Tax me harder!

I'm not entirely certain this wasn't run tongue in cheek (from the NY Times' selection of academics' essays on things deemed most overrated and underrated in 2002):

I live in Massachusetts, generally considered the most liberal state. We have enjoyed relatively good public services. This year, despite a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, 45 percent of the electorate voted to get rid of the state income tax!

My first impulse is to blame the ignorant electorate. But the real condemnation should fall on our leaders, locally and nationally, who are afraid to go up against Reagan, Gingrich and the two Bushes and state the truth: You can't have a decent, functioning society without a progressive tax system.

Is Massachusetts vying to become the next Mississippi?

Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

Of course, Mississippi does have a state income tax; in fact, Mississippi's state income tax with its three brackets and large personal deductions would appear to be more progressive than Massachusetts' flat rate tax, especially considering the substantially higher cost of living in Massachusetts (compare rates here).

Perhaps Massachusetts voters were thinking of states such as Alaska, Florida, Nevada, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming, all of which have no personal state income tax; or New Hampshire and Tennessee, which tax only dividend and interest income.

Thanks for the corrections, everyone -- hope all is finally OK.

Much ado about Milton

Haven't kept up with the TLS for quite some time. Reading triage and all that -- parenthood, making a real living, etc.
Anyway, today's NY Times reports on an ongoing controversy in the TLS in the wake of Professor John Carey's essay assailing Milton's Samson Agonistes as "an incitement to terrorism" in which Samson himself "is, in effect, a suicide bomber."

Professor Carey said that in the weeks following the atrocity [of Sept 11] he had been haunted by the similarities between the biblical Samson and the hijackers. "Like them Samson sacrifices himself to achieve his ends," he wrote. "Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes and loves are all unknown to him personally." Professor Carey wondered whether "Samson Agonistes," with Milton's sympathetic portrayal of his hero, should not be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally."

Along with the Bible, one presumes -- or at least the bits with all the smiting. Carey, however, seems to have difficulty distinguishing present-day warfare from the tribal slaughters of the past:

When Samson brought down the temple on his Philistine tormentors, Professor Maccoby wrote, "he was far from being a 'terrorist' in the modern sense." To which Professor Carey replied, "I am not sure what the modern sense is, but the mass murder of civilians in a politico-racist cause certainly looks like terrorism."

He'll probably soon be calling for the suppression of Beowulf (glorifies extermination of endangered species), the Odyssey (celebrates extrajudicial killing of petty offenders), and the Inferno (justifies torture, cruel and unusual punishment, indefinite detention).

Medieval toilets found, but not for long

An elaborate medieval toilet system has been found during excavation at a shopping center construction site in England:

The stone-lined garderobe system, which can be seen from a special viewing platform, is thought to date back to the 11th, 12th or 13th century and would have formed part of a substantial building, possibly a royal castle.

The discovery was made just a week after experts started digging at the town-centre site prior to redevelopment.

Stafford Borough Council Archaeologist, David Wilkinson, said: "Whatever was associated with it was a major building of high status.

"The site is going to be redeveloped as a new shopping centre, so whatever is there will be destroyed or lost."

Pharaonic tombs found

Not much in the way of details yet. Four tombs, dating from 2260-2050 BC, some 60 miles south of Cairo, uncovered by Spanish archeologists.

A really hostile takeover

Some rough business in Mexico City:

Mexican broadcaster TV Azteca took over the facilities of local television station CNI Channel 40 early Friday, drawing charges of threats and abuse as a legal dispute with the station escalates.

CNI Channel 40 said private armed guards wearing ski masks and black uniforms stormed the station's transmission facilities before dawn, holding channel employees for several hours and taking over the channel's signal, which has since carried programming of Channel 13, TV Azteca's flagship station.

Chaos at the British Museum

Just noticed this appalling report from last Sunday:

Priceless artefacts from ancient Greece and Rome are being mislaid, broken and poorly protected in the cash-strapped British Museum, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Chaotic scenes at the museum — custodian of some of the world’s greatest antiquities — were witnessed by an undercover reporter posing as a work experience trainee.

During his three weeks in the museum’s department of Greek and Roman antiquities he found that:
- Pieces from the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, were among hundreds of artefacts that had gone missing in storerooms.
- Two-thousand-year-old pots and glass artefacts were accidentally broken. Some staff secretly glued smashed items back together so that the museum authorities would not know.
- Security was so lax that the reporter was able to walk out of the museum carrying the foot of a 3rd-century BC Greek statue, valued at £20,000, without being noticed.

As the article notes, the British Museum's finances are a mess; what it does not mention, however, is the lasting effect of the huge cost of converting the old British Library rotunda into the Great Court -- a stunning space, but one that only the most incompetent management could have expected to pay for itself.

