an unemployed, 20-year-old blond dancer still in shorts on a chilly fall day, responded, “Nobody knows exactly who started it. It was like an immaculate conception.  It was just here.”  If the movement itself were a book, that might stand as its epigraph.  Even if Occupy Wall Street indeed did start somewhere (as did its library), the way it has exploded globally in a historical nanosecond, does give it exactly the feeling Scales described.

When asked why he himself was here, he simply said, “I wanted something productive to do.”

In an economy where “production” is gone with the wind, that makes the deepest sense to me.  Who doesn’t want to be productive in life?  Why should a generation that Wall Street and Washington seem perfectly happy to sideline not want to produce something of their own, as they now have?

I was no less touched, while listening in on a long meeting of the Library Working Group one Saturday afternoon amid the chaos of Zuccotti Park -- crowd noise all around us, a band playing nearby -- when the woman standing next to me interrupted your meeting.  She identified herself as an elected legislator from an upstate New York county who had driven down to see Occupy Wall Street for herself.  She just wanted you, the librarians, to know that she supported what you were doing and that, while her county was still funding its libraries, it was getting ever harder to do so, given strapped state and local budgets.

In other words, as education is priced out of the reach of so many Americans and in many communities library hours are cut back or local libraries shut down, you’ve opened for business.

Here are just a few things that you, the librarians of Zuccotti Park, said to me:

Bill Scott: “Part of the reason we’re down here is because we live in a society which promotes the idea that education should be bought and sold on the open market.  We want to establish it as a human right.  What the People’s Library proves is that books belong to the people, as does education.  People with student-loan debt find their freedom and options limited.  It severely limited my options.  I’m still crawling out from under a ton of debt.”

Zachary Loeb, who in what passes for real life is an actual librarian: “I’m working part time, so I wake up every morning and spend two hours sending out resumes, but the work isn’t out there.  My training’s in archiving, but nobody’s hiring.  I got a degree in library science, not philosophy, which I wanted to go into, to be on a job track.  Obviously, I’m not.  Lots of people are here because the work situation is abysmal.

“I’ve been an activist for a long time.  I read [the magazine] Adbusters and saw the call to occupy Wall Street.  I was down here on the first day.  I think we’ve changed the conversation in this country.  We’ve given people permission to stand up, to talk to each other, test their ideas out against each other, and consider decisions that shouldn’t simply be made by the powerful in Washington.”

Frances Mercanti-Anthony, out-of-work actress (“my last play closed in August”) and comic writer: “Knowledge is the greatest weapon we have.  What we’re doing is offering knowledge to people who have been disenfranchised.  Our online database of books [in the People’s Library] stands as a great symbol of the movement, of democracy, of knowledge, and sharing.”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. You care. Sometimes it really is that simple.

Read the rest of Tom's (self-) graduation speech here.

Press Release: How To Thrive As A Solo Librarian

How to Thrive as a Solo Librarian, to which Lara and I both contributed chapters (hers is on weeding, mine is on library security), is officially available. Witness the press release:

 

                                FOR OCTOBER 2011 RELEASE

Contact Lisa McAllister v 301-459-3366 x5619 v lmcallister@rowman.com

 How To Thrive As A Solo Librarian

 “The audience for this book—librarians who are working alone, or nearly alone—may be larger than many of us suspect. And once again Carol Smallwood has done what she does so well—present a guide, written by a variety of experienced professionals, full of common sense, nuts and bolts advice, and step-by-step instruction.” —Tom Cooper, Director, Webster Groves Public Library; Writing and Publishing: The Librarian's Handbook (ALA, 2010)

 “A wealth of solid, practical advice, this anthology provides essential how-to articles that speak directly to the needs of those solo librarians who do it all.” —Kim Becnel, assistant professor of library science, Appliachian State University

 How to Thrive as a Solo Librarian is a useful compilation of chapters by librarians offering advice to colleagues who must work alone or with very limited help. The contributors come from schools and colleges, special and corporate archives, public libraries, and seasoned LIS faculty across the United States and abroad who are familiar with the vigor, dedication, and creativity necessary for solo librarians.

