There are several OlyBloggers and Olympians in Mark Shimada's "Art and Business Interviews, Release 1.0"

Status Rerum : A Manifesto, Upon The Present Condition of Northwestern Literature Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances, Upon Persons in the Public Eye

By James Stevens and H. L. Davis (1927)

The present condition of literature in the Northwest has been mentioned apologetically too long. Something is wrong with Northwestern literature. It is time people were bestirring themselves to find out what it is.

Other sections of the United States can mention their literature, as a body, with respect. New England, the Middle West, New Mexico and the Southwest, California—each of these has produced a body of writing of which it can be proud. The Northwest—Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana—has produced a vast quantity of bilge, so vast, indeed, that the few books which are entitled to respect are totally lost in the general and seemingly interminable avalanche of tripe.

It is time people were seeking the cause of this. Is there something about the climate, or the soil, which inspires people to write tripe? Is there some occult influence, which catches them young, and shapes them to be instruments out of which tripe, and nothing but tripe, may issue?

Influence there certainly is, and shape them it certainly does. Every written work, however contemptible and however trivial it may be, is conceived and wrought to court the approbation of some tribunal. If the tribunal be contemptible, then equally contemptible will be the work which courts it.

And the tribunals are contemptible.

To be more precise, when catalogers go bad, it is the worst. Catalogers are a curious subspecies of librarian. They wear cardigan sweaters. They have bifocals. Many of them cringe at the thought of sitting at the reference desk. They see license plates and think they are call numbers or MARC tags. Yet they hold positions of great power in terms of information access. And when they use their vast power for eeeeevil, well ...

One of the very worst public servants in American history started out as a cataloger. I quote from Young J. Edgar : Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties by Kenneth D. Ackerman (2007):

"After graduating in 1913, he turned down a scholarship from the University of Virginia and enrolled instead at George Washington University, a local school that allowed him to live with his parents while taking law school classes at night. During the day, he took a $30-a-month clerk's job at the Library of Congress, a five-block walk from his house, to earn extra money. He put in grueling twelve-hour workdays with little sleep. At George Washington, he made the extra effort to earn two degrees, Bachelor's and a Master's of Law, before graduating. But it was at the Library of Congress that inspiration struck him. Edgar's job there involved cataloguing [stevenl note: U.S. librarians spell this as "cataloging"] new books, and the library had recently adopted a groundbreaking new system to keep tabs on its bulging collection of over a million volumes plus hundreds of thousands of journals, manuscripts, and newspapers. Similar to the Dewey Decimal System, developed separately about the same time, it assigned each item an index card with a unique code indicating its topic, title, author, and location."

No other words really do justice to the idiot who nominally heads the US government. What else can be concluded by Bush's attempt to justify the continued occupation of Iraq by comparing it to what followed the US pullout from Vietnam.

The most obvious factual inaccuracy is his claim that one of the consequences of leaving would be that "the enemy would follow us home." Except, of course, that did not happen after Vietnam despite claims made at the time. The Vietnamese were too busy trying to repair the damage that US invasion had caused to their country. We can be sure that Iraq would be the same particularly as the vast bulk of the insurgency are Iraqi Nationalists and not Islamic fundamentalists.

Equally wrongly, he opined that "one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'." Except, of course, America did not "withdraw" voluntarily. It was loosing both the war in Vietnam and the (class) war at home. Nor did Bush explain how defeat in Vietnam led to the "killing fields" in Cambodia. Strangely he failed to note that it was the covert carpet bombing of Cambodia by the US that created the opportunity for the Khmer Rouge to seize power. So it was not American "withdrawal" but intervention that led to the killing fields. Nor Bush did note that the US bombing killed around 700,000 people in that country. Nor did he bother to mention that the US, like the UK, supported, armed and trained the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese state invaded Cambodia in response to its attacks (and the US accused Vietnam of aggression when it ended Pol Pot's genocidal reign).

George Bush will be visiting the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue on Monday, August 27th to raise funds for embattled Congressman Dave Reichert.

--> Cost to attend the General Reception: $1,000 per person

----> Cost to attend the VIP Reception: $10,000 per person

------> Cost to protest Bush and all his failed policies: priceless

We are encouraging folks to start getting set up and in place around NOON to avoid police road closures, sidewalk closures and traffic. Be prepared to stay until 4pm...

PROTEST BUSH VISIT TO BELLEVUE

Date/Time August 27 (Monday), 2PM

Location HYATT REGENCY BELLEVUE

Map: http://www.bellevue.hyatt.com/hyatt/hotels/services/maps/index.jsp?icamp=propMapDirections
900 Bellevue Way NE Bellevue, WA 98004

Grand Ballroom Donor Registration Opens at 2:00 p.m.

Donor Registration Closes at 3:00 p.m.