Alderpoint Road fire

I just got back from a property inspection near Harris.  On my way back I witnessed a fire down the hill from the Harris Junction.  The fire was difficult to get to and despite the plane and helicopter dumps it reached pretty close to the Harris road by the time I left.  It’s hot and windy and I really hope it hasn’t jumped the road by now.

My client took photos and I may have some to post later on.

Really weird

The Duvall sex bragging story just won’t quit.  Although the television video chose to blur out the gentleman Duvall was bragging to, we have since learned that it was fellow Republican Jeff Miller, representing an Orange County district near Duvall’s.  Yesterday Miller was booted from the Ethics Committee investigating whether Duvall sold votes for sex.  Not just excluded from the investigation, but taken off the committee entirely.

Now various media are putting some fascinating facts together, which so far reveal smoke but not quite fire.  Did Miller set Duvall up?  If so, why?

Addendum: Only slightly off topic maybe, as it’s in the “really weird” department, Newt Gingrich’s nonprofit offers an Entrepeur of the Year award.  The winner this year is a CEO in the porn industry.

Remembering the other 911

A fairly brutal moment in history.  Allende’s Popular Unity Party having won three elections in a row (two presidential and one parliamentary) and fended off one coup attempt had faced an economy in free-fall largely due to a trucker’s strike which paralyzed the country – possibly the only corporate financed labor strike in history.

Not that the Popular Unity government was angelic or perfect.  There were some pretty doctrinaire elements in the party which did engage in some undemocratic and legally questionable policies with regard to dissenting press, though nothing that warranted a military coup – as well as some radical policies arguably justified by the circumstances and a political mandate.  When companies had shut down factories in protest of land reform and other socialist policies, Allende’s government seized them and turned them over to worker’s councils, citing laws passed under the quasi-socialist government of Marmaduke Grove during the 1920s.  This freaked some very powerful people, domestic and American, out.

The numbers of dead are disputed, estimates ranging from 3000 to 20,000, though it’s hard to know because many of those reported as “disappeared” were in hiding or even managed to leave the country and probably weren’t going to advertise the fact.  But it was brutal, as was the repressive aftermath in which many captured by the military were tortured and beaten, and soldiers ruled the streets of Chile like a high powered street gang for years while Milton Friedman’s acolytes came to Chile and ruined the economy for a decade.

There are extensive accounts of the US involvement, as well as financial commitment from metal companies like Alcoa (Chile produces one third of the world’s copper, essential for electronics) and others like ITT.  Later when escaped P.U. Minister of Foreign Affairs Orlando Letelier was assassinated by bombing in Washington DC mere blocks from the White House, the apathy from US officials was astounding, though several people including one former CIA agent were arrested and prosecuted.  There are plenty of accounts of our own shameful involvement, and a rather unapologetic Henry Kissinger, who when asked about the wisdom of overthrowing a properly elected government responded:  “I don’t see why we should have to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Salvador Allende died after a battle culminating in the surrender  of the Santiago Police to the army.  The Pinochet regime claimed he committed suicide, which is in dispute.  An essay entitled “The Death of Salvador Allende” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which is in an anthology entitled “Introduction to the Sociology of Developing Societies,” edited by Hamza Alavi and Teador Shanin, Monthly Review Press, 1982, contains the following account.