The lack of money has also brought disillusionment among staff. Curators with years of experience get as little as £12,000 a year and many complain they cannot afford to live in London. Some museum assistants have to take second jobs.

I don't know of any museums that pay curatorial staff well. And how any ordinary person can afford to live in London nowadays is a bit of a mystery.

The staff want to use a laser machine favoured by other top museums to clean objects without touching them. But it will cost too much money.

One assistant said glass vases dating from the 3rd century BC were often broken while work was being carried out on them. “You either admit to it or you go down to ceramics conservation and ask them to do (fix) it for you on the sly. Most of the curators have a little tube of glue with them and try to do it themselves. Once I was mounting two glass vases on perspex and they shattered when I was trying to put a clamp on them.”

Even [curator Dr Peter] Higgs told the reporter: “I have had a Greek marble face crumble in my hand. It is a horrible feeling as you have to try to catch all the bits.”

Last year a visiting academic, who was supposed to be supervised, broke five ancient Greek terracotta carvings in less than an hour. “He just picked them up and they broke,” an assistant said.

Last Monday the department of Greek and Roman antiquities was due to get £260,000 to refurbish and reopen some of its galleries, but that morning the museum’s accountants told staff that the money had been diverted elsewhere.

Government support for the museum has declined 30% in real terms over the past 10 years.

Nazi art loot Down Under

Australia is checking to make sure their museums hold no objects of questionable provenance, as this rather melodramatic article reports:

Some of the National Gallery's most famous and valuable artworks are on a risk list of art possibly stolen by the Nazis.

Paintings by Picasso, Monet, Matisse and Rubens are on a list of 86 suspect art works released by the gallery.

An internal gallery audit found the works have suspicious gaps in their ownership between 1933 and 1945, the years of Nazi rule.

The full list of works on the National Gallery website is here. It appears that the museum administration is being extremely careful, and has listed everything that did not have rock-solid evidence for its whereabouts during the Nazi era. To state that these items have "suspicious gaps" in their provenance, however, is quite misleading (see this Book of Hours for an example).

Archer killed by own bow

Douglas Mitchell, 58, near Crieff, Perthshire, suffered serious head injuries while he was handling a bow in his workshop.

The Great Britain archery international was taken to hospital after the accident happened at his home in Ochtertyre, but died a few days later.

Police say Mr Mitchell is believed to have been handling a bow when part of the assembly (?) came off and struck him on the head.

From Ananova.
Likely a compound bow, and part of a pulley block broke loose.

Rare whale beached in Japan

A whale that beached itself in Japan this summer has turned out to be the most complete specimen ever seen of a rare species, scientists have said. The creature, which died soon after coming ashore in July, has been identified as a Longman's beaked whale. . . Japanese scientists realised soon after the animal was buried that it was unlike other whales known in Japanese waters and dug it up on 3 August to perform tests. They announced on Wednesday that the 6.5-metre (21-foot) female was the first whole adult specimen ever found. . .

[The] species - Indopacetus pacificus - is known from two skull samples, one found in 1882 and the other in 1968, and from other fragmentary remains found in South Africa, the Maldives and Kenya. . . they have only been seen two or three times alive

From the BBC.

Boxing Day

The snow came late last night, leaving little more than a scenic inch or two under sunny skies this morning.

Pancakes for breakfast, catching up on yesterday's food section, whence the good news of a wine glut, a piece on lutefisk, and an amusing restaurant review leader:

Universities have a way of raising real estate values and depressing culinary ones. Seemingly forever, the neighborhood around New York University has supported the lower life-forms beloved of urban students: the overstuffed burrito, the soggy slice of pizza, the desiccated lump of sushi. A few Italian restaurants from the Cretaceous period add color without improving the overall quality.

Hey, at least at NYU you didn't have to walk very far to get away from the Regrettable Food. The Village was certainly a better place to eat well on the cheap than my Upperer West Side neighborhood.

Triumph of the chain stores

Perhaps spurred by holiday nostalgia, I was browsing through James Lileks' ode to his old hometown the other night.
Which conveniently primed me to take note of this profile of an old-time Milwaukee department store which has survived the onslaught of the big chains (though its future ain't exactly bright). Here are the grim stats:

In 1993, there were 281 single-location department stores, with collective sales of $533.6 million, in the United States; as of July of this year, there were just 53 left

Damn, that's in the whole country! Just one more thing to make you feel really old.

Armenian monuments in peril

A tale of neglect and indifference in Van. The Turkish government has long had mixed feelings about preserving ancient Armenian churches.

