The Invisible Library

I’m tired of reading about the slowest Swift Boats this side of Mai Lai. Seriously. I’d say let’s move on to more important matters but apparently there are no such thing. We have always debated the meaning of “bled” and forever more, will we debate what Kerry did 35 years ago in some river in Vietnam (but let’s not talk about what Bush did or didn’t do– that would be lowering the discourse).

I’ve made my Political Views known here. I’m a borderline socialist. I think that if we are going to have a government, it’s sole purpose should be to promote the welfare of the citizenry. I’m anti-war, pro-choice, pro-drug legalization, pro-gay rights, anti-religion, anti-stupid and I prefer cats to dogs. I think George W. Bush is a miserable failure and my opinion is only solidified every time the dingbat opens his sneering little mouth. I’m voting for Kerry in November but i don’t like him much either, I just think he’ll be not as fucking horrible as Bush and his little cadre of anarcho-capitalist/ borderline fascists have been.

This is it. I’m not blogging any more about politics. Oh, sure, I’ll have words to say about the Patriot Act, freedom of speech issues and the occasional pro-Gay rights post. But no more dissection of the daily political minutia will be found on this site. I’m tired of reading it and I certainly don’t want to write any of it. So, from now on, it’s all writing about writing/ librarian issues/ cats/ books/ movies/ existential meanderings/ assorted mental gymnastics and whatever else I feel like. But not politics. I’m not dropping out of the Liberal Coalition, mind you but form now on, if the mood strikes and I feel like ranting about Bush or Kerry or what have you, I’ll do it over on the LC site, not here.

Human Rights Archives: The first in a series of blog entries.

The National Security Archive is one example of a human rights archive, a place that collects materials documenting the ongoing struggle for human equality.

Internet access to archival material is changing the way archivists and researchers work. Remote access to materials makes it possible to reach a far greater number of people, and archives like the NSA that track the patterns of use of its visitors are one step ahead of those who do not.

E-mail counts and web statistics are a great place to begin. NSA, for example, hosted more than 11 million successful visits and fielded 2,137 e-mail research requests in 2003, almost double the number of requests by telephone in the same year. Researchers downloaded more than 7.5 million pages, or almost 1.5 gigabytes of material.

Some archives offer documents such as finding aids in searchable format by use of Extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) offering another level of physical and intellectual control over the material. While labor-intensive, some experts predict XML is the future of complex sharable electronic documents.

The NSA, founded by scholars and journalists in 1985, reports that it operates on a $2.3 million annual budget and cares for more than two million pages of material. Their published statistics boast 2,500 annual public service requests. No government funds support the NSA, according to the organization website, but its support comes from private donors and royalites from its publications. The website lists a staff numbering more than 30 people.

Over the next couple of months, I will continue to feature archives and archivists who work to tell the amazing story of political,legal, spiritual struggle.

Here is an example of the important work of the National Security Archive. It is taken from material written by the NSA.

“On March 14, Archive executive director Thomas Blanton, general counsel Meredith Fuchs, FOIA coordinator William Ferroggiaro and research associate Barbara Elias released results from the first-ever government-wide audit of federal responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in a presentation at the 2003 International Freedom of Information Day, hosted by the Freedom Forum. The audit showed dramatic variations in agency reactions to the restrictive FOIA guidance issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001�a handful thought the guidance in effect overturned the FOIA, another handful didn’t even notice the guidance, and most made few tangible changes to their FOI programs. Requests to the 35 agencies handling 97% of the FOIA load for records relating to any guidance, regulations and training resulting from the Ashcroft memo revealed a system in disarray. A lack of central oversight within the agencies resulted in lost requests, response times failing to meet the statutory standard and inability to track the progress of requests.”

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Edited to correct formatting– Keith

Via Patrick Neilsen Hayden, I found this fascinating essay entltled, What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?:

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use “social issues” as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

It’s rather long, but worth the read, if for no other reason to use it as a resource for arguing with your Republican neighbor or coworker.

If you thought Jason Vs. Freddy was a good idea and are thinking of seeing Alien Vs. Predetor, then you need to check out Defective Yeti’s March Madness-style Cinematic Supervillain Showdown sheet.

Five bucks says Darth Vader makes it all the way.

From my wife (passed on from our friend, Shane) I bring to your attention Manybooks.com, a website that offers free access to more than 10,000 ebooks by such authors as Charles Baudelaire and L. Frank Baum (I only got as far as the Bs but there’s plenty more). All of the copyrights on these books have expired and so they are now in the public domain, which means you can download them and print them out, make colages out of them or wear them as hats. You can also read them, if that’s your thing, too.

On an administrative note, work is sucking time and classes are starting soon, so posting will be light for the next week, and non existant this weekend. Kevin is planning some great posts so keep checking back.

