Tasty Tuna

Force some unexplained and mysterious reason I feel compelled to share with you my love for tuna, lime, and Mayo, spread over toasted bread. (Sorry, I know there's a couple of you out there who dislike, rather, abhor tuna. Some days I wonder how my tuna-hating friends are doing...It has been a while since I last heard from them. I hope all is well).
It's a great meal, and the best part is that you can mix it in the can and when you're done there are no dishes to wash. Now, why am I saying all this? I already forgot where I was going. It has been a long weekend, I have a million things due this week.
Would anyone be so kind as to post a comment please? (family doesn't count) So that I know you're reading the blog and I'm not going crazy here with an imaginary audience? DAMMIT!

Another Name to the List

Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo
Bagram

Let's add Bagram to the list of places that will be infamously remembered by the world. After the torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and even the shameless acknowledgement by the head of the US Central Command that hunger-striker detainees in Guantanamo Bay were being "indulged to the point that [when they were being force-fed] they had been allowed to choose the color of their feeding tubes" Right, I can picture the scene:

the government has now decided to keep abuses away from home. The solution? Forget Guantanamo, keep them somewhere else where no one can see them or hear about them, it seems like Cuba was still too close, so Bagram prison in Afghanistan seemed like a perfect place.
As one of the officials pointed out in the article I link to above: "Out of Sight, Out of Mind".
Shame.

Great Event

I'm sorry it has been so long since my last update. School is pretty crazy these days. The Discussion Panel I planned was a great success and I'm very happy about it. We packed 96 people in a room with capacity for 40! And that was as far as I could count heads, because there were many waiting outside and trying to hear what was being said. Read the ARTICLE in my school's newspaper.

This weekend I have to revise the paper I'm submitting for a conference in New Mexico, and it's going to be published, so I have to send something decent. I am in the middle of a major revision and trying to meet monday's deadline, so you probably won't hear from me until later next week.

What are they complaining about?

The Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post complaining about this cartoon. They said it was "beyond tasteless", but totally missed the point. I see a Secretary of Defense diagnosing a crippled military as "battle hardened" and offering as treatment to be "stretched thin", with a torture punch-line that is pretty funny. The JCS have it in their faces and can't get it, not even from a cartoon. The artist was in fact supporting the military and criticising Rummy for his policies.
Well, here we go again with the freedom of the press argument.

Dubya's Arch

I am supposed to be studying, but a newspaper headline caught my eye this morning and made me burst out laughing. The Washington Post lists a Religion section in their paper, and today's single headline for that section was "GAY BISHOP IN ALCOHOL REHAB." I didn't even bother reading the column, I think the headline embodies the conflict of values and total corruption of religious values in this country. I think the only way it could get worse is if the headline read "Overdosed Gay Bishop in Alcohol Rehab Shoots Neighbor at Casino". Do you think that's a stretch? Would you have conceived today's headline 15 years ago? The funny thing is, it made me laugh. The religious establishment is -pardon me- so fucked up, that it's almost not even worth the effort to try to save it. Maybe we should consider building another Arch, and have Dubya and Rummy nuke the Iranians. Perhaps then they could rebuild the country the way they like it.

Beyond Cartoons and Danish Flags

I have decided to put together a discussion panel on the issue of the Danish cartoons, I talked to some people at the graduate school and it looks like it will be a reality. We're expecting a crowd of around 100 students. It will include the participation of Dr. Larry Hufford (International Relations, St. Mary's University); Dr. Mansour El-Kikhia (Political Science, University of Texas at San Antonio); and Dr. Sussan Siavoshi, (International Relations, Trinity University). It will be held next Wednesday, February 22nd at 1:00 p.m. Location TBA.

Force Feeding

This is not the country I know. Reading this made me sick. I don't know what to say.

I have Skype

I may be a little behind, but I finally got a Skype account. A few minutes ago I called my grandparents in Colombia and it worked just fine, which to be honest, was more than I expected. So if anyone out there has one, you can click on the green link just below my profile to add my name to your list.

In Our Own Terms

Much has been said and written in the past few days regarding the infamous cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. For those who continue to side with the "freedom of the press" argument, and who still don't grasp what the big deal is all about, I would like to present the same situation in our own terms: Imagine for a moment a cartoon of Jesus asking a woman at a bar: "your place or mine?", or one of the Virgin Mary sunbathing at a nudist beach. Would they be legal? Sure. Would they be tasteless? No doubt about it.

I can't imagine what would happen in Israel if a Palestinian newspaper published a cartoon of Hitler lighting Hanukkah candles and having dinner with a Jewish family, and a week later four or five Middle Eastern countries reprinted the images to show solidarity with their fellow Palestinian journalists.

The relevance of these hypothetical situations is a matter of perception, yet it doesn't take much to realize where the line is and when it is being crossed. The press is free to publish what it wishes, but not to slap 1.7 billion Muslims in the face and then hide behind the "no censorship" banner. Freedom of the press is much too important to compromise it in such a careless manner. It is in fact an invaluable tool to promote Western ideas in non-western countries, and all this incident has done is to close even more doors for those struggling for free press inside authoritarian and radical regimes.