Day 343: A Time for Pho

 

December 9th, 2011Throughout the course of time itself, many things have been consumed by man. Today, I added to this epic history by consuming various foods of my own. In the morning I said my goodbyes to Amul as he departed away to Imperial Beach. I would meet up with Michelle in the afternoon to get lunch at Tapioca Express and go back to my place to finish watching the second half of Home Alone 2 (the first half of which we watched around the same time in 2010, but never finished). I departed for my last “final” of the quarter, in the form of a video presentation for COMT100. I went home, before leaving for Pho Time with Adam, Jessica, Henry, and Bee-John. I would say it’s around the same quality as Pho T Cali, which is delicious, but still not as good as Garden Grove pho. We went back to Adam’s place where Henry departed us, before heading back to my place to play two games, starting with Munchkin Fu. It ended up being a dramatically long game as Tyler played with us, left in the middle, and Bee-John was leading with 9 points a majority of the game but somehow got knocked down to 3. Eventually I overcame the odds and ended up winning, before we played an annoying game of Bang where Bee-John eventually forfeited. Katie brought me over some of her leftover magazines as I ended the night just chilling now that the quarter is officially over.

On this day in 1992, 1,800 United States Marines arrive in Mogadishu, Somalia, to spearhead a multinational force aimed at restoring order in the conflict-ridden country. Following centuries of colonial rule by countries including Portugal, Britain and Italy, Mogadishu became the capital of an independent Somalia in 1960. Less than 10 years later, a military group led by Major General Muhammad Siad Barre seized power and declared Somalia a socialist state. A drought in the mid-1970s combined with an unsuccessful rebellion by ethnic Somalis in a neighboring province of Ethiopia to deprive many of food and shelter. By 1981, close to 2 million of the country’s inhabitants were homeless. Though a peace accord was signed with Ethiopia in 1988, fighting increased between rival clans within Somalia, and in January 1991 Barre was forced to flee the capital. Over the next 23 months, Somalia’s civil war killed some 50,000 people; another 300,000 died of starvation as United Nations peacekeeping forces struggled in vain to restore order and provide relief amid the chaos of war. STUPID STUPID STUPID.

There’s some disturbing rhetoric flying around in the debate over the National Defense Authorization Act, which among other things contains passages that a) officially codify the already-accepted practice of indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects, and b) transfer the responsibility for such detentions exclusively to the military. The fact that there’s been only some muted public uproar about this provision (which, disturbingly enough, is the creature of Wall Street anti-corruption good guy Carl Levin, along with John McCain) is mildly surprising, given what’s been going on with the Occupy movement. Protesters in fact should be keenly interested in the potential applications of this provision, which essentially gives the executive branch unlimited powers to indefinitely detain terror suspects without trial. WHAT A TERRIBLE LAW….

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