A permanent and unnecessary loss

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Plenty of blame to go around, and you may be sure there will be lots of finger-pointing, not all of it unearned. Besides the easy lessons to be learned here, there are also a few that aren’t quite so easy, not quite so obvious. Among them:

  • Collection is not necessarily preservation. It doesn’t do anybody any good to collect ancient Egyptian artifacts only to have them go up in flames.
  • Libertarians and Ronald Reagan to the contrary, there are some things that should not rely upon private efforts, and that cannot be done well without support for public institutions.
  • Beyond the need for digital archiving to reduce the risk of total destruction, there is the question of how our human history can be seen whole when the bits of evidence are scattered all over the place and collated nowhere.

In any case, a tragedy.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-fire-museum/rios-200-year-old-national-museum-hit-by-massive-fire-idUSKCN1LJ00L

https://www.wired.com/story/brazil-museum-fire-digital-archives/?CNDID=41291302&mbid=nl_090918_backchannel_list3_p2

Egypt builds a new capital city

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/egypt-builds-new-capital-city-replace-cairo-n893606

I am old enough to remember John F. Kennedy’s project to send man to the moon, and Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. Both these massive social investments helped transform the country, kick-starting technology, in the case of the space program, and facilitating new mobility, in the case of the interstates (though inadvertently damaging the railroads almost beyond repair). Those were the exuberant can-do days before Ronald Reagan and his colleagues decided that “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” (though you will notice they always exempted military spending and subsidies to their rich friends, such as the oil depletion allowance). The truth is closer to, “Government is sometimes the problem, sometimes the solution, and only the very feeble-minded think only the one or only the other.”

The result of this continual nay-saying? A country that has lost its self-confidence. So we have to watch countries such as Egypt and Singapore and China and most of Europe embrace the new technologies, cooperate in creating new possibilities in energy, etc., and we can’t even fix our obsolete railroads. Well, so much the better for the countries that still dare to do things, and so much the worse for Reagan and his legacy.

Of course, just because some things can only be fostered by government doesn’t mean they will be done right. Here is a somewhat jaundiced view of the same project.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/16/new-cairo-egypt-plans-capital-city-desert

 

Night Light radio, Monday night

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Tonight beginning nine p.m., EDT, I will be a guest on Night Light radio, Barbara DeLong’s two-hour Spiritually Speaking show, talking mostly about Awakening from the 3D World. At least, that’s where we’ll start. Where we’ll end up, who knows?

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/night-light

From Barbara’s website:

Welcome to the Night-Light/Spiritually-Speaking radio show, a forum for spiritual enlightenment, cosmic understanding and insight into those etheric realms that ever surround us. Host, Barbara DeLong and a wide variety of fascinating guests will be sharing with you spiritual information and philosophies that you can use to enlighten your lives and open you the creative sources you carry within. This venue allows me to reach out to greater numbers of you and to provide you with new insight … and understanding to the times we are now experiencing. We will be covering everything from the mundane to the magical and will share all of these new paradigms with laughter and love. I hope you visit us regularly and use this resource to find your own inner lights to guide you along your spiritual pathways.