Making it in America

Although it has certainly engaged in its share of fashionable America-bashing, the NY Times can swing the other way, too, as this immigrant-makes-good story (with a twist) illustrates:

In a country where class, education and pedigree still count, Mr. Dia is emblematic of a small new group of French entrepreneurs — hip, young and determined to escape the tough suburbs of the immigrant poor.

In Mr. Dia's case, the road to success came via New York. "America is a place where you can still dream," he said. "In America, if you want to succeed, you give yourself the right to do it and no one stops you. In France that can't happen."

Mohamed Dia was the son of immigrants from Mali, and was going nowhere after his parents split up until his mother sent him to spend a summer with relatives in Harlem.

Arriving first in Baltimore with a friend with relatives there, Mr. Dia was stunned by the level of racial integration he witnessed. "My first shock was to see so many black policemen in the airport," he said. "I couldn't understand it at all. In France out of 100 policemen, maybe one is black. I thought all blacks in America lived in the ghetto. Then I saw blacks with two cars and beautiful houses. I thought I was in the middle of a movie."

In New York, Mr. Dia experienced a freer city life than the one he had known and was transfixed by the street basketball culture. "I didn't understand a word of English, but I was transported into another world," he said. Slowly, Mr. Dia came to realize that in America, destiny was not automatically determined by skin color or family history. "When I saw blacks making money, in responsible positions, I saw that I had a chance," he said. "I said, `Why not me?' "

UPDATE: today's Sunday NYT has a front page article about Somali refugees being resettled in the USA. The Times has had a warm spot for immigrants as long as I can remember, and every few years it runs a piece giving an overview of immigrant groups in greater New York City -- the variety of which is always fascinating.

Today's article is also notable for pointing out that the Somalis are part of a much larger migration:

By the end of next year, officials plan to resettle nearly 13,000 Bantu, who were enslaved and persecuted for generations in Somalia until civil war scattered them to desolate and violent refugee camps in Kenya in the early 1990's.

Over the past decade, State Department officials have increasingly shifted their focus toward Africa as wars there have displaced millions of people. The end of the cold war has resulted in a sharp decline in refugees from the former Soviet Union and Vietnam. Africans are among those filling the gap.

State Department statistics show that Africans made up 3 percent of the refugees resettled in the United States in the 1990 fiscal year. By 2001, that figure was nearly 30 percent.

This may end up having a major long-term impact on attitudes towards race in the United States: what happens to race-based preferences when race is no longer a reliable indicator of past persecution? America is truly becoming more diverse, including diversity within racial and ethnic groups.

Napoleon's jailer

Meant to post a note about it earlier, but there's a fine entry on Hudson Lowe over at Ideofact -- take a look.

Hunting down American interlopers in Europe

In today's Times, a tale of two ducks:

Neither the Spanish nor our Government will wish to hear it. Both countries are committed to spending millions to eradicate the ruddy duck — whose only crime is to be American, over-sexed and over here — to protect its close cousin, Spain’s white-headed duck.

So angered is he by what he calls “this massacre” that Mr Gullick, revered in the birding world for having spotted 8,250 species out of the world total of 9,600 — has told The Times that the Spanish white-headed duck is in fact Pakistani.

And he should know, because it was he who introduced it into Spain when the indigenous white-headed population was just one more winter’s hunting season away from extinction.

Playgroup ejects mother: too old at 38

A mother has been asked to stop taking her toddler to the Christian playgroup they have been attending for the past 18 months because, at 38, she is considered too old.

Angela Hayes received a letter from the Young Women’s Christian Association, which runs the Cosytoes nursery in Llanelli, South Wales, saying they wanted to “refocus” their services on the under-30s. The association asked her not to bring her son Scott, 3, back to the playgroup, which meets three mornings a week, when term restarts in September.

From the Times of London.

Jeffrey's Archer's art now in question

Jeffrey Archer has been convicted as a perjurer and caught out as an adulterer but no one has questioned the integrity of his multimillion-pound art collection. Until now.

A BBC documentary, to be broadcast on Monday to coincide with Archer’s release from prison, will allege that the painting of the Houses of Parliament by the French impressionist Claude Monet, which has pride of place in his London penthouse, may be a forgery. . .

