Tag: mexico

A (Possibly Premature) TS Karl Update

Bahia Soliman, QR, Mexico–Thanks for the comments and the kind words and the link repair.  The weather event seems to have been excessively over-horribl-ized.  Why am I not surprised?  And why, I wonder, does this hysterical kind of reporting always… (please fill in the ellipses).  If I contributed to the craziness, perdon.

I’m back at the barbecue Internet.  The cell phone is out, but the Internet’s on.  Amazingly, there is electricity.  Mexico’s infrastructure works.  And, the good news, the storm seems to have gone someplace else.  Or not to have materialized in the utterly devastating form predicted by some.  Yes, we have high winds (imagine the wind map here), and yes, we have marea alto (high tide) (imagine photo of rolling waves here), and yeah, we had some crazy horizontal rain (imagine…).  But all now seems to be in order: no real damage (2 plates and a tray), nobody hurt or injured, ocean churned up (of course), and winds blowing hard now still, but as things go, simply excellent.  Considering that the storm was supposed, according to some, to bring the end of Western Civilization with it.  And, lest I forget, the sun is out and has been in and out for the past couple of hours (imagine photo of such on turquoise water, cumulus clouds, palm trees slightly shaking).

Three pelicans decided to ride out the storm on the bow of Moonstar’s boat (imagine cute photo).  I decided to ride the storm out on the beach in a plastic chair (no beer logo this time)(imagine photo of Sol beer commercial chair). The pelicans and I were there all morning (except when occasionally wind and rain drove me inside) until somebody decided to move the boat next to it.  That got the pelicans to move.  I have no idea why they are moving the boat now, since the storm is apparently about played out, but maybe these guys know something I don’t.  My consultations today with locals yielded this appraisal: no big deal, what’s for lunch.

Somebody really should do a treatise (ok, a short blog) on the affect Katrina has had on weather reportage and how it has made WR intentionally even more hysterical that before.  Is it the goal of this kind of WR to desensitize us to climate changes?  Just asking.

Thanks for all the good wishes.


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cross posted (maybe) at The Dream Antilles  

Tropical Storm Karl Coming Soon (To Me)

Please pardon the extremely low tech, wordy approach this extremely brief essay takes.  I’m writing it “borrowing” Internet from my neighbor (who is away), so my laptop is sitting on the barbecue (no, it’s not on) while I write this.  I will not regale you (sorry for the wind pun) with why I don’t have my own Internet this evening.

I’m in Bahia Soliman, which is just north of Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico.  This afternoon I (and probably everyone else in the world who cares about this) learned that what we following as Invest 92 had indeed attained Tropical Storm Status (TST) and was now named TS Karl.  TS Karl, the computer models and other models (imagine I had posted a map of that right here) is planning to come through the front door of my house tomorrow morning or afternoon.  What’s that mean?  Who knows: it probably means up to 50 knot winds and up to 8″ of rain.  Knots, I am reliably told, are bigger than miles.

On one level, I consider this retribution.  I have been working on my novel, working title “Tulum,” here for more than a week.  I am working in what IB Singer called the “literary factory,” i.e. I write and I take breaks, I write and I take breaks, repeat and repeat again ad infinitum.  So it is I who wrote the Hurricane scenes in the book, and now I have “called” in a real storm with my maniacal focus on storms.  It’s “the law of attraction” gone crazy, if you will.  Or it’s the Damapada.  I am what I think, and I’ve been thinking a lot about TS’s and Hurricanes, if you will.  If you won’t, fine, but it’s thundering as I type this.

On another level, I consider this a study in how most people in the US don’t give a rat’s ass about what happens in Mexico.  They and their media are obsessing about what will happen when the storm leaves the Yucatan Peninsula and heads towards South Texas.  If TS Karl decides instead to come ashore (again) in Mexico the story won’t merit a 1″ column on page 23 of your local newspaper.  But if it should head for Texas, there will be guys with slickers standing in the surf and reporting every 3 minutes on what it feels like.

Hell, I can tell you “what it feels like.”  And I’m not wearing one of those jackets.  It feels like tomorrow the weather is really gonna suck here.  High wind, lots of rain, high tides, flooding.  You’ve seen it before on TV, right?  It makes a mess of things.

I have taken my book, all almost 80,000 words of it, and saved the entire thing on two key drives, and put them in a safe, where they will be dry, no matter what.  I will also put this 10 year old lap top, whose aging memory also contains my book, in a safe place.  Everything of value is in a place where it cannot get ruined.  By wind.  By water.  By anything.  Everything that’s not tied down is likely to end up in the next state, which is Campeche, and in Mayan means, the place of snakes and scorpions.  In other words, you will not likely retrieve any of it.

Meanwhile, many of us stand on the beach looking at the lightning, listening to the wind, watching the tide.

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cross-posted (maybe) at The Dream Antilles

DREAM Now Letters to Barack Obama: Lizbeth Mateo

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!

Dear Mr. President,

My name is Lizbeth Mateo and I am undocumented. On May 17th, on the 56th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I, along with Mohammad Abdollahi, Yahaira Carrillo and two others, became the first undocumented students to risk deportation by staging a sit-in inside Senator McCain’s office in Tucson, Arizona, to demand the immediate passage of the DREAM Act. As a result of that sit-in we were arrested, turned over to ICE, and we now face deportation

Population Dynamics of Places in the News

Population 1960-2008

Population2

I’ve been watching the great HBO series Six Feet Under on DVD for about a week, and yesterday I saw the episode which ends with Ruth Fisher singing along with a tape of Joni Mitchell. I didn’t even recognize the song, but a google search for the lyrics revealed it was Woodstock.

Then last night I had a dream about walking up a long hill with the same song playing in my head, but when I came to the crest and looked down, instead of mobs at a concert I saw a flood like an ocean, and millions of people washed away in it.

“And maybe it’s the time of year

or maybe it’s the time of man

and I don’t know who I am

but you know life is for learning.”

“We are stardust,

billion year-old carbon,

we are golden,

caught in the devil’s bargain

and we got to get ourselves

back to the garden.”

Mexico Supreme Court Recognizes Same Sex Marriage

Or, more exactly, they have ordered the states to recognize same sex marriages performed in Mexico City.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Mexico City’s same-sex marriage law, enacted in March, extends to wedded gay couples the right to adopt children, to jointly apply for bank loans, to inherit wealth and to be covered by their spouses’ insurance policies. Some of those may end up applying only in the capital.

It’s simply a more tolerant place, than todays US.  

DREAM Now Letters: Yahaira Carrillo

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!

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest
Washington, DC  20500

Dear Mr. President,

My name is Yahaira Carrillo and I’m undocumented.  As I write this, over 20 undocumented youth are risking arrest and deportation to demand that Congress take action for the DREAM Act.  Just over two months ago, I, along with two others, became one of the first undocumented immigrants in U.S. history to do the same.  Like Mohammad Abdollahi, who wrote you a letter on Monday, I too am queer.  I risk being deported to a machista country, Mexico, where killings related to homophobia are rising.

Update:Storm Alex Now a Hurricane, still Warning Heading to Texas

Update. Tues June 29, 8:20 pm PDT.  NWS, Miami, FL.  Tropical Storm  Alex is now officially a Hurricane, and the first hurricane of the season and the first June hurricane since 1995.  Alex is about 255 miles / 415 km SE of Brownsville, TX, with winds of 75 mph, moving 9 mph / 15 km/hr .  All watches remain in effect.  Hurricane Alex is expected to make landfall late Wednesday evening in the Texas/ Mexico border area.  

Status of Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Area’s “City of Ships”  of Blown Out BP Well : Oil skimming operations by surface boats have been suspended.  BP Oil is still so far collecting gas/oil from the riser pipe and the BOP,  but the attempt to hook up another gathering ship to the BOP to suck up yet more oil from below the sea’s surface has been delayed due to high winds and waves.  BP says they are still working on installing yet another floating riser pipe that they can then quickly disconnect from in the case of bad weather, but it’s not finished yet.

Status of relief well. Still close to wellbore, allegedly within 20 feet yesterday,  now drilling past it and down and taking multiple magnetic soundings to locate it before attempt is made to intersect.  Still supposedly on track for August of this year.

________

Well, I’ve got bad news and good news.

The National Weather Service as of 10:00 pm CDT Monday has upgraded the Hurricane Watch for Tropical Storm Alex to a Hurricane Warning.  

But it’s heading northwest to Texas.   http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/r…   Sorