Still True Today

Ref Desk: Keeping Your Data While Border Crossing

February 15, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

Since the subject of international border crossing shenanigans for travelers has come up in the news, I found this tidbit on Boingboing.com:

How to legally cross a US (or other) border without surrendering your data and passwords

The combination of 2014’s Supreme Court decision not to hear Cotterman (where the 9th Circuit held that the data on your devices was subject to suspicionless border-searches, and suggested that you simply not bring any data you don’t want stored and shared by US government agencies with you when you cross the border) and Trump’s announcement that people entering the USA will be required to give border officers their social media passwords means that a wealth of sensitive data on our devices and in the cloud is now liable to search and retention when we cross into the USA.

On Wired, Andy Greenberg assembles some best-guess advice on the legal and technical strategies you can deploy to maintain the privacy of your sensitive data, based on techniques that security-conscious travelers have arrived at for crossing into authoritarian countries like China and Russia.

The most obvious step is to not carry your data across the border with you in the first place: get a second laptop and phone, load them with a minimal data-set, log out of any services you won’t need on your trip and don’t bring the passwords for them (or a password locker that accesses them) with you, delete all logs of cloud-based chat services. I use POP mail, which means that I don’t keep any mail on a server or in a cloud, so I could leave all my mail archives at home, inaccessible to me and everyone else while I’m outside of the USA or at the border.

Call your lawyer (or a trusted friend with your lawyer’s number) before you cross the border, then call them again when you’re released; if they don’t hear from you, they can take steps to ensure that you have crossed successfully, or send help if you need it.

One thing Greenberg misses is the necessity of completing a US Customs and Immigration Service Form G-28 before you cross the border. This form authorizes an attorney to visit you if you are detained at the border, but it has to be completed and signed in advance of your crossing. It also should be printed on green paper. The current version of the form expires in 2018, so you can complete it now, file it with your attorney or friend, and leave it until next year.

Remove any fingerprint-based authentication before you cross and replace them with PINs. Greenberg’s experts recommend using very strong passwords/PINs to lock your devices. I plan on a different strategy: before my next crossing, I’ll change all of these passwords/PINs to 0000 or aaaaaaaa, so that I can easily convey them to US border officials and they can quickly verify that I have no sensitive data on any of my devices. Once I have successfully crossed, I’ll change these authentication tokens back to strong versions.

Trusting Your News Feed

January 31, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

10 Investigative Reporting Outlets to Follow

January 13, 2017

This post first appeared on BillMoyers.com.

We’ve just started a new series highlighting some of the best, in-depth investigative journalism that is uncovering real news, revealing wrongdoing and fomenting change. As a compendium, here are 10 investigative reporting outlets that are worth following if they’re not already on your radar.

1. ProPublica — Founded 10 years ago by a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica is a nonprofit investigative news site based in New York City. In 2010 ProPublica was the first online publication to win a Pulitzer Prize and has earned two more since, as well as a long list of other prestigious awards.

2. The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) — An early player in the nonprofit investigative space, CPI has been around for close to 30 years. Its reporters have won dozens of journalism awards, including a Pulitzer in 2014, for its investigations of money in politics, national security, health care reform, business and the environment.

3. The Center For Investigative Reporting (CIR) — Founded 40 years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, CIR is a nonprofit that has partnered for years with other outlets to reach a wide audience in print, on television, on radio and online. It collaborates with PRX Radio to produce Reveal, the investigative radio program and podcast. The Reveal website is now home to all of CIRs investigative content.

4. Frontline — Launched more than 30 years ago, Frontline is television’s most consistent and respected investigative documentary program. Its documentaries are broadcast on PBS and are available online, along with original reporting.

5. Mother Jones — Mother Jones, founded in 1976, is a reader-supported, nonprofit news organization headquartered in San Francisco with bureaus in Washington, DC and New York City. The site includes investigative reporting as well as general reporting on topics including politics, climate change and education.

6. The Intercept — The Intercept is a news organization launched in 2014 by legal and political journalist Glenn Greenwald, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

7. Real Clear Investigations — Real Clear Investigations, which launched last fall, is the new nonprofit, investigative arm of Real Clear Politics. It is mostly an aggregator of investigative reporting, but has also begun conducting original investigations.

8. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) — ICIJ is a nonprofit offshoot of the Center for Public Integrity that began 20 years ago. It is a global network of more than 190 investigative journalists in more than 65 countries who work together to investigate cross-border issues including crime, corruption and abuse of power.

9. Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) — IRE is a grass-roots, nonprofit, membership organization that has been providing tips, training and conferences for investigative reporters since 1975. Its blog, Extra! Extra! showcases a wide variety of watchdog journalism.

10. BuzzFeed — Whatever you think about its decision to release the Trump dossier earlier this week (journalists are divided in their opinions), BuzzFeed has a growing investigative team and body of work worth attention, but it’s not always easy to find on the site. If you want to know what the team is up to you can follow its editor, Mark Schoofs, @Schoofsfeed on Twitter.

2017 Isn’t ‘1984’

January 30, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Shoe Room: A Visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum

January 27, 2017 by robmcclel Leave a Comment

Today, January 27, is Holocaust memorial Day. An appropriate day to re-post this bit about my visit to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. a few years ago. Let’s read and remember and understand that by the time the bad guys (of any stripe) start the expulsions, legalize the executions, and dig the mass graves, it’s too late to fix the problem through legislative means. We believe ourselves to be better than that. Let’s not allow it to get to that point.

***

I was all right until I saw the shoe room.

My wife and I spent the weekend in Washington, D.C. She had business to take care of, I had research to do at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We had plans to leave Monday afternoon so Monday morning we decided to visit the U.S. Holocaust Museum. We’re not religious Jews, neither of our families dealt much with the Holocaust directly but we figured for a day, we could afford to put our noses up to the window of history and embrace the horror.

I’m not going to describe the whole thing (I mean, hey, why ruin the ending, right? /sarcasm) but the Power of Nazi Propaganda exhibit was an awesome display of just how to get ordinary people to consistently behave like madmen. That was our first stop, it took about an hour to go through the whole thing.

We had to wait a while for the permanent exhibit: a grand tour of the most horrific years in twentieth century history. We joked as we got on line, because, well, you sort of have to. Mel Brooks was absolutely right: you have to laugh or you never stop crying.

The museum was packed: I’m told it generally is. Parents bring their kids, grandparents bring their kids. There’s a waiting area near the door and the children, especially the young ones act like themselves. They run, they jump around, they hang on the furniture and get scolded by attentive parents. I must have heard ten different languages and seen folks of every color and creed walk by while we waited for the permanent exhibit to open up, which was strangely comforting. It’s one thing to be told that WE MUST NEVER FORGET and another thing entirely to see families with no roots in European Jewry whatsoever making an effort to live up to that advice.

All that stops when they go into the elevator and go up to the fourth floor. Up there it’s nothing but hushed whispers and wide eyes.

The first thing you hear is a voice over a speaker in the elevator, ostensibly a bewildered American GI, saying “We’ve found something here and we’re not sure what it is, exactly. Some kind of prison. There are people wandering around, starving, dying.” The doors open and you’re face to face with a wall-sized photo of those same American GIs standing over a mass grave filled with burnt, mangled corpses, obviously at a loss for understanding.

There are three floors of that sort of thing placed in chronological order. The tour is self-guided, so you proceed ar your own pace. The fourth floor deals with the rise of the Nazis to real power in 1933, and then consolidating that power at the expense of those they considered inferiors. The third floor shows the war itself and the American reaction. The second floor shows the details of the Final Solution and the post war years.

There was little on display that I hadn’t encountered before. I was used to it. My father, my brother, and I were all World War II buffs. I had a grand-uncle who parachuted into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne. And we were Jewish, so we had to learn all this other stuff on top of it. Names of concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto uprising. The gas chambers, the crematoria, the rise of Zionism to a fever pitch after the war ended. The fact that the American government had other things on its mind even as the newspapers screamed about what was going on in Europe. Cantor Bydner, who taught me my Bar Mitzvah haftorah, was a Holocaust survivor. Those of us who didn’t have a survivor in their family, knew friends who had. It was part of our lives. Walking through the displays caused a lot of stress, but no surprises.

In a grotesque way, all this was old hat: Jewish American kids in the 1970s learned about those events the way we learned about English grammar and chemistry: I before E except after C. Water is H2O. The Germans wiped out six million of us, and the crazy Arabs would finish the job in a minute if they could, so Israel is the center of the world. Got that? Good. Let’s eat. The possibility that it wasn’t that simple never occurred to us.

On the second floor as you walk through a glass corridor, several panes etched with the names of scores of towns that were wiped out, you enter a darkened room that is filled with shoes.

That’s the display: Shoes. Old shoes. New shoes. Worn shoes. Badly repaired shoes. Some were withered with use. Some were scuffed from extensive use. Black leather shoes. Brown cloth shoes. Men’s shoes. Women’s shoes. Wide shoes. Narrow shoes.

Baby shoes.

Hundreds of them. Arranged in a heap ten or twelve inches deep covering the two hundred square foot floor except for a narrow path that you walk through to go the next room.

Shoes.

Obviously, there are other artifacts on display, both out in the open and behind plexiglass. Some are necessarily more personal than others: Striped pajamas from the camps. Eating utensils. Bowls, plates, cutlery. Doors. Keys. A massive black iron casting of the front gate of Auschwitz (the original is in Poland). Scale models of the Killing Centers* including a massive crowd of two-inch tall figurines being herded into gas chambers. A preserved gas chamber door. Empty poison gas canisters. Prisoners’ wooden bunks. Thousands of photographs, several miles of archival film. The shoe room breaks everyone, even if it’s just a little bit.

Shoes.

On reflection, I know why the shoe room works. Shoes are intensely personal items that we use to define ourselves as people. Think about it: is there any item of human manufacture that speaks to civilization and our place in it more than footwear? Even simple ones like sandals, even cut strips of bark wrapped around the foot with vines. Shoes are a mark of western civilization, evidence of progress, a standard of normal life among cities. Our rules of daily routine require them. Going barefoot is permissible to very young children but that’s it. “I cried because I had no shoes …”** The only time we take our shoes off is to sleep. Even when we bury our dead, someone puts a pair of shoes on the deceased before the body is lowered into the grave. We discard shoes only when we’ve destroyed them. Or, in this case, destroyed the people in them.

Shoes.

The problem with exhibits like this one–graphic presentations created by curators and the processional historians they work with to try to illustrate and perhaps explain immense, insane things to otherwise well-informed visitors–is that after a certain point, people tend to turn off. It quickly becomes to much to process. Something like the Holocaust is too big to grasp, even if like me and five million other American Jews, we’ve been steeped in this history most of our lives. Additionally, this is for all intents and purposes, a pretty tame exhibit. The really frightening stuff is living over at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Living beneath that Sword of Damocles is now part of growing up Jewish. We all asked the same question of our teachers in Hebrew School: Why them? Why us? How did something like this ever happen? There were no answers except for the obvious platitudes: “Because they hate us.” “Because they were crazy.” “Because that’s what people who hate do.” The real answer, however, was always the same: the haunted look in our elders’ eyes when they told us these things. That look said: we have no idea. We don’t know why it happened, but then we don’t know why water is H2O, either. It just is. And that terrified them. It didn’t do us kids any good, either.

But anyone can understand a room full of discarded shoes.

This is probably wishful thinking at work but for the first time in my life, I think I have an idea of why Holocaust deniers stick to their stories.*** People who insist that the big event never happened or happened on an infinitely smaller scale aren’t like Bob in Accounting who swears up and down that he paid back that five-spot that he borrowed from you last month when he didn’t–that guy is just being a putz. You don’t loan him money again. Fine.

They also aren’t like pundits, politicians, and corporate excs who insist that there’s no such thing as man-made global warming, or if there is, it’s either not their fault or not as bad as the media says it is. That’t mere greed in action: if it’s real, and they caused it, then they’re responsible for fixing it which would cost them their jobs. Obnoxious but understandable.

People who deny the facts of the Holocaust are coming from a much darker place. It has less to do with hate and more to do with fear. Raw, unbridled, fear of it having happened, because if it’s real, then it really did happen, and if it happened once to the Jews, then it can happen again, to them. That’s a decidedly sane reaction. It’s a good thing to be afraid of for the simple reason that there are always people willing and able to capitalize on fear and hate to gain and maintain power. But instead of dealing with the fear, these folks twist it, turn it into something outside reality, and blame the victims. Perversely ensuring that the next time something like it does happen, they won’t see it. Problem solved!

