Archive for May, 2008
Extinct is forever part 2
There was a lot of attention in the media for the past few days being paid to the existence in the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest, on the border of Brasil and Peru, of Indian tribes which have lived there ‘isolated’ for many centuries at least. This is not true of course: they were [...]
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One sits behind one’s desk
This week an agreement was reached on a treaty banning cluster munitions. See Cluster Munition Coalition: http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/ and Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org/doc/?t=arms_clusterbombs. Being a pessimist — as far as the future of our society and our world is concerned – I don’t think this means that cluster munitions will soon be a thing of the past, and if [...]
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Blasko Gabric for president
In a BBC special report titled “What happened to Yugoslavia?” there is a short interview with Blasko Gabric, the man who runs the theme park (well, a very large word for a couple of billboards in a meadow) Yugoland. Hear and see the man at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7416069.stm. Being asked what he liked about the old Yugoslavia, Blasko [...]
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To build a fire
In a pre-press release, The Journal of Human Evolution has made available online an article by Victoria Wobber, Brian Hare, and Richard Wrangham, titled “Great apes prefer cooked food”. Below I quote the abstract that can be found at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00472484 (go to: articles in the press). You can buy the whole article for PDF-download, if [...]
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Continuity of worship
Underneath the church of Elst, Holland, which dates to the 15th century, there have been found the remains of a 8th-century church and of two Roman temples , dated to the 1st and 2nd c. A.D. It has always been thought that the 8th-c. church was built on what was considered at the time, and [...]
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Eleven elderly women were burned alive in Kenya because they were suspected of being witches. See the BBC news report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7413268.stm. Typical for Africa, you say? Where believe in magic lingers on? Certainly many of the news reports on this sad occurrence carried overtones of “Darkest Africa”. In France some 15 graves are desecrated every day (!) [...]
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Surrealist, to be sure
Sotheby auctioned a hand-written copy of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du Surrealisme for 3,6 million euros. The auction house had valued the 21-page manuscript at 200.000 to 500.000 euros. This is all SO ironic, considering the anti-establishment, especially anti-art-etablishment, character of the surrealist movement. Once again, it has been shown that money perverts all original thought. The only [...]
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PVV shows racist face
The Dutch right-wing party PVV, whose leader Wilders drew international attention with his anti-Koran movie Fitna (the stupidity of which was so glaring that even a majority of Muslims did not waste their anger on that, in spite of the insults), now shows its true face: they protested against the commemoration of North-African soldiers who [...]
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Caesar surfaces, or did he?
There are now hundreds of references on the web to the discovery of a supposed bust of Julius Caesar, announced two days ago. Most of these are variants on the text distributed by the Associated Press. In fact, the bust was found between September and October 2007 in the River Rhone by divers of the [...]
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Extinct is for ever
The BBC World Service today quoted the Living Planet Index of the WWF and the Zoological Society of London as saying that between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970. Well within my life time, so the speed at which this is happening is truly staggering. The losses [...]
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