Pinging stuff I care about.
Talk about brushes with greatness. On the same night I find out Sara stared from a distance of mere inches at the back of John Waters’s head throughout a movie, and Nate somehow (perhaps through a typographical error gone horribly wrong?) got himself blogrolled by Fafblog, a blog-status-symbol than which no greater can be conceived. (It’s Anselmian, that linkage. Wow.)
I am now two degrees of separation both from Fafnir and from the back of John Waters’s head.
The mind reels!
Several protesters were arrested and jailed for trespassing on Fort Benning, location of America’s terrorist training ground, the School of the Americas, during the annual protests there. (They mark the anniversary of the rape and murder of American missionaries by United States-sponsored Salvadoran death squads.)
Ah, those were the Reagan years. Sponsoring death squads who rape and murder American churchwomen.
Old news? No, all the cool conservatives are advocating the “Salvadoran Option” for Iraq. It worked so well in Central America! Why not? We put the guy in charge of the original death squads plans, John Negroponte, in charge in Iraq.
Good thing this is all in the news. Oh, wait, it’s not in the news? Huh. I thought we had a liberal media…
Via Colin from ISCABBS, friend of protestor Dan Schwankl, who will be spending the next 90 days in Federal prison.
From the SOAW web page:
The US Army School of Americas (SOA), based in Fort Benning, Georgia, trains Latin American soldiers in combat, counter-insurgency, and counter-narcotics. SOA graduates are responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America. In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Among the SOA’s nearly 60,000 graduates are notorious dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-level SOA graduates have participated in human rights abuses that include the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians…
In an attempt to deflect public criticism and disassociate the school from its dubious reputation, the SOA was renamed to “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC)” in 2001.
What You’ll Wish You’d Known when you were in High School, by Paul Graham. I am bookmarking this here in my blog to expand on later. I don’t have time to read it this moment. It’s via slashdot and all that.
It interests me because while I am not a dot-com millionaire, I am finding out a lot of things I wish I’d known a long time ago, and I was thinking about writing just such a piece. I wonder how much mine would be different from Paul’s. Quite a bit, I suspect, from previous Graham stuff.
From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth . . . So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
George W. Bush
Second Inaugural Speech
January 20, 2005
Officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and other nonmilitary personnel fall outside the bounds of a 2002 directive issued by President George W. Bush that pledged the humane treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, said in a document.
In written responses to questions posed by senators as part of their consideration of his nomination to be attorney general, Gonzales also said a separate congressional ban on cruel, unusual and inhumane treatment had “a limited reach” and did not aply in all cases to “aliens overseas.”
mes
Gonzales excludes CIA from rules on prisoners
January 20, 2005
thanks to billmon with a hat tip to PuddingTime
Just a note to the world — though I am currently doing contract work programming Perl to feed the ol’ family, I don’t have any permanent employment; haven’t for a little over a year (though the contract work has been steady). So if you know of work in the West Michigan area, or long distance, which would be suitable for a strange hippie-like character, with quirky interests and strong opinions, who’s read Homer and Vergil in the original languages and has published illustrations of elves, trolls, and strange mushroom people, who’s very good at programming and teaching, and who is friendly, easygoing, and easy to get along with but not always so good at fitting in and being normal… Drop me a line.
There’s got to be something out there, but it sure ain’t in the want ads.