None of the visitors in my group stayed in the Shoe Room for very long. We glanced around and hurried past. That’s simple self-preservation at work; anyone with a fragment of imagination who lingered in the Shoe Room walked out in tears. There are giant posters placed throughout the museum, ordering visitors to THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN, but compared to the Shoe Room, they fall flat.

The final rooms cover the aftermath years: 1945-1949, covering the gathering of the survivors, the effort to push Great Britain to release control of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. There are flags to denote the countries where sympathizers rescued Jews from the Nazis, and the names of thousands of Jewish resistors. It’s heartening to see, if only because no-one likes to think of their people as the ones who went to their doom without a fight. None of it made up for the Shoe Room. I don’t think anything can.

* “Killing Center” is the museum’s term for it, and that is how it’s used in the explanation placards. I find the phrase accurate but sterile. “Death Camp” is the term I was raised to remember. It’s not technically correct–there were many more forced labor camps than death camps per se– but it’s got a bit more oomph, don’t you think?

** ” . . . until I met a man who had no feet.”

***As opposed to mere anti-semites who are all about the hate.

Renewing an Oath

January 20, 2017 by robmcclel 1 Comment

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall educate people, answer any question, and read to children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my reference desk. I am the candle in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the knowledge of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Library, for this night and all the nights to come.

—The Library Oath

The Smartest Ones in the Room: A Review of Hidden Figures

January 16, 2017 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

In 1961, America was all about the mission. A directive that sounds simple was but was anything but. The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was on. Both sides were engaged in a game of technological Can You Top This? and the Russians were winning. Cold War America was held in the grip of a simple fear. The Russians had already proved five years earlier that they could built a rocket capable of pushing an artificial satellite into orbit. The logic from there told us a simple story: If a satellite could be pushed that far that fast, then what was to prevent them from putting a nuclear bomb on the top of that rocket and flying it over to the US? World War II was only a decade and a half into history and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh in American minds.

Into this setting we meet Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson (played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae respectively), three black women who work as “computers” at NASA, calculating the trajectories for Project Mercury. They are part of the West Area Computers Group at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Despite their clear experience, talent, and proficiency with the work–and the ambition to improve their skills and experience–1961 Virginia is not an encouraging place. Despite making use of her skills, Johnson’s supervisor won’t allow her to put her name on the report she writes or attend briefings on mission updates. The local librarian would rather throw Vaughan out of the building than allow her to borrow a book on FORTRAN so she can learn about the newly installed IBM mainframe. And while she contributes to figuring out how to improve the quality of the Mercury capsule’s heat shield, Jackson can’t be trained or hired as an engineer without taking the advanced classes that are only available at a whites-only institution.

Hidden Figures is a movie about achievement and racism. History, until relatively recently, has tended to forget or ignore the stories of individuals who contributed significantly to our national success if they didn’t fit the narrative. It makes its point without being high-handed or manufacturing drama for the sake of a conflict. The setting provides conflict enough. 1961 Virginia was was a time and place where segregation was considered utterly normal, even banal. We’re shown this in a series of small but essential scenes on the NASA campus: Johnson’s most annoying problem isn’t her work load or her co-workers, it’s the fact to just going to the toilet entails a 40 minute trip from her office to the colored-only rest room on the other end of the compound. It’s not until her boss is made aware of this that he realizes just how insane the law is. His solution is to tear down the white-only signs from the building. Segregation doesn’t fit the Mission, so out it goes. Time is precious. Get back to work.

That’s really the point of the film: segregation doesn’t fit the national mission. It’s an archaic, emotional reaction to a shallow need to feel superior to those around us based on superficial differences. The decision to do away with it is one we never really made.

On that note, we could do worse than to encourage women and girls to get involved in determining our national mission.

So, be the smartest one in the room.

Be essential to the mission.

Demonstrate your ability, skill, and competence to the world.

And if the existing mission is detrimental to the country, then let’s create a new mission that isn’t.

