Rescuing Da Vinci

Rescuing Da Vinci is the first comprehensive photographic telling of the amazing and largely “untold” story of Hitler and the Nazi theft of Europe’s greatest art and America and her Allies’ recovery of it.

The book is 320 pages in length and contains more than 460 photographs including 60 in color. It is the first time this group of photographs has been assembled in a single book. These photographs, rarely published and with clarity not seen before, illustrate masterpieces being handled in unimaginable ways.

While enjoying dinner in Mill Valley prepared by a fine chef only recently from Israel, Joe Klass, the grandfather of the famous Klass Foundation, who spent more time as a WWII POW than any American, said to me, “We will see pieces melt from the bottom of glaciers. Soldiers were ordered to throw everything.”

There’s an update to this post at “Hitler’s mountain treasures

And another update:
Joe Klass thinks three strikes laws are mis-used. His 12-year-old granddaughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered by a repeat offender. The case provided much of the impetus for the three-strikes law Klass initially supported. But he takes issue with the provision that counts non-violent crimes as third strikes.

assuming credit

A much more interesting and important plagiarism case is happening at Raytheon, where the defense contractor’s board has penalized the CEO by what could amount to a million bucks, while still praising his leadership.

It seems that CEO Bill Swanson had been publishing and assuming credit for a pamphlet called Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, a compendium of digestible platitudes that Business 2.0, in its regrettable cover story last July, called “The CEO’s Secret Handbook.”

Swanson, however, apparently ripped off much of “his” rules from a 1944 book called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering.

via rangelife

Learn your Local Rights

The boxTank posts that the Forum for Urban Design and responds to a panelist’s statement saying, “It’s not our job to say: Gee, the new Home Depot sucks…”

But of course it is!
That’s exactly your role; that’s exactly the built environment as it’s now experienced by the majority of the American public. “Architecture,” for most Americans, means Home Depot – not Mies Van Der Rohe. You have every right to discuss that architecture. For questions of accessibility, material use, and land policy alone, if you could change the way Home Depots all around the world are designed and constructed, you’d have an impact on built space and the construction industry several orders of magnitude larger than changing just one new high-rise in Manhattan – or San Francisco, or Boston’s Back Bay.

You’d also help people realize that their local Home Depot is an architectural concern, and that everyone has the right to critique – or celebrate – these buildings now popping up on every corner.

If critics only choose to write about avant-garde pharmaceutical headquarters in the woods of central New Jersey – citing Le Corbusier – then, of course, architectural criticism will continue to lose its audience. And it is losing its audience: this was unanimously agreed upon by all of last night’s panelists.

Architectural Criticism

Quick Med

Many diseases are detected in late stages just because the tests that detect them are expensive and require manpower and equipment that makes them scarce. What if tests were really that simple. Many lives will be saved thanks to early detection and available cheap preventive screening.

The above scenario is not science fiction anymore. Israeli company Medex Screen Ltd has unveiled groundbreaking pen shaped device that detects cancer and other internal organ diseases in 20 minutes. The new device promises breakthrough in internal disease diagnostics and detection with amazingly simple procedure.

The device, called Medex Test is a pen shaped detector, about 10 inches long which connects to a standard personal computer. All the doctor has to do is touch the fingers of the patient. Results and diagnostic information is then displayed graphically on the computer screen.

via coMags

Taxes Are Sexy

So let’s stop being shy about what we want.

Think for a moment of all the ways that tax is actually like sex…

if not now, when?

Under our system, every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.


Robert Heinlein

learn to cut butter

Kelly Odell is learning everyday about the power of the digital universe. A couple weeks ago he published the “World’s Shortest Marketing Plan” giving himself the challenge of making a marketing plan template that was reasonably comprehensive and could fit on a single page. This was Odell’s reaction to marketing plan templates — just too long and too complicated to get your arms around — even as a seasoned marketer and damn near impossible for a novice.

Reasons to own a dog

No wonder they’re man’s best friend. Deborah Wells of the Canine Behaviour Centre at Queen’s University Belfast has surveyed the literature and found widespread evidence for the benefits that dogs can bring to our physical and psychological well-being.

Read Reasons to own a dog

waging of nonviolent conflict

A Force More Powerful is the first and only game to teach the waging of conflict using nonviolent methods. Destined for use by activists and leaders of nonviolent resistance and opposition movements, the game will also educate the media and general public on the potential of nonviolent action and serve as a simulation tool for academic studies of nonviolent resistance.