Swiss and Nazi gold: the controversy continues

Although the story first broke at least ten days ago, it was thanks to today's New York Times that I noticed that the Swiss are up in arms again -- this time over the cover of a forthcoming book, Imperfect Justice, on the struggle over Swiss reparations to Holocaust survivors. The cover depicts Nazi-marked gold bars arranged in a swastika over the Swiss flag, which is also the emblem of the Swiss National Bank.
Though not mentioned in the Times article, other reports note that some Swiss historians have come to the defense of the cover image, while Jewish organizations in Switzerland have spoken out strongly against it.

It's no surprise the author was taken aback by the vehemence of the response, which, incidentally, went all the way up to the top levels of the Swiss government (which even looked into legal options for suppressing the book in the United States). In America, flags are revered -- but not as much as freedom of speech, and in particular, the freedom to criticize one's country.

I first began to realize how different Switzerland was, back when the campaign for reparations first began to gain momentum. My Swiss friends were uniformly unsympathetic, dismissing it as an opportunistic moneygrab.

At first I was inclined to read this as simple nationalistic defensiveness, but now I realize much must have to do with a fear of losing face. This struck home during a Swiss friend's recent visit, when I mentioned how one of the main highways through Providence was being relocated, since its original path has now been acknowledged to have been a mistake. This left him somewhat astonished; as he explained: "this would never happen in Switzerland; they would never say they had made a mistake."

12 Days of Xmas Price Index

In case you missed it, the Core Christmas Price Index is down this year some 7.6%; much of this appears to be due to a glut of swans, though pear tree prices have come down as well.
The full breakdown is here.

Blogging on Xmas

Blogging on Christmas?
Well, the girls are taking their naps, it's drizzling outside, and a snowstorm's on the way. So after the morning's excitement, time to sit back with a cup of tea and the Times. And then I spot an interesting article, and experience tells me there's no use sending a letter to the editor (only letters from the famous, the exceedingly lucky, or the totally clueless seem to have any chance at publication). Presto -- we're back blogging, holiday or no.

Assorted aviation video clips

I guess this is what happens from being stuck in bed with a cold on Xmas Eve -- started looking for a picture to go with the previous post on the airlines' mothball fleet and I stumbled across this site, which hosts (among other things) a video clip showing the shock wave left by a transsonic fly-by (great for physics classes) and another clip showing a carrier crewman sucked into the engine of a plane on deck (amazingly, he survived).

Idle airliners

Amid all the bleak air travel news, one number really caught my eye this morning: "More than 1,300 planes are already temporarily out of service from airlines around the world, most of them parked in the Arizona desert."
That's one heck of a mothball fleet. No luck in finding a picture of hundreds of planes sitting out on the desert tarmac, though.

War & Peace, Clinton & Bush

Some weeks ago I was reading a report on Clinton-nostalgia among European leaders and diplomats. Astonishingly, many of these luminaries stated (off the record) that they would not have opposed intervention in Iraq if Clinton were still president.
Whatever your opinion regarding Iraq, this is clearly not a very rational way to set policy. Yet it isn't just the Europeans following their hearts rather than their heads: as Robert Kagan points out in today's Washington Post, such eminent figures as Michael Walzer have also flip-flopped, discarding closely reasoned opinions simply because they are now shared by the "wrong" people.

Javelin vs tank: overkill?

The destructive power of modern military hardware sometimes beggars belief. This photo sequence from Strategypage shows what happens when a T-72 is hit by a Javelin, the US Army's new shoulder-fired antitank missile.

Woodrow Wilson's Jim Crow presidency

Historical amnesia is everywhere. Consider Woodrow Wilson's reputation as a liberal idealist, and then read this:

It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act supposedly "consonant with Southern tradition."

This is not an alternate world scenario imagining the results of a Strom Thurmond victory in the 1948 election; it is the real March 4, 1913, the day Woodrow Wilson of Virginia moved into the White House.

And then from bad to worse:

Wilson's racist views were hardly a secret. His own published work was peppered with Lost Cause visions of a happy antebellum South. As president of Princeton, he had turned away black applicants, regarding their desire for education to be "unwarranted." He was elected president because the 1912 campaign featured a third party, Theodore Roosevelt's Bullmoose Party, which drew Republican votes from incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson won a majority of votes in only one state (Arizona) outside the South.

What Wilson's election meant to the South was "home rule;" that is, license to pursue its racial practices without concern about interference from the federal government. That is exactly what the 1948 Dixiecrats wanted. But "home rule" was only the beginning. Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington's large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson's cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.

Earprints to help solve crimes

Morelli figured it out a hundred years earlier, but now researchers in Scotland are looking into using the ear as a means of identification:

The uniqueness of the human ear may hold the key to solving some of the 45,000 housebreakings that bring untold misery to Scotland every year.