In the meantime, make noise. Make them notice you. Make it clear to those who don’t value you that you must be valued. More importantly, show them why. Show them what you have done. Demonstrate your vision to anyone who will listen. Do it now.

Happy MLK Day. Go see this movie. Now.

Banned Book Week 2015: Fahrenheit 451

September 29, 2015 by Jon Frater 4 Comments

Bad news: 451 degrees F is not, in fact, the temperature at which paper bursts into flame. (It’s actually between 440 and 470 degrees F depending on the type of paper).

Good news: Ray Bradbury’s novel about censorship, mass media, and induced apathy in the modern world is as accessible and spooky as it was the day he finished writing it in 1953.

Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a fireman in the most literal sense: he sets books on fire. Bradbury said in interviews that he wrote the book to address the popularity of the idea of book burning during the McCarthy years in the U.S. As time wore on, he came to describe the book in more general terms. The book has pulled down a number of awards starting with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Commonwealth Club of California Club Gold Medal in 1954. Francois Truffaut wrote and directed an excellent film adaptation in 1966, and the BBC produced a radio adaptation in 1982.

And of course, it’s been banned, censored, and redacted by schools and libraries since its publication. (The irony of banning a book about burning books is apparently lost in some circles.)

Anyway, Guy Montag burns books. In this world, firemen seek out and seize stashes of books in private homes and ignite them. Books are considered confusing things, filled with all sorts of ideas that make people uncomfortable (“painful, awful, hurting words” as his wife Millie describes them). In that sense, the firemen perform a public service: they keep the masses happy and allow them to focus on the permissible outlets: television (parlor walls), visual mass media, and sports events.

Frankly, Montag is okay with his life until he meets Clarisse, a new neighbor, a high school girl who is far more likely to ask “Why?” than “How?” While she vexes her teachers and fellow students, Montag finds her refreshing and fascinating–until she disappears. Montag’s wife, Millie, thinks the girl died in an auto accident but doesn’t really know or care.

Missing Clarisse is bad enough, but Montag truly questions his life when he takes a call to burn the stash of an elderly woman with a huge hidden library. The house is torched and the woman elects to burn to death with it rather than give up her library. Superficially, Montag understands that the woman sealed her own fate, but his guts tell him a different story.

Montag starts stressing out. Beatty, his fire chief, takes him aside to explain that the books aren’t really illegal per se. A fireman is even allowed to keep one and read it as long as he burns it within 24 hours. It’s the books’ effects on the public that forces the state to employ firemen. After he leaves, Montag reveals to his wife that he does have a stash of books, and he has no intention of burning them.

Montag loses his desire to play by the rules and obsesses about the books. He contacts an old English professor in a desperate attempt to figure out how reading works (and why it’s forbidden), only for him to avoid Guy like the plague. Guy then crashes his wife’s “parlor wall party,” reads the poem Dover Beach, and makes one guest cry. Millie flips out, Guy burns the book to mollify the guest, everyone storms out, and his wife turns Montag over to the authorities.

Millie leaves him on the spot while firemen burn his house. After a grand chase, Montag escapes the city to find a group of exiles who live by the river. Each of them has memorized one book in the hopes that the future will be more receptive to the idea of reading and preserving thoughts through the written word. War breaks out, the city is destroyed, and when the flames die down, Montag and his new friends head in to rebuild.

Bradbury’s work is generally allegorical, but Fahrenheit 451 is a thematic wonderland. Besides the obvious comparisons to real-life book burning which are perpetrated in the name of racial, political, or cultural purity, Bradbury equipped many of his characters with “Seashell ear-thimbles,” tiny earpieces through which individuals received streams of personalized media entertainment. On the surface, it’s just a radio, but just beneath that is the desire to surround oneself with a cocoon of sound to keep the world at bay. In that respect, one can’t exactly look at a world where tens of millions of personalized iPhones, Androids, iPads, tablets of every size and price range, float around keeping their users’ attention focused on their glowing screens at the expense of their neighbors and not be a little concerned.

Beyond that the book itself has been the victim of corporate meddling in the name of education standards. Starting in 1967 the book was subject to the expurgation of all words “hell,” “damn,” and the word “abortion” by its publisher, Ballantine Books, to create a high-school friendly version. Worse, by 1973 the cleaned up edition was the only version on the market. When Bradbury learned of this in 1979 he insisted that the original text be reinstated, and in 1980 it was.