I’ve just acquired a copy of both Schott’s Original Miscellany and Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany. I had hoped that they would be invaluable references but I was not prepared for the sheer mass of fascinating trivia contained in these slender little volumes. The two page spread of presidential facts is worth the price of the Original Miscellany alone.

Until yesterday, I didn’t know that the first 7 presidents were all born “British,” or that Buchanan was the only bachelor president (and that Tyler, Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were all wed while in office), or that Garfield was the first left handed president. Bush 41 is a Gemini while Bush 43 is a Cancer.

Most fascinating, is that the salary for every President from Washington to Grant was $25,000, which is surprising, considering how much money 25 grand was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The Presidential salary has periodically increased over the decades, upped to 50K (by Grant), 75K (by Taft), 100K (by Truman) and 200K (by Nixon). The 200K salary stayed until Bush 43, who gave himself a 100% raise, to $400,000. Apparently, the president gets a raise in direct proportion to how bad a job he does (see: presidential careers, Grant, Nixon). Who knew?

The Miscellanies also have other info, besides presidential facts: Cuban Cigar sizes, the different types of curries, a handy diagram for measuring spaghetti (which I used last night and works quite well), a list of poker hands, the 33 degrees of Freemasonry, a table of the unusual deaths of various pop stars, Shakespearian insults, a list of chatroom abbreviations and various and sundry other bits of interesting notions. One of my favorites is also contained in the Original Miscellany, the “Certain Chinese Encyclopedia” invented by Borges, entitled Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, which states that all animals can be catalogued thusly:

[a] belonging to the Emperor - [b] embalmed - [c] tame
[d] sucking pigs - [e] sirens - [f] fabulous - [g] stray dogs
[h] included in the present classification - [i] that shake like a fool
[j] innumerable - [k] drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
[l] etcetera - [m] having just broken the water pitcher
[n] that, if seen from a distance, look like flies

I hope Mr. Schott continues to compile these delightful Miscellanies, as they have become invaluable resources for this Librarian ¹.

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1. He adds a disclaimer that some of the information is subject to dispute, such as the red headedness of Andrew jackson, and goes on to note what we reference librarians have known all along: that facts are neither cold, nor hard but tend to amend themselves, or be amended over time.

In These Times:

I Love You, Madame Librarian

By Kurt Vonnegut

I, like probably most of you, have seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Its title is a parody of the title of Ray Bradbury’s great science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. This temperature 451 Fahrenheit, is the combustion point, incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

We love you too, Mr. Vonnegut. Click on the link and read the rest.

The Guardian:

Nasa has decided to try to save the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope by sending a Canadian-made robot to fix it, say agency officials.

[edit]

“Everybody says, ‘We want to save the Hubble’ - well, let’s go save the Hubble,” O’Keefe was quoted as saying by the Orlando Sentinel newspaper. “Rather than just sitting there and talking about how we think we’re going to do it, we’ve got an option we’re ready to go with.”

It will cost up to $1.6 billion (about �0.9bn) to save the telescope, which has peered back to the very beginnings of the universe, found planets outside our solar system and taken dramatic pictures of stars being born.

Unlike the dubious and thankfully forgotten Mars mission, the Hubble telescope has proven its scientific worth a hundred fold. In the years it’s been in orbit, it has seen farther than humans ever dreamed possible. The knowledge we’ve gained about the origins of the Universe have expanded our understanding of the cosmos beyond what we ever thought it could. As one of the few remaining international outlets for cooperation left for the US, it’s worth extends beyond the scientific, into the politcal and I for one, am glad that we’ll be saving it.

Way to go, Canada!

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Edited for Fnords.

John Kerry: The Most Liberal Senator? An Analysis

Fellow LC member, Scout at AND THEN… has a great post concerning latant UN hatred on the right:

But it seems like maybe the UN would have saved us a lot of misery if only we listened to it. And so it reminds me a bit of the parable on the West Wing a while back, when President Bartlett had to consider commuting a death sentence? You might remember it.

There’s a man in a town where it’s been raining for days and days, and so the Mayor says that everyone should evacuate. But one man says no, he’ll stay because he has faith in God. And so the rain water gets higher, and kills his sheep, and his wife implores him to leave, and he says no, he will stay because he has faith in God. So then his wife leaves, begging him, but he won’t leave, his faith is so strong. So then a rescue boat comes, and says they will save him, but he won’t, because God will see him through. They leave, and the rain continues, until he is on his roof and it collapses, and he drowns. He ascends to heaven and he says to God, ‘Why did you take me, when I had so much faith in you?’ And God replies, ‘I sent the mayor to warn you, I killed your sheep to warn you, I sent your wife to warn you and then finally sent a rescue boat to save you, and you turned them all away. So I ask to you, why, when I was telling you all of this, did you refuse to listen to a word I said?’