Sorry about that, old chums...

The British government has gone and done something absolutely dreadful:

British PM Brown 'profoundly' regrets data security breach

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 | 11:44 AM ET
CBC News

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Wednesday for the "inconvenience and worries" caused by the British government's accidental loss of computer discs containing detailed personal information of 25 million citizens.

During a heated question period in the House of Commons, Brown tried to reassure the country that people's personal details gathered by Britain's tax and customs service were safe following one of the biggest security breaches in the country's history.

Two computer discs that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and — in some cases — banking details for nearly half the country's population.

"I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits," Brown said. "We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public."

Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the discs contained details of the 7.25 million families in Britain claiming the child benefit — a tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children.

He said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.

The discs were password protected but the information on them was not encrypted, officials said.

I always find it interesting that our governments collect ever-increasing amounts of personal information on their citizens--on us. It's all for our own good, for our safety and protection, they tell us. When they demonstrate they aren't even capable of keeping this supposedly critical information safe, what sort of confidence are we supposed to have in their ability to protect us from more concrete and salient threats?

Which brings us to my next book review, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better by Matt Hern. Hern runs an independent school in East Vancouver and is a scholar of Urban Studies. With Watch Yourself, he discusses our society's increasing obsession with safety and protection before openly wondering if we're actually safer as a result. Not to mention, as the subtitle indicates, if safety is always the preferred option.

Hern notes the obsession with safety in all aspects, often accompanied by the mantra "for the sake of the children". He shares an anecdote about two girls who died during a high school skiing trip. They slipped under a safety fence that had been clearly plastered with warning signs, and fell to their deaths. Despite these precautions, their families still felt that "more could have been done" to prevent the deaths of their daughters.

Fear is among the most potent of marketing tools, and this does not escape Hern's notice. His discussion on SUVs, summarized in this interview states that SUVs were originally a ploy by automobile manufacturers to sell cars as trucks, skirting around certain emission and safety requirements. Owners became convinced that the size of an SUV compared to other passenger vehicles made them safer, when in fact the opposite is true: top-heavy SUVs are more likely to roll over during a quick manouevre, say when trying to avoid a crash.

Hern does not speak from some cloistered, upper-middle class bubble or ivory tower of academe. He runs an alternative school, the Purple Thistle Centre, in Vancouver's infamous East Side. He and his family have been the victims of property crime, and he knows that drug dealers operate in his neighbourhood. This gives his narrative an authenticity other books of this type often lack. For example, he notes that a park in his neighbourhood known for the presence of drug dealers and their clients, was granted a beefed-up police presence. All this did was move the drug dealers to another park several blocks away, whereupon the residents of that neighbourhood began to demand more police. Hern notes that calls to deal with crime and safety typically mean spending more money on policing, and not on the root causes of crime. This is treating the symptoms while letting the disease fester.

Heresy is Hern's agenda: to spread the idea that safety is not always the most desirable goal. And he has a point: how much progress has been achieved in our society because some people were willing to take risks? I would say damn near all of it.

When he has a fire sale, he means it

This used bookseller has found a way to sell his merchandise and make a social statement too:

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Tom Wayne has amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books.

His collection ranges from best sellers, such as Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," to obscure titles, like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910. But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books in protest of what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books

Via LIS News.

Bring back those golden oldies...

Senator Vivienne Poy will be visiting our library system for Asian Heritage Month, the annual observance of the history and cultural contributions of Asian-Canadians to our country. Poy, as Senator, introduced the Senate motion for the federal government to recognize this event.

One of Senator Poy's goals is to amend the words to the national anthem, changing the line "True patriot love in all thy sons command" to the more gender-inclusive "True patriot love in all of us command". She produced as support for this measure, a recently-unearthed copy of Robert Stanley Weir's original 1908 English lyrics, where the line is question was rendered as "True patriot love thou dost in us command". (Weir revised the lyrics three times after writing these--one of the later versions is the official anthem.)

Reading over the original lyrics, I'd actually be in favour of instituting them as the official English language lyrics, since they are actually fully inclusive. Poy's change would leave the reference to God in the anthem (incidently, this never appeared in any incarnation of Weir's lyrics, but was added by the National Anthem Act of 1980), excluding the 16%+ of Canadians who are non-religious, not to mention polytheists, some Buddhists, and the like. The one potential stumbing block would be the line "May stalwart sons and gentle maidens rise", but that's in the third verse, so we could just omit it from the official anthem (the rest of that verse doesn't add anything not already said in the second).

As an aside, the French lyrics (which were written earlier) have never changed since their authoring. The French lyrics make explicit references to Christianity and militarism ("Car ton bras sait porter l'épée, Il sait porter la croix!"), though most contemporary Quebecois have little passion for either.

Oprah's dirty little "Secret"

For those not aware, Oprah's been hawking another useless self-help tome, this one being Rhoda Byrne's The Secret. The Amazing Randi has gone to town on this, but this article in Salon really gets to the "secret":

Steve Martin used to do a routine that went like this: "You too can be a millionaire! It's easy: First, get a million dollars. Now..."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Read it all, it's quite damning.

However, it's one of Randi's readers who reveals what the real source of The Secret is:

I was taught "The Secret" when I was younger by a well-guarded book shown to only those who can understand the secret. It's called "The Little Engine that Could". He thought he could do it, he worked towards his goal and he took the chance to prove he could do it when the situation presented itself. AMAZING!

Just Say NO to Imagination!

As a follow up to the scrotum kerfuffle, we have this strong warning to curb children's imaginations:

The Department of Health and Human Services issued a series of guidelines Monday designed to help parents curtail their children's boundless imaginations, which child-safety advocates say have the potential to rival motor vehicle accidents and congenital diseases as a leading cause of disability and death among youths ages 3 to 14.

From the The Onion.

Honoré de Balzac

Both MadJenny and Pharyngula reveal this half-silly, half-sad tale.

My fellow librarians, today you disappointment me.

Read what Lois Lowry had to say about "acceptable content".

Then, accept the words of those fine German musicians, Accept:

"Balls to the Wall"



Balls to the wall, man
Balls to the wall
Youll get your balls to the wall, man
Balls to the wall - balls to the wall

UPDATE: The Deranged Squirrel has directed me to a list of other children's books containing the word "scrotum".

Yes Virginia, there are Virgin-Whores



OK, this was funny:

Partying heiress Paris Hilton claims she’s been celibate lately...Hilton insists that she’s actually quite modest in that area. “I’ve only been in, like, two relationships and I just thought I’d like to be single,” Hilton declared. “Sex is sacred. People shouldn’t have sex unless they’re in an exclusive relationship anyway. I’d rather not do anything. Guys want you more when you don’t do it! Young girls should know that.”

Maybe you should have thought of that before leading a whole generation of young girls into being airheaded, skankily-dressed prostitutes-in-training, eh?