Against Closed Eyes In Marketing

How heartening after decades of decay and the destruction of many old fine homes, to see a revival of Scotland’s Castles. After the war when many properties which had been either closed up or badly damaged by their war time guests, were facing a grim future. Many had been used as hospitals or temporary billets for servicemen and to use a modern expression, they had been pretty much trashed. Of course the end of the war also coincided with a period of heavy taxation and a huge shortage of raw materials. Many families simply buckled under the pressure and either sold up or pulled down the ancestral pile.

However fortunately some hung on and battled through a pretty grim four decades of heavy taxation and diminishing returns from their estates. With the passing of the estates onto the next generation and all the new prosperity that Britain was enjoying, many homes underwent extensive restoration, which breathed new life into these historic old homes. Whereas previously many castles only survived through government grants or by being taken on by the National Trust, Landmark trust or some other preservation organisation, they now were benefiting from new sources of revenue, like property development, mobile masts, wind farms and office developments in old farm buildings.

An even more exciting development was the emergence of new owners, many from the building industry, who had a passion for old buildings. They bought run down and in some cases ruined former manor houses, castles or keeps and restored them to their former glory. This often involved huge amounts of money and real dedication as they overcame many construction problems. However twenty years on, Scotland is dotted with such buildings and it is wonderful to see so many being enjoyed once more as private homes, small inns or as some form of cultural venue.

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Native Americans are often cast in the role of victims of White aggression and unbridled avarice-driven or gratuitous violence, especially in the territories known collectively today as the United States. But the first massacre was perpetrated by Indians in the British colony Jamestown, in Virginia in 1622. They slaughtered 347 white men, women and children on that occasion.

Europeans are also accused of importing pathogens, disease causing agents, such as smallpox and measles, malaria and yellow fever. Indigenous people had no immunological resistance to these illnesses as they were never exposed to them.

But recent findings by a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a massive study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere in the last 7,000 years - suggest that Native American’s health was severely run down long before the Europeans delivered the coup de grace.

The researchers analyzed more than 12,500 skeletons - half of them pre-Columbian - from 65 sites in North and South America for evidence of infections, malnutrition and other health problems.

The study - “The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere”, edited by Dr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose - discovered that the haleness of Native-Americans declined markedly in the 1000 years before Columbus “discovered” them.

The vast majority of the skeletons showed telltale signs of advanced degenerative joint disease, deteriorating dental health, stature, anemia, arrested tissue development, infections and trauma from injuries. These were attributed by the participants to limited diets and urban congestion. People became shorter and died earlier - on average at age 35 - as the centuries passed.

“Pre-Columbian populations were among the healthiest and the least healthy in our sample,” Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose said. “While pre-Columbian natives may have lived in a disease environment substantially different from that in other parts of the globe, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic conditions of ill health under conditions of systematic agriculture and urban living.”

Moreover, there are signs that diseases hitherto thought to have been introduced by the white explorers were actually indigenous.1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for instance, were found to have been infected with tuberculosis in their lungs.

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com

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