One bit that appears frequently in the text that I sped over in this review is the mechanical “hound” that follows Montag, literally sniffing out trouble. It’s basically a robot that’s designed to assist the firemen in their daily lives, including sniffing out book stashes. Besides emerging as a stand-in for continual state surveillance, it’s one of these drones that chases Montag all over the city as a last ditch attempt by the government to silence him. For all that, the hound fails. It’s his wife, Millie, that rats him out the the government, showing that people are still the more dangerous enemy.

Another bit that recurs in the text: there are very few scenes where the subject of war isn’t in evidence. Bombers constantly fly overhead on their ways to foreign targets, Millie’s friend’s husband has been called up (she figures he’ll be back in a week because it’ll be over quickly), and Montag’s home town gets annihilated at the end of the book. The fact that war even exist in this world gives the lie to the danger that books and reading supposedly represent. If everyone must be kept happy and quiescent, why even have wars? Bradbury’s characters are not even sophisticated enough to ask that type of question. Even Beatty is, at heart, a just a functionary. And while Montag and the exiles have the best intentions, we have no clue if they have the skills to rebuild anything, even as they’re willing to try.

As always, many thanks to Shiela DeChantal and her Book Journey blog for giving awareness boosts to Banned Book Week.

And Now, a Damage Recovery Project

June 29, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Writing is a set of permanent thoughts, or, as a famous Gelfling once said, “words that stay.” I tell my students that a book is just about the most effective method of data storage and transmission ever devised. It’s a set of transcribed thoughts organized by page number and cross-referenced both by sequential progression (TOC) and also by subject (index). Computers can make the retrieval process faster, but engineers haven’t quite come up with a better method of storage. (Yet.)

But books are fragile. They don’t weather the elements well. Stone tablets will last for millennia. Paper lasts for a century at best, and mass-market paperbacks won’t last more than a few decades. (It remains to be seen what the lifespan of e-books are.)

Worse, disaster can strike without warning. Like when the water sprinkler on the floor above your library goes off and water cascades into your open stacks and onto your computers. Which is what happened to the MCNY library Saturday morning.

Water is the enemy of every library. Humidity breeds mold, which eats through paper like a college student goes through pizza and Froot Loops. There are ways of recovering books that have been affected by fungus, but they’re expensive and not always reliable. As in medicine, the best fix is to prevent it.

The good news is that most of the collection is fine. The bad news is that about a thousand books got drowned. We have a circulating collection of about 20,000 books, so 5% of our stuff needs to be dealt with on an emergency basis.

In some cases, water pooling on the carpet is all we had to deal with. That’s not too awful. The fix is to move in mobile AC units and up the heat over the weekend. That was done, and it worked.

Bloop ... bloop ... bloop — Bloop … bloop … bloop

Many books were pulled off shelves pre-emptively, before the worst could happen.

Widows and Orphans first ... — Widows and Orphans first …

Many more volumes were soaked and were moved into the server room, because it had the best air flow.

This is where we are now, with piles of books awaiting triage. Over the next week I’ll go through them one at a time. The dry ones will be replaced in the now dry stacks. The soaked ones will probably be discarded. The merely damp ones will be dried as best they can and replaced in the stacks. If mold has set in, they’ll be discarded as well.

In the meantime, all other work stops. The current mission is recovering what assets we have.

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Digital Recovery Plans, Libraries, and Us

May 6, 2015 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I’ll just say that if you couldn’t make it to NYTSL’s Spring Program last night, you missed an excellent discussion.

The program was “”Disaster Recovery and the Digital Library”, and as such, it brought a bit of real world application to the often abstract world of disaster planning. NYTSL’s guest speakers were Frank J. Monaco, a retired Army Colonel and the recently retired CIO of Pace University; and Neil H. Rambo, the Director of NYU Health Science Libraries and Knowledge Informatics.

Both men spoke about experiences that put their training, planning, and experience to the test. In Frank Monaco’s case, it was managing the school’s recovery from the 9-11 attacks.

