[meteorite-list] NYT: Barristers & Schmitt say: Vanilla & Porc Bellies are Cultural Heritage. & smth hefty.

From: Martin Altmann <altmann_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2011 02:37:59 +0200
Message-ID: <008201cbf329$b74f0910$25ed1b30$_at_de>

Yuhu Phil....

Of course Richard, all meteorites are illegal!!

But chicken wings, daisies and potting soil too.

Gosh I'm so sleepy, of course you would expect me to comment that article, wouldn't you?
And such articles make me tired.
You know what? That article is disastrous. It is labeled with NYT. Hence it will have the same aftermaths like the two BBC articles had, with the bullshit quotes from Smith. Because "BBC" & "NYT" - they are telling the truth. That article will be quoted thousandfold and will be the base for hundreds of articles other journalists will write about meteorites.

I don't know anything about Anglo-Saxon press.
Here in Germany it's usual, that a newspaper or anyone else publishing that someone has acted illegal or blaming someone to be a criminal, investigates the legal situation BEFORE the article is published and not afterwards. Northafrica illicit, "black market", Egypt... I doubt that the authors and redactors have checked the legal situation before. Because in the very most cases, there are no laws at all.
Normal would be, addressed about these errors, to print a counterstatement.

Very tired I am from the interviewed people. Always the same, for what motifs ever, first they lean out of the window - nobody forces them to do so. And afterwards they always turn to windy tergiversations, that they would have been misquoted. Always the same. As they hadn't gotten propounded the articles for rereading before the publication.

In general that doesn't matter. It happens here and there, that people, who had built up their academic career in working on and publishing about such in their opinion no-go-stones or who curate collections of institutes and museums, which consist mainly of such private finds or who are in the domain of recovering new meteorites absolute dilettantes feel an urge to call for a witch-hunt or to act as well-poisoners.
Such erratic minds are no global problem, they cause damage only locally isolated, to their universities, museums and sometimes to the tax-payers of their country.
They are no problem, because the metoricists and scientists of the countries leading in meteoritics like USA, Canada, the European states, Russia and Japan simply don't want to have such a disaster like in Australia, where no meteorites are found anymore, where no exchange of material with other universities does happen, where they failed even to classify their 500 ordinary chondrites from expeditions from 20 years ago and where meteoritics suffered so badly, that in a few years they won't have any young meteorite scientists anymore.

That is not the problem.
Problem is, that the articles wear the brand "BBC", "New York Times"
plus whenever a layman has to publish about meteorites and it comes to the legal question as only source else he will find the unhealthy article of Schmitt & Barrister in MAPS.

That combined does an irreparable harm to meteorite science and meteorite collecting.

Aggravating. Because always we all here on the list and the top-notch scientists have to suffer from the lapses of such individuals. Always we and not they have to repair it again over years, what these destroyed within a minute in their spotlight seeking. Always others then they have to take the can for.




And now Richard, I will demonstrate you, that from now on, all vanilla taste and coffee will have to be banned from the cafeterias and the bureaus of the large meteorite institutes of the world.

Schmitt & Barristers recovered, that coffee and vanilla are protected moveable cultural heritage by the means of the UNESCO convention of 1970:

Look what for a method they used in their paper, authoritative for all meteorite Taliban:


Here you have the full paper:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2002M&PSB..37....5S

And here the abstract, found more often on Web.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/metsoc2001/pdf/5150.pdf

And here you have the full-text of the Unesco convention:
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13039&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html


So Richard, follow me.
No worries, it's short.

What are Schmitt & Barrister doing?
They blank completely the formal legal regulations out, from when on and how only at all a meteorite can be protected by the convention, like it is given in the convention itself as mandatory for any item of cultural heritage:
Ratification -> National Law -> national inventory -> meteorites there.

The convention is no law, it is a convention to harmonize the laws among the countries. Meteorites always can be only protected by national laws. The UN can't dictate laws to their member states. That is very simple, each lawyer knows that. - and btw. very practically, the 1970 convention deals with states, private persons are not concerned at all. (Other than later in the Unidroit convention).

So far so bad already.

Now. Schmitt and Barrister ignore completely the definition of cultural heritage given in the article 1 of the convention, but nevertheless they dare to quote it for their goal.

And look in which way they do it. Here the central sentence of their whole paper. I quote exactly. The omissions are not from me, they are from Schmitt & Barrister:

? ?cultural property? which is broadly defined in Article 1 to include ?rare ? specimens of ? minerals? which would include meteorites.?