 As noted in the Foreword, "In many ways, solo librarianship demands more communication and collaboration than librarians might experience in larger multi-employee libraries." Despite the fact that most of the authors are currently working alone in their library or archives, they do not work in a vacuum. These chapters aim to help librarians thrive in the demanding environment that exists for the solo librarian. Topics covered include time management, community involvement, public relations and marketing, professional development, internet-based ideas, administrative tasks, assessing and moving collections, and general overviews. How to Thrive as a Solo Librarian will be useful for all professionals and students in the field of librarianship.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Carol Smallwood has worked as a public library systems administrator and consultant, and in school, academic, and special libraries. She has authored, co-authored, edited, and co-edited several books, including Writing and Publishing: The Librarian's Handbook (2010) and Librarians as Community Partners: An Outreach Handbook (2010). Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including American Libraries.
Melissa J. Clapp is the Coordinator of Instruction & Outreach at Humanities & Social Sciences Library West, University of Florida. Her most recent publication appears in Collaborative Librarianship. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

THE SCARECROW PRESS

An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

www.scarecrowpress.com

October 2011 v 978-0-8108-8213-3v $45.00 Paperv 314 pages

 

"Spooky Tome" Auctioned by Texas Library

The book in question is a 1933 first edition  copy of "Champion Textbook of Embalming" by A.O. Spriggs. And it seems to well and truly freak out at least one of the staff:

"Oh no, no, no, it's not something we could ever put on the shelves," Evelyn McLane, programming associate, said. "I think the embalming book came in about a year ago, as a donation."

I'm temped to describe the programming associate as a lightweight, but that wouldn't be fair. First, I don't run a  public library, so I avoid the political flak that public librarians do. We rarely if ever get complaints from our students, and when we do it's most often to deride us for not having a given book on the shelves. I don't think we've ever been asked to remove something already here. The medical textbooks are quite well-utilized.

Besides that, I had plenty of chances to check out the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine when I worked there. George Washington's teeth were a big draw; their most requested item, in fact. In a collection like that, the emblaming book might actually seem a little banal.

On the other hand, American culture seems more removed from death than ever. All the heavy lifting is taken care of by hospitals, morticians, and funeral homes, and they don't do so for free. It's no wonder that a book that describes in painstaking detail the care and feeding of human corpses creeps her out. She's hardly alone:

Library officials said donated books that can't find a home on circulation shelves sometimes become undiscovered treasures for others.

In the case of the embalming book, it was immediately clear it needed to go . someplace else far, far away from unsuspecting library patrons.

"We put the embalming book in the last one (sale), but it didn't sell," Ms. McLane said. "We paired it with Poe to see if someone would buy it."

Not a bad idea. The Poe book she mentions is a 1944 edition of "Tales of Edgar Allen Poe." All things considered, if you're into creepy stuff, this might be worth checking out.

Librarians Feel the Squeeze in Jobs and Salaries

This is not the most welcome news on a Monday morning, but it is consistent with what I've been hearing elsewhere:

For 2010 graduates, the past year presented challenges in finding professional jobs with adequate living wages; however, it also offered unexpected opportunities and sounded positive notes despite a battered economy. A total 1,789 LIS graduates responded to LJ’s annual Placements & Salaries Survey, down from last year but still representing a solid 37.3% of the approximately 4790 2010 graduates from the 38 participating schools. In another sign of the times, fewer LIS schools participated, and the ones that did once again reported that graduation rates are down (8.4% below 2009), ranging from 2% to almost 50% lower.

Average starting salaries were basically flat, improving by less than 1% to $42,556—which could be seen as good news, given the economy, but is nonetheless bad news for a profession that is already widely considered to be underpaid. On the upside, the gender gap narrowed significantly to a 3.7% difference (from 8.3%) between wages for women and men. And the new graduate unemployment rate went down slightly, with 6.7% reporting they were still unemployed compared to 7.8% in 2009.

And to think that a mere two years ago, Librarian was considered a job with one of the best prospects by U.S. News & World Reports. Apparently not.

 

 

Hell in Stereo

The road, they say, has many turns, and I have many meetings over the next few days, as we are still looking for a new Director here. In addition to that, I have a meeting with an editor this afternoon over a project that's been in the works for a long while, and I just started reading We Meant Well: How I helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren, a book that describes a slice of Hell in freakish detail. I'll post a review of that as soon as I finish it, probably early next week.

But since Hell is one of those ideas that extends to much of humanity I figured I'd post a link to and an excerpt of an excellent review of Alice K. Turner's The History of Hell, by Slacktivist Fred Clark:

Turner introduces us to many of the more obscure sources that have shaped our idea of Hell — including ancient Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman myths, once-popular pseudoscriptures like the Gospel of Nicodemas, and once immensely popular tales like the vision story of Tundal and his cow.

They may be obscure, now all-but forgotten, but their effect and influence lingers on, shaping what we hear in and what we mean by that word “Hell.” The influence of these sources is intriguing, particularly when contrasted with the paucity of actual biblical material supporting what we say we “know” about Hell. The Old Testament does not appear in Turner’s history. Nor, for the same reason, do the New Testament writings of the Apostle Paul — at least not the biblical Paul who, like the Hebrew scriptures, never mentions Hell at all.

