Gotcha Big Time

The scrambling and fumbling from the white house would be comical if it were not for the fact that these pratfolks are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. They are, as thinking folks have long realized, full-out war-criminals, basically indistinguishable in terms of moral lapses and general violation of the codes of human decency from Milosevich, Hitler, and Stalin. Lining their pockets and subsuming power were of such importance that Condi, George, Dick, Don, Karl, Colin, et al were willing to sign up to mass slaughter of civilians including dissemination of spent uranium, use of cluster bombs, and allowing massive quantities of munitions to be left unguarded in the desperate race to "take" Baghdad. I am an optimist and believe that karma will settle the score with each and every one of them in the long term. But in the meantime we are responsible for continuing to hector and agitate for something gradually getting back to a system of democratic government. Congressional oversight is a good start.

I preach to the choir here only in hopes of emphasizing how dire the consequences ought to be for the obvious conniving and obstruction of justice that is becoming more and more obvious with every day. This happens to be from Huffpost, but the bells are ringing on all sides:

When a massive quantity of White House information is supposedly lost--four years and five million emails--the truth is that somebody made it happen, somebody wanted it all lost and did what was necessary to make it so.

In today's world, "lost" is what happens to socks in the washing machine, not what happens to political communication in the White House.

The question to ask in the case of the missing emails--four years and five million missing emails--is not, as the White House would have it, "Whose screw up resulted in the information being lost?" but the more accurate question, "Who gave the order to make it lost?"

We live in a world where a twelve-year-old with broadband and an iBook can find anything on the Internet in less time than it takes to microwave some mac and cheese. Ten minutes later, that same kid can download more pages onto the iPod jacked into their sweatshirt than in all the books in their school library. Maybe forty years ago we lived in a "global village," but we're in a "Google village," now--and we get there on the Fios freeway. This is not a world where "lost" and "information" are two concepts that make much sense.

If my house catches fire and collapses on my laptop, I can take the molten mass that remains to a specialist who can retrieve all my information and tell me the the name of the last person who sent me an instant message. "Lost" does not apply.

In this world of high-speed access, giga-downloads and cell-phone searches--for the White House to claim that they "screwed up" and lost four years and five million emails is to claim that they have transported the entire planet to the year 1971--back to a world where information is not something forever waiting to be found, recovered and reclaimed, but something dusty and yellow stacked in cardboard boxes. That was the world of "lost," not this world, not today.

In the world of 2007, information does not just vanish. Either somebody makes it go away or it lingers on far longer than any of us want. Either somebody decides they want information to disappear or that information sticks around like flypaper. If information is no longer searchable, recoverable, discoverable or downloadable, it is not because someone "screwed up," but because someone with power gave an order to someone with skills, "Make this information go away. I don't want some twelve-year-old kid with broadband and an iBook finding it."

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One Librarian Bites the Dust

I've always found librarians to be my natural allies. How could it be otherwise, assuming you read and love books? And if not, why are you here - or for that matter have you considered euthanasia? They're the amanuenses after all to those terrific repositories of information, i.e., books. And, in my experience, almost always ever-so-smart and most importantly savvy. And perhaps as important as any other factors, wonderfully open-minded and tolerant.

So I'm having a very strong negative reaction to the concept of a "library" in the name of george bush. This lowly banana-slug is a specimen who from what I can tell is scarcely capable of reading. Not because of some innate handicap, mind you, but because he has no curiosity or concept of actually learning anything. He's almost certainly an anti-reader, notwithstanding his obsession with "The Pet Goat" when he should have been at least pretending to be president and might even have been making a difference on 9/11. It's ever so clear that he would never explore alternatives or contemplate a change of mind - and given his stump-headedness, he'd no doubt find any of us who choose to question or explore to be losers. I.e., he does not read, never miind think.

Not the least of this for me is that Laura, once a theoretically competent librarian, is now staggering around with every evidence of being opiated and no longer a proponent of actual education, thinking, or even any program of self-improvement. She's become a prop for a total moron who is the antithesis of everything librarians are trained to support. Imus would have a name for that, I guarantee.

Of course we recognize the brush-cutter's remarkable performance as the obviously floppiest and most inept cartoon-character-buffoon of a president of all time seals the deal. A loser is a loser, and this george has more or less cornered that market. It doesn't even require great reading skill to figure that out.

But a library? Why not name a sewage treatment plant after him? How about a new shoe sole design?