I was just thirty-four years old and I was still wandering in a haze

There is nothing worse than writers block when I am trying to put together the introduction to a chapter.

So, how's that WOWIO thing working for you people these days anyway?

http://comicsworthreading.com/2009/02/01/remember-wowio/

For those of you out there who are fans, at 8PM EST, The Prisoner will be showed on IFC (The Independent Film Channel)

...and today I thought I would revisit it.

The U.S. overthrow of Chilean democracy 25 years ago
by Saul Landau

On Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military overthrew the elected government of Dr. Salvador Allende and established a dictatorship that ruled until 1990. The United States played a prominent role in these events.

The CIA began to instigate violence in Chile following the September 1970 election of Allende, who headed a multi-party socialist coalition. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people," National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger said at the time. In testimony before a Senate investigating committee in 1975, CIA Director Richard Helms told of how President Nixon gave him "the marshall's baton" to conduct covert activities designed to stop Allende from being inaugurated in November 1970.

Helms' covert staff tried to bribe Chile's Congress and its military to deny Allende the presidency. Failing on that front, the Agency paid an extreme right-wing group to assassinate Gen. Rene Schneider, Chile's chief of staff. When even the brutal murder of Schneider didn't succeeded in blocking Allende's inauguration, the CIA began to destabilize his government.

For three years, CIA officials helped instigate strikes in strategic sectors of the economy, promoted violence and initiated smear campaigns against Allende in the media. Washington applied a credit squeeze to make Chile's economy squirm.

This destabilization campaign had its desired effect. Social conflict grew to the point where the military commanders, with U.S. encouragement, decided to stage a coup. As tanks and aircraft bombarded the presidential palace on Sept. 11, 1973, U.S. Navy vessels appeared off of Chile's coast. U.S. intelligence vessels monitored activity at Chile's military bases in order to notify the coup makers, should a regiment loyal to the Allende government decide to fight.

Allende, a medical doctor who served 25 years as a senator before winning the presidency, died in the assault, alongside dozens of his loyal supporters. Cabinet ministers and other staff were arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. No charges were brought against them.

Chile's institutions were destroyed, including the Congress, the press and trade unions. Troops burned books deemed subversive. The junta began a systematic terror campaign, arresting, torturing and murdering thousands of "suspected subversives." A Chilean government agency estimates that the reign of terror between 1973 and 1990 resulted in the deaths of some 2,300 Chileans.

Pro-Allende Chileans took refuge abroad, but even there, the long arm of Pinochet's secret police managed to reach them. Among the victims were Gen. Carlos Prats, Chile's former chief of staff, and his wife, who in 1974 were blown nine stories high in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian capital.

In September 1976, Pinochet's hit squad struck in Washington, D.C. Michael Townley, a U.S. national and an electronics and bomb expert employed by Chile's secret police, recruited five anti-Castro Cubans to help him carry out the assassination. The assassins placed a bomb under the car of Orlando Letelier, Allende's former defense minister. As Letelier's car entered Washington's Sheridan Circle, half a mile from the White House, the bomb was detonated, killing Letelier. The blast also killed Ronni Moffitt, a passenger in the front seat. Both victims worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

The FBI discovered that the Chilean dictatorship had organized a six-country alliance of secret police agencies, which provided surveillance on each other's dissidents and helped assassinate the most troubling exiled opponents. Bureau agents also learned that the CIA knew considerable detail about this "Condor Operation." The CIA even provided the secret police chiefs with a special computer to better conduct their relationship.

In the late 1980s, the United States, embarrassed over Pinochet's "excesses," pushed for a referendum to end military rule. Pinochet was defeated, but he forced the civilian government to accept him as head of the army until he retired in March of this year. He then became senator for life, a post he had arranged for himself.

Fortunately, Chile has now returned to democratic procedures. But 17 years of military rule have taken an immeasurable toll on its people.

We should ask ourselves how we would feel if another government decided that our voters had exercised poor judgment and sent a team of saboteurs to undo the results of the election by force. This is what we did to Chile. We altered her destiny.

Saul Landau is the Hugh O. La Bounty Chair of Interdisciplinary Applied Knowledge at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the co-author of "Assassination on Embassy Row" (Pantheon, 1980), the story of the Letelier-Moffitt killings.

---

"What 9/11/01 gave the United States is a new rationale for overthrowing governments, not the moral authority to do so. In Chile, Henry Kissinger maintains, our government was preventing the spread of communism and promoting democracy. In Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush claims, we are combating terrorism and promoting democracy. That is the way they would have us see it. It is what former Senator J. William Fulbright called the "tendency to equate power with virtue" or, in short, "the arrogance of power." Most realize, however, that our policymakers' motives are not always as pure they proclaim.


Why do people object to the United States assuming the role of world policeman in the wake of 9/11/01?" "Because they recall 9/11/73," is one answer. "Why do they question our government's motives in Iraq?" "Because they know that the Bush administration has close ties with business firms hoping to profit one way or another from Iraq's oil, because they remember we helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile, and because they recall Allende's caveat about capitalists," the cognoscenti respond. "But Iraq is not about oil," our policymakers say. "Sure, and Chile was not about copper," the skeptics retort. "Still we got rid of Saddam Hussein," the Bush administration boasts. "Yes, and in the process marginalized the United Nations, undermined respect for international law, killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and neither advanced the cause of democracy nor diminished the threat of terrorism," diplomats and scholars respond. "What can we learn from 9/11?" people ask. "Which 9/11?" is the appropriate answer."
---Paul Cantor

---

As the United State seeks to impose its sense of good citizenship upon the world, it is now more important than ever that the US is the best possible global citizen it can be. It cannot simply say: "While we are for the war on terrorism, we do not support the war on AIDS, pollution, human rights abuse, child slavery, and corporate abuse."