The much later so-called Gospel of Paul — like the so-called “Gospels” of Peter and Nicodemas — is obsessed with Hell, weaving a pseudo-Christian underworld out of Greek and Roman stories, dirty jokes and scatological humor. All of these pseudo-Gospels of Hell were, in their day, very popular. They were never seriously considered for inclusion in the Christian canon, yet most Christians had read them, or heard them, and the portrait of Hell they created has endured long after the books themselves were forgotten. That portrait today remains, in a sense, canonical for many believers who seem certain that it’s actually somehow biblical.

The whole post is here. Enjoy!

NYTSL: Fall Program Announcement

Fall Program Friday, November 4, 2011

The Future of MARC

Location: The Carroll Classroom in the Uris Center for Education at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.  1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
City.  Use the 81st Street entrance behind the south fountain.

Time: 6:00 - 8:30 pm

Join NYTSL for our annual fall program as we discuss the future of
bibliographic description and MARC with former LOC "digital pioneer"
Rebecca Geuther. Building off our Spring Program on RDA, we'll be looking
at how or if MARC can support the content new standard. Does MARC need to
change? Or do we need to support new structure and encoding standards for
RDA?

Rebecca Guenther has 35 years of experience in national libraries,
primarily working on library technology standards related to digital
libraries. Most of her professional life has been at the Library of
Congress developing national and international standards related to
metadata. This includes 22 years on the development and maintenance of the
MARC formats and the development of related XML formats, such as MODS and
MADS. She has served on numerous standards and implementation
committees, several as chair, is widely published in professional
literature, and has given many tutorials, workshops and presentations. She
recently began to explore use of semantic web technology and the potential
of Linked Data. She left the Library of Congress in August 2011 to work as
a consultant on metadata development and planning.

Refreshments served, 6:00-7:00 pm

Meeting and program, 7:00-8:30 pm

Elizabeth Warren: Markets Need to be Regulated

 

If We Maintain/Build/Rennovate It, They Will Come

  . . . and they will bring toys!

 Maybe I'm being unfair here by calling Kindles, iPads, and Nooks "toys." Or maybe not. I own an iPad and while I absolutely love it, I had to talk one of our students out of using her new iPad to write her thesis. And maybe that was presumptive. After all, who am I to tell anyone how to write anything, or which equipment they should use to do so?

I told her what I knew: it was an amazing device to scan web pages, e-books, PDFs and such, but in terms of writing what is expected to be a 70+ page dissertation, I prefer t0 use a laptop or desktop if only because the formatting features of Office are more complete than those found in Pages.

It doesn't matter. Writers write and will always discover the best tools for them after a bit of searching and experimentation (I did.) Readers will do the same, and often you'll find that writers and readers are the same people. They all know what they want to do, the problem lies in finding the right tools to maximize productive activity. E-books readers are becoming essential tools for readers and writers alike.

More frequently, the question that we hear is not "Should I buy a thing to read e-books?" but "Which thing should I buy?" And libraries both public and academic are on board--the question we ask at MCNY is often not "Should we make e-books available to our students?" but "How do we make more e-books available for them?" It's a very Big Deal.

Spending money on materials, staff and access is how you make a top-notch library, folks. I doubt anyone reading this is unaware of this position. So it should come as no surprise whatsoever when the headlines announce that "New, Rennovated SF Libraries Are Thriving":

In the past six years, nearly two dozen new and renovated branch libraries throughout the city have opened their doors. With three more to go, the largest capital improvement project in the library's history is coming to an end. And a happy ending seems sure: Checked-out materials and visits, already in the millions, are on the rise.

Elsewhere, shrinking budgets mean libraries are closing the books on better days. All 18 of San Jose's branches are in danger of closing. Oakland considered shuttering 14 libraries this summer. Santa Clara County now offers library cards to nonresidents - for $80.

But San Francisco's libraries are doing well for a number of reasons, including their widespread presence in community life and a fundraising arm that can both generate money and lobby for the city agency.

"We like to think of it as a rebirth or a renaissance," said City Librarian Luis Herrera.

Regardless of what supposedly fiscally-minded people tell you, the decision to close a library is never inevitable when budgetary woes arise:

The recession has hit libraries hard nationwide, said Marcia Warner, president of the Public Library Association. While voters generally back library bond measures, shrinking budgets make libraries "easy targets," she said.

"If I have to choose between taking police and fire down or taking libraries down, on the surface of it, it seems like, 'Oh, no big deal, we have to have these safety things,' " Warner said. "But then you begin to realize that libraries are at the core of a city's or a community's education."

Education is a life-long process, folks. We all learn, we all benefit, we all need libraries.