Verizon facility serving most of downtown Manhattan — 140 West St, damaged by 7 WTC’s collapse.

Monaco has already written extensively on what he did that day but briefly: after he transitioned from the military to CIO of Pace U., the first part of his plan was to move the institutional data centers as far away from downtown as possible, meaning Briarcliff Manor, the site of Pace’s Westchester campus. This turned out out to be a fortuitous decision. When the Internet collapsed (literally, as data transfers relied on the Verizon facility at 140 West Street which was damaged by the 7 WTC building collapse) Pace’s CTO had to physically carry the school’s mission-critical external servers and move them to a disaster-recovery site in Hawthorne, NY. After 24 hours to allow new IP addresses to propagate, web pages and e-mail returned to functionality.

Importantly, Monaco noted that their disaster recovery plan was still incomplete at the time of the attack. He also pointed out that restoring service was a very small part of the tremendous effort exerted by Pace’s president, executive staff, administrative staff, faculty, and students.

Neil Rambo told a hair-raising tale of the events that occurred in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy heaped a few million cubic feet of water on New York City. Long story short, a 14-foot storm surge sent a wall of water powerful enough to blow steel doors off their hinges and send part of the East River into the lowermost levels of NYU’s Langone Medical Center on First Avenue. The result was a ruined library, destroyed archives, and a non-functional hospital.

Part of the problem was that NYU had previously weathered hurricane in 2011, Irene, which did minimal damage, and created a plan that expected similar damage from Sandy. After creating a response that planned for a cleanup and restoration of the medical center, library staff were enabled to work out of different facilities in a building across the street, reducing the loss of activity. It’s taken this long to determine that the library will be rebuilt into a superior environment which will devote nearly all its space to electronic resources, and is due to open later this year.

The lessons here aren’t really that surprising: make plans when things are running well, because there won’t be a chance when things break. A great plan, properly executed, is always better than an okay plan properly executed and light-years ahead of no plan at all. Optimally, the highest levels of administration need to be on board from the first stages of planning. Monaco’s advice on achieving this: “Scare the hell out of them.” Rambo’s advice was a bit more circumspect: “Imagine what would happen if you library was just gone, and work from that.”

And so I did. I’ll tell you what I figured out in the next post.

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Known Veterans of the Frater Family

May 26, 2008 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I hate memorial Day. Specifically, I hate the jingoism, the militaristic bullshit and the monumental levels of hype one hears pretty much on every television, radio, and in every newspaper and magazine, and on God knows how many internet sites, for these 24 hours. Statism is bad when it’s tolerable, it’s disgusting when it’s prostituted for mere political gain.

That said, I was born here, and at least 2 branches of my immediate family risked literally everything to come here in the early part of the 20th century, and for all it’s warts, it’s home. It’s a home that numerous individuals lived and died to defend and protect, and for their service, I am grateful.

My only real experience with the U. S. armed forces has been financial: I sold a couple of hard drives to the Navy and the Marines way back when I was in the computer parts business. The navy ship in question, whose quartermaster ordered the equipment was the U.S.S. Enterprise, which, being the science fiction nerd I am and will always be, pretty much made my whole year. But asthmatics with crappy vision are generally exempt from military service, so a civilian I remain, despite high scores of marksmanship at the local rifle range.

Members of my family, however, have served, for a wide variety of reasons, and I’m going to honor them and their memories by putting their names and service information here. You’ll notice that there’s more information on some than others, but in every case I listed as much as I could find.

Many thanks to my grand-uncle, Fred Frater, for maintaining these family records. (Fred’s half-brother, Hal Frater, was my grandfather; Hal passed away this past February 3, only 30 days sort of his 99th brthday. Hal’s wartime service was spent working for the War Dept. illustrating equipment manuals for the Army and Navy.)

