Smoke On the Water and Fire in the Sky

Facts are inconvenient truths.

The above statement is a trope. It's a truism. It's many variations on the sardonic commentary that you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Nobody likes it when they discover that you're just making shit up as you go along, *lying* to get your own way.

Facts push non-factual accounts further and further and further out onto a ledge where more and more witnesses can examine the merits and find them so wanting that it's a 'meh' reaction when the non-factual account finally leaps off into oblivion.

One of the defenses of non-factual accounts without actually being able to resort to evidence, is 'if I can't have my feel-good anecdotal version of 'fax', you can't have yours neither, and I'm just the power to wipe out your proof'.

This last while in Canada, (atop everything else) we've seen some damn weak attempts to paw metaphorical kitty litter over steaming excuses as to why scientific research facilities have been shut down and their *hard won* legacy of hardcopy data archives haphazardly and appallingly mishandled and destroyed. There comes a point where a person has to stop saying the people in charge of such Book Burning activities are not incompetent but working with a total dismissal and loathing of reality and its treasures. In light of how Britain values not only its artistic but scientific history and its great educational archives, what is happening in Canada is not only shameful, destroying research is a criminal act impoverishing the intellectual heritage and sabotaging the scientific potential of our nation and the greater global community.

I'd like to know just how these so-called transfers to digital media guaranteed a one-to-one quality match of hardcopy documents to electronic databases, and what ISO standards of archiving they followed? We do have ISO document management standards in this country, as led by the National Archives departments. At what point was there signoff that the data had been migrated? By whom? What consultancy with the clients using the data was done? Corporations have to follow standards of due diligence for knowledge management or they will get their corporate asses handed to them by the courts in litigation matters when they shrug and say oopsie, can't produce anything.

With all that in mind...I'm resorting to bad poetry. I can't be more coherent so I'm going to let my right brain smack words out like Animal of the Muppets enjoys beating dents into walls with his head. I apologize to all, especially archivists and librarians, for the oblique bits to follow.


Agoraphobia

Through a looking glass fractured,
Censor smoke fogs forth spices of the shroud.
Amid the cloying mists,
Black wreaths crown ash strewn halls.

True voiced Hypatia is dead.
She dared sing songs of the world.
Shadows glide at command of the Bishop.
Faith’s rift eyed night shall have its day.

Rent garment breezes wander wild,
Sweltering in their airs.
Chilled canaries at the coalface,
Choke on fire underground.

Within pitchdark vaults, Persephone mourns the silence.