Live From Liberty Park: Democracy in Action

I just found the embed codes for Livestream's Global Revolution channel which is doing a live webcam feed from the goings on in Liberty Park:

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

 

Banned Book Week 2011: The Handmaid's Tale

I don’t get book bans. I’ve never encountered a book I wanted to see expunged from the collective human knowledge base. I’ve read books I have absolutely hated for a variety of reasons ranging from crappy scholarship, outright falsehood, awful or just dull writing, or boring subject matter. But I’ve never felt the need to deny a writer their say. I’m not alone in this: Banned Book Week is a shrine to the idea that all writing is valid, even if it’s not welcome on a given bookshelf.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37^th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it anti-Christian and pornographic. Also quite recently, the Judson School District Board in San Antonio, TX overturned a ban of The Handmaid's Tale by the superintendent. Ed Lyman had ordered the book taken out of the advanced placement English curriculum when a parent complained it contained sexual and anti-Christian content. A committee comprised of teachers, students, and a parent had recommended the book remain in the class, but Lyman said he felt it did not fit in with the standards of the community.

To be fair: violence, certainly. Sex, absolutely. Anti-Christian, perhaps, if you happen to believe that Jesus was all about wielding obscene levels of wealth and power against the meek. Pornographic, no. There is nothing arousing about the situations found in this book.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim one. Women are second-class citizens in the recently formed Republic of Gilead. Women may not own property or carry money. All dresses and hats come with veils. They may not read, write, or (occasionally) speak unless spoken to.  Older women are often pressed into service as domestic Marthas, ruled over by Wives. Working class women, known as Econowives, do not get servants, or Handmaids, or anything other than a life of back-breaking labor. Because of falling fertility rates in Gilead the younger and hopefully more fertile women are sometimes assigned as Handmaids, expected to produce children for the elite rulers of Gilead. Early in the book, it’s suggested that the suicide rate among Handmaids is quite high.

It gets worse. Older women, barren women, homosexuals and criminals are declared Unwomen and sent to colonies to enjoy hard labor cleaning up environmental disasters, toxic chemical spills, or other similar work. Secret police, known as Eyes, are everywhere.

All this is told to the reader through the eyes and voice of Offred, a Handmaid who’s assigned to an older military officer known as the Commander. Her job is to produce a child for the couple, which is unlikely, as the Wife believes that her husband is actually sterile—a dangerous thought, as Gileadan law says that only women can be sterile. Desperate to manage the situation, the Commander’s Wife arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, her husband’s driver, in an effort to get her pregnant. Nick and Offred become attached to each other. Eventually, Nick tells her that he can get her out of the country if she’s willing to trust him. The book ends with an assumed contact of Nick’s leading her into an unmarked van, although whether she’s being saved or led to her doom by Eyes is left unsaid.

You don’t read a lot about the men in this society directly, since Offred’s dealings with them are sharly limited by the rules she lives by. Men are in charge, as the Commander is; or they serve those in charge, as Nick, his driver, does; or they populate the military and police forces that maintain order. The pecking order is extreme and there is no escape. Men conform or die, their bodies to be hung in a public square as a testament to the Gileadan manner of justice. Simple.

The most frequently cited reasons for banning this book are the description of Christianity found in its pages. However, anyone—certainly any actual Christian—should be able to tell the difference between the teachings of Jesus and the religious fundamentalist government depicted in the book, which is using certain imagery found in Christianity as a tool to maintain militarily enforced rules of society. There is a difference. The world Atwood describes is a world founded on a uniquely American form of biblical law. For an environment supposedly espousing Christian values, Christ himself--who commanded his followers to love the poor, tend the sick, comfort those in prison, and abhor excessive wealth--is nowhere to be found.  

The folks who complain about the sheer brutality of the book’s worldview may have a point: violence is at the center of the Handmaid’s world. Society at some point in the not too distance past was disrupted when a cabal of fundamentalist-minded military officers essentially executed the civilian government and declared themselves rulers over God’s kingdom. Wars against the infidel are endemic; a news show described by Offred mentions the execution of Quaker and Baptist rebels, and the forcible uprooting of “Children of Ham” (i.e., Blacks) to North Dakota. Jews are given a choice: convert or leave for Zion. There’s some question as to how many of those put on the boats ever arrived at their destination.

The violence that Offred experiences is more psychological than physical, although she says at one point the Wives are allowed to beat Handmaids as long as they use bare hands, since “there’s scriptural precedent.” Handmaids have no names except for those assigned (Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc.) by the management. Money has been replaced by pictograph tokens they can use to buy food at the local grocery; even the store signs have been replaced by wordless logos. The ostensible reason for this—the reason the Handmaids are told during their training as state-sponsored breeders—is that it’s for their own protection. Women are too valuable, they’re told, to have to deal with such types of stress.

