inkbluesky

naked binary 149

When he puts on his director’s hat Mel Gibson is an artist. Whether is he is a good artist or not is up to the audience to decide. As an artist he has the right to present his artistic vision to the world, but while that vision will ultimately be Mel’s truth. It is not The Truth. Artistically there is some ethical obligation on the artist in portraying the real world and real people with a certain degree of accuracy. Mad Mel and the Maya

 May May tells the story with the kind of rage and pride that Gibson tried to portray with his Scottish heroes in Braveheart and postapocalyptic picaros in Mad Max: “A Maya, of the middle class, like me,” May May said, “went into a Ford dealership here in Mérida. He intended to buy a new pickup truck. He was well dressed, but clearly Maya. The dealer offered him ten pesos to wash a truck.” It is a common experience for people of color in a white world. The Yucatán is not entirely a white world, yet the Maya suffer the most severe prejudice of any large ethnic group in Mexico. In the language of prejudice in Mexico, the Maya are said to be people with big heads and no brains, too short, too dark and with a strange, laughable Spanish accent. Gibson accepted the stereotype and embellished it.

To grasp what a racist act Gibson has committed in the making of his new film, it is necessary to understand the world of the Maya as it exists today. Perhaps realizing what has been done to the Maya in the film, Gibson has been seeking allies among Latinos and American Indians.

I don’t buy into the idea that every role in a film must be filled with someone of the race/religion etc. of the character portrayed, but at least cast someone that looks like a Maya rather then  a native American that simply has a skin tone that the audience will accept as Mayan. And as the writer of this article points out why the implied connection between Maya and violence.  And as much as it is important to learn from history why the incredible stretch to make the allegory between the  end of the old Mayan civilization and modern warfare. Gibson is free to do all of this and people are free to see it, but we’re getting more of a Saturday morning cartoon version of history with a very thin premise for the story line. As an artist with access to great resources why did Gibson offer up this C grade adventure? Just a guess, but because blood, lots of running around in the jungle and the fear motif sells tickets. I’ll keep taking up for Mel or any artist’s right to make their art, but given the money and resources the least they could do is genuinely try to make good art.

Lactose tolerance in East Africa points to a surprisingly recent moment in human evolution

A surprisingly recent instance of human evolution has been detected among the peoples of East Africa. It is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago, a team of geneticists has found.

Throughout most of human history, the ability to digest lactose, the principal sugar of milk, has been switched off after weaning because the lactase enzyme that breaks apart the sugar is no longer needed. But when cattle were first domesticated 9,000 years ago and people later started to consume their milk as well as their meat, natural selection would have favored anyone with a mutation that kept the lactase gene switched on.

Just thought this was interesting because I have relatives that couldn’t enjoy ice-cream until those pills that help with latose digestion became available.