The League of David

So long, adios, arrivawhatever

This has been a bad year for Philistines.  The loss of their philosopher frog, and the emergence of alternative media were just two of  many tribulations they bore with little or no grace.  The election wipe out didn't help, of course.  It just reinforced the unspoken reality they all know, but refuse to openly acknowledge:  they are not the Voice of The People.  As a matter of fact, they are seen more like the Mouth of Sauron then the collective Che they wish to be.

The tsunami didn't help, because they can't pin it on President Bush.  Although they're trying, hard.

And now comes the passing of Susan Sontag.  A lover of dictators, a hater of America, Mz. Sontag lived the comfy, cozy life of many Philistine intellectuals, pronouncing what is Right & Good from a well-appointed living space in the greatest city on earth, in the most tolerant country on earth.  And all Philistines loved her for her "courage" to say stupid things in one of the few countries that permit women to say what they choose and make money doing it.

And what did this brilliant mind contribute to American civilization?

Love of dictators

"...the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization...No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published."

Hatred for her countrymen

"Americans have a completely linear sense of history -- insofar as they have one at all."  Or, "America is a cancerous society with a runaway rate of productivity that inundates the country with increasingly unnecessary commodities, services, gadgets, images, information."

Elitist condescension

"...not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don't need `a wider scale of experience.' It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people."

Tribal chic

"The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print culture."

Respect for the men who slaughter innocents by the thousands.

"In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

9/11 wasn't good for Philistines, because it brought out the ugliest facets of their collection character: hysterical hatred for America and people who don't share their views.  Mz. Sontag embodies this hysterical ugliness.  As a matter of fact she reminds me of Denethor, who despaired in the face of his own inevitable irrelevance.

And what better way to remember  Mz. Sontag than a Separated-At-Birth homage?

Like Capt Ed, I will also need to confess this when the time comes, but at least I won't be alone.

Another Good Riddance

Drudgereport links to an obit for Susan Sontag, Philistine extraordinaire:

An early and passionate opponent of the Vietnam War, Sontag was both admired and reviled for her political convictions. In a 1967 Partisan Review symposium, she wrote that "America was founded on a genocide, on the unquestioned assumption of the right of white Europeans to exterminate a resident, technologically backward, colored population in order to take over the continent."

In her rage and gloom and growing despair, she concluded that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Good riddance, bitch.

UPDATE:

Just a reminder to one of my three readers who may think my disgust is ill-informed.  I had the pleasure of reading the miserable woman's essay published to commemorate the 1st anniversaryof 9/11, and I was once again reminded of her unbounded disdain for the civilization that spawned her:

Describing America's new foreign policy as actions undertaken in wartime is a powerful disincentive to having a mainstream debate about what is actually happening. This reluctance to ask questions was already apparent in the immediate aftermath of the attacks last Sept. 11. Those who objected to the jihad language used by the American government (good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism) were accused of condoning the attacks, or at least the legitimacy of the grievances behind the attacks.

Under the slogan United We Stand, the call to reflectiveness was equated with dissent, dissent with lack of patriotism. The indignation suited those who have taken charge of the Bush administration's foreign policy. The aversion to debate among the principal figures in the two parties continues to be apparent in the run-up to the commemorative ceremonies on the anniversary of the attacks - ceremonies that are viewed as part of the continuing affirmation of American solidarity against the enemy. The comparison between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941, has never been far from mind.

Once again, America was the object of a lethal surprise attack that cost many - in this case, civilian - lives, more than the number of soldiers and sailors who died at Pearl Harbor. However, I doubt that great commemorative ceremonies were felt to be needed to keep up morale and unite the country on Dec. 7, 1942. That was a real war, and one year later it was very much still going on.

This is a phantom war and therefore in need of an anniversary. Such an anniversary serves a number of purposes. It is a day of mourning. It is an affirmation of national solidarity. But of one thing we can be sure. It is not a day of national reflection. Reflection, it has been said, might impair our "moral clarity." It is necessary to be simple, clear, united. Hence, there will be borrowed words, like the Gettysburg Address, from that bygone era when great rhetoric was possible.

Or this from Newsday's oogling obit:

Then in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sontag offered a bold and singular perspective in the New Yorker. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?" She added, "In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards."

UPDATE II:

Newsday has toned down the force of Sontag's statement.  She actually wrote this:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing America bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue) whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.

This was written, oh, I think one week after the attack.  Vile, vile woman.

 

Last Word on Target

Okay, this is the last thing I will ever say about Target:

A Nightmare Come to Life

Tsunami victims are beginning to tell their stories.  This is deeply horrible stuff, a nightmare come to life. 

