AdamSmith

The kind of story we could use right about now. The girl who gets gifts from birds Lots of people love the birds in their garden, but it's rare for that affection to be reciprocated. One young girl in Seattle is luckier than most. She feeds the crows in her garden - and they bring her gifts in return. http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026

Something, anyway. Did ISIS Smash Fake Sculptures in Mosul? Experts say Many of Them Were Replicas Brian Boucher, Friday, February 27, 2015 Artnet News ISIS militants smash artworks in Mosul in their latest propaganda video. While no one should take ISIS to be any less of a threat than it is, we might take some small consolation from the possibility that some of the sculptures the militants smashed on video this week at the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, Iraq, were replicas. While an Assyrian stone lion smashed in the videos is indisputably a terrible loss, the destruction of replicas in this particular case may soften the blow. "According to archaeologists, most if not all the statues in the Mosul museum are replicas not originals," reports Channel 4 News, London. “The reason they crumble so easily is that they're made of plaster. ‘You can see iron bars inside," pointed out Mark Altaweel of the Institute of Archaeology at University College, London, as we watched the video together. ‘The originals don't have iron bars.'" “According to the British Institute," adds Channel 4, “the originals were taken to Baghdad for safekeeping. ISIS probably wouldn't care about the distinction. One false idol is the same as another." All the same, reaction around the world has been swift and horrified (see The Metropolitan Museum and Others Respond to ISIS Destruction of Assyrian Sculptures). ISIS has also done a brisk business in smuggling antiquities out of the region for sale on foreign markets (see Increase in Antiquities Smuggling Busts amidst Government Crackdown), though the international trade is mostly focused on smaller items. Why are the militants so bent on destruction of the region's cultural heritage? Amr al-Azm, a Syrian anthropologist and historian, told the New York Times that the destruction of artworks, and the slaughter and capture of Assyrians and others in the area that it accompanied, are strategic. While the militants claim that they are smashing the sculptures because they are idols forbidden by Islam, he posits that “It's all a provocation" aimed to lure U.S. and Iraqi forces to try to retake Mosul. “They want a fight with the West because that's how they gain credibility and recruits," Azm said. ISIS has “repeatedly threatened to destroy [the museum's] collection," according to the Times, since they took the city in June. http://news.artnet.com/art-world/did-isis-smash-fake-sculptures-in-mosul-271776

I have been, and always shall be, your friend.

Hooray! For now. I want to see the tech press get the back story on all this, to know better what the future is likely to hold.

A Syrian friend of mine says the same things. Heartbreaking. Also too, too terrible the antiquities just destroyed in Mosul. In 1992 I saw an awe-inspiring exhibition of ancient Near Eastern art and artifacts at the National Gallery in DC. While the docent wasn't looking I actually touched the stele of the Code of Hammurabi. (Pretty sure that hardness-scale-10 diorite didn't suffer as a result.) Have been wondering if any of the fragile sandstone stele and statuary just lost were among the things I saw that day.

Re: Saddam's ethnic cleansing and other atrocities, there is the argument that the U.S. reaching out more or less unilaterally (+ Tony Blair for what that was worth) and taking out a sovereign government in Iraq -- not to mention botching the aftermath even beyond our fundamental miscalculations about the aftermath in the first place -- ended up damaging our moral authority around the world, thus our ability over the long run to help the downtrodden etc., in ways that far more than offset the "good" of stopping Saddam. That is, that Bush/Cheney may end up responsible for having destroyed American exceptionalism. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of casualties in the chaos following our actions in Iraq. Nor our role in propping up Saddam in the first place. Nor the extent to which the drain of the trillion-plus dollars and counting that we've spent there has damaged our national security, it being based far more today on economic strength (and everything that buys, guns and butter and economic leverage over enemies and frenemies abroad) than on anything else.

Exactly. George H.W. -- and Colin Powell, at that time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- specifically decided to end the Kuwait blitz after 100 hours and not chase Saddam all the way to Baghdad because they knew, "You break it, you own it." And could see no way it was worth getting stuck doing post-Saddam nation-building there.

AS never sleeps. Struggling though to recall from eons-ago AP biology whether this would verge toward risking the kind of genetic-disorder problems that the incest taboo seeks to prevent? (Leaving aside for now the separate discussion of what incest taboos may really be about.)

