August 18, 2010 archive

DREAM Now Letters to Barack Obama: Selvin Arevalo

Originally posted on Citizen Orange.

The “DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama” is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, have good moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service.  With broader comprehensive immigration reform stuck in partisan gridlock, the time is now for the White House and Congress to step up and pass the DREAM Act!

[Note from Kyle de Beausset: Selvin wrote this letter right before he got into a minor car accident on April 9, 2010.  He was set to get his high school diploma in June but has been in detention ever since.  I have chosen reproduce Selvin’s letter as I found it in his empty room, rather than polish his slight grammatical errors, to allow his character to shine through.]

Dear President Barack Obama,

From the bottom of my heart, I plead to my God that you and your entire family receive blessings from the highest God while you are reading this letter.  I admire and thank you for the great labor that you are fulfilling as a president in this big nation.  My name is Selvin Ovidio Arevalo.  I came to this country when I was 15 years old.  I came from Guatemala to this country to fulfill my dreams because I always have believed that this is a country of many opportunities for those whom want to succeed.

Open Measure

Photobucket

When banking laws are for breaking

  A relatively obscure case in Norway shows just how different the United States is from the rest of the industrialized world.

  The Oslo Stock Exchange was halted by unusual trade action. It seems two Norwegians were trying to manipulate stock prices.

 We believe the two are behind a number of cases of price manipulation. They have set purchase and sales orders that have not been real, because they have had another motive, namely to move prices, “said Stenberg.

 In other words, they did exactly what every single bank on Wall Street does every single day. In New York it is called High Frequency Trading. In Oslo it is called getting six years of jail time for breaking the law.

 So who is right? Is Norway some Socialist Hell for not allowing the free market to work, allowing faster traders to skim profits from slower traders? Or are laws in the United States too lax, allowing people to take money from the system without adding any value, thus destabilizing the economy?

  To answer that we need to look at a couple more examples.

News at Noon

From Reuters

Dozens missing after landslide in southwest China

By Huang Yan and Chris Buckley

August 18, 2010

(Reuters) – At least 67 people were missing after mudslides hit a remote southwest Chinese town near Myanmar, state media reported on Wednesday, adding to the thousands killed or missing in floods and landslides this year.

Mudslides triggered by torrential rains hit a township in Gongshan County, located in a mountainous corner of Yunnan province, early on Wednesday morning, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

“The number of casualties is unknown at the moment,” the report said.

Seriously: Afghanistan

Yet Another Conservative Finding The First Amendment Is Not A Shield

Our founders were brilliant people.  Really.  They were.  One of the very best things about the first amendment is the idea that we get to hold each other accountable for those things we say and do.  This isn’t civil or criminal accounting, but social accounting.

Before we showed the world what the value of expression is for society, people were limited in what they could say, “because it might disturb the powers that be”, or maybe they valued their head being attached to the rest of their body.

Free speech and tolerance are linked together in a most powerful way.  If we tolerate bigots, for example, we will live in a world filled with bigots.

Why is this?

Not everybody does the work to properly socialize, and they won’t do that, unless they feel some need, or pressure to do it, which is the core of what the First Amendment is all about.

More Domestic Criminal Terror! and Silence Following?

One wonders, not really very hard, why we readily call others, who have done nothing, ‘terrorist’, just because of where they might be from or their religious beliefs, and we get never ending opinion talk and pure propaganda {lies} about as a whole group and not the extremist using, yet something like this happens and it gets very little news play. You have to search it out rather then hear anyone report on or seriously talk about. A most certainly ‘domestic criminal terrorist’ act seemingly hell bent on taking out as many police or innocent people as possible, all because, apparently, he’s a white guy in Texas. Will he become the new hero of certain groups within our society, much like the Austin Pilot Did or others that seek to be the next McVeighs as Individuals or in Groups!!

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

An Opened Mind V

“I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out.”

–Harold T. Stone


Blue Mother

Chapter 6

The Spirit of the Valley

never dies.

It is called

the Mystic Female.

The Door

of the Mystic Female

Is the root

of Heaven and Earth.

Continuously, continuously,

It seems to remain.

Draw upon it

And it serves you with ease.

–Tao te Ching (tr. Lin Yutan)

Blue Mother

Like you

I hang my head

You in sorrow

Me in shame

Blue Mother

I weep with you

for the damage done

to the spirit

of the valley

–Robyn Elaine Serven

–November 1, 2005

BP Bottom Kill Stalled Out During Shrimp Cocktail Party Season

You are so going to love this.  Another in the series, Macondo, Oil Well of Doom.

I have wrestled an image from the balko puter onto photomucket.  Look what I found on the BP webcams this evening.

BP oil spill,bop tool

What the bleep is this on Rov Enterprise 2 cam  Tues evening Aug 17th ?

Check the official BP twitter feed.  http://twitter.com/BP_America    

As part of a #BP tourism grant, Gulf resort giving free night’s stay and $250 gift card: http://bit.ly/bV9XKC

about 4 hours ago via HootSuite

Retweeted by 5 people

BP_America

http://twitter.com/BP_America/…

That’s not a Motel 6.  WTF.    

BP’s Oil is NOT on the Surface — it’s on the Sea Floor

Two weeks ago we were being told the majority of the Oil Spilled was “mostly” gone …

How did five million barrels of oil simply disappear?

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs points to a pie chart on the BP oil spill during the Daily White House Press Briefing, Washington, DC.

AFP/ Getty Images

Now, University of South Florida, Marine Scientists are reporting Science has a different tale, to tell …

BP’s Oil is NOT on the Surface — it’s on the Sea Floor

Two weeks ago we were being told the majority of the Oil Spilled was “mostly” gone …

How did five million barrels of oil simply disappear?

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs points to a pie chart on the BP oil spill during the Daily White House Press Briefing, Washington, DC.

AFP/ Getty Images

Now, University of South Florida, Marine Scientists are reporting Science has a different tale, to tell …

Life under GOM waters

I’m posting this for all of us who have been so horrified/saddened by the rape of the GOM, especially for knucklehead. I was just so happy to see life in the gulf waters.  The video is not as beautiful as are knuck’s wondrous presentations, but just to see things swimming around in the gulf gave me thrills of delight.

Don’t get me wrong though.  I am not a pollyanna rosegarden smiley face.  I’m not minimizing the disaster nor what is to come.  I found this as I was looking for more information about seafood safety, damage to the food chain, etc. in my effort to tell our food program managers not to buy from the Gulf.  So far they have ignored me, but then they are pollyanna rosegardeners, especially when they feel helplesss to do anything about it. I’ll keep trying despite the fact that many have dismissed me as quite crazy and far too negative.  In my last note, I said that I didn’t think any of us wanted to be subjects in experiments of the quite possible detrimental health effects of oil and dispersants in the food chain, possibly carcinogenic.

I found this in a comment posted at TOD by lotus (h/t to ya lotus) of a video by a Pensacola diver named bender (and a scuba tip to you bender, hope you stay well). Comment:

I took this video on 8/7/2010, about 9 miles SW of Pensacola. Most significant to me is the fact that the reef critters (tunicates, anemones, bivalves, sponges) are still alive. This suggests that oxygen levels haven’t dropped to fatal levels, which would have happened in the presence of significant hydrocarbons (because the critters that eat oil use tons of oxygen). I did another dive further out and found less reef life, but ACRES of red snapper. I did two dives the next day at Ft. Pickens, and found life in all forms, including shoals of baitfish.

I’m not ready to eat from the Gulf though (even lobster). I’ll need months of clean tests before I’ll eat from the Gulf again.

See the video at this link…

Pensacola Diving (post oil spill)  

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