The Powertool Shed

After seizing power in a bloody CIA-backed coup, General Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile with a rod of iron for two decades, during which human rights violations became the norm of Chilean life.

Hailing from an upper-middle class background, Pinochet entered the military academy in Santiago at the age of 18, graduating three years later as a second lieutenant. By 1968 he had risen to the rank of brigadier general.

In 1970, Salvador Allende, a Marxist, became president of Chile with the backing of the Christian Democrats, and began restructuring Chilean society along socialist lines. In the process he expropriated the US-owned copper-mining companies, alienating the US government and foreign investors. He further annoyed Washington by establishing relations with Cuba and Communist China, which the United States did not recognise at that time. As a result, America imposed tough economic sanctions and the CIA spent millions of dollars destabilising the Allende regime, much of it going into Pinochet’s pockets.

By 1972, the Chilean economy had collapsed. With no foreign investment, production had come to a standstill. There were widespread strikes, inflation, food shortages and civil unrest. With the backing of armed forces, Pinochet staged a military coup on 11 September 1973. It was bloody even by Latin American standards. The navy seized the key port of Valparaiso, while the army surrounded the presidential palace in Santiago. Allende refused to step down. When the palace was overrun a few hours later, he was found dead. It appears that he shot himself rather than face inevitable torture and execution.

A junta took over and declared marital law. Those who violated the curfew were shot on sight. Pinochet was named president two days later. He broke off relations with Cuba - Nixon had staged his famous rapprochement with China by then - and moved against Allende’s supporters. Some 14 000 would be tried and executed or expelled from the country, while Pinochet claimed he was only trying to ‘restore institutional normality’ of Chile.

In June 1974 Pinochet assumed sole power, with the rest of the junta relegated to an advisory role. Under Pinochet’s tyrannical rule, it is estimated that 20 000 people were killed and torture was widespread.
While Pinochet continued to maintain tight control over the political opposition, he was rejected by a plebiscite in 1988. He eventually stepped down in 1990 after immunity from prosecution in Chile. He stayed on as army chief of staff. However, during a shopping trip to London in October 1998, he was arrested on a Spanish warrant charging him with murder. He was later accused of torture and human rights violations. For 16 months, he fought his extradition through the British courts, and then in January 2000, Home Secretary Jack Straw decided that he was too ill to stand trial and sent him back to Chile.

More info about Augusto Pinochet

Written by Vassil Dimitroff

If indeed, the differentiations between the higher groupings termed Classes and Sub-kingdoms might be accounted for in the same way is a much more difficult question. The differences that distinguish the mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes from one another, although large, yet appear to be of the comparable nature as those which separate a mouse from an elephant or a finch from a grouse. But the vertebrate animals and the insects are so largely distinct in their structure and in the very plan of their bodily structure, that protesters may not unreasonably doubt whether they can all have been descended from a common ancestor by way of the same natural laws that explain the specialization of the diverse species of birds or of reptiles.

Antecedent to Darwin, the large majority of naturalists held firmly to the belief that species were ontological, and had not been derived from other species by any law accessible to us. There was, then, no dubiousness relating to the origin of families, orders, and classes, because the “origin of species” was considered to be an unsolvable problem. Today all changed. The entire scientific and literary world admits, as a matter of commonplace knowledge, the origin of species from other allied species by the ordinary process of natural birth.

What we may expect a true theory will endow us to grasp and implement in some detail those changes in the form, structure, and relations of animals and plants which are modified in short periods of geologic time and that are now going on around us. We may expect this theory to explain with satisfaction most of the lesser and superficial differences which identify one species from another. And, finally, we may ask that it explain many troubles and to harmonize many incongruities in the excessively complex phylogenetic relations and relations of living things. All this the Darwinian Theory undoubtedly does. It exhibits how, by means of some of the most universal and ever-acting laws in nature, new species are needfully produced, while the old species become extinct. Evolution theory also enables us to understand how the uninterrupted process of these laws during the long periods is calculated to bring about those greater differences portrayed by the distinct genera, families, and orders into which all living things are classified by naturalists.

Fortunately the burdensomeness of this subject has been lightened with a good dose of evolution humor, popping up on web sites and office doors. See some of this evolution humor here.

The Pentagon was completed in 16 months. It was built on a swamp and on the area of the old Washington airport. Trucks hauled some 5.5 million cubic yards (4.2 million cubic meters) of junk and soil and dumped it in the marshes. The building’s foundation rests on 41,492 concrete piles.

The purchase of land cost $2.25 million (in 1943 dollars). The building itself cost c. $50 million, or $83 million with outside facilities. The Pentagon stands on 29 acres (=c. 120,000 sq.m.).

The center court alone occupies 5 acres (c. 20,000 sq.m.). The heating and refrigeration plant and the sewage structure sprawl on 1 acre each (c. 4,000 sq.m.). Fifty miles (=80 kilometers) of access highways were especially constructed, replete with 21 overpasses and bridges. The parking space is spread over 67 acres (c. 270,000 sq.m.) and can accommodate up to 8,800 vehicles.

Each wall of the Pentagon is more than 920 feet long (=300 meters). It is almost 78 feet high (or a little short of 25 meters). It should have been higher but the planners wanted to preserve the view of the neighboring Arlington National Cemetery. There are almost 18 miles (c. 29 kilometers) of corridors in the building, 131 stairways, 19 escalators, 13 elevators, 672 fire hose cabinets, 284 rest rooms (toilettes), 691 drinking fountains, 4200 electric clocks with sockets for another 2800, 16,250 light fixtures (250 bulbs are replaced daily), 7,754 windows, and 7 acres of glass - or c. 29,000 sq.m.

More than 23,000 people work in the Pentagon. It contains a heliport, huge restaurant and shopping mall, and bus and taxi terminals. The Pentagon has its own metro (subway) station.

This masterpiece of engineering was designed by George Edwin Bergstrom. Despite its gargantuan size, the distance between every two points in the complex never requires more than a 7 minutes walk. Plans to convert the Pentagon to a hospital after the second world war were abandoned with the outbreak of the Cold War.

The September 11 attack demolished 400,000 sq. feet of space and damaged another 1.6 million. To recover them would cost $700 million. About 1000 tons of limestone in 3700 separate pieces were quarried in Indiana to overhaul the facade. More than a 1000 laborers worked in three shifts for almost nine months until the facade was remade. Restoration will be completed in Spring 2003.

The State Department says that “a condolence book, a Presidential photo, and handmade sympathy cards written by children were included in a bronze box that was sealed into the limestone facade of the newly rebuilt section of the Pentagon. The capsule is not intended to be opened.”

Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

Visit Sam’s Web site at samvak.tripod.com