The programme, Archer’s Millions: Liquid Assets, claims that the novelist’s private art collection is worth about £20 million but that he lost £500,000 when he disposed of his collection of Warhol paintings as news of his arrest came to light. . .

Chris Beetles, the St James’s art dealer who has been a friend of Archer for more than 20 years, rubbished the documentary. “Jeffrey has never claimed that the Monet is an original. His art collection is worth closer to £2 million, not £20 million,” he said.

From the Times of London.

Speechifying

Why is it that the art of oratory is so undeveloped among American politicians? Perhaps it has at least something to do with how opinion is so often divided along such rigid lines. In any event, we end up hearing many assertive speeches, but few that are truly persuasive.

Tony Blair's address to the US Congress on Thursday was a perfect illustration of the impact of an argument that rests on reasoned exposition, where opposing opinions are actively addressed rather than flatly contradicted or simply ignored.

Giant carnivorous lizards proliferating in Florida

Cape Coral has become a haven for Nile monitor lizards, and their population in the Gulf Coast city has possibly reached the thousands . . .

Nile monitor lizards, which can easily grow to 5 feet . . . can hunt prey in the water, in trees and even underground. "They likely eat anything they can fit in their mouths," said Gregg Klowden, a University of Florida biologist working on the project. "In my opinion, burrowing owls are like popcorn snacks for them". . .

"They certainly wouldn't have any problem with baby alligators," Campbell said, adding: "These things eat oysters, so to crunch a gopher tortoise shell would be nothing. They probably eat armadillos, foxes, ground doves, reptiles, amphibians. There's one story of a lady finding a hatchling monitor eating goldfish out of her pond."

Read more here.

Excavating the Wright Brothers

From Dayton, Ohio:

The bicycle shop where the Wright brothers built their first airplane may have been scooped up and sent to Michigan, but some archaeology students hope something was left behind.

Their digging at the shop site has turned up pieces of the foundation and a few other items, but they have yet to uncover any evidence of the brothers' airplane work — or even a piece of a bicycle.

The digging is taking place as the hometown of Wilbur and Orville Wright celebrates the centennial of powered flight. It was at the bicycle shop that the Wrights built the airplane that made the first flight near Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Dec. 17, 1903. . .

Automobile legend Henry Ford purchased [the shop] in 1936 and moved it to Greenfield Village, a living-history area he founded in Dearborn, Mich.

Read the rest here.

Another parody reported as straight news . . .

Looks like the Arts Journal got sucked in by this very amusing parody:

Metallica are taking legal action against independant Canadian rock band Unfaith over what they feel is unsanctioned usage of two chords the band has been using since 1982 : E and F.

"People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once," stated Metallica's Lars Ulrich. "We're not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous. We're just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music."

Maybe we should send them a DVD of Spinal Tap?

UPDATE: Looks like someone tipped off the AJ folks -- the writeup has vanished without trace. The parody is still as good as ever, though.

Stolen art: the Shchukin collection controversy continues

Back in December we noted that the US Government had granted immunity from judicial seizure for paintings from the Shchukin collection to be included as part of a traveling loan exhibition from Moscow's Pushkin Museum. Now the exhibition is due to open in Los Angeles, and Shchukin's grandson is keeping on the pressure with a lawsuit. The LA County Museum of Art, however, has announced that the exhibition will open as scheduled on the 27th.

By any logical standard, the case against the Pushkin is strong. There is now general consensus that all reasonable efforts should be made to return works seized by the Nazis. Why should art seized by the Bolsheviks be treated any differently? One might make the argument that after a certain period of time, it becomes too difficult to undo a past wrong -- and in cases such as the art looted by Napoleon or the Elgin Marbles, that argument has, so far, held sway. But there is a significant difference between events dating back nearly 200 years, and those that are still a living memory (albeit not for much longer). The Nazi depredations started 70 years ago; the Bolshevik seizure of Shchukin's collection took place 85 years ago. Of course, in the short term, this isn't a question of justice so much of power. The Nazis were crushed after 12 years; Russian Bolshevism took over 70 years to collapse, and even now has not been fully repudiated. It may well be another generation before Sergei Shchukin's losses are finally made good.

