...needs a satire tag...
So...therefore...union workers can be made more productive through the use of a whip.
Cool! Let’s go all Egyptian!
That guy will say anything.
What exactly did he do to be appointed Grand Poobah of Antiquities anyway? You can bet it was political.
I bet the Egyptian pyramid builders were more motivated by whips and chains than good healthcare ....weren’t they called “slaves” back then?
Wait until next week. He’ll find Jimmy Hoffa under one of the pyramids.
Come for a laugh?
Chinese drywall?
Dr. Haffass like to mug for the TV cameras. He may be a worshipper of the bamster. Picture in Egypt have turned up showing His feculence as Pharoah..
lol
So this means they used unions. Why am I not connecting the dots? LOL
Does this mean there were 20,000 slaves working on the pyramids, while another 20,000 supervisors stood around watching?
If labor unions were involved in the construction of the pyramids, they would either have failed in 20 years or they would still not be complete.
Small wonder it took 30 years to build a single building...
A few decades ago, someone at the Smithsonian came up with a simple and low tech way for the Egyptians to build the pyramids with far fewer people and faster.
To start with, the quarry was located upriver, and there is the remains of a large, professional mason city next to it. Once processed, each block was moved to an expendable small boat, where it would be floated down river to the pyramid site.
The problem was first of all, moving the blocks from the quarry to the mason city, then from the city to the boat, and then from the boat to the pyramid site.
The solution was to do the equivalent of turning the rectangular blocks of stone into cylinders that could be rolled. This could be done by using two large wooden wheels, four segments that formed a wheel, held together with pins. Square on the inside, round on the outside.
For short distances it could be moved by men, for longer distances, by oxen. The Egyptians were experts with building dirt ramps as well, so they would likely use ramps to get the stones emplaced, “burying” the pyramid on the way up, then as they reduced the ramps, putting in the casing stones on the way down.
Union theme: “Work Like An Egyptian.”
Great analogy to the modern federal platation slaves receiving welfare, food stamps and public housing.
Never forget for a minute that Egypt is a rotten, impoverished, dictatorship where promotion and longevity in government circles is determined by loyalty to the Man.
And like in all unfree countries, if you’re a gringo who plans to make his career working and studying there you gotta play ball from your first field trip to your last dying breath or you’re persona non grata.
Maybe one of these days an “Anonymous” will write a riveting expose of the whole rotten system but I doubt it. I don’t have to be told to know that everybody knows everybody in the wonderful world of Egyptology and if you’re an academic who drops dime I imagine it won’t take five minutes to figure out who you have to be and if necessary your whole department will be made to suffer.
There’s no getting away from dirty old politics anywhere in the world of mankind. I recall reading a passage from former Soviet-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician Anatoly Scharansky’s memoir “Fear no Evil” where he talks about how he and his fellow Russian Jews inclined towards science and academia to try and insulate themselves from the ugly reality of the system they lived under, without success as events proved...
Lord only knows what revelations will be brought to light if and when the Mubarak Dynasty goes down and something approaching democracy takes its place. There’ll be some embarrassing revelations alright. Imagine a combination of the worst of banana republic politics mixed with the worst of academic feuding and ass-kissing and you’ll have yourself some material.
What it must be like to have to be a female scholar climbing that greasy pole would no doubt make even Bill Clinton do a double-take.