New speed cameras at Norpoint Way and Marine View Drive in Northeast Tacoma photographed almost 400,000 drivers exceeding the corridor’s 40 mph speed limit between Sept. 14 and Oct. 11, according to city data…In total, approximately 515,000 vehicles drove through the corridor in the same period, meaning that roughly 77% were speeding. On average, the cameras photographed slightly more than 14,000 speeders daily.
That’s really just a tremendous amount of speeding. In fact, it’s so much speeding that the company in charge of sending out tickets was overwhelmed. As a result, the city has decided to send just 100 tickets a day, meaning speeders have a 0.71% chance of facing a penalty.
Crazy that the city or their contractor isn't paying the cost for poor implementation. Instead the public gets to live with the resulting safety hazard. Sorry, pedestrians!
This is a mass grave of the victims of the Chilean dictatorship.
Whew…this is heavy stuff.
I have profiled many people in Santiago General Cemetery over the last couple of months, including Salvador Allende. Most of them are in the front of the cemetery, near the main gates. But that cemetery holds a lot of people and most of them are not rich and powerful folks. If you walk past the first sections, you have huge areas of poor people’s graves that look basically like the image above. If you go on and on and on and on, you eventually reach the back of the cemetery, where this mass grave is.
Now, in 1973, Augusto Pinochet and the Chilean fascists launched a coup against the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende. Unable to defeat him democratically, the Chilean Navy and its allies in the business community decided to do so violently. This was done with the full support of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and other “realists” in the foreign policy community, for whom thousands of dead and tortured people was just an accounting figure.
So the Chilean military and its secret thug agency the DINA spend the next few years engaging in mass torture and death in prison camps. This mostly subsided by the late 70s, once everyone the dictatorship thought needed killing was dead and those who remained were cowered to its power. But as it engaged in its mass murders, it needed somewhere to throw the bodies. The bodies were always inconvenient to these dictatorships. The Argentines tried to solve the problem by just dropping people from airplanes while still alive, but occasionally some part of someone would roll back to shore. The Chileans tried versions of this too, tying weights around the dead and throwing them in oceans, but faced the same problem. In the northern camps, most of the dead were buried in the vastness of the Atacama. These mostly consisted of workers, as the base of Allende’s socialism were in the copper and other mines of the region, workers who had been killed by the state for decades when they engaged in labor activism.
Santiago provided a bigger challenge in dealing with all the dead leftists. In many cases, the dictatorship didn’t go very far with the prisoners. There was a major torture chamber right in downtown Santiago that was unfortunately closed for restorative architectural work when I was there. And yes, you can visit many of these places, as the Chileans have done a good job of official remembrance of the horrors of their recent past, most notable because a lot of the people involved are still alive. There was another major torture and murder site just north of the city, right up against the mountains, in a large hacienda the state bought. That you can visit and I did and while there’s very little left of the site in terms of original buildings, it’s also a tremendously powerful place to be immersed into what had happened there, with tons of memorialization going on inside, especially by the Communist Party, who has placed a lot of material up to remember its martyrs.
In any case, when you have these sites of mass death in and around the city, you have to do something with the bodies. This leads us back to Patio 29 of the Santiago General Cemetery. It’s unclear to me whether anyone knew what was up at the time. I don’t think so. It was easy enough to hide this. You just have a regular cemetery, you contract out with supportive undertakers, and you put the bodies in these graves. They didn’t just open a trench and they didn’t make a big deal of it. So that’s how it went down.
Now, this part of the cemetery did in fact have a use in the past–pauper’s graves. So no one paid attention to what was going on back here. In the years after September 11, 1973, mostly by 1977, the dictatorship dumped many victims of its crimes against humanity–done explicitly with American approval let us remember again–in Patio 29.
One of the perhaps less expected things about the Chilean dictatorship is that the Catholic Church in Chile did not approve. It didn’t outright oppose Pinochet, but it most certainly did not help it. In fact, it established the Vicariate of Solidarity in 1976, an agency within the church to help families of the disappeared. From the moment of the coup, quite a few high-ranking members of the church were trying to help dictatorship victims with legal and financial assistance. In 1979, the Vicariate of Solidarity heard about the mass graves at Patio 29, as it was helping people in one area try to find their loved ones and rumors came about.
This did put pressure on the dictatorship. Families wanted the remains of their loved ones. Pinochet and his evil fascist henchmen were annoyed. In 1981, it banned the transfer of any remains from Patio 29, all but admitting what it had done there. But in 1983, investigations began to identify the remains. 124 people were found, which leaves a lot unfound and I don’t really have the entire story here, but this provides you something of a basic overview of the issue and this place. This is the largest mass grave of Pinochet victims.