Protecting museums in time of war: the Prado

They bricked up fountains and sandbagged statues, fortified museums and trucked some of the world's greatest paintings through a war zone. They saved works by Goya, Velazquez, El Greco, Titian, Dürer and Bosch from the ravages of war, yet were officially ignored for 67 years. But a new exhibition at the Prado Museum here and a plaque unveiled by the Spanish minister of culture pay tribute to hundreds of citizens who risked all to save their artistic heritage during the Spanish Civil War. . .

These groups, described by a Spanish official as "a kind of artistic Red Cross," moved thousands of artworks — private and public, religious and secular — for safekeeping from the Fascists' aerial bombardments and the wrath of the militant masses.

"In all wars there is looting of art and destruction of cultural monuments," Joaquín Puig de la Bellacasa, director of the fine arts section of the culture ministry, said at a news conference to present the exhibition. "The Spanish Civil War was perhaps the first conflict in which both sides took measures to protect art."

On July 17, 1936, the Civil War began when troops loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco staged an uprising in Morocco that spread to the Spanish mainland, prompting a week of retaliatory looting and burning of religious buildings and palaces by left-wing militias.

Six days later, as Germany and Italy declared their support for the rebels, the Republican government formed the first of several committees for confiscating and protecting artistic treasures. One month later German and Italian planes began bombing Republican cities, including Madrid.

From the NY Times.

De-shredding

An interesting article in today's NY Times on the technology of recomposing shredded documents. Looks like even those cross-cut shredders are far from perfect -- "pulping, pulverizing and chemically decomposing" are mentioned as the current obliteration methods of choice.

Stone Age finds in Scotland

Two hugely significant Neolithic finds have been made in Fife within weeks of each other, thanks to sharp-eyed amateur archeologists.

Historic Scotland has confirmed that intricate markings on boulders on the Binn Hill, a volcanic plug above Burntisland, are neolithic cup and ring marks which may be 4,000 years old.

In a separate find, an outstanding example of a ceremonial Neolithic axe, which may have belonged to a leader or a priest, has been unearthed in a newly ploughed field at Mid-Conlan, just below East Lomond Hill.

Amateur archeologists Colin Kilgour and Jock Moyes contacted Historic Scotland after seeing photographs of Neolithic carvings in an exhibition and recognising the designs they had seen as children playing on the Binn Hill.

"It was then we realised we had seen these markings before," explained Mr Kilgour. "When we were kids we used to play on the Binn Hill, and I remembered finding patterns just like that when we were building a gang hut. We went back and, sure enough, the carvings were still there. We knew what the markings were, but had never imagined they would be so important."

From The Scotsman.

Black Sea shipwrecks: send in the robots!

Robert Ballard . . . is traveling to the Black Sea to investigate what may be the best-preserved ship from the ancient world ever found. He's bringing a robotic archaeologist to scour the vessel. And anyone with an Internet connection will be able to watch the $7 million, 41-day mission live.

The 1,500-year-old ship sits mast-up off the coast of Turkey, buried in Black Sea mud. What makes the craft -- unimaginatively called Wreck D -- remarkable is how intact it is. Usually, shipwrecks decompose rapidly after falling under the surface. But the main mast and stanchions of the Byzantine-era ship have remained whole, despite centuries on the sea floor.

From Wired.

Blog globally, act locally

Apologies for the slow blogging lately; partly it's been the usual summer stuff, but lately it's been trying to fend off the developers. One would think that in this day and age this couldn't happen, but we here in Providence are faced with the prospect of a huge industrial building being built in in the very heart of the city's oldest and most historic (not to mention, densely populated) neighborhood -- a facility that its own proponents say will spew thousands of pounds of toxic waste into the air annually.

Who is behind this monstrous project? None other than Brown University. Brown is hugely influential here in Providence, and as anyone knows who followed the story of our now-imprisoned former mayor, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, bending the rules has been SOP in Providence for a very long time.