So here we are. 2011 and Handmaid’s Tale is every bit as creepy as it was when it was published in 1985. In a way it’s worse now. The Commander’s Wife, a genteel lady named Serena Joy, was, in her prime, a televangelist who railed against the horrors of modern life and worked tirelessly to bring about the world she now lives in, a world directed by “Christian” values and enforces “traditional” family life. One imagines that she’s resigned to being the head of a household rather than a self-directing individual in a world of business, power, wealth, and religion. One expects that she’d imagined herself being rather more free and/or powerful than she is allowed to be by the leaders she helped bring to power.

And the really interesting is the fact that there are women in American politics even now—Michele Bachman and Beverly LaHaye spring to mind — who are seeking such a world on one level or another without understanding that in such a world, women like themselves are not allowed.

For their own good, of course.

Banned Book Week 2011 Begins

As I wrote earlier today, it’s Banned Book Week. (Yay!) As part of an agreement with Sheila DeChantal over at the Book Journey blog, I'm reviewing  a banned book.

Last week, I took an extremely informal poll on my Facebook page and asked people to vote on which book I would review this week. The possibilities were limited to books that I felt that I knew well enough to write competently about, namely The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, The Diary of Anne Frank, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath. All four selections got at least one vote each, but the contenders turned out to be Atwood or Anne Frank. 

I decided on Atwood for several reasons. First, the controversy over The Diary of Anne Frank is generally more limited when it surfaces at all, mostly over sexually explicit scenes. The Handmaid’s Tale gets a lot more flak a lot more often over it's treatment of sex, violence and politics. Also, I’ve never reviewed Handmaid.

Thursday around noon is when this review will be up, if you want to mark your calendar. If you are reading this and want me to comment on any particular aspect of the book, just leave a comment below and I’ll do my best to comply.

See you Thursday.

A Monday Wake-Up Call

Welcome to Banned Book Week. I'll be posting about that in a bit, but first, a brief assignment, should you be inclined to accept it.

Take this photo which has been making the rounds on FaceBook and Google+:

Print out 1,000 of these, go to book stores in your area and stick them into the pages of every bible you see on the shelf. All of them. New Testament, Torah, Koran, Book of Mormon, all of them. You will be doing Christians all over the United States an enormous service.

First, you will be reminding the faithful who remember who and what Jesus said about the pursuit of excessive wealth and power (bad) and humility and charity (good). That's some basic reinforcement of a generally positive idea: a good thing.

Second, you will be reminding those who have taken less positive variants of this fascinating faith (let's refer to them collectively as Power Seekers*) and turned them into commands, that they are not living up to their savior's ideals (bad).

Third, by alerting those of us who are not Christians of those positive ideals by their savior, you will be reminding us that genuine Christians exist and have influence over their brothers and sisters. You will be reminding us that it's not Christianity which is necessarily the problem so much as some Christians who misread the words printed in their bibles and decide that wealth and power are valid ends in themselves.

If nothing else, share this meme around a bit and let's see what happens.

 

*I'm thinking specifically of Tea Partiers and people who internalize the writings of Tim LaHaye, but the field is wide open for additions to this group.

"Nobody in This Country Got Rich on His Own"

 

Yowza.

Sept. 18, 2001: Brooklyn Book Festival

The Brooklyn Book Festival will celebrate its 6th anniversary on  September 18, 2011, a thrilling milestone for one of the country's most exciting literary festivals.

The festival celebrates authors and their work by presenting challenging, provocative and thoughtful programming in the areas of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.  Organized by the Brooklyn Literary Council and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's office, it has quickly established a reputation as the premier, free literary festival in New York City.

As in past years, the 2011 festival will again be held at historic Brooklyn Borough Hall, outdoors on its beautiful plaza, and at St. Frances College and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Multiple outdoor stages and indoor venues will feature adult and children's programming, panel discussions, and spoken word performances.

Find more information here: http://www.visitbrooklyn.org/BBF/Home

In preparation for the Book Festival, Brooklyn Public Library is hosting a librarians-only talk and reception with Marilyn Johnson on Saturday, September 17 at 4 pm.  Details are included below.

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

Brooklyn Book Fest Book End Event: Marilyn Johnson

Brooklyn Public Library celebrates librarians with an exclusive reception with Marilyn Johnson, author This Book Is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All! She’ll discuss current issues in librarianship, such as digitization, eBooks, and the constant threat of budget cuts.

Enjoy refreshments and an author talk at the Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture at Central Library

Saturday, September 17, 3:30 PM
Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza
Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture    
718-230-2100
www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org

Want a Real 9-11 Memorial? Donate Blood

We donated blood that day ten years ago. At least, we tried to.

