Geronimo descendant sues Skull and Bones

For those of you who don’t know, The Order of the Skull and Bones is a secret society at Yale University.

It’s basically a fraternity of rich dorks with the concomitant hush-hush rumors of dark rituals and political intrigue, which features in a fair few conspiracy theories along with the Freemasons and Illuminati.

Well, one of the hush-hush rumors is that initiates are made to kiss a skull, possibly the skull of the great Apache warrior Geronimo, stolen from his grave in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by a cadre of rich dorks including Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of a couple of former US presidents, while stationed at the Fort during World War I.

Harlyn Geronimo wants the truth, and has filed suit against Yale, Skull and Bones, President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Army Secretary Pete Geren to get it.

It has long been rumored that several of Yale’s “Bonesmen,” including, by one account, Prescott Bush, father of one Bush president and grandfather of the other, robbed Geronimo’s grave and brought back his skull and femurs, and his horse’s bit and saddle horn, to the Tomb.[…]

Harlyn Geronimo’s lawyer is William Ramsey Clark, who served as U.S. attorney general under Lyndon Johnson. Clark brought the action under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The suit seeks to “free Geronimo, his remains, funerary objects and spirit, from 100 years of imprisonment at Fort Sill, Okla., the Yale University campus in New Haven, and wherever else they may be.”

Harlyn wishes to reinter Geronimo’s remains in his ancestral lands, so he wants Fort Sill as well as Skull and Bones to cough up any remains they might have.

The Apache tribe disagrees. They don’t want Geronimo’s grave disturbed and they don’t think the rich dorks really dug him up at all. There’s no physical evidence of desecration. The rich dorks could have grave-robbed anyone or even just stolen a skull and two femurs from the science lab and pretended they were Geronimo’s.

The only evidence in the case comes from a 1918 letter recently uncovered in the Yale Archives, but it was written by someone who was not at Fort Sill, so although contemporary, it’s still circumstantial.

The letter was written on June 7, 1918, by Winter Mead ’19 to F. Trubee Davison ’18. It announces that the remains dug up at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, by a group that included Charles C. Haffner Jr. ’19 (a new member, or “Knight”), have been deposited in the society’s headquarters (the “Tomb”): “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K — t [Knight] Haffner, is now safe inside the T — [Tomb] together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn.”

But at best that indicates that some Bonesmen (yes, that is what they call themselves; like I said, rich dorks) thought the bones were Geronimo’s, not that they are, and let’s face it, the odds of any these guys having been sober at the time are slim to none.

Slavery and Jackson Five theme park in Nigeria

Just in case you thought Michael was the only crazy Jackson, here comes his brother Marlon with the most appalling notion of “edutainment” I’ve heard in a long time: a 3.4 billion dollar resort with a golf course, casinos, a slavery museum (complete with replica slave ship) and a Jackson Five museum all on the site of one west Africa’s Middle Passage ports.

Badagry, Nigeria, was formerly a slave port and is currently a tourist destination with an important museum documenting the trade.

“The Jackson Family had been looking for a place to site their memorabilia collection for some time,” says Gary Loster, a former mayor of Saginaw, Michigan, and chief executive of The Motherland Group.

“We visited the site of the slave port in Badagry and Marlon turned to me and said: ‘Let’s put it here, this is right’.

“It’s such an emotional place, and I think we all felt that it was the right place to have the Jackson family memorial.”

:facepalm:

The Motherland Group, incidentally, includes the creator of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, so there’s a recommendation for you.

As disgusting as it is, it’s likely to provide an enormous number of jobs for the locals, perhaps as many as 150,000, it’s a plum prize to dangle. Still, I like how writer Toyin Falola put it:

The professor of history at the University of Texas and author of many books on the Nigerian diaspora and African-American history said the development was exploiting painful history.

“Money-making and historical memory are allies in the extension of capitalism. You cry with one eye and wipe it off with cold beer, leaving the other eye open for gambling,” he said.

Even looked at purely from an investment standpoint, it’s risky business. Nigeria isn’t exactly a placid country, and you can’t even get a visa without a letter of recommendation. These developers are going to have to make major changes to the government and infrastructure of the country to get anything like the number of paying guests they project.

I’m just going to rock myself and hope the new museum will at least contribute something of historical value to the area instead of exploiting human misery for profit in the most hideously ironic way.

Huge 12th c. waterwheel found on Thames bank

Developers prepping for new construction in the Greenwich Wharf area have found the remains of an enormous 12th c. waterwheel.

Look at the size of this monster:

Archaeologists estimate that the foundations were 30 feet by 36 feet and the waterwheel was more than 20 feet in diameter.

The Romans were the first to build tide mills long the Thames foreshore. The waterwheels powered millstones by sucking in the high tide and releasing the low tide.

We know the technology was still going strong in 1086 because four tide mills are mentioned in the Domesday book, but until now, little evidence of them has ever been found.

It has been preserved against centuries of damage by riverside peat deposits. Carpenters’ or millwrights’ assembly marks are clearly visible on the timbers. […]

The find is similar in design to Roman mills. What has survived is the water trough, carved from a single log, and a carved section of the waterwheel itself with paddles.

Dendrochronological analysis – where tree rings are counted – dates the trees’ felling to 1194.

Researchers think the mill was probably associated with a nearby monastery run by a Belgian order. They’re going to sift through the monastery records to see if they can find any information on the mill.

Meanwhile, the timbers have been removed for conservation and the site is being fully documented. Then the developers will get it back to build some ugly contemporary crap on it.

Okay to be fair, I don’t know that it’ll be ugly or crap, but given what’s become of the London skyline over the past 50 years, it seems likely.

Druids at war

I’m sure you all fondly remember our neo-pagan heroes Arthur Pendragon et al. standing up for their pre-Christian, post-living brethren. Well, thanks to the always juicy Daily Mail, we can now take a look at the men/drunken sots behind the self-delusion.

First of all, “Arthur Pendragon” is the short version. His actual name — legally changed in 1976 — is King Arthur Uther Pendragon. He’s a former Hell’s Angel and current barfly. Oh, and of course, the Battle Chieftain of the Council of British Druid Orders.

In his capacity as Battle Chieftain, King Arthur Uther Pendragon has accomplished many feats of strength.

‘I work out the political tactics for the druids. My order is the political arm. We’re the guys in white frocks, up the trees. We’re the ones trying to stop the Newbury by-pass.’

Hasn’t that been open for a few years?

‘Whatever — we’re at the sharp end. We’re the political arm of the whole spiritual movement.’

Unfortunately, not everyone is on board with Battle Chieftain King Arthur Uther Pendragon’s vision of the Druidic future. There are heretics, splitters, blasphemers who dare question his approach.

The ‘row’ concerns a small breakaway group of druids (known to some as COBDO West) who’ve requested the museum release the remains so they can rebury them where they came from. King Arthur and mainstream COBDO want the same thing — but are upset that COBDO West have taken matters into their own hands. ‘COBDO West are just a joke — three men and a dog, without even the dog,’ splutters King Arthur. ‘I’ve got thousands of members in my Arthurian War Band all round the world and loads more in the UK. I could field hundreds of activists at the drop of a hat. Bunch of idiots.’

Yes, how dare those men and their missing dog bother to actually fill out the paperwork to petition English Heritage for reburial of the Avebury skeletons. Don’t they know Battle Chieftain King Arthur Uther Pendragon could summon an army of RenFaire drunks with the merest whisper in the wind?

Iraqi National Museum to reopen this month

After the nightmare of post-invasion looting and with thousands of pieces still missing, Baghdad’s National Museum is scheduled to reopen by the end of February.

They’ve been renovating the space for months, and restoring the 5,000 recovered antiquities out of the 15,000 estimated to have been destroyed or stolen. Most importantly, they’re actively working to prevent anything like this happening again.

The museum and other archaeological sites will be protected by a newly formed Interior Ministry force called the “relics protection force,” Jibouri said in an interview.

The force will aim to prevent a repeat of the devastation of April 2003 when looters robbed the museum of some 15,000 priceless artefacts as part of a wave of theft from public buildings after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell.

Saddam Hussein was no great steward of the Cradle of Civilization. Archaeological sites were plundered all the time under his rule, so this is a major (and very much welcome) shift in attitude to Iraq’s immense cultural patrimony.

Qahtan al-Jibouri, Iraq’s minister for tourism and antiquities quoted above, is also hoping the reopening of the museum will usher in a new era of tourism and associated revenues. The budget is tight, needless to say, so an influx of tourist cash would make a big difference.

For years the main source of Iraqi tourism has been Iranian pilgrims visiting religious sites. Hard to believe, but the enormous wealth of Mesopotamian history never really made it onto the brochure until now.