Well, here the original sentence from the convention without Schmitt&Barristers distorting mutilations:

"For the purposes of this Convention, the term `cultural property' means property which, on religious or secular grounds, is specifically designated by each State as being of importance for archaeology, prehistory, history, literature, art or science and which belongs to the following categories:

(a) Rare collections and specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects of palaeontological interest;"

Complete different sense.

(Not to mention, that beginning with (a) follows us a catalogue of categories as suggestion, what all could be reckoned as cultural heritage in the individual national inventories. Suggestions. A "can" and not a "have to"-thing.)

Well and in the abstract, that what the curators and Mettaliban, too lazy to read the convention and unfortunately the journalist too, take at face value
that all reads then in the end like that:

"UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting
and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of
Ownership of Cultural Property:

This Convention, ratified
by over 90 states, provides for tracking and retrieving from
reciprocating states, cultural property including meteorites."

Cheap & bold.



Well Richard, so much grammar we still know all.
I make it now in no way different than Schmitt & Barrister.

"specimens of fauna, flora, minerals and anatomy, and objects.."

That is a grammatical sequence of equal nouns.
I pick from there two different ones and make the quotation like they did:

? ?cultural property? which is broadly defined in Article 1 to include ?rare ? specimens of ? fauna,flora? which would include coffee and chicken wings.?

Et viola - any farm product is suddenly a cultural heritage.
(And even more as a meteorite, no human hand had touched bevore, I guess, it's called agriculture).

If you're disturbed by the term "rare" take vanilla, it's the second most rare and expensive spice in existence and take pork bellies, because pig breeding is rare in Islamic countries.
 
So Richard, feel free to call Dr.Harvey and Dr.DiMartino in the New York Times criminals, dogsbodies of illicit trafficking and theft of cultural property, as soon as you catch them with a coffee mug in the hand or a piece of ham in the cheek.

Funny? It would be, cause it's so idiotic.
But because of that private misinterpretation of the convention by Schmitt and Barrister,
such collections like London, Smithsonian, Chicago do not acquire - other than before - desert meteorites anymore. Those collections, which were founded with and built up by nothing else than such privately hunted and traded meteorites. Well, and if they don't do Antarctics, it means a great harm to the quality of the scientific work there, to disengage in the advance of meteoritics of the last and the current decade. As Antarctic meteorites can't be owned, it means also great harm to public task of the continuity, the enlarging and diversifying of those old collections
and if they have to acquire historic meteorites at the insanely high prices instead, it means also a harm to their budget (and to the tax-payer. Anyway the Harveys and DiMartinos of the World do seem always to forget, that their work is no private amusement, but that it and they are paid with a lot of money by the public).

Their cup of tea.

Well Richard, you might think, that the NYT article is disgusting.

How about that?
That is the most feculent and vile statement in that topic I ever read in 30 years,
especially disgusting because it was made by a practicing catholic.


?The question of researching meteorites gathered illegally is essentially the same (though with lower stakes) than the question of doing biological research on stem cells.?


Look Richard, where we are meanwhile. That climate is new, we have it only since the last 10 years.
We all saw that theatre in Oman, now where so much china was smashed (a germanism), we have a court decision, that it was about nothing!!! See the brutality in Brazil. Remember the drama the Algerians made. The evil baiting in Canada even addressed to children. The idiocy in Poland. Or how Australia was eradicated from the World Map of meteoritics.
All new. The four curators who made once that all possible in the UNESCO working group, they would cry bitter, bitter tears, if they could see that perverting of their idea their sons and daughters are doing now.


And it makes me endlessly sad & tired too. Who of you would like to work in such a climate?

Shame has become a foreign word.


Meteoritics needs meteorites.
Such evil-minded idiots meteoritics doesn't need.

Good night,
Martin

 






-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com [mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von Richard Kowalski
Gesendet: Montag, 4. April 2011 21:31
An: meteorite list
Betreff: [meteorite-list] So all meteorites are illegal?

Thanks Dirk for posting your links.

A direct one to the NY Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/science/05meteorite.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

An interesting quote:
?It?s a black market,? said Ralph P. Harvey, a geologist at Case Western Reserve University who directs the federal search for meteorites in Antarctica. ?It?s as organized as any drug trade and just as illegal.?

Either Dr. Harvey is mis-informed, mis-quoted or is in the camp of misinformed scientists that believe meteorite ownership should be illegal to all.


Good to see Anne B quoted in the article

--
Richard Kowalski
Full Moon Photography
IMCA #1081
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Received on Mon 04 Apr 2011 08:37:59 PM PDT