Month: January 2005

Timely Protest of the School of the Americas

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.

Sanssouci

Sanssouci is a reimplementation of something like naked objects, which I always thought was way cool.

The basic idea behind Naked Objects is that you make the “objects” of your OO system into things that can be seen and manipulated directly by the user. This was one of the concepts behind the old Self project from Sun, whose GUI (“Morphic”) was appropriated for Squeak, but IMHO wasn’t as cool in Squeak because Squeak wasn’t a prototype-based system like Self, and wasn’t designed from the ground up with Morphic in mind.

Interfaces like this are cool because they allow the GUI to be a more direct path from the user to the underlying machine representation. Traditionally GUIs have put distance between user and machine, leading to the phenomenon which is the basis of Neal Stephenson’s int he beginning was the command line, where the GUI becomes a symbol of babying the user and giving him a distanced, artificial, unreal interaction with the machine, as opposed to the command line, which gives him a real, immediate connection to the machine. There’s no reason it has to be that way though, and things like Naked Objects move in the direction of making a more transparent GUI.

Sanssouci is the name of a palace built by the famous prussian king Friedrich II. (“The Great”) between 1745 and 1747 in Potsdam (near Berlin), Germany. The english translation from french “sans souci” is “no worries” or “no sorrow”. The palace was meant to be a peaceful place where the king could spend the summer season “without worries”.

We chose this name, because we as programmers don’t want to worry about writing GUI interfaces. Nobody really likes to do it and it is still difficult to maintain a good ease-of-learning and ease-of-use at the same time, while still providing maximum flexibility and functionality. Another reason for the naming: The user-interfaces generated by Sanssouci are really nice, just like the palace of the old prussian king!

Literal Killing Machines

Via Father Jake Stops the World, a Times Online article on “killer robots.”

“These robots have no fear,� John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an online military research firm in Virginia, said. “They can advance into enemy fire in a way that human soldiers will not.

“What’s more, these robots don’t need retirement benefits, they don’t have to be paid a re-enlistment bonus and they can be boxed up and warehoused between wars. They also, of course, don’t have loved ones who miss them and mourn them — and they can be produced in huge numbers.�

What is unsaid is that robots also have no conscience. A constant problem with human soldiers is that humans have a problem with killing. We have this thing called a conscience. If we have to kill it tends to mess up our minds, and we are liable to suffer for it for the rest of our lives, with PTSD and the like. It used to be that most soldiers in a given war never even shot anyone, but in and following the Korean War America found ways to condition its soldiers to make a higher percentage of them willing and able to kill, and we all know what spectacular success we’ve had in war in the latter half of the 20th century. This is the logical culmination of such policies.

Another thing that’s kinda unmentioned in this article is that presumably the people these robots are shooting at will indeed have “loved ones who mourn them and miss them.” And those loved ones are going to want revenge, and they are going to find ways to take revenge, and when they do so, they’re not going to go after the robots.

I’d be more geeked about these killer robots if they heralded an age when we’d all just build robots and let them fight it out, and didn’t get humans involved on either end. But that’s not what I’m expecting here.

Ever notice that with every development of military policy under the Bush administration, America more strongly resembles a bad guy in a Hollywood movie? The good guys never employ robot warriors. It’s always the bad guys with the soulless killing automatons. And under Gonzalez and Bush’s “pro-torture but we don’t call it torture” policies, America embodies the melodramatic Nazi bad guy who says “Ve haff vays of making you tok.”

Shouldn’t that be telling us something?

Dan Gillmor: Torture and the Blogosphere

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: Torture and the Blogosphere

It’s not as if this matter is closed. The show trials of people — who are plainly guilty — low on the command chain look as much like a coverup as an attempt to get to the truth. And the Bush administration is doing everything it can to keep its options wide open. In confirmation hearings, attorney general designate Alberto Gonzales disclaimed torture but remained infinitely vague about what kinds of interrogation are beyond the pale — and, of course, most of the spineless Democrats and who-cares Republicans refused to pin him down. This was in keeping with the administration’s ongoing strategy on this issue: Use methods that amount to torture, rationalize it with Orwellian language that calls it something else and then insist that torture is wrong.

The boldfaced bit (my boldfacing) is the best summary of the situation in a single sentence I’ve ever seen.

Pivot

Why have I never heard of Pivot before? it’s a gorgeous GPL-licensed PHP-powered blogging tool. I wouldn’t drop WordPress for it unless there was a way to convert my entries and preserve the hyperlinks — I’ve disrupted my blog universe too much in the past year. But I will definitely look at it for future blogging projects.

UPDATE: downside to Pivot: does not yet use Blogger or Atom XML-RPC api’s, so you can’t use remote blogging tools like MarsEdit or Ecto to post to it.

It has excellent “multiple blogs/multiple users” capabilities though. Neat stuff. Oh, and it has an *incredible* image upload/thumbnailing feature.