From Chile to Washington (State)

Well, my first order of business (I've been very busy preparing midterms and have been gone quite a while), is to put Sehome High School on notice. This was e-mailed to me at ethnomorph@gmail.com by Tanner Parfly. SHS, as it is called has been weak-kneed in respect to US Army Recruiters, who used underhanded tactics (ie tricking people into signing consent forms for a pullup competition to get personal information) and repeatedly closed the library to students, denying precious learning time. They've been warned. And they don't want to end up like Eritrea. Oh no, they certainly do not. Eritrea is reaching out a country that, at this very moment is conducting a sham of a convention on the "validity" of the Holocaust. Its like truthiness except much scarier. Yes, there is an orthodoxy of information on the events, and yes Israel is opressive to Palistineans, but this is just a bunch of fringe lunatics hiding behind a curtain, but that curtain is clear.
Meanwhile, in Chile we can be happy and sad for the death of Augusto Pinochet. He was never brought to face justice, always slipping away like the weasel that he is . But, he no longer crawleth the earth by night.
As we see the old vanguard of Cold War brutality (Jeane Kirpatrick (go to this link, its great)pass on the the Ethnic Threat Matrix turn from Russians and lefties to Arabs and fundamentalists, we must ever be wary of the Eagle of North America and its long talons. Extroidinary renditions in one step above disapearing people. And just as South America quietly and not-so-subtely assert independence and leftism post-righ-wing Reagan authoritites vs Soviet-esque Rebels, we must remember that when the eagle bites, the world will bite back, just look at Iraq.
Quote of the Day:
"Los Angeles Times
Simple, clear and wrong

Los Angeles Times
It's a coincidence that Jeane Kirkpatrick, the astringent U.S. envoy to the United Nations in the 1980s, and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died only a few days apart. But in death as in life, the two are associated with a political theory that defined the early days of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Unfortunately for Kirkpatrick, its author, the theory proved to be dead wrong.

The idea was that right-wing authoritarian governments were much better bets for conversion to democracy than left-wing totalitarian ones.

Chile, where the murderous Pinochet eventually relinquished much of his power after a 1988 referendum, seemed to vindicate the Kirkpatrick doctrine. But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of more democratic governments not only in the formerly captive states of Hungary and Czechoslovakia but also in Russia.

Like other reductionist theories, the Kirkpatrick doctrine ran up against ... H.L. Mencken's observation that "for every problem, there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong."
--LA Times Editorial, unattributed
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/4394859.html