Isegoria

Boiled bones show Aztecs butchered, ate invaders:

The caravan was apparently captured because it was made up mostly of the mulatto, mestizo, Maya Indian and Caribbean men and women given to the Spanish as carriers and cooks when they landed in Mexico in 1519, and so was moving slowly.

The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day at dawn, held them down on a sacrificial slab, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods.

Some may have been given hallucinogenic mushrooms or pulque — an alcoholic milky drink made from fermented cactus juice — to numb them to what was about to happen.

“It was a continuous sacrifice over six months. While the prisoners were listening to their companions being sacrificed, the next ones were being selected,” Martinez said, standing in his lab amid boxes of bones, some of young children.

“You can only imagine what it was like for the last ones, who were left six months before being chosen, their anguish.”

The priests and town elders, who performed the rituals on the steps of temples cut off by a perimeter wall, sometimes ate their victims’ raw and bloody hearts or cooked flesh from their arms and legs once it dropped off the boiling bones.

Knife cuts and even teeth marks on the bones show which ones had meat stripped off to be eaten, Martinez said.

Aztec warriors whitened the bones with lime and carried them as amulets. Some were used as ornaments in homes.

In Aztec times, the site was called Zultepec, a town of white-stucco temples and homes where some 5,000 people grew maize and beans and produced pulque to sell to traders.

Priests had to be brought in for the ritual killings because human sacrifices had never taken place there, Martinez said.

On hearing of the massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque — meaning “where people were eaten” in the indigenous Nahuatl language — and sent an army to wipe out its people.

When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims’ possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewelry for the archaeologists.

Michael Strongs says, Forget the World Bank, Try Wal-Mart:

Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month.[1] With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports),[2] Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.

There are estimates that 70 percent of Wal-Mart’s products are made in China.[3] One writer vividly suggests that “One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market.” [4] Even without considering the $263 billion in consumer savings that Wal-Mart provides for low-income Americans, or the millions lifted out of poverty by Wal-Mart in other developing nations, it is unlikely that there is any single organization on the planet that alleviates poverty so effectively for so many people.[5] Moreover, insofar as China’s rapid manufacturing growth has been associated with a decline in its status as a global arms dealer, Wal-Mart has also done more than its share in contributing to global peace.[6]

Economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin shares some photos of Public Works Gone Awry:

It is commonly agreed that Keynes came up with the idea that public works are the best way to help the economy during a recession.

As a result, Keynesian economists seem to have developed a blind faith in the government in general, and in the system of public works in particular.

I do not share the same faith in the government.

I do not share the same faith in public works.

And this may help explain why.

Jerry Bowyer opens Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor… Arguments with this tip to masochists:

If you want a lot of hate mail, write pro-immigration articles for conservative publications.

A tired argument:

As the argument runs, we all like immigrants just fine, thank you. But what we don’t like is illegality. My grandfather, argues embattled Senator Rick Santorum, came here legally, and so should this generation’s immigrants. The problems here are legion. First, when our grandfathers came over here legally, it was relatively easy to do. During the late 19^th and early 20^th century, 37 million immigrants came to American shores. Irish, Italian, and Slovak workers flooded into the country, legally. To compare earlier waves of immigrants with current, largely Latino, immigrants is to leave out a tremendous shift in immigration law.

Second, the argument is basically circular. The debate is about whether we should change our laws. If we liberalize immigration rules, then a number of immigrants will no longer be in violation of the law. They won’t be “illegals.”

The BBC’s If Drugs Were Legal is a peculiar mix of interview-based documentary, with experts from both sides of the issue, and dystopic Bladerunner-esque drama, complete with dark skylines, 1980s soundtrack — listen for Soft Cell’s “Sex Dwarf” — and sinister corporations.

This HTML DOM Visualizer Applet produces beautiful output. A still image doesn’t do it justice either; the graph grows organically. It’s quite mesmerizing. Here’s the key:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags