The Invisible Library

There was an interesting discussion over at Boing Boing earlier about libraries and how they handle books on the occult.

Cecile Dubuis wrote a master’s dissertation for University College London titled “Libraries & The Occult.” I’ve only read bits of it,but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems.

Sadly, the discussion wandered off into weird, symbolic arguments about Remote Viewing and whether or not it can be scientifically validated (short answer: it can’t. Remote Viewing has about as much science in it as Voodoo Economics has dolls and magic potions).

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China Mieville has a great article over at In These Times about Floating Utopias and the sinister, libertarian shadow, the tax-free micro-nation. It’s a fun read* but the best part is his summation of Libertarianism:

Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.

Libertarians have always struck me as either extremely naive or excessively callous. They don’t want to be part of society if they have to share burdens and responsibilities or contribute (other than goods and services that they get cash money paid for). They want to drop out of society and be like hippies, only they still want to drive Hummers and have that leather couch they’ve always wanted.

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It’s hard being a satirist these days. No matter what great little idea you come up with to poke fun at the powerful and well connected, it pales in comparison to the tinfol hat, bat shit snorting insanity that actually is the Right Wing Media. Take Bill O’Reilly’s latest fantasy:

A “national underground network” of pink pistol-packing lesbians is terrorizing America. “All across the country,” they are raping young girls, attacking heterosexual males at random, and forcibly indoctrinating children as young as 10 into the homosexual lifestyle, according to a shocking June 21 segment on the popular Fox News Channel program, “The O’Reilly Factor.”

Titled “Violent Lesbian Gangs a Growing Problem,” the segment began with host Bill O’Reilly briefly referencing for his roughly 3 million viewers the case of Wayne Buckle, a DVD bootlegger who was attacked by seven lesbians in New York City last August. Deploying swift, broad strokes, O’Reilly painted a graphic picture of lesbian gangs running amok. “In Tennessee, authorities say a lesbian gang called GTO, Gays Taking Over, are involved in raping young girls,” he reported. “And in Philadelphia, a lesbian gang called DTO, Dykes Taking Over, are allegedly terrorizing people as well.”

In Bill O’Reilly land, lesbian gangs wielding pink pistols are terrorizing heteros and children, driving them into a life of depredation, sodomy and crime. I think it’s the pink pistols that really puts it over the top. If I wrote a story in which I described this sort of thing, no one would believe it. Honestly, I couldn’t have come up with something so bizarre and perverse if I tried. I haven’t heard anything so fucking weird since the last time I read Naked Lunch. Thing is, William S. Burrows was out of his mind on heroin when he wrote about talking assholes and jism drinking alien sodomites and even then he meant them to be satirical fantasies. But Bill O’Reilly was stone cold sober, people. Think about that. Even more far fetched, Papa Bear wants you to consider this, not just as a fantastical bit of absurdest commentary, or as some dark and perverted fantasy, but as an actual, factual and verifiable event in the material world. David Neiwert, via the link above, has all the pertinent details on how this is complete fascist bullshit, in case you’re concerned.

We need stronger satire people, because reality is catching up.

Has it ever seemed to you like the folks over at Homeland Security think they live in a science fiction universe, where water can be made to explode and a nut with a home made shoe bomb is a credible threat? This is the reason why:

Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described “deviant” thinkers: science-fiction writers.

“We spend our entire careers living in the future,” says author Arlan Andrews, one of a handful of writers the government brought to Washington this month to attend a Homeland Security conference on science and technology.

Those responsible for keeping the nation safe from devastating attacks realize that in addition to border agents, police and airport screeners, they “need people to think of crazy ideas,” Andrews says.

The writers make up a group called Sigma, which Andrews put together 15 years ago to advise government officials. The last time the group gathered was in the late 1990s, when members met with government scientists to discuss what a post-nuclear age might look like, says group member Greg Bear. He has written 30 sci-fi books, including the best seller Darwin’s Radio.

Now, the Homeland Security Department is calling on the group to help with the government’s latest top mission of combating terrorism.

I’m as much a fan of Science Fiction as the next geek, but these guys write futuristic war porn. Plug any one of their names into Amazon and you’ll find a bibliography of wingnuttery. These are the guys who think worldwide wars with tactical nukes are a good idea. And now the TSA and OHS want them coming up with fantasy scenarios that they think terrorists will use against us. Because we don’t have enough of those.

Terrorists will not be stealing a super secret experimental rail gun that fires sub light speed pellets of Einsteinium. They will not be hijacking the MIT Centrifuge in order to try and create a rogue black hole. Any would-be terrorist is going to use the easiest, dirtiest and most effective way to cause a Black Swan Event. That means hijacking airplanes to use as missiles (which, now that it’s been done is predictable and therefore, a worthless tactic). They’ll build homemade explosives, stuff them in a backpack and then blow themselves up on the New York Subway. Maybe. More than likely though, as we recently discovered, they’ll be so scared by an undercover FBI agent trying to get them to preform an ill-advised raid on Fort Dix, that they’ll call the police on themselves.

It’s this sort of sci-fi nonsensical thinking that has got US citizens afraid, and willing to turn over their rights, in the hopes that Jack Bauer will save them from terrorists with fantasy super weapons. Perhaps we’ve seen too many James Bond films but so long as we’re distracting ourselves looking for Dr. Evil and his sharks with laser beams, we’ll overlook the real threat, which of course is the point of all this terror theater: keep people distracted with elaborate scenarios and maybe they won’t notice that there’s nothing practical we can do to predict who the next disgruntled guy with a grudge and an IED or a cache of weapons will be.

Link via Boing Boing.

In order to reach the conclusion that there is no Limbo, the Pope sent out an official Vatican exploration team, led by a driven, sincere priest who wanted to find out if Limbo was real for personal reasons, to see if his brother, who died as an infant, was there, safe and sound. But after years of plundering heaven, driven mad by his quest, he reached the same conclusion as did Ponce de Leon (and the same fate as Lope de Aguirre): that just because you can imagine something exists, it doesn’t mean it will show up in the real world.