Forensic experts at Glasgow University are working on a computer system which would allow detectives to match earprints found at crime scenes with a database of earprints taken from known criminals.

Many housebreakers are in the habit of pressing their ears to doors and windows to check for sounds of movement inside the home they are about to ransack. This habit has become more common as a result of homeowners leaving on lights in a bid to deter criminals.

Detectives frequently recover earprints from crime scenes but at present have no reliable system either for matching them to suspects, or proving their case in court.

The breakthrough is possible because no two human ears are alike. Positive matches can be made between key points of reference on an ear and an earprint from a crime scene in a manner similar to the use of fingerprint evidence.

Seine rising; Paris museums prepare for flood

No damage yet, but Paris is on alert. Efforts to clear out museum storage areas vulnerable to flooding began months ago, in the wake of the central European floods of late summer, but it is clear that much still remains to be done.

Iraq returns some Kuwaiti loot

The Guardian reports Iraq has made what appear to be some token returns of stolen loot:

Kuwait scorned Iraq's return of paintings, swords and other cultural items missing since Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion, dismissing it Sunday as a public relations ploy.

"They are not handing over the things that are important to us, like the war prisoners and the historic documents,'' Abdul-Hamid al-Awadhi, a foreign ministry official, told The Associated Press. . .

Kuwait accuses Iraq of failing to account for more than 600 Kuwaitis and other nationals missing since the Gulf crisis. Baghdad insists it has released all war prisoners.

Mark Dion and the scientists

"Microcosmographia: Mark Dion's Chamber of Curiosities'' has recently opened at the University of Tokyo Museum's Koishikawa Annex.
Apparently the university's professors were less than overawed by the artist:

"Forgive me if I sound rude,'' said one. "But if you like science so much, why don't you study in earnest and become a scientist? I mean, you seem like a child playing with science.''

From Asahi Shimbun.

Is Dorking something English people do?

. . . and other silly questions asked at the English Tourism Council's offices, as reported by the BBC.

Medieval America and the story of Moundville

Most Americans know more about the ancient civilizations of Europe than those that flourished on their own continent -- many of whose traces have been wiped out over the years by construction and development.

In the Southeast, much of what has been preserved or at least recorded is thanks to Clarence Moore:

Moore died in 1936, well into his 80s. While his fame never fully dimmed in scholarly circles, perhaps only now is he getting his deserved moment in the sun. The University of Alabama Press is reprinting the detailed and handsomely illustrated accounts that he faithfully published after each expedition. There's talk of a biography.

"This is certainly an amazing career. The work that he did is sort of the foundation of an awful lot of work that people are doing now, 100 years later," said Larry Aten, a retired National Park Service archeologist in Washington, D.C., who has spent the last six years researching Moore's life.

Moore was among the legion of gentlemen researchers who filled the ranks of 19th-century scientists and scholars. The only son of a Philadelphia paper company magnate, he walked away from the family business at age 47 to devote himself to archeology.

Love Moore or hate him -- and some professionals confess ambivalence over his relatively crude excavation techniques -- there's no escaping his importance. Between 1891 and 1918, he roamed from east Florida to Mobile Bay to Indiana on a single-minded quest to explore every major Indian site that could be reached by water.

His work salvaged countless remnants of prehistoric civilization. Sites that Moore explored in the Tennessee Valley later ended up under water after hydroelectric dams were built. Indian shell mounds in Georgia became road pavement.

Moore's greatest find was what is now the 320-acre Moundville Archeological Park, run by the University of Alabama. Yet the site still suffers from neglect:

Even today, one can fairly argue that the haunting assembly of 30 earthen pyramids near the banks of the Black Warrior River is still awaits its rightful due. Moundville is one of the largest prehistoric settlements discovered north of Mexico. Recent scholarship hypothesizes that the site later evolved into a sanctuary so sacred that Indians considered it a transit point to the afterlife.

But Alabamians are more likely to know Moundville as a routine stop on the grade school field trip circuit. Its cramped 63-year-old museum hasn't had a facelift in three decades; Director Bill Bomar frankly calls some of the park's exhibits "embarrassing." Some, such as a replica of a chief's house atop the largest mound, have had to be closed because they are unsafe or not presentable, he said.

Unesco blows it in Argentina

Argentine literary giant Victoria Ocampo left her villa and its contents to Unesco, along with a beach house to sell to fund the conversion of the villa into a cultural center. Nearly 30 years later, the villa is in a ruinous state, most of the money has been misappropriated, and Ocampo's library has been looted (some of the books, personally-inscribed first editions by Latin America's most eminent writers, have turned up for sale priced in the tens of thousands of dollars).
The New York Times tells the sad story.