The Sea Dragon Fresco from the temple of Isis. Survived the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in Pompei 2000 years ago, destroyed by government two weeks ago.
A 200 year old museum recently burnt to the ground in Brazil.
It had been mismanaged and underfunded for decades, so a lot of people are upset but nobody's surprised.
They've only just started picking through the rubble, but early estimates suggest 90% of the 20 million artifacts were lost.
The blaze also destroyed the museum’s linguistics department, which included records of indigenous south American languages no longer spoken by living people. The museum housed remains and artefacts belonging to numerous indigenous groups, including skulls belonging to the Botacudo people who were killed off by colonial settlers in the 1800s - many of which are believed to have been lost.
Source
These 10 million bottles of water sent to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and never distributed would have been handy fighting that fire.
After a year in the sun, it isn't exactly drinkable.
I keeping hearing faux wisdom like;
Some things are too important to entrust to the free market
As if it's somehow settled science that centralised government becomes more necessary the more important the goal; yet time and again we see the frivolous, bawdy wastefulness of state action, we shrug in resignation and move on to the next story.
The people who died from contaminated water in the aftermath of Maria are gone forever.
The artifacts in the museum are gone forever.
The fauna specimens sent from France and incinerated by Australian Customs are gone forever.
You know what isn't gone forever?
Thousands of historical records detailing the men, machines and missions of the Royal New Zealand Air Force during and after WWII.
The New Zealand government isn't preserving them.
We are.
We have an account - @len.george
He's fighting the ravages of time and state neglect by compiling and posting every piece of information he can find, long lost in musty basements and abandoned hangars.
Nobody else was doing it, these records would have otherwise been lost forever.
His age has given him the wisdom and perspective to understand their importance and we've given him the tool to preserve them.
There's no way he's motivated by money. He's been active since Jan 2017 and rarely makes more than $1 per post, but this blockchain is a private, for profit enterprise and many people would claim it can't be trusted to do important stuff like that while themselves doing nothing, and forgiving the state for failing constantly.
Two thousand years from now, when only a few relics and records exist from today, who do you think historians will be grateful for?
The well paid public servants who stored an irreplaceable trove of priceless artifacts in one central tinderbox without any backups, or Len?
In one of my posts about a year ago, I mentioned the owner of an ex WW2 Tiger Moth aircraft offering it to the RNZAF.
He lived about 2 hours drive away, and it was decided that it wasn't worth the diesel to go and get it.
With a certificate of airworthness, they change hands at 900,000 to 1 mil dollars now.
Such incredible wastefulness.
I saw it up close in the Aust Army in 96.
Zero respect for the taxpayer.
Hopefully he sat on it long enough to see some of that appreciation.
He had owned it for many years, it was due it's next airworthiness certificate, as a pensioner he couldn't afford it so he was going to give it to a "Good Home". the RNZAF Museum at Christchurch.
We had a civil licenced bloke at Ohakea who could have watched over the work while the airmen did everything.
The training they would have got alone would have been worth it.
The engineer oversaw the rebuild of the Avro 626, the only known pre WW2 aircraft left in NZ.
They stopped flying that one due to the lack of engine spares.
Another great thing about the people choosing to store it is that everything will get stored and not just the versions the governments might want to get stored.
I'm assuming the RNZAF have already shredded the stuff that never happened.
That aside, the decentralisation of permanent record keeping is going to be what the first quarter of this century is known for.
I guess that would be about right. Now we have this at our finger tips, hopefully some first hand accounts will get saved before they are destroyed.
All your eggs in the one basket and left on the roof of a car. Nothing lasts forever but, storing it all together means losing it all together.
Everyone still gets their pension though. It's this twisted miasma of shared responsbility.
You know who's not going to get a pension? Us. And everyone below us. That ponzi scheme is about to burst worldwide; then watch some shit hit the fan. You can blame me for not having kids and doing my part. I can take it.
Man , that's shameful. 10 mil of bottled water never delivered to the people who needed it so badly :(
I heard about the fire. Such a tragedy all that priceless history wasted. Kind of Ironic that it survived Pompeii but then goes down in flames eventually..
#len100percent #theyneedamap #hemadeacopytoaccess
He gets it.
At these point, records should be backup online for future references and study as well. I only hope people will also learn from this.
Thanks for sharing. Sent you a message. Check your wallet pls.
Hi Gideon. It's encrypted on steempeak and blank on steemit.
Are you on discord? You can get me at @mattclarke#6202.
Thank you so much. I just did.
The BBC destroyed over 100 episodes of classic Doctor Who. While they might not have been the best episodes, the fact that there wasn't a preservation policy intact at the time is unforgivable.
This was because they didn't see the 'financial' value of keeping them. When in reality, they should have held 'historic' and 'sentimental' value, and a short financial investment at the time would have kept those episodes airing throughout time itself.
Good on Len for doing this.
What a shame. Sure sound like the way the government operates over here in the US.
This is sad, but you can't blame centralisation. It is more mismanagement, lack of funds and no doubt sprinkled with a good dose of corruption.
The thing that saddens me most about it is the linguistics department. With the pictures, even though the originals are gone, I bet there are postcards or reprints. So people in years to come will know what they looked like.
But those sounds are gone forever, nothing will ever bring them back. Unless somebody has memorised them and can accurately recreate every recorded sound. Which is highly doubtful.
A sad day indeed 😥😪
Cg