Libraries We Love

Libraries We Love

The Libraries We Love, the first book to sing the praises and show the beauty of our beloved public libraries.

Bush Pressured NASA Scientists

Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

Dorothy Day Guild

Brockport librarian promotes cause of Dorothy Day.

What is a saint? Like many words in our language, the meaning of the word "saint" has evolved. Lawrence Cunningham captures the essence of the word in his book, The Meaning of the Saints. He writes, the saints "give us the encouragement to be more self-giving, more loving, less inclined to hate, more compelled to love. They invite us, in short, to transcend ourselves."

One candidate for sainthood fits the description. Dorothy Day (1897-1980) founded the Catholic Worker Movement, a lay apostolate that promotes ideals of voluntary poverty, prayer, hospitality, and nonviolence. From its humble beginnings in New York City, the movement has grown to over 185 communities across the country.

Librarian Bob Gilliam of Brockport was a volunteer with the Catholic Worker and knew Day. He is a member of the guild created to promote Day's life and works. "I know of no one whose life is more profoundly or thoroughly formed by the example of Christ than Dorothy," Gilliam said.

The little man: G. Bush

Garrison Keillor: The little man; History will remember Bush as an incompetent and incurious man overwhelmed by a world too big for him.
...In his presidential library, he'll be portrayed as Abraham Lincoln after Chancellorsville and FDR after Corregidor, but to most of us, the crisis in Washington today stems from a man intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to rise to the challenge. Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see.

Political Pressure Applied to Limit or Flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush Administration Particularly Global Warming.

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said. Deutsch lied about his graduation from Texas A & M. His qualifications seem to be his work on Bush Jr's. campaign.

NASA fights Bush Muzzle on Scientists

A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for "scientific openness" throughout the agency.
It is not the job of public-affairs officers," Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, "to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff."

The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with "dire consequences" if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters.
'In my three decades in government, I've never seen control of communications to the public so constrained," Hansen said over the phone this week. ''Communications from government scientists have never been so constrained."

25th Anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man

Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary theorist, and dialectical scientist, one-quarter century ago, in 1981, published the first edition of the landmark book, The Mismeasure of Man. Gould provides a devastating critique of the right-wing (pseudo-) science of classifying individuals on a one-dimensional scale of supposed inherent intellectual worth.
Good essay: "Debunking as Positive Science: Reflections in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man by Richard York and Brett Clark."