These are excerpts from the BBC

I just met a couple out at the airport who were leaving without their passport,  without any of their belongings.

I spoke to another man who had tried to resuscitate a young Thai boy  for 50 minutes and had ultimately failed
They had been swept from their hotel room after being given five minutes warning to get out.  They couldn't get out in time.

The husband tried to hold onto his wife as long as he possibly could.

She was swept away.

He caught up with her again but suffered burn marks on his hands where he grabbed onto electrical wires to try to brace himself against the waters.  Just horrific tales.

I spoke to another man who had tried to resuscitate a young Thai boy  for 50 minutes and ultimately failed.

And this

I woke up to what I thought was banging on our hotel door - it blew open and we were tossed from our bed by the surge of tide into the room. It broke out the back windows and we were carried out. We scrambled on to walls and rooftops but within minutes the tide surged higher and 15 to 20 feet was not high enough. The buildings around me collapsed and I was thrown into the surge. When I came up there was a branch I grabbed on and held. Surviving the receding tides was hardest. Pinned against a tree by the water, debris and bodies started to pile up against me and it felt like I was being crushed. In the end, the whole resort was gone. There are many others like me - lost, dazed and searching for their loved ones.

Another one

We were still in bed in a ground floor room right on the beachfront when we suddenly heard some shouts from outside.

Then the water started coming under the door.  Within a few seconds it was touching the window.

We very quickly scrambled to get out as the windows started to cave in and glass shattered everywhere.

We swam out of the room neck deep in water, forcing our way through the tables and chairs in the restaurant and up into a tree.

But within about 30 seconds that tree collapsed as well and we were thrust back into the water where we had to try and keep our heads above the water line.

We were swept along for a few hundred metres, trying to dodge the motorcycles, refrigerators, cars and other debris that were coming with us.

Finally, about 300m inshore, we managed to get hold of a pillar, which we held onto until the waters just gradually began to subside.

There there's this from the Washington Post:

All of a sudden, I found myself being swept out to sea with startling speed. Although I am a fairly strong swimmer, I was unable to withstand the current. The fishing boats around me had been torn from their moorings and were furiously bobbing up and down.

For the first time, I felt afraid, powerless to prevent myself from being swept out to sea.

I swam in the direction of one of the loose catamarans, grabbed hold of the hull, and pulled myself to safety. My weight must have slowed the boat down and soon I was stranded on the sand.

From Sky News

In the Phang Nga tourist spot of Khao Lak, 20 small resorts weres wiped out, a hotel worker  said.                     

"Before the wave hit, I saw sea water fell back around 100 metres from the beach and some minutes later there was a three-storey high wave moving toward the beach and everything collapsed," he said. 

I looked around at the Philistine, er, mainstream, media websites, and I found little coverage.  Perhaps it's because so few Americans vacation in that part of the world.  It's too bad that the MSM isn't paying attention.  It's a huge story, and even though only a handful of Americans may have died, this earthquake will impact America's economy in ways that we can hardly imagine.  It's full effect might not be felt here for another six months.   

Fantasy & Nightmares

Today of all days I'm reminded once again that we don't live in the fantasy world needed to sustain the Philistine's environmental policies.

Fantasy

Gaia theory is a class of scientific models of the biosphere in which life fosters and maintains suitable conditions for itself by affecting Earth's environment. The first such theory was created by the English atmospheric scientist James Lovelock in 1969 . He hypothesized that the living matter of the planet functioned like a single organism and named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia .

Gaia theories have non-technical predecessors in the ideas of several cultures. Meanwhile today, "Gaia theory" is sometimes used among non-scientists to refer to theories of a self-regulating Earth that are non-technical but take inspiration from the scientific models.

Reality

Tourists, fishermen, homes and cars were swept away by walls of water up to 20 feet high that rolled across the Bay of Bengal, unleashed by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake centered off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The rush of waves brought sudden disaster to people carrying out their daily activities on the ocean's edge: Sunbathers on the beaches of the Thai resort of Phuket were washed away; a group of 32 Indians — including 15 children — were killed while taking a ritual Hindu bath to mark the full moon day; fishing boats, with their owners clinging to their sides, were picked up by the waves and tossed away.

"All the planet is vibrating" from the quake, said Enzo Boschi, the head of Italy's National Geophysics Institute. Speaking on SKY TG24 TV, Boschi said the quake even disturbed the Earth's rotation.

The U.S. Geological Survey ( news -web sites ) measured the quake at a magnitude of 8.9. Geophysicist Julie Martinez said it was the world's fifth-largest since 1900 and the largest since a 9.2 temblor hit Prince William Sound Alaska in 1964.

