The Invisible Library

IOL:

Facing global opposition fuelled by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, Washington has dropped a contentious UN resolution that sought to renew an exemption shielding US troops from international prosecution for war crimes.

The decision followed an intervention by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who urged Security Council members to oppose the resolution.

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Washington argues that the court - which started operating last year- could be used for frivolous or politically-motivated prosecutions of US troops.

Given the Bush Administration’s fondness for frivilous laws, they know of what they speak. I’m not worried about frivolous charges against our troops (some soldiers did commit crimes and should be tried for them. That’s not frivolity, that’s justice) But I think these protests are more a case of George Bush trying to cover his own ass, and once again, failing miserably due to lack of nowledge and pure bluff. If only he puffs up his chest big enough and swaggers long enough, everyone will let him do whatever he wants. That’s been his strategy September 12, 2001. But this time, it’s not working.

I’ve felt for some time that our not signing on to the international War Crimes Tribunal was naked politics at it’s worst: trying to hold the world accountable to laws that do not apply to us. This is a step in the right direction.

My only question now is for the gentleman at the Hague: When will we see Cheney, et al charged for war crimes? After the election or before?

For some time, I’ve been following this little gem of a story but haven’t written about it because I couldn’t come up with a handle, a way to describe the events of the story without it sounding ridiculous or absurd. The problem was not mine but the facts. They are absurd. Let’s face it, when our elected representatives crown the Rev. Moon as the Messiah at an exclusive ceremony on Capitol Hill, it sounds just a wee bit over the top.

But that’s what happens when you do business with Rev. Moon. Logic gets turned inside out, otherwise reasonable or at least competent people go off their heads, cats and dogs, etc, etc. The reason is simple: Reverend Moon is batshit crazy. Seriously. He’s nuttier than a two headed calf on milking day. Jesse at Pandagon sums it up nicely:

…The man hates everyone. He’s anti-Semitic on a level that would make Hutton Gibson blush. He hates Christians, as is mentioned in the article he hates gays and lesbians, he hates America, he hates every political party, so far as I can tell…he hates ponies, or so I’ve heard.

What kind of monster hates ponies?

But seriously folks, what the fuck are our Congresscritters and Senatefolk doing crowning anyone anything? I seem to remember we fought a little war over the fact that people who wear crowns do not have the ideals of Democracy at heart and in general, tend to treat people like crap. So why are the Powers That Be doling out crowns, especially to wackos who openly espouse genocide and theocracy?

I don’t know, but John Gorenfeld has some ideas.

Michael Mcgrorty at Library Dust predicts the future of libraries. I of course don’t agree with all of his predictions, especially his dire assessment of cataloguing services but it’s a fine mixture of whimsy and truth just the same:

The librarian stereotype will prevail, with its thousand variations. New librarians will shock older ones with their mode of dress, accessories and language.

Young boys will fall in love with librarians who help them locate books on reptiles. Some of those boys will become librarians; others will become reptiles.

Library literature with footnotes will be impossible to understand. Library literature without footnotes will be a mass of generalizations. The popular topics in library literature will be: The status of the profession; low pay; effectiveness of library organizations, funding issues and problem patrons. The rest of it will be indistinguishable from any other professional literature.

A Soldier of Conscience is an interview with Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, a Marine who was in Iraq. You really need to read the whole thing but if you choose not to (and I can understand, it being Father’s Day and maybe you want to be happy and not read anything depressing) here’s the heart of the piece:

Did the revelations that we didn’t find any proof about Iraq’s weapons affect the troops?

Yes. I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I’ve had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it.

I understand that all the incidents — killing civilians at checkpoints, itchy fingers at the rally — weigh on you. What happened with your commanding officers? How did you deal with them?

There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were going through my head — about what we were doing over there. About some of the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: ‘You know, I honestly feel that what we’re doing is wrong over here. We’re committing genocide.’

He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we’re leaving over here, we’re not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn’t like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer.

What happened then?

After I talked to the top commander, I was kind of scurried away. I was basically put on house arrest. I didn’t talk to other troops. I didn’t want to hurt them. I didn’t want to jeopardize them.

I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something. When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major. He’s in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. ‘Sir,’ I told him, ‘I don’t want your money. I don’t want your benefits. What you did was wrong.’

It was just a personal conviction with me. I’ve had an impeccable career. I chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the U.S. It’s not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.

Christian’s new post is up now.

MSNBC:

Public librarians aren’t prone to looking gift horses in the mouth, but many have nevertheless been taken aback by the odd and in some cases overly generous allotments of free music CDs that have begun arriving in the last week as the result of the settlement of an antitrust lawsuit against major record companies.

The CD cornucopia - consisting of approximately 5.6 million compact discs - was billed as a windfall for libraries and schools when it was announced in September 2002 as part of a $144 million settlement of the lawsuit, which alleged that music distribution companies illegally inflated the price of CDs by requiring retailers to sell them at or above a set level in order to qualify for substantial advertising funding.

But when the first shipments began arriving last week, some librarians suspected that the companies - the Bertelsmann Music Group, EMI Music Distribution, Warner-Elektra-Atlantic, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment - were dumping CDs that had been gathering dust in warehouses when they received hundreds of copies of some titles for which there is little or no demand.