Anyway, I've been busy setting up a website for our neighborhood association, where you can read more about Brown and its proposed Life Sciences Building. What is particularly galling about Brown's highhandedness and utter ruthlessness towards its neighbors is the fact that this isn't a normal town-gown divide: most of the neighbors are themselves Brown-affiliated, whether as alumni, parents of students, patrons, or faculty members -- with a significant number having lifelong or multigenerational Brown connections, making them at least as much a part of the school as the administrators now pushing the project.

Autism predictable through head measurements?

This may be more Medpundit's beat, but as a parent of young children my interest in such stories needs no excuse:

The brains of many autistic children are smaller than normal at birth and then grow at an abnormally fast rate during the first year - a new finding that could lead to clues to the cause of the puzzling disorder. . .

In the latest study, Eric Courchesne and his colleagues at the University of California, San Diego . . . studied 48 children between ages 2 and 5 who had already been diagnosed with some form of autism. The scientists asked the children's pediatricians to provide medical records from birth onward, looking for head-size measurements commonly taken throughout the first year. These measurements were compared with national growth charts developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Head circumference at birth was significantly smaller among the autistic children than those without the neurological disorder. And they found dramatic growth of the head between one to two months and three to five months, and another spurt between six and 14 months. On average, the autistic children were at the 25th percentile at birth and by 1 year or so were at the 84th percentile in head size.

By contrast, body length and weight developed normally in autistic children. The results of the study were published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

From Newsday.

UPDATE: Read Medpundit's doubts about the study -- once again, the newspapers are trumpeting results that are far from definitive.

A MORE RELIABLE report: activated charcoal offers significant benefits in case of accidental ingestion of peanuts by those with nut allergies. The same article has some other interesting reports on new measures against life-threatening allergies.

Ideology vs common sense: privatizing National Parks archeology

This sounds like a seriously misconceived idea:

The Bush administration is considering privatizing archaeological oversight of hundreds of national parks and landmarks and firing the National Park Service archaeologists who for decades have been charged with protecting their historic value and cultural heritage.

Read all about it here.

New URL for Ideofact

Bill Allison's new site is up, as the Blogspot exodus continues (the old site is here -- full of good stuff).

Career guidance Down Under

I recall reading recently a series of comments on high school career counseling. Most of the now-successful respondents didn't have much good to say about the advice they had been given, but none received anything quite like this:

A Tasmanian man has been encouraged to apply for work as a female prostitute under a job programme from the Australian government. The man, who had registered with the Job Network programme, was matched with a job entitled "ladies of all ages".

According to the job description, the ladies were needed for a busy city escort service and the advert included a mobile phone number and job reference number.

Bastille Day reading: deja vu all over again

From today's NY Times, the story of a WW2 US Army publication:

"112 Gripes About the French." Published late in 1945, when the euphoria of liberating and being liberated had soured into sullen resentment on both sides, the booklet was reprinted in 1994 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

Not listed in Amazon, sorry -- but now it's available in a French translation, "Nos Amis les Français". But . . .

Some friends! The French, according to the book, are rude, dishonest, lazy [This really should read, "According to the book, American soldiers thought the French to be . . . " -- D.]. Their morals are loose and they smell terrible. They eat frogs. I can't stand the French and never will, goes Gripe No. 5. No one's asking you to like them, the reply offers. But disliking them is not to your advantage. First try to understand them.

The booklet's anonymous author takes on the gripes crisply and succinctly. The French are mercenary? The French think that the American soldier who sells soap and cigarettes on the black market is mercenary, too. The French drink too much? That's what they say about us. And you'll never see a Frenchman drunk. French women are immoral? Depends on which ones. Obviously it's easier to meet those who are.

And then a bit of background:

Dr. Thomson, who wrote a doctoral thesis in 1996 on Americans in France in 1944-45, said most Americans preparing for the Normandy landings had been given "The Pocket Guide to France," and by the eve of departure it was only one soldier in four who knew no French at all. The troops who relieved the combatants were less well prepared and a lot less disciplined, he said.

Already, in Normandy, heavy bombing and serious crime (rape and murder) had caused resentment, which was dissipated by the elating liberation of Paris soon after, Dr. Thomson said. In the following 12 months relations deteriorated rapidly, with half the American troops having an unfavorable opinion of the French by the time of an opinion poll in August 1945.