The epicenter was located 155 miles south-southeast of Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province on Sumatra, and six miles under the seabed of the Indian Ocean.

On Sumatra, the quake destroyed dozens of buildings — but as elsewhere, it was the wall of water that followed that caused the most deaths and devastation.

Tidal waves leveled towns Aceh province on Sumatra's northern tip. An Associated Press reporter saw bodies wedged in trees as the waters receded. More bodies littered the beaches.

Health ministry official Els Mangundap said 1,876 people had died across the region, including some 1,400 in the Aceh provincial capital, Banda Aceh. Communications to the town had been cut. 

Note to Philistines: The planet does not self-regulate!

Not A Happy Review

This New York Times reviewer is trying to be nice while writing some of the most dreaded sentences in the museum industry:

But the exhibits are where the problems begin in earnest.

Ouch.

I work near the National Mall, and on nice days I usually walk across the Mall and catch the Metro on the other side. Sometimes I'm walking through a protest; sometimes it's a party.  I remember the festivities commemorating the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in late summer.   I was startled by the sheer number of people who claimed American Indian decent, and I saw a variety of faces and shapes that made me think that "American Indian" is like "Asian," just an expedient bureaucratic phrase to describe an unbelievably diverse group of people. 

That is, however, everything I know and care about when it comes to American Indian art and culture.  There just aren't many American Indians here in an east coast,  blue state urban environ, and Indian kitsch doesn't blend well with DC-area decor. 

However, I hate the building that houses the Museum.  It's a great big eyesore in a strategic part of the Mall.  It reminds me of the old stucco walls in my grandparent's brownstone in Queens.  The hard, pointy stucco used to catch on my shirt or poke me in the arm.  It also matched perfectly with the green velvet and gold lame decor.  When I look at the building I'm reminded of the gilded busts of Ferdinand and Isabella in their living room.  After a childhood living of fear of visits to my grandparent's house, I'm less inclined to visit a place that brings back old memories.

For some reason the Museum's designers felt the need to stand out.  They couldn't build any old beige stone monstrosity like the other buildings on the Mall.  They had to be different.  Thus, ugly:

Some of these problems seem palpable in the Indian museum's building itself, which fills the last open spot on the Mall. In 1998 [chief architect] was fired from the architect job and multiple voices came into play; he called the result a ''forgery'' and refuses to take credit. His vision of a sweeping earth-form, shaped by nature's force fields, can still be sensed. But the northwest corner of the building is leaden, its Mall-facing facade only half-heartedly awakening as it leads toward the east-facing front. The landscaping, which includes 33,000 plants of 150 species along with various invocations of Native American elements -- a boulder from Hawaii, growing stalks of corn and a recreated Chesapeake wetlands -- is marred by fussiness.

Double ouch.

It also appears that the Museum suffers under the heavy weight of moral relativism and political correctness:

In fact, there is an astonishing uniformity in the exhibits' accounts of religious beliefs, which may have been homogenized by subtle forces within the museum itself. The building emphasizes a kind of warm, earthy mysticism with comforting homilies behind every facade, reviving an old pastoral romance about the Indian.

But these were communities that at least at one time were vastly different, which farmed or hunted, engaged in war, suffered indignity, inspired outrage. The notion that tribal voices should ''be heard'' becomes a problem when the selected voices have so little to say. Moreover, since American Indians largely had no detailed written languages and since so much trauma had decimated the tribes, the need for scholarship and analysis of secondary sources is all the more crucial.

But the museum almost seems afraid of distinctions. [Triple ouch] There are display cases of objects made with beads, organized with no particular logic; a beaded horse-head cover from 1900 North Dakota appears near a mid-19th-century sea-otter hat from the Aleutian Islands. One wall holds ''star'' objects, whose only connection is that they have pictures of stars on them. Some tribes are asked to present 10 crucial moments in their history; the Tohono Oodham in Arizona choose, as their first, ''Birds teach people to call for rain.'' Their last is in the year 2000, a ''desert walk for health.''

The result is that a monotony sets in; every tribe is equal, and so is every idea. No unified intelligence has been applied. Moreover, with a net cast so wide, including South and Central America as well as Alaska, the only commonality may be the encounter with colonizers -- and even this must be simplified.

What a shame.

The Battle for Christmas

Touchstone Magazine has a roundup of recent anti-Christian Christmas activity.

Google & Libraries 102

The editorial boards at the New York Times and the Boston Globe add their .02 US to the Google/libraries deal.  There's not much new here.  Even with a little more information about the deal, my original response remains the same:  big deal.