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Among them are the librarians at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, who last week received a shipment of 1,325 CDs that included 57 copies of “Three Mo’ Tenors,” a 2001 recording featuring classically trained African American tenors Roderick Dixon, Thomas Young and Victor Trent Cook; 48 copies of country artist Mark Wills’ 2001 album “Loving Every Minute,” 47 copies of “Corridos de Primera Plana,” a greatest hits compilation by Los Tuscanes de Tijuana (2000); 39 copies of “Yolanda Adams Christmas” (2000); 37 copies of Michael Crawford’s “A Christmas Album” (1999) and 34 copies of the Bee Gees’ “This Is Where I Came In” (2001).

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Eva Silverstone, communications director for the Spokane Public Library, said the library in eastern Washington received many copies of “Three Mo’ Tenors” among its 1,325 CDs, along with “tons of copies of Christina Aguilera’s Christmas album.” All told, she said, 15 titles represented 36 percent of the shipment.

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The public library in Worcester, Mass., with a main library and two branches, received 150 copies of “Nastradamus,” a 1999 album by the rapper Nas, and 148 copies of “Entertainment Weekly’s Greatest Hits of 1971.”

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The Des Moines (Iowa) Public Library was on track to take the lead in redundancies, though the identification of the programming bug may come in time to avert what might have been a record overkill. Its crate of 2,647 CDs, due to arrive in the next couple weeks, was listed as containing 430 single-song discs � 16 percent of the total — of Whitney Houston singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl, according to Steve Cox, of the Iowa State Library.

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“We’ve been wondering if we’re going to get 12,000 Yanni CDs,” said Wallace Hoffsis, director of collections development for the Sacramento (Calif.) Public Library.

Turns out that it was just a computer glitch that shuffled all these stinkers off to the libraries but still, what is one to do with 430 copies of “Star Spangled Banner,” as mangled by the crack-addled warbling of Whitney Houston?

link via Neil Gaiman.

Lucy was a circus cat. She walked the high wire, never afraid of the void between her and the dusty ground below. Roaches are another matter.

Salon.com:

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The management company that represents Britney Spears and ‘N Sync is searching for a divine voice.

‘Gifted,” a Christian version of the popular American Idol TV show, is scheduled to debut in October on Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based conglomerate that features such well-known evangelists as Benny Hinn.

It’s American Idol! Minus the modicum of talent and subtle references to idolatry! As if American Idol isn’t saccharine and sanitized enough. I suppose the contemporary dress-code and ocasional flirtatious wink was too much for the Christian Entertainment world to handle.

As Slacktivist points out, this is more than just an uppity youth group or conglomerate of Mothers Against Short Skirts (MASS). The SIC community has for quite a long while now, engaged in a long standing trend of undermining aesthetic sensibilities in order to promote their core values namely, vapid witnessing to dogma rather than scriptural fellowship and advertising what they are against rather than for.

The real problem with Christian Pop Music or any Evangelical Art in general is not that it’s preachy. It’s that it’s afraid of artistic conventions like metaphor, irony and ambiguous narrative, as Slacktivist elaborates:

It is no accident that the Left Behind novels are remarkably free of metaphor, of multi-leveled themes, or even of the kinds of visual details that might be taken to stand for something at a non-literal level. Artless art — explicit, monovalent, prosaic prose — is the only permissible form of storytelling.

Evangelical Artists reject ambiguity because it breads a tendency towards introspection and interpretation. If you don’t have the message spelled out for you in bold capital letters or blatant choruses of “Our God is an Awesome God,” than you might go looking for the message and find something that challenges the Evangelical Dogma.

This rejection of metaphor also explains the Satanic Panic of the seventies and eighties, when SICs tried to prove that there were evil messages hidden backwards on the records of Musicians like Kiss, Metallica, Twisted Sister and the Beatles. Perplexed by the lyrics of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, these concerned mothers and tightly wrapped preachers went looking for a sign and stumbled over their own unexplored subconscious. And it frightened them. So unaccustomed to playing with our cultural archetypes were they, that they shut their eyes, said a dozen hallelujahs and went and formed their own music label, only insular home schooled kids with WWJD bracelets need apply.

Yahoo! News:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozen detention centers worldwide and about half of these operate in total secrecy, said a human rights report released on Thursday.

Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said in a report that secrecy surrounding these facilities made ‘inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable.’

‘The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation,’ said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the group’s U.S. Law and Security program, referring to the U.S. Naval base prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news - web sites) where abuses are being investigated.

‘This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law,’ Pearlstein told a news conference.

The report coincided with news that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold a suspect in a prison near Baghdad without telling the Red Cross. Pearlstein said this would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department directives.

She said thousands of security detainees were being held by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites) as well as locations elsewhere which the military refused to disclose.

So, can we impeach the bastard now? If we’re going to try a president for getting a blowjob, we should at least considder the same proceadings for war crimes.

A Thunderstorm knocked out my electricity about three hours ago and now it’s too dark to read a book so I’m running down the battery on my laptop. Blogging in the dark? Not so easy.

The fact that I’m SO bored without electricity is a problem. It underscores how dependant we as a species have become on our tools. Seriously, how the fuck did anything get done after sunset before we were all on the Grid? I’m not saying I can’t live without TV (I’ve lost the ability to watch it anyway; the comercials make me feel like I have ADD) or my computer but still, this sucks.

I guess the fact that I realise my dependance is at least a step in the right direction. The fact that I’m powerless to do anything but whine about it is still rather bothersome though.