The Americans, Dr. Thomson says in his thesis, thought the French "were not putting enough energy into rebuilding their country" and were "thieves." The French resented the Americans' late recognition of the Provisional Government, as well as what they saw as their soft treatment of German prisoners and their bad behavior toward French women.

And then one instance in which the author's defense of the French is perhaps less than wholehearted:

The Germans are easier to get along with than the French because they obey the law, Gripe No. 71 says. The French obey laws, the author notes. Even barbaric ones. They obeyed Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

Ouch.

Bloggers at Westminster?

The House of Commons is taking a look at weblogs, but while this BBC article describes an enthusiastic response, it seems that it is all more of the same, the old top-down communication trying to move into a different medium. Note that what the article calls "bloggers" might better be labelled "personal website promoters":

[Bloggers] are taking part in a meeting at Westminster on Monday designed to look at how weblogs can be used in politics, particularly in the light of their increasing use in the US. There has been so much interest in the meeting that the organisers, online think tank Voxpolitics, have had to hire a bigger room.

"Blogs are an exceptionally good way of talking to people who are interested in what you do," said Voxpolitics director James Crabtree. "They could provide a place for people to go and see what MPs are doing, what they are thinking about". . .

"Blogs can provide politicians with a human, more accessible face," said Mr Crabtree, "they are a tool for transparency and openness". . .

So far some 120 people are taking part in the seminar, which is due to be held in the Grand Committee Room in the Commons at 1900 BST on this evening.

Ask not what you can say to the politicians, but what the politicians can say to you.

Lax security at European museums

It's cops and robbers in the museums, and the robbers are winning. This article in the Dallas Morning News was spotted thanks to the Arts Journal (which can also help with registration for such sites). Here are some comments about the Louvre:

Sometimes museum heists are an inside job. Mr. Cadias said police believe the 1998 theft of Le Chemin de Sevres, a major painting by Camille Corot, is such a case. Rogue security personnel at the Louvre may have provided thieves with precise information about when the painting would have the least protection, he said.

"If true, it wasn't done for money, but for internal vengeance between people who were feuding at the Louvre, which has since improved its security," Mr. Cadias said. The painting has not been found.

A government auditor's report issued last year harshly criticized security procedures at the Louvre, perhaps the world's most famous museum. The report said the institution's management did not have a complete inventory of its collection and typically could not open many of its galleries for public viewing because of a shortage of guards.

In addition, workers often took coffee breaks lasting three hours or longer, the report said, and security procedures were found to be extremely lax. For example, when a security chief was fired after the theft of the Corot painting, he was allowed to keep his keys to the museum and a free apartment provided for his use for more than two years, the report found.

And, once again, the issue of European property laws:

Ton Cremers, manager of the Museum Security Network in the Netherlands, said laws in some countries – including his own – make it relatively simple to become the rightful owner of stolen works of art after a lengthy waiting period. This means the works can be sold openly at great profit, he said.

"European law is very different from U.S. law and British law. If you have stolen property, you will become the legitimate owner in five, 10 or 20 years," he said. "In the Netherlands, if you have valuable stolen cultural property, you could auction it after 20 years if you can prove you bought it in good faith. It's better than a pension." Mr. Cremers said criminals with large proceeds from drug sales that they cannot put into the banking system often turn to stolen art for this reason.

He said that stolen works are often sold to collectors in the United States but that criminal gangs have not generally targeted U.S. museums. There has been no noticeable increase in thefts at U.S. museums, Mr. Cremers said, while in recent years France has seen a 40 percent increase.

Three Gorges Dam status report

From the Art Newspaper:

Nearly 1200 sites of historical and archaeological importance along the Yangtze River are now underwater as the first stage of China’s massively ambitious Three Gorges Dam hydro-electric project reached completion on schedule. On 1 June the waters began rising in the huge 375 miles long reservoir created by the 185 metre high and two kilometre wide dam.

Archaeological discoveries made during the salvage efforts have recently identified the area as one of the most culturally important in China, local museums have been greatly enriched, and Chinese archaeology has advanced both technically and financially. Unfortunately for the future of serious archaeological research in the region, it is all too little, too late.

Read it and weep. . . .