Google will provide primary funding for the project, and by the looks of it, will provide technical and logistical support.  They intend to scan 15 million books from all five collections in 6 years.  I'll tip my hat to them if they can achieve that goal.  Still, there are way too many intellectual property issues involved, and the Times hits the nail on the head when it describes the nature of much of the initial material involved:

The prospect is inherently enticing, especially to anyone who has ever worked in a major research library. Google says it will take six years to scan some 15 million books. It will take even longer to understand the cultural implications of admitting everyone with Internet access to the contents of the world's great research libraries.

But there are some serious concerns. One is about copyright. At the outset, this project will be limited to books that are old enough to no longer be under copyright. This is as it should be. It will serve as a demonstration of the immensity - and the immense cultural value - of works in the public domain, and could well kindle a new appreciation of the significance of the public domain.

And from the Globe editorial:

The full text of books whose copyright has expired will be available. Access to books still under copyright will be more limited.

That's an understatement.

This is old stuff, folks.  Public domain material is not younger than 75 years old.  In subject areas such as science, medicine, and the social sciences, the materials will be woefully useless.  Even Google's own example of the material they are making available is sort of sad:  an 1896 book called Books and Culture.

As the Times editorial points out, one latent effect this project might have is to increase awareness of the issues surrounding public domain.  In recent years Congress has been more than happy to extent copyright privileges well beyond the original Constitutional intent (IMHO):

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

It would be nice to see this issue revisted.

I can understand why Google chose such a project.  They need content, their tool is effective at searching websites, and some other web content, but currently that's about it.  But I have real doubts that they are going to overcome some of the legal and logistical issues involved in a project this size.  Intellectual property may not be easy to visualize, but it is property nonetheless, and it represents a significant portion of our economy.  I wouldn't want to be the Google lawyer who has to suggest to publishers that they make their backlists (example) available, you know, for free!   I would love to be a fly on the wall in those discussions.

Oh, one more thing.

One of Google's executives went off the rhetorical deep end when he said that Google's ultimate goal was to have his search engine replicate the "mind of God:"

Sergein Brin, one of the founders  of Google once told me he hoped Google could be like the mind of God, everywhere and knowing everything. And that's their goal. They want to organize everything.

If he honestly believes he can do this with a search engine, then I would suggest he point his search engine to this and think hard about certain lessons in hubris.

UPDATE:

Before you go out and buy Google stock, I would read the this sobering NewsHour interview with Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library; and Jason Pontin, the editor-in-chief of the MIT Technology Review.

UPDATE II:  I know it's cold out their, but I can assure my three readers that hell hath not frozen over.  I really do agree with the New York Times.

Savoir of the People

A friend of mine has the pleasure of teaching at a local college in New York.  Here is an annual sampling of spell-check-o-rama:

Courtesy of my students, a sampling from this semester's crop of sentences gone awry from trusting the spellchecker:

1. "All throughout the Confederate states and the Union, there were bounty hunters whose soul purpose was to capture slaves on the run."
2. "To slaves, a man who owned many slaves was defiantly more evil than a man who owned fewer or no slaves at all."

And something you might consider about JC's role in this world:

"Christ was the savoir for people."  Savoir faire or savoir vivre? Lots of folks need both, salvation from sin aside. Pick and choose!

Book Geek Bona Fides

I received an e-mail from someone -- who is not among my three readers -- demanding to know how I am so sure that this well-intentioned, multimillion dollar boondoggle is NOT going to be the end of libraries and librarians as we know it.

Where to begin:

I worked in a public library when I was in high school the summer and fall of 1986-87 (before the e-mailer was a glimmer in his mommy & daddy's eye).  Off to college at the University of Maryland, I spent two years shelving and repairing books, and checking them out for patrons at the school's two largest libraries.  I've worked as a reference librarian in two government libraries, one legal library, and one non-profit library.  I was the knowledge manager at federal information center.  I've been a corporate intelligence librarian, and an open source intelligence analyst on a government contract where they are designing the next generation of search engines. 

While in college I studied medieval literature. I started graduate school working toward a PhD in medieval literature.  Reality got in the way, and so I decided to pay my bills by becoming a professional librarian.  My coursework at Catholic University's library school included two classes in analytical bibliography, but my emphasis was management, and it was this emphasis that become the inspiration for my first book.

In the early 1990s, I was responsible for digitizing a paper collection of government legal documents.  I've been responsible for assessing current digitization technology and processes.  In the late 1990s, I took some advanced training in copyright and intellectual property law.

I've been listening to the siren calls of End Times for Libraries since 1987.  The Google/Libraries project is nothing more than a very large digitization project, folks.  They happen all the time.