This was in the late afternoon, around five or six pm. This was after my wife and I had met up at the entrance to the Queensborough Bridge at 59th street. It was after her freak out upon watching the second tower fall into dust, after my freak out upon hearing that the towers had in fact fallen down since her place of work was only a few blocks away.

This was after we walked across the bridge to Queens Plaza, where a horde of people fleeing Manhattan were allowed into the subway for free. We took the G train to 63rd Drive and walked home, to our apartment. We were safe. We were fine. We were good.

Then we tuned the television on, and watched the news and we stopped being fine. We were struck with the urgent need to do something and in the big picture, librarians aren't generally thought of as first responders. We figured we'd donate blood at Elmhurst Hospital which was the nearest blood center. We gathered my sister and her room-mate, Gene, and we left to be useful.

Sometimes sharing the simplest of things, like blood, or platelets is the most productive use of your time.

So if you really give half a hump about your country or the people who live in it, then here's an idea: instead of the bullshit politics or trading one-up stories with your buddies about who was the bigger hero on that day--how about you save a life and head to the closest blood center and bleed into a bag for half an hour. You will do more to help your fellow Americans than invading all the Muslim countries in the world. Trust me on that.

Sadly, we did not actually donate blood that afternoon. We did get to the hospital, and we did fill out the forms and get tested. My form was rejected because I'd recently gotten a new tattoo. My sister was rejected for anemia. Gene had a cold, so he got sent home. My wife passed the paperwork and the blood test, but her rolling veins made a donation impractical. Four attempts to do good and four failures.

Life is like that sometimes.

President Obama Finally Sounds Like a Democrat

Our President finally sounds like a Democrat and for that, I am grateful.

Last night's speech was a good one: read it here, or better still, watch it.

The only thing that worries me--other than the fact that 461 billion dollars is not much to work with given a 15 trillion dollar economy--is the fact that it took the Dems 3 years to come up with a jobs bill that actually had the word "jobs" in it.

Dems, listen to a man who interned at a PR firm in his youth. It's all about the story behind the story. In this case, the story is that Obama wants you to have a job. The story behind the story is a disfunctional economic policy. Believe it or not, people will get that if you say it often enough.

Remember above all that hearts and minds do not win themselves and the Republicans have a 40-year head-start on you. They are greedy, lying, cheating, remorseless cretins but they have their story down pat (government is bad. Really, really bad. Deadly, even. To you! ) and they stick to it.

Do better.

Speaking of the story behind the story: something else that's been making the rounds of news these past few days is a report by a former GOP Congressional staffer, appropriately titled Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. Absolutely required reading to get a handle on what the disloyal opposition does, why and how.

In other news, a few of us at chez Frater are planning to start a small press. I'll write more on that in a future post, after we've though about it a little more.

For today: Happy Friday.

Quote of Note

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."  ~Ray Bradbury

Warren Mosler: The Economy is Just Bits in a Computer

When I was in the final stages of getting my BA from Queens College I took a class on essay writing. Not exactly surprising as I was an English major and necessarily took a bunch of writing classes. One assignment was to respond to an article in a popular magazine. I chose an article from BusinessWeek which reported on an article published in a national economics journal which supposedly proved that American students were abandoning classes in the hard sciences for classes in the Humanities (English in particular) due to rampant grade inflation. In other words, students who loved science loved easy grades even more.

I called bullshit.

I thought, awesome, I can respond to this in my sleep, and I pretty much did. I found the original article in the QC library and realized that the research only showed that the grade inflation had been a constant over the past 20 years. They failed to show that the enrollment of students in English classes had increased by a similar proportion to the decrease of enrollments in the hard sciences.* As far as I could tell, they never attempted to demonstrate either of those relationships. The guys at BusinessWeek merely had column space to fill and to do so, they basically made stuff up with the point of making Economics sound more authoritative than, say, English Lit.

Two valuable lessons here: first, English is not a science**, although it is a valuable discipline. Lesson two: Economics is in exactly the same boat, although I question its value. In my experience, Economics is more about method than result and the math rarely works as advertised.

You don't have to take my word on that; take Warren Mosler's instead.

Mosler is a self-taught economist with an extensive background in investing and teaching. He eschews complexity and thinks modern economics is so much nonsense while recognizing that modern finance is almost purely extractive in nature. Most importantly, he thinks that our ideas about economics are mired in sixty year old assumptions about debt, taxes, and spending, and our public policy is driven entirely be ideology. He thinks we can do better, so he wrote a book titled The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy to explain how. Better still, the book is free and available as a PDF on his web site. There is no excuse not to read it.

In simplest terms, Mosler thinks that modern economic policy is a garbage-in-garbage-out affair. Our assumptions about how things work are wrong and so we come up with fixes that are politically pleasing, but which cannot possibly work. His years working on Wall Street taught him at the operational level how things do work, and to him the disconnect between fact and policy couldn't be more clear.

