embryonic : crankygirls.com, unfinishedprojects.net
abandoned : everything else



purloinedpotty@yahoo.com










from Phil Agre:

Let me repeat my cheap pen deal: if you send me a check for US$20 (or the equivalent in another currency) made out to Amnesty International then I will send you an interesting cheap pen. Here is my address: Dept of Information Studies; UCLA; Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520; USA.

You may have heard about the arms race that's been going on between the doctors who have made a specialty of diagnosing the signs of torture and the torturers who have made a speciality of torturing people in ways that the doctors can't diagnose. I want the doctors to win, but that'll be tough. The big fashion in torture is to devise situations in which the victims inflict pain on themselves. These techniques have spread around the world. You can confine the victim in a small box for a few days so that the pain is inflicted through muscle cramps, or you can shut the victim in an outhouse or in a box with a decaying corpse so that the pain is inflicted through nonstop retching. Another approach is to put the victim in a room that has nothing but a small platform and six inches of cold water; the pain is inflicted by sleep deprivation and the endless changing of posture to try to avoid having all of one's body heat sucked out. The great virtue of these techniques is that they don't leave marks. If you tie someone's wrists behind their back and then hang them up that way, you'll cause plenty of pain, but you'll also yank the nerves hard enough that the doctors have something to testify to in court. Electricity burns the tissues. And so on. But there are gray areas. For example, the doctors are trying to figure out why victims from some of the more advanced countries appear to have deep brain damage that is not consistent with anything so crude as blows to the head.