Now, more than ever, is the time to throw hypocrisy aside.

Our very lives depend on it.

http://darkpassagetravelogue.blogspot.com/

It's been a quiet last few days; mainly been dealing with software crashes over here.  I did see a documentary on the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival that I enjoyed a lot.  It was worth it just to see Otis Redding :)
It's been another long weekend for me, and I am looking forward to getting back to work :)

I never thought I would be so bored not working.

Finally, LJ actually responded for once.
Right now I'm in the middle of a 4 day weekend, and I am crashed out doing comics right now.  I'm a week ahead, and going for two right now.  Tropic Thunder is currently going on the tube, and I am trying to absorb it right now.  It's better than I thought it was, though I am not quite believing what I am seeing.  Flabbergasted is a good word to use to describe my reaction right now.

Remember the video for The Talking Heads "Burning Down the House" and at the end, David Byrnes face is projected semi-transparent on the highway with the white road lines running through it?  If you look closely, all of those white lines are going right up his nose.

That always seemed to sum up a lot of the eighties for me.

I knocked out three more cards in the Tarot series tonight.....

The King of Cups
The King of Pentacles
The King of Swords

I am so tired right now, my eyes feel like they are going to cross.  It's bedtime for me.  Enjoy the art.

There’s been some conversation going on in the comments section of one of the previous comics that’s talked about the mesh of different elements from different time periods that have made appearances in the comic so far, and it got me thinking about things.  So tonight, I’m gonna ramble for a while, and hopefully, you’ll enjoy the ride

One of the things that made the most impression on me as a kid was a movie called “Streets of Fire.”  It was criminally ignored back during it’s release in 1984, but to a 10 year old kid, it planted the seeds for a lot of things.  Streets of Fire was a stylistic mix of 50’s cars, and 60’s Motown, and 50’s style with present day elements buried in the background.  And it has this architecture style that was 40’s/50’s with a worn look to it that suggested to me that the movie was set farther in the future (early 21st century, maybe).  It was rainy streets, and neon reflecting in puddles, and mist and steam at night.  And it had this dystopian air to everything that called to mind a lot of the scifi that I was coming to love as well.

It was advertised as a rock and roll fable at the time of it’s release, and to this day there’s hasn’t been anything like it since.

“Another place, another time.”

One of the things that I loved about was the mixture of styles.  I loved the fact that you didn’t quite know what world it was set in.  You didn’t know where it really was from.  It was the world next door, maybe.  A world where the A-Bomb hadn’t been invented, and WW2 had finally ended a couple of decades after it did here.   The ambiguity was what appealed to me the most, though.  Because when you think about it, it could be set any where, or any when you wanted it to be.

Back when a 10 year old kid saw this in the Scottsdale Mall movie theater in South Bend, Indiana (a theater, and a mall that doesn’t even exist anymore) it blew his tiny little mind   The idea of it, this mixture of different elements has been what drove Requiem from almost the beginning.  It’s as much about the uncertainty of what world you’re really on as much as it is about the answers to the mysteries.   It’s fabulation, or at least what a ten year old kid thought of fabulation as.

One of our characters; Jonathan Delrain said something once comic-wise that I’ve said many times over the years “Nothing without purpose”.  There’s a reason for everything.  From the dream symbolism floating through the current section of the comic, to the crystalline reflection that permeates many of the things you see here, even to the use of dark glasses among the people who have been changed by the Sentience Virus (and it’s not just to hide the fact that their iris’s have shifted color)  But while there is a reason for everything, the feel comes from the eyes of a ten year old child.  A ten year old child who realized that what he wanted to do more than anything else in his life was to build worlds.

Someone said that my computer must be powered on souls instead of electricity. 

I just love that ;)

I haven't died.  I've just been quiet.  For the most part, nothing really has been going on, with the exception of a road trip withy friends to the VNV Nation concert in Chicago this last Friday night.

Currently in the downside of a four day weekend, and looking forward to going back to work.

City Engine

It's all rules based 3d modeling that allows you to design complete 3d cities.  They can be exported into a variety of places, and the capabilities of it just blow me away.

God, I wish it didn't cost $4600 though.

The idea that suffering is somehow virtuous is one of the sickest ideas that I have ever heard.

I'm seriously missing Toronto right now.  I seriously need to get back there some time.

Not much to say lately for some reason.

Right now, I've been baking my brain on 3d work, and testing alternatives to Carrara for the comic.  I've been looking pretty heavily at Cinema 4d on a friends machine and I am liking what I see, but there are some issues that vex me.

The big problem with things is the 32/64 bit divide, and the fact that my current program of choice is still in 32 bit territory.  I've been sitting out upgrades for the last year and a half just because RAM limits piss me off.  At the same time, my minds eye keeps on seeing things that I just can't pull off with my current setup.

And on a personal note, one project fades away, and another one may end up becoming a reality.  The latter just depends on how sarcastic I can safely become without giving myself a stroke.

It's gonna be a long night, I just know it.  One of those nights where you have to sleep, but can't because you keep on thinking of things you don't want to be thinking of.  One of those nights where listening to music becomes a masochistic exercise.

...but if you pale him out, and add red hair, doesn't Governor Bobby Jindal look a whole hell of a lot like Alfred E Neuman?

It's a late night, and I'm crashed out listening to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?" album.  Few things are this perfect. :)