Mosler's precepts take his knowledge of operational finance (aka, accounting) and applies them to the structure of the economy as is exists in the twenty-first century. Computers handle everything, and they use proven standards of book keeping: debits on the left, credits on the right. All transactions must be recorded in a pair of matching entries. Everything must balance out in the end. Simple.

Most importantly, he says, our insistence of thinking in terms of stuff--cash, gold, and physical notes--has blinded us to the truth that money is now entirely electronic. Bits in a computer, numbers on a screen. Debt is imaginary and the main difference between taxation and spending is in whose bank accounts the transfers appear. Changing policy is no more complicated than swapping out entries in computers.

Anyway, Mosler's seven deadly frauds--the stuff that he says everyone gets wrong--are as follows:

1. The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.

Bushwah, says Mosler. Taxation is merely how the government regulates aggregate demand. As such, taxation should increase during good times and decrease in bad times.

2. With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.

 Nonsense, he says. In the collective sense no such burden can exist. Debt or not, our children will consume as much or as little as they produce.

3. Government budget deficits take away savings.

 Not true, Mosler tell us. Federal government budget deficits actually add to savings.

4. Social Security is broken.

 No, it's not. Mosler says. Federal government checks do not bounce--they never have and they never will.

5. The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.

Incorrect, is the response. "Imports are real benefits and exports are real costs. Trade deficits directly improve our standard of living. Jobs are lost because taxes are too high for a given level of government spending, not because of imports."

6. We need savings to provide the funds for investment.

 Balderdash, says Mosler. Investment adds to savings.

7. It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.

Madness, says Mosler: this is really a good thing. Taxes reduce aggregate demand, and if taxation increases it's because the economy is about to blow the roof off.

  I'm the first to admit that although I like the way Mosler thinks, I'm not entirely on board with his proposed policy solutions.

His first proposed fix is a "payroll tax holiday" where employers and employees would be exempt from paying the payroll tax for an undetermined length of time. In Mosler's description this would be a situation "whereby the U.S. Treasury makes all FICA, Medicare and other federal payroll tax deductions for all employees and employers." In other words the government would be borrowing these funds for its own use.

It makes a certain amount of sense, and it would give everyone getting a W-2 form a substantial (on the order of 8%) pay raise. Hell, it'd give employers the same raise. Unfortunately, there's no indication that this would increase hiring: increases in revenue is what does that, not a decrease in tax rates.

His second idea, that of a $500 per capita revenue sharing plan from the federal government to each state government, I like very much. Unfortunately, his thinking is too small: 500 dollars for three hundred million Americans still averages out to only three billion dollars per state. Yes, I comprehend that New York, with 20 million people would get ten billion dollars while New Mexico, with only two million would get one billion. That's not the point. The point is that Mosler is thinking way too small in this plan. The states taken together have something on the order of trillions of dollars of infrastructure repairs and delayed maintenance that need to be done; power plants, roads, bridges, waterways, sewers, etc. 150 billion won't come close to making a dent in that, although it might scratch the paint. But if everything is really just bookkeeping, then Mosler has no reason not to blow up the numbers to match the need. Make it  ten or  twenty trillion dollars and we'd have something to look twice at.

There's a great deal more to consider. Mosler is very much into a national jobs program and universal government supplied health care. Children should be considered investments rather than expenses in financial terms. He believes that there is such a thing as public purpose and economic policy needs to be restructured to reflect that fact. (All the stuff that the talking heads on Fox love.)

There's plenty to argue with as well. Classical Kenesians won't think much of this work, and libertarians will like it even less. That said, I've read enough policy proposals from both crowds to understand that new thinking isn't exactly their strong suit.

What I do like about this tome is the fact it's different. There's no ideology to defend. There's no insistence that we somehow live in the same world (or even the same structured economy) we had in 1945. There is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system is broken and the only way we can to begin to fix it is to admit that fact to ourselves.

There are only debits and credits, bits in a computer.

Happy Labor Day.

 

*If X number of students had abandoned the hard sciences in favor of English, you'd expect a proportional increase in the latter and decrease in the former as the lure of easy A's enticed physics students to change their majors.

**Science: a rigorously self-regulating model of discovery wherein hypotheses are created through observation of events and tested through experimentation. Repeated results are considered valid. Unique results are not. Economics rarely provides this level of rigor in the pursuit of knowledge. It's a discipline, not a science.

Quote of Note

"I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries."

---Carl Sagan

10 Books About American Prisons

 In all fairness to author Anna Clark at AlterNet, the full title of the article is 10 Books About Prison That Will Make You Rethink the United States Penal System, as if it's somehow a well-kept secret that the USA now has a greater percentage of its population behind bars than any other industrial country in the world.