After Pinochet was forced from power in 1990, the move to identify the victims and remember this site grew. In 1991, the search for the murdered leftist Bautista von Schouwen led to a lot of the exhumations. When this happened, Pinochet thought it was hilarious. What it revealed was the state of the victims upon death–broken bones, missing limbs, hands tied with wire. Some were as young as 13. They were often stacked up. Pinochet “joked” “What great economizing!” What a complete fucking piece of shit. Who was of course still best buds with Henry Kissinger. That joke really hurt the Pinochet cause. This new information turned many people on the fence against Pinochet and demands for real punishment for the regime’s soldiers began. Also, fuck you Kissinger you evil bastard. At least Hillary and Bill were sad upon their friend’s death.
In 2006, the government declared Patio 29 a national monument. DNA has later shown that the early identification of remains were all messed up. The process continues to get it right.
The victims of the Pinochet murders are buried in Santiago General Cemetery, Santiago, Chile. Once again, thanks to the United States for its excellent Cold War foreign policy decisions.
To say the least, visiting this site is a powerful and infuriating experience, one that made me very, very sad.
If you would like this site to visit other victims of American Cold War foreign policy decisions, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Various mass graves in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Congo, Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Iran, Greece, Turkey, and 50 or 60 other countries are out there. At least those people didn’t get the kind of freedoms that Americans have here at home. Gotta stop that communist freedom of the press and democratic elections and all. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
After years in the making (or more accurately, years in the wanting), I finally figured out how I wanted to do search for KDO posts. I’ve been tinkering with this specific implementation since the beginning of the summer and it finally all came together. If you’re a member, please help me to kick the tires on this for a few days. (That link, as well as the search links below, will 404 for non-members for now.)
Hopefully it’s pretty close and then I can open it up to everyone. I’ve been using it for the past week or two and it’s been really helpful so far, especially in surfacing older posts about topics I’m currently writing about or generally interested in. The tag pages are good for that too, but search can help hone in on specifics — like posts I’ve made about fascism or posts that link to McSweeney’s. Search also pulls in results from Quick Links, which aren’t included on tag pages. The rankings still need some work here and there (it’s not magic), but your searches will help calibrate things.
For now, the search only looks at posts from 2014 to the present. You can search by keyword, describe what you remember (“the guy who walks in Japan”), or paste a link to find posts that link to it. Search is fuzzy-ish but it’s not an AI bot or anything like that so if you ramble on with a 25-word query, it’s probably not going to work that well. You can sort by best match or newest, search all posts or just Quick Links or main posts, and filter by time (past month, past 3 months, etc.)
I’ll share more about how search works in a subsequent post. For now, kick the tires and let me know what you think in the comments or via email. As always, bug reports, comments, and suggestions are welcome.
Game 6 of the WNBA Finals took place yesterday, but it would have been extremely easy for you to miss, because the Golden State Valkyries and Atlanta Dream tipped off in Georgia at a ridiculous 12:30 PM Eastern. For Valkyries fans back in California, that was 9:30 in the goddamned morning Pacific. That’s a travesty, and it didn’t have to be that way. Thankfully for those who wanted to watch, Flavor Flav declared it a paid holiday, and Hillary Clinton endorsed the message.
Ultimately, there was no 3 PM title celebration, because the Dream got an early afternoon W to even the series at 3 games a piece. Game 7 will now take place back in San Francisco on Halloween night, at 8 PM Eastern/5 PM Pacific, a far more fitting time slot for a championship-clinching game.
Abstract: With entrepreneurial fraud cases on the rise, we investigate how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception, employing deceptive means to defraud audiences. Analyzing court data from Silicon Valley ventures and their founders prosecuted for fraud between 2000 and 2023, our findings reveal that entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception through a process of façading: Entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances (façades) that externally project high-growth performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual underperformance. We identify three forms of façading—surface, reinforced, and deep façading—that are contingent on the severity of the gap that entrepreneurs face between audiences’ performance expectations and ventures’ performance reality. Our theoretical framework captures how entrepreneurs facing minor, wide, and extreme expectation-reality gaps engage in evermore sophisticated efforts to detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. Practically, we propose several approaches to deter and detect criminal deception, including the extension of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission surveillance and whistleblower program, investor due diligence reform, and dedicated entrepreneurship education interventions that clearly demarcate when entrepreneurs transgress into criminal deception. We make contributions to literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship. ...
Following a prompt from Joanna at Cup of Jo… The local deli or sandwich shop names a sandwich after you. What would be on it? Perhaps another way of asking the question: what’s your favorite sandwich that’s a little bit unusual?
I love a classic BLT, banh mi, or jambon beurre, but a sandwich that is fairly unique to me is tuna salad (made with pickles, pickle juice, and scallions), havarti, lettuce, and tomatoes on good white bread or a kaiser roll. I think that would be The Kottke at the local deli. Either that or something chopped?
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