inkbluesky

machu picchu - peru 1280×1024 

Ancient antiquities, where do they rightfully belong

If you have visited Machu Picchu, you will probably find Bingham’s excavated artifacts at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven to be a bit of a letdown. Mostly, the pieces are bones, in varying stages of decomposition, or pots, many of them in fragments. Unsurpassed as stonemasons, engineers and architects, the Incas thought more prosaically when it came to ceramics. Leaving aside unfair comparisons to the jaw-dropping Machu Picchu site itself, the pottery of the Inca, even when intact, lacks the drama and artistry of the ceramics of earlier civilizations of Peru like the Moche and Nazca. Everyone agrees that the Machu Picchu artifacts at Yale are modest in appearance. That has not prevented, however, a bare-knuckled disagreement from developing over their rightful ownership. Peru says the Bingham objects were sent to Yale on loan and their return is long overdue. Yale demurs.

The article goes on to point out that the British Museum will not return the Rosetta Stone to Egypt, the Germans have a bust of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and the Greeks want the Parthenon marbles. The writer Lubow describes a metaphorical swooshing sound as the great museums of the United States, France, Germany and Britain are half emptied as all the arts and antiquities are returned to their nation of origin. I wish I had an clever easy answer, but I don’t. Even as the Peruvian government tries to have the Machu Picchu artifacts returned they acknowledge a thriving illicit trade in antiquities by local smugglers. Legally they belong to the nation of origin, yet part of me thinks that some of the countries like Peru have such unstable governments maybe it would be better if Yale acknowledged Peru as the rightful owners, but perhaps worked out some compensation plan to keep them as trustees and where they would be safer. While Egypt has done a good job in many respect of protecting their ancient artifacts they have also, because of financial constraints let many be literally worn away by the weather - again here maybe some kind of annual royalty should be paid by the British, German and American museums to keep them. Imagine if the situation were reversed and Peru had a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence or the the British had taken the Liberty Bell during the War of 1812 and never returned it.

Librarians Describe Life Under An FBI Gag Order

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government.

They had simply refused to turn over library computer records with out a court order - the FBI used a National Security Letter authorized under The Patriot Act which doesn’t require a court order. The Librarians couldn’t even attend their own hearing because they were regarded as a national security threat. No wonder the majority of Americans have finally come around to seeing that the country is headed in the wrong direction.

The Vatican expands its Ten Commandment franchise
“The Vatican on Tuesday issued a ‘Ten Commandments’ for motorists to keep them on the road to salvation, warning drivers against the sins of road rage, abuse of alcohol or even simple rudeness.”—Associated Press, June 19
Justin Peters adds his own new commandments,

Ten Commandments for Airplane Travelers

—Thou shalt have patience with security personnel, for they art underpaid, and their feet hurt like those of Saul of Tarsus after his escape from Damascus.

—Thou shalt not have to pay $3 for bottled water from a price-gouging airport merchant. Instead, thou should put an empty bottle in thy carry-on and fill it at a water fountain.

More at the link.

Undoing Bush: how to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect By Bill McKibben

One of the best things about the departure of the Bush Administration will be the end of headache-creating cognitive dissonance. It has taken over institutions ostensibly devoted to defending the natural world—the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Council on Environmental Quality—and turned them into organizations devoted to environmental degradation. And it has passed a set of anti-environmental laws that sound like they were dreamed up by wild-eyed nature lovers—the Clear Skies Act turns out to gut the old Clean Air Act, for instance, and the Healthy Forests Initiative has initiated a great deal of unhealthy deforestation. (”No Tree Left Behind,” someone quickly dubbed it.)

Disclaimer: I’m not a populist ( a term that has been denigrated to the point where it is almost meaningless - xenophobic Lou Dobbs for example thinks he’s a populist). So sure when President AWOL talks in bureaucratic doublespeak like a character out of Orwell that’s his fault, but he gets away with saying he’s cleaning up tons of metal particles from the air when he is actually allowing more is just as much the fault of the average Jane and Joe. Their alliance to ignorance and party outweighs their loyalty to truth and justice. We’ve had a few thousand years of lessons in tyranny and yet we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Reagan was Bush-lite leaving a legacy of debt, speaking in circles, corrupt and claiming credit for things accomplished by others. Someone once said that the publics memory of any scandal lasts about two weeks, they may have been right. Can The Decider Guy’s mess be cleaned up, sure, but the problem is the laws of conservation of mass are always in effect - it is much easier to blow things up then it is to rebuild them.

open book 1600×1200 or V for victory and Vendetta if you prefer.

gothic sunrise

Agency Is Target in Cheney Fight on Secrecy Data

For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit…

Why should the National Archive monitor Cheney’s office since they do such a stellar job of handling classified information?

Mr. Waxman added that in May 2006, a former aide in Mr. Cheney’s office, Leandro Aragoncillo, pleaded guilty to passing classified information to plotters trying to overthrow the president of the Philippines.

“Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information,” Mr. Waxman wrote to Mr. Cheney.

Not to mention Scooter Libby Jr., the VP’s former chief of staff who  was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying to a grand jury about revealing the classified identity of a CIA agent who was an expert on weapons of mass destruction.

The lipstick is great, but you might want to skip the make-up

A British biochemist says women who use make-up daily are absorbing almost five pounds of chemicals a year.

On the other hand a spokesman for The Cosmetic, Toiletry and Perfumery Association says all the compounds in make-up are certified to be safe. Spokesmen seem to have a tendency to act like a vending machine, you put in a quarter and the disclaimers pop out.

the three little green apples 

doodlebank takes doodles up a level or two. if i was the politically correct type i’d resent the series where all the boys are little devils and all the girls little angels. then there are the pirates that are bound to be a bad influence and the bug eyed animals - you know the kind that hide in the closet until you go to sleep, then play with all your best toys.

What the First Moviegoers Saw 

Legend has it that when the Lumière brothers’ film Coming of Train, La Ciotat was screened in 1896, its image of a train approaching a station made viewers flee their seats for fear of being crushed. In fact, reactions were less dramatic but perhaps more profound. One audience member wrote, “[T]he train rushes in so quickly that, in common with most of the people in the front rows of the stalls, I shift uneasily in my seat and think of railway accidents.”

Screens and moving images are such an integral part of our lives that trying to imagine the first encounters with movies is like trying to imagine a world without telephones or electricity.

Speaking of political correctness, justice and the bizarre, A Nebraska judge bans the word rape from his courtroom

Yet a Nebraska district judge, Jeffre Cheuvront, suddenly finds himself in a war of words with attorneys on both sides of a sexual assault trial. More worrisome, he appears to be at war with language itself, and his paradoxical answer is to ban it: Last fall, Cheuvront granted a motion by defense attorneys barring the use of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit from the trial of Pamir Safi—accused of raping Tory Bowen in October 2004.

I’d love to read the transcript of just the prosecutor: The defendant is accused of something, we can’t say what and we can’t talk about a certain kind of kit that was used to gather evidence, but we know he did do something and it was a bad thing, a very bad thing that he did. As we hold up the evidence we leave it to the jurors to decide what it is and what it means.