Re: Looting of museums, banks, shops, factories--South Central LA writ large
At 02:57 PM 4/12/03 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
The imams have asked for all their stuff to come back to the mosques, and, oddly enough, the stuff's coming back.
Expect the same thing for the hospitals, at least in the Shiite areas...
Yeah, but so much for the careful calibration that med equiptment is supposed to have. A stuck anesthetic valve or out of place x-ray filter can ruin your whole day... .
On Saturday, April 12, 2003, at 04:11 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
At 02:57 PM 4/12/03 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
The imams have asked for all their stuff to come back to the mosques, and, oddly enough, the stuff's coming back.
Expect the same thing for the hospitals, at least in the Shiite areas...
Yeah, but so much for the careful calibration that med equiptment is supposed to have. A stuck anesthetic valve or out of place x-ray filter can ruin your whole day... .
Sometimes you people are so naive you take my breath away. Some small fraction of broken chairs and used tires are dropped off at mosques and Hettinga proclaims it as a triumph of ideology. As for the 170,000 or so pieces from the main museum, well, the Sumerian pottery makes good gravel for roads. And at least the gold can be melted down. --Tim May
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 4:57 PM -0700 4/12/03, Tim May bestirred himself from that Ultimate Barcolounger In The Sky and tapped, furiously, into his lap:
Sometimes you people are so naive you take my breath away.
Would that it were truly so. Meanwhile, I'll settle for the odd occasion that his killfile bites him in the ass. :-). In other words, I think my original post said it clearly enough, but he didn't see that, I expect. Or this, for which I also laugh in his general direction...
Some small fraction of broken chairs and used tires are dropped off at mosques and Hettinga proclaims it as a triumph of ideology.
No. I just said that the imams are getting their stuff back from their mosque because the Shiites, not under the thrall of the Baathist state like the Sunnis are, decided immediately to take matters into their own hands and form armed vigilante mobs. Creating their own force structures from scratch. I said nothing about the museums, but, now that you mention it...
As for the 170,000 or so pieces from the main museum, well, the Sumerian pottery makes good gravel for roads. And at least the gold can be melted down.
Serves Saddam right for not surrendering to save the antiquities from looters, right? :-). (A good retort to the Odd Liberal when she tries to bean you in head with the proverbial cuneiform bolla about how "we" should stop the looting...) In the meantime, I expect that collectors will have a field day with all the liberated stuff from the museum, and, frankly, like Nazi and Soviet "plundered" art, it will all come back, sooner or later, to some new, improved UrWorld museum someday. Here's hoping, by then, it's a private enterprise. One can hope, anyway. I mean, the Baghdad Museum was a private enterprise, a wholly owned subsidiary of Saddam, Inc., right? Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPpjkPsPxH8jf3ohaEQJ/SACdG/ECF80pQpAkZSuV8iXEnZsfwoYAoNeL N90ZMZjGEwy379IttQjBpwGF =kb+j -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
participants (3)
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Major Variola (ret) -
R. A. Hettinga -
Tim May