Inside the Asylum

My last post about UNESCO made me decide to find out something about the current head of the organization, Koïchiro Matsuura. Here's a speech he made when he was reelected in 2005:

He said that “2005 is, to me, a key year because it marks the end of a series of reforms presented in 2000 and whose final measures are now being implemented. Today, we have a coherent body of personnel policies, a complete chart for delegating authority, an integrated programme, budget and financial information system, and a more efficient internal monitoring system. The review of the new decentralization strategy ends the first cycle in the restructuring of the Organization...What remains to be done is to make the qualitative leap which will allow this new vision of the Organization to truly function, as would a network whose different components are complementary and which mutually reinforce each other”.

Have you ever seen such a mindless bunch of bureaucratic management buzz words? It strongly reminds me of some Dilbert cartoon where Wally is mocking the pointy haired boss with a pile of meaningless management speak.

My recent post about UNESCO reminded me to post a follow-up story to my previous one about Faruq Hosni, the Egyptian Culture Minister, who is the current favorite to be the next head of UNESCO. His chances went up with the withdrawal of the only other Arab competing for the post recently withdrew (Algerian Mohamed Bedgawy). This is the man who said he wanted to burn Jewish books in Egyptian libraries. His most serious rival for the post seems to be former Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Well, UNESCO has proven itself to be pretty anti-American even under current head Japanese Koichiro Matsura, but I can't imagine that situation would improve under Faruq Hosni.

This is pretty cool. The universe began to form about 13.7 billion years ago (the "Big Bang" was a process, not a single event, so I don't really like to say the universe was "created" at the time, as some do.) Now scientists at UC Irvine have detected a couple of supernovas ("supernovae" if you want to be strictly correct about it) that are 11 billion years old. Stars are born and stars die all the time. An 11 billion year old supernova only gives you 2.7 billion years for the whole life cycle of a star, but the giants live and die at a much faster rate than smaller stars. To put this is context our sun is probably something more than 4 billion years old, perhaps as much as 5 billion. It's a case of bigger not necessarily being better, because the bigger the star, the shorter its lifespan. This whole cycle is pretty damned important for us too ... because there are elements present in our Solar System that can only be formed during a supernova, including small amounts even within human bodies. In other words, there has to have been at least one supernova in our area of space, and our Solar System has to have formed using some of the left-over fragments of that explosion. We're talking about cycles that are billions of years long ... and our puny human brains have trouble wrapping our brains around any concept beyond a few thousand. Except, oddly enough, when it comes to money, and then people seem to think that a trillion isn't a very big number. Go figure. (How much is a trillion seconds? See my "Wisdom of Heinlein" post.)

Expedia did a survey of several thousand hoteliers about what they think of tourists from various different countries. They rated them on politeness, loudness, generosity, likelihood to complain, all sorts of things. There were some expected results, but also some surprises.

Top five (starting from the best): Japanese, British, Canadians, Germans, Swiss.
Bottom five (starting from the worst): French, Spanish, Greeks, Turks, South Africans.

I'll leave it to you to guess which ones I think are surprises.

The state-controlled Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco) recently had a failed $19.5 billion bid for a large stake in Rio Tinto. The Chinese were pretty pissed about it at the time, and evidently they still are. In completely unrelated news,

Four staffs of the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Ltd. have been detained on charges of stealing China's state secrets, the Shanghai state security authorities said Thursday.

In China, that's the way business is done. Everything is related to everything else.

AP Headline

US military damaged ancient Babylon site

I'm not even going to quote any of the BS from this story, because you'll learn nothing factual about how the US treated sensitive archaeological areas, and instead you'll wade through a lot of politically charged anti-American rhetoric produced by UNESCO. There's not a peep about the appalling damage inflicted on priceless sites by Saddam Hussein's regime. There's not a word about how one of his sons had things bulldozed just so he could have one of his palaces on a hill. This story is an anti-American political hit piece.
I happen to know a high ranking marine who told me about the extra-ordinary measures his troops took to protect archaeological sites. He also told me a story of the tours an Iraqi archaeologist gave himself and some of his men, as they walked (on foot) through one of the most famous ancient sites. There was no

leveling of hilltops and driving of heavy vehicles over the fragile paving of once-sacred pathways.

as the AP UNESCO hit-piece alleges. The only ones who did that were the pre-invasion Iraqis. This particular marine was visibly awed at having the opportunity to walk down those once-sacred pathways. He was filled with respect for the site, and knew exactly the significance and value of the place. Did UNESCO even bother to check who was responsible for leveling the site? More likely they saw Iraqi inflicted damage and automatically assigned it to American forces.