Forensic anthropology

We just got the "crime/suspense" channel added to our cable TV...(we've had cable tv here since 1990...the same year we got electricity in the village where we have our farm...)

A common sight in our area is a small traditional bamboo house with a small wire coming into it, and a TV antenna...although now many of the houses are of concrete...

You see, globalization has occured, and 20 years ago most of my husband's family's tenants obtained their land via land reform...so good hybrid seeds, handplows, fertilizer, and children sending checks back from Saudi Arabia has improved the baseline poverty here...alas, the local unemployment rate is still 40 percent in town, but if Gloria gets her act together, maybe that will improve too...

Well, anyway, my main point is that we now can watch all these "Forensic science" shows, which I find fascinating...

The above link is a story of a forensic anthropologist from Pittsburg who helped identify 300 Kurds in one mass grave.
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".....The men's remains had been riddled with bullets from assault rifles. The women and children were shot in the back of the heads with small-caliber handguns. A pathologist took that data and, combining it with clothing and other cultural artifacts, concluded the dead were Kurds slaughtered by Saddam Hussein's regime during Anfal, a series of assaults during the Iran-Iraq war.

"That's what's wonderful about taking each of these bones out of the mass graves and letting them speak and say, 'I was blindfolded and shot in the head,'" Bytheway said. "It's wonderful to be able to do that."

"From January to July, Bytheway, 44, and her husband Robert, 41, were part of an international team that dug up a small fraction of some 300 mass graves believed to be in Iraq. She helped catalogue more than 300 skeletons found in just two of the graves....

Legal experts say the hardest part may be tying the horrific skeletal evidence to Saddam.

"If Hitler had actually been captured and they would have had to prove the case against Hitler, it would have been difficult because he didn't put anything in writing," said Robert Hardaway, an expert on legal evidence at the University of Denver.

"I guess you could argue that, 'Look 6 million people were killed and you were the head of state with absolute power when that happened,' so the thing speaks for itself,'" Hardaway said......

Baktiar Amin, the former minister of human rights in the U.S.-backed Iraqi administration, has said there may be 1 million people buried in mass graves.

That thought haunts Bytheway - but the chance to use her lifelong passion to bring Saddam to justice made the Iraq assignment irresistible....

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So where is the outcry against these people killed? Hello? Hello? Was anyone out there in the 1990's?

So when you read THIS in the NYT (reg Req)complaining about blogs answering the NYT and printing the entire interview instead of just the juiciest quotes:

"...Ms. MacKinnon predicted that traditional journalism and the art of distilling information would not vanish..."

Yup...distilling is the correct word.

You take weak wine and end up with rotgut whiskey, which is NOT the same thing as when you started...

So don't wonder when some of us remind you that originally 98% of what you reported was water...and that by leaving it out and "distilling" the product that you wanted, you essentially changed the brew and distorted the reality of what you reported.

I have no problem with reporting the latest atrocity from Iraq, but until you put it into perspective, you are distorting reality...