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musings of mark since 2001

Rummy and Bush are both saying that it’s not the values of America that are showing in the humiliation of prisoners in Iraq but once again both are lying. Abuse in American jails and prisons is well known and all the tactics seen in Iraq are used on prisoners at home as well.

In Texas, their prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum-security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison systems were under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that calls for alternatives to incarceration.

Still cleaning off the granite getting ready for anchor rods, lots of dirt and moss to pressure wash off and looks like 3 days will do it – as planned. Will be glad to finish that little chore, really dirty job and you’re wet all day even with raingear on. We’re back in a regular spring mode again of a little rain, then a little sun past few days and glad that the car is insured once more so I don’t have to walk in the rain, just work in it. Working on the side of a mountain though makes for some pretty nice views of the North Shore mountains when the sun comes out and you forget about the rainy parts.

Looks like I’ll be busy building a house for the next eight months! As always happens on Bowen, when you really need something it’s going to come around on Bowen time and a really nice couple that I met in the Legion are building a new house and I’m part of the crew. I know two of the other guys already and they’re good workers too so it should be a nice gig.

Today was cleaning off the rocks (a lot of the homes on Bowen are built on the side of a cliff or steep rock and this one is no exception) to get them down to bare granite as later a type of cement coating/sealer will go over the mountain underneath the house. After the left over dirt is cleaned off, we get to run bore holes in the granite that with steel rods inside them forms the anchor points for the cement foundation of the home.

Just in Bowen Time too, after paying the rent for this month I didn’t have next month yet and people that know me have seen jobs passed up by moi because they weren’t right, even if it means going homeless for a month or so. Some people may think that’s a fault of mine, but after doing it a few times a person begins to think of it as an asset to be able to go through it and it’s generally better after the experience.

Finally getting a bit of rain around here, driest April we’ve had in a long time and could sure use the fresh water. Fun morning talking about and viruses and email and cookies with the S.K.Y. (Seniors Keeping Young) group at Bowen Court this morning. I showed up at 10:30 and started talking at 11:00 with a little background about myself and 15 minutes later the questions were flying. One question led to another of course and a lot of the 20 or so people got some chuckles out of my stories and descriptions and came away feeling like they had learned something.

When the hour passed way too quickly, I had one audience member that just couldn’t wait and we went to her house and cleaned a bunch of junk out for her. While there the cover came off the puter and showed her where the RAM goes and her husband is bringing some home after work to put in themselves. Everyone that came to listen also took a business card and there’s sure to be some work that comes out of the deal.

Watched a blue jay do something interesting with a few peanuts I left out, after putting a couple in his mouth, a third was in his beak as he dropped down to ground level and buried it until later. He came back and grabbed another and off to hide that for later as well, smart bird!

How many machines do you ned to put together to make one of the most powerful computers in the world? Tristan Louis thinks he knows by looking at the SCC filing for Google and doing some napkin calculations that the largest computer in the world is now a search engine. It would be interesting to see someone put something like this together just for scientific purposes, no doubt it’s being thought about if not done somewhere.
Maybe even the NEC’s Earth Simulator which has been doing 41 teraflops in Japan is now dated with Tristan’s low estimate for 126 teraflops of power on the low end for Google’s cluster. And it’s done with Linux, of course.