This I want to see. CULTURE Why Inside the Commons is the funniest comedy of the year Whitehall farce: Sir Robert Rogers plays to the camera in Inside the Commons By Benji Wilson 9:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2015 When I heard that a BBC camera crew had been granted warts-and-all access to the Palace of Westminster for a documentary series, Inside the Commons, my first thought was, thats a lot of warts. My second thought was what on earth were the politicos thinking? Why would they let the veteran political film-maker Michael Cockerell in at all? In the run-up to an election, and at a time when respect for politicians runs somewhere alongside respect for Seventies DJs, how was letting in TVs quiet assassin, a man who does for political reputations what oxidisation does to cars, a good idea? Well, it wasnt a good idea, not for our elected members, anyway. Cockerell, with a forensic brilliance honed over years of taking down preening nitwits, quickly latched on to a trenchant metaphor and hammered it home that the Palace of Westminster is a mock gothic relic that is coming apart at the seams, and so is the institution it houses. The shots of peeling paintwork and crumbling stone intercut with images of politicians being berks undermined our democracy faster than a Saudi arms deal. But Inside the Commons did proffer an answer as to why the politicians would have let Cockerell in to do a Guy Fawkes in the first place. Politicians are all budding thespians, said Deputy Speaker Lindsay Hoyle at one point. That chilled me to the marrow have you ever been in a room full of budding thespians? Its the budding part of their thespianism thats truly blood-curdling theyre not even any good at it. And if you wanted an example, PMQs, filmed here at ground level for what we were told was the first time, as if that was a good thing, was the horror show writ large. What a tawdry carnival of mountebanks and yahoos. The sight of MPs bobbing standing up and sitting down in the hope that they might get a free hit and actually ask the PM a Q was an image of dumb futility as potent as anything Beckett ever dreamt up. If politicians are all budding thesps, what do you think happens when you put them in front of a camera? That was why they were queuing up to let Cockerell mug them. Michael Fabricant (a man whose hair has formed an uneasy coalition between Smashie, Nicey and a polenta bake) and then Nicholas Soames (in skull-and-crossbones comedy braces that require no further comment) and then Clerk of the House Robert Rogers (taking snuff) all did their bit to make MPs look as relevant as steam power. Cockerell cleverly kept the cameras away from Joe Public for most of the time and there were very few shots of windows or natural light, making the Commons look like an entirely inward-looking institution. Overall I was struck with the same feeling as when watching the auditions for The X Factor or Big Brother. Surely no one can want to be on television enough to commit these kinds of crimes against dignity? But they couldnt help themselves. Presumably it is the lust for attention that makes them want to stand in the first place. Cockerell simply served the choicest cuts on a platter in the edit and there you had it the funniest comedy of the year. I laughed my head off at that withering satire on politicians and after that I watched Rory Bremners Coalition Report. Satire has been pronounced dead more often than rock n roll, in general because reality Fabricants barnet, for example has overtaken it. And so theres always a feeling these days that Bremner himself is a relic of the type that Spitting Image might have mocked in the Eighties with a sheep on his head or something. Bremners satire, here with the help of a brilliant younger Brem-a-like called Matt Forde and a few old chums like John Bird, is indeed old-fashioned in as far as he simply pretends to be a politician and makes them all look like chumps a bit like Cockerell but with voices and wigs. But it works, up to a point, because Bremner always was, and still is, tack sharp and just angry enough. The problem is that this programme was a one-off, to mark five years of the Coalition government. Spitting Image, and indeed Bremner, Bird and Fortune, ran for years. To really make a mark, satire needs to be relentless. Spitting Image seared itself onto the public consciousness because John Major was dull and grey every single week. Satire cant just prod power once and then walk off it must keep prodding. Rory Bremners Coalition Report was funny, and at times devastating the song about zero-hours contracts, for example but you cant chop down a tree with a single axe blow. Someone needs to give Bremner a regular slot again. One of the things that both Bremner and Cockerell highlighted was our politicians distance from normal people. What any party would give to have motorbike racer, lorry mechanic and worlds least likely TV presenter Guy Martin on their ballot sheet. Hes a man you can see people voting for. Martin is the TV executives golden goose, a discovery who hasnt been to stage school and probably thought Channel 4 had something to do with CB radio before they signed him up. Unfortunately for Martin he made the mistake of appearing in a documentary about the Isle of Man TT, fell off, and became Grimsbys latest possibly first instant cult star. Martin has a sense of honesty that Cameron, Clegg and Miliband will never possess. And Channel 4 is not going to let its new discovery go. Hence, he is now being sent to any part of the world that a motorcycle can go. This time it is India. The curse of the celebrity travelogue is that it can quite quickly start to look like a spurious jolly for someone who could have just paid the airfare themselves and saved us their tedious observations. But this series has gone to the other extreme Were not making a holiday programme, were here to see the reality of India, Martin said on several occasions. We know full well, however, that the reality of any given place is really not available to anyone on a statement vehicle being followed by a camera crew, which left Our Guy in India betwixt and between: lengthy scenes of Martin pruning bushes on a tea plantation or watching a woman change a tyre certainly werent contrived, but they werent very interesting either. The problem is that theres really no reason for him to be doing any of this. Martins selling point is that he likes simple things that are not normal TV fodder riding bikes, drinking tea, fixing trucks. Viewers have fallen for him because he represents integrity in a medium where, like politics, these are scarce resources. But as Tony Blair found out, overplay the pretty straight guy card and eventually the public will smell a rat. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11395052/Inside-the-Commons-review.html

http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/50-weirdest-and-coolest-facts-lgbti-history200215 Some of the summaries are a bit loose with the facts but still a fun & intriguing compendium.

Closer than we thought? First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims Doctor plans to graft a living person's head on to a donor body using procedures he believes will soon be ready http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/25/first-full-body-transplant-two-years-away-surgeon-claim

http://www.amazon.com/Fart-Dictionary-Scott-A-Sorensen/dp/0762441453

And who knew...?