Whose Horses Are They?

This blog has repeatedly called attention to the battle over the Kennewick man. A&L links to Edward Rothstein’s review of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage, which critiques the concept of “cultural property” underlying arguments that led to bulldozing Kennewick’s burial ground. The review (and Cuno) argue that that idea has been betrayed. The framers of the doctrine, he contends, had a “universalist stance”; they “would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.” The writer finds this change “as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests. It has been used not just to protect but also to restrict.” Rothstein concludes “But if cultural property really did exist, the Enlightenment museum would be an example of it: an institution that evolved, almost uniquely, out of Western civilization. And the cultural property movement could be seen as a persistent attempt to undermine it. And take illicit possession.”

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Abu Muqawama Retires

Abu Muqawama is an excellent blog that is on my daily blog reading list.  It focuses on counterinsurgency issues, as well as wider issues in military affairs.  I tend to favor it because of the humility of the authors.  Often they comment on issues, and are authoritative, yet allow for the fact that ladies and gentlemen may have legitimate disagreements.

Unfortunately, The Abu Muqawama has revealed his identity as Andrew Exum and has stated that he will no longer be blogging regularly.  Instead his co-bloggers, Erin “Charlie” Simpson, Dr. iRack, and Londonstani, among others, will continue where Abu Muqawama leaves off.

Andrew Exum will be missed, but the blog will continue.  Good luck to Andrew in is intellectual endeavors.

I nonetheless look forward to the new Abu Muqawama blog.

Zen comments as well.

Kissinger: Establishing Priorities, Tolerating Our SOBs

“Kissinger … was above all a revolutionary.” … [T]his may come as something of a surprise. Kissinger a revolutionary? The man who told the Argentine junta’s Foreign Minister, Cesar Guzzetti: “We wish [your] government well”? The man who promised his South African counterpart to “curb any missionary zeal of my officers in the State Department to harass you”? The man who told the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet: “We are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here”? Yet Suri has a case to make, even if he does not make it more than obliquely. An integral part of Kissinger’s grand strategy was always to establish priorities. In order to check Soviet ambitions in the Third World – the full extent of which we have only recently come to appreciate – some unpleasant regimes had to be tolerated, and indeed supported. Besides the various Latin American caudillos, the Saudi royal family, the Shah of Iran and the Pakistani military, these unpleasant regimes also included (though the Left seldom acknowledged it) the Maoist regime in Beijing, which was already guilty of many more violations of human rights than all the right-wing dictators put together when Kissinger flew there for the first time in July 1971.

Niall Ferguson, reviewing Henry Kissinger and the American Century in the TLS.

The book sounds good. The review is worth reading.

The Cold War was a bad time. It was a dangerous time. Victory was not assured. When Kissinger was in office, defeat seemed possible. When Nixon came to power in 1969, the country was in terrible shape, with only 1933 and 1861 being worse for a new president. American leaders made decisions under what they considered to be desperate conditions which we now question, or challenge, or repudiate. America allied itself with regimes which behaved very badly. Opposing and defeating the Soviet Union had many costs. We are too close to fully assess them.

Of the many books I have read about the Cold War, or events during the Cold War, the single best book covering the whole period which I have read is Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War.

Suggested favorite books about the Cold War would be appreciated, in the comments.

UPDATE: Good Zenpundit post about, inter alia, the Nixon White House. Zen suggests some Nixonian literature in the comments.

UPDATE II: Zen provides a Cold War reading list, in the comments. Check it out.

Skipping Science Class, Continued

Three years ago, I posted about some disturbing trends in UK science education:

Instead of learning science, pupils will “learn about the way science and scientists work within society”. They will “develop their ability to relate their understanding of science to their own and others’ decisions about lifestyles”, the QCA said. They will be taught to consider how and why decisions about science and technology are made, including those that raise ethical issues, and about the “social, economic and environmental effects of such decisions”.

They will learn to “question scientific information or ideas” and be taught that “uncertainties in scientific knowledge and ideas change over time”, and “there are some questions that science cannot answer, and some that science cannot address”. Science content of the curriculum will be kept “lite”. Under “energy and electricity”, pupils will be taught that “energy transfers can be measured and their efficiency calculated, which is important in considering the economic costs and environmental effects of energy use”. (The above is from John Clare’s article in the Telegraph.)

A couple of days ago, the Telegraph had an article about the Government’s new national science test and the unbelievably simplistic questions it contains. For example:

In a multiple choice question, teenagers were asked why electric wires are made from copper. The four possible answers were that copper was brown, was not magnetic, conducted electricity, or that it conducted heat.

This question can of course be answered without knowing anything at all about either electricity or copper. Demonstration:

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