It's only  a secret if you have no eyes or ears, or if you happen to rely on the penal system for your livelihood. If you live in the world of facts, it's a well-known reality.

It's a beautifully researched article and you should absolutely click over to the page and read the whole thing, but a few highlights for those of you who prefer the quick and dirty version:

 

 1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

Where have all the black men gone? To jail, mostly.

2. On the Yard, Malcolm Braly

Take s good, long look at the people inside San Quentin prison ca. 1967.

3. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Ted Conover

Conover's report of his year as an correctional officer at Sing Sing.

4. Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis

Hint: yes, unless you make money off them. (And there is a lot of money to be made off prisons.)

5. The Exonerated: A Play, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen

You're mistakenly sent to death row, then by pure luck you're proved innocent. They release you back into society. Now what?

6. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault

The history of the modern prison. Essential reading.

7. Soledad Brother, George Jackson

If you need proof that being black in America constitutes a crime, read this. If you don't need proof, read it anyway.

8. Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean

The movie was good, but the book is infinitely more nuanced.

9. The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn literally wrote the book on the Soviet prison system. It's been required reading for Russian high school students for the last 20 years.

10. De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

Wilde did two years of hard labor in English prison for "acts of gross indecency" with other men. Ernest, indeed.

Clark provides a reading list of a dozen or so more titles, so definitely click on over and start reading.

Lost and Found

Remember this Kinks song, from 1985? Remember the circumstances (Hurricane Gloria vs. NYC)?

I thought not. Neither did I, and I owe massive thanks to Slacktivist for reminding me:

Waiting for the hurricane to hit New York City

Somebody said it's hit the bay
this is the nitty gritty.
And all the bag ladies better put their acts together

We're near the eye of the storm
this is really heavy weather.

We were lost and found

In the nick of time while the ship was going down.
We were lost and found

Just in time with the hurricane crossing the coast line.
We were lost and found
just in time.

The thing is bigger than the both of us

it's gonna put us in our place.
We were lost and found
iust in time

now we've got no time to waste.

They're putting up the barricades

Because the hurricane is heading up this way.
[ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/k/kinks-lyrics/lost-and-found-lyrics.html  ]
So won't you come in from the cold and the pouring rain?
And the old sea do@ says: shiver me timbers.
The sky's gone blac and it's like the dead of winter.
We were lost and found in the pouring rain

When the hurricane swept across the coast line.

This thing is bigger than the both of us

It's gonna pvt us in our place.
We're gonna say what really matters
When you see that storm stare us in the face.

We were lost and found

And we beat the fear
we came through the storm.
Now it all seems clear
we were lost and found

Standing here
looking at the new frontier.
Lost and found
just in time

With the hurricane crossing the coast line.

Hurricane!

It's been an active week, and it's going to get a lot more exciting this weekend:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the United States' most populous city was bracing to experience at least tropical storm conditions and flooding starting on Sunday from Irene, which could hit Long Island as a Category 2 hurricane.

"We hope for the best but prepare for the worst," Bloomberg told a news conference, adding some evacuations could be possible. The city was positioning rescue boats and helicopters, working to minimize street flooding and gearing up at hospitals. Evacuations were possible.

"The city has already seen the power of Mother Nature once this week, and Mother Nature may not be done with us yet," Bloomberg said, referring to Tuesday's earthquake that shook the East Coast, frightening millions but causing no deaths.

Forecasters warned that even if the center of Irene stays offshore as it tracks up the mid-Atlantic coast, its wide bands could lash cities like Washington and New York with winds and rain, knock out power and trigger flooding.

Oil terminals, refineries and nuclear plants from the Bahamas to Rhode Island were preparing.

Four catastrophe bonds totaling over $1 billion could leave financial investors exposed to insured losses if Hurricane Irene makes a U.S. landfall.

Earth to Mike: Mother Nature is never truly done with anything, must less as recent a development as modern civilization.

If nothing else, librarians all over the five borroughs are even now going over their flood preparation policies to see what might be needed to prepare (as we are.)

Earthquake!

As for the big event:

 

Magnitude 5.9 Earthquake Felt In NYC

By: NY1 News

Dozens of buildings throughout the city, including City Hall, were briefly evacuated this afternoon after a 5.9 magnitude earthquake centered outside of Washington, D.C. rocked much of the east coast.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the earthquake was centered northwest of Richmond, Virginia and was 3.7 miles deep.

It could be felt as far north as Rhode Island.

The Associated Press says shaking could be felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Parts of the Pentagon, White House and U.S. Capitol were also evacuated.

As for MCNY, the building shook for nearly 20 seconds, we evacuated. The building was declared safe, we came back and the library is now open.

Whew!