Sunday, June 13, 2004

Liberty Action of the Week: Flag Day. Last year this time, I wrote in my annual "Flag Day" column (Flag Day 2003) that I had no idea that by Flag Day 2003 the American flag would not only be commercialized and debased at home, but would be seen as a symbol of tyranny and imperialism, not freedom, worldwide. Last year (and in 2002), I suggested that we celebrate Flag Day by flying one of the true flags of freedom, one of the rattlesnake flags, instead of "Old Glory" as a protest against the increasing police state. Flag Day 2004 is [Rational Review] I don't fly any flag, living as I do in an apartment building, but I have the Gadsden flag on the wall of my apartment. 11:17:50 PM    comment () From the smith2004-discuss mailing list: 06/12/2004 10:28am Top U.S. General in Iraq Approved Alleged Prisoner Abuse Tactics Washington (dpa) - Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the most senior United States military commander in Iraq, personally approved interrogation tactics at the root of prisoner abuse scandals, the Washington Post reported Saturday. Sanchez in September 2003 approved for use in Iraqi prisons a list of 32 "high-pressure" tactics originally developed by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, said the newspaper. Among the tactics on the originally-approved list were the use of military dogs to provoke fear, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, dietary manipulation, confiscation of religious artefacts and forcing prisoners to adopt "stress" positions for periods of up to 45 minutes. Citing newly-obtained documents, the Washington Post said Sanchez had passed the list of tactics as permissible, leaving it up to individual officers in charge of interrogations to decide when their use was appropriate. Some of the more extreme methods on the list were withdrawn in October 2003 following disquiet about their use among senior officers at United States Central Command in Florida, from where U.S. operations both in Iraq and Afghanistan are directed. The use of high-pressure interrogation tactics was discontinued on Sanchez' orders following the worldwide publication of photographs taken in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison depicting the apparent abuse of detainees. A number of U.S. military personnel face courts martial over alleged prisoner abuse in Iraq, among them a 27-year-old marine sergeant accused of giving electric shocks to an Iraqi prisoner at a temporary detention facility, the Washington Post said. Copyright 2004 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH 10:49:17 PM    comment () The hard drive in my TiBook has failed, after about a day of making grinding and clicking sounds when in use. Fortunately I had been backing up the important files to my desktop G4 frequently, because I was expecting it to fail soon for a different reason. The little hooks that hold the DIMMs in place in their slots are made from soft plastic in the TiBook, and (not surprisingly) the hard edges of the top DIMM wore through the plastic until the hooks were no longer able to keep it in place. I expect it's only a matter of time before the bottom DIMM suffers a similar fate. Apple claims that this is not a manufacturing defect, and therefore I would have to pay $945 to fix the problem by replacing the motherboard--that being more than I paid for the TiBook when I bought it from a co-worker. Tomorrow I'll call Apple to see how much it would cost to fix the hard drive. If it's cheap, I may send the TiBook out for repair--but since I'm still expecting it to fail, there's a good chance that it won't be worthwhile. In the meantime I'm back to my Pismo, which has its own design flaw that requires a trip to Apple for repairs at least once per year. If the Pismo ever fails I expect I'll buy an IBM ThinkPad or something similar. You can't buy a new PowerBook that will run the Mac OS, and there's no way I'm going to pay for Apple's overpriced garbage if I can only run OS X on it. I'd be tempted to switch now, but my laptop is my email machine, and I have a system for archiving email from whichever email app I'm using into a FileMake Pro database. To my knowledge there's nothing like it on Windows, due to Windows' weakness in inter-application communication. 6:34:05 PM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:01:49 PM.