KNOWN VETERANS OF THE FRATER FAMILY

Captain Garret Winegar, 12TH Mass. Regiment, Revolutionary War; enlisted, Continental Army, America, N.U. (see Revolutionary Rolls, Mass. Archives, Chapter 45, page 406)

John N. Francisco, Civil War, Union Forces, 1st Lt. Co. K, 22nd Infantry, Iowa Volunteers. Wounded, Port Gibson, Miss. (Battle of Vicksburg), (Grandparent of Jannibell O. S. Frater)

Edward W. Knapp, Civil War, Pvt., Co. E, 9th Regiment, Iowa Infantry Volunteers, (Grandparent of Janibell)

Walter A. “Skip” Smith, WWII, Seabee Pacific

Janibell O. Smith Frater, Army Nurse, WWII, served 1943-46 (wife of Fred)

Fred Stanley Frater, 82nd Airbone, WWII (Husband of Janibell)

Albert R. “Al” Frater, USMC, Vietnam, 1965-66

Arthur Frater, Major, U.S. Army, 9 years service

Jules Frater, served in Europe

Ronald Wherely, U.S.M.C

Tom Wilbean, U.S. Navy

Stan Smith, Served in Vietnam

Dick Memmary, U.S. Navy

Julian Frankel, U.S. Army, served in Korea

Happy Memorial Day!

Obligatory 9/11 Post

September 11, 2007 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I’ve written on this subject before (here and elsewhere) and I don’t think I have anything genuinely new to say on it, so I’ll stick to the things that are old but still true. The "Still True Today" category is a new one that I blatantly stole from Matthew Miller’s book "The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways That Liberals and Conservatives Can Love." Miller’s idea about raising the awareness of the typical American about things that are problematic for 21st century U.S.A. is to imagine what it might be like if every newspaper had a weekly or daily column titled "Still True Today" in which would be presented a salient fact such as "47 million Americans still do not have health insurance," or something similar. And since I don’t see anything like it in any newspaper I read, I figured I’d go ahead with the idea here.

So, it’s been six years since we lost the World Trade Center and as events would have it, the 11th once again falls on a Tuesday as it did in 2001. Some related bits and pieces that are Still True Today include:

3,000 American victims of the events of that day are still dead and are still missed terribly by their families and friends. And certain politicians (*cough* Giuliani *cough*) are still reminding us of the fact on national television for the sake of getting you to vote them into power and privilege. And for the most part, it’s still working.

This is not to avoid the fact that at least 70 thousand Iraqis remain dead since "major combat operations" ended in 2003 and they are terribly missed by their families and friends. And that is not to detract from the fact that nearly four thousand American servicemen and women are still dead from action in Iraq since 2003. They are missed as well.

However, let’s not lose sight of the fact (unpublicized but still a fact) that the attack was committed primarily by Saudis, not Iraqis. We’re still buying Saudi oil as fast as they can pump it out of the ground, and we are still selling them expensive weapon systems. Unfortunately we’re also still beating the living crap out of the folks in Iraq and we’re still fighting in Afghanistan as well. And despite the noise coming from congress, we’re still not planning on leaving either country any time soon. (And Osama bin Laden is, we are told, still alive and supposedly making new video tapes.)

On the subject of Afghanistan, opium is still the most profitable crop grown there, and the Taliban is still in control of a big chunk of the country. This despite an American military presence there since 2001.

To backtrack a bit, there are still an uncomfortable set of questions about the events of that day which have never been adequately addressed in the public arena. And one still need not resort to conspiracy theories to describe what can still be explained by pure human fuckery, greed and ambition.

Worst of all considering our current leadership, the Doomsday Clock is still set at 5 minutes to midnight. It could be worse–three minutes or one minute, or the stroke of midnight itself–but it’s not likely to be set back in the near future, mostly owing to a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons that are still set on hair-trigger alert all over the world.

But there’s good news, too. A lot of people are still refusing to give in to the anger and fear that seem to be the standard (read, "conditioned") response to today. You’re still far, far more likely to die at the hands of Planet Earth herself (or an auto accident) than from a terrorist plot. And you’re just as likely to get home safely today as you were yesterday, and the day before that (and the day before that.)

Additionally, Ann Coulter still has not convinced anyone to blow up the NY Times. And notwithstanding six years of threats, warnings and concerns from the government there still has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

So, my advice to people remains what it was six years ago: kiss your significant other, play with your kids, tell your family and friends that you love them and enjoy what you have. Heck, remember what life was like in NYC on that day six years ago and be nice to total strangers for a day. All of them.

P.S.: Purely for the heck of it, I’ll point out that the National Review has still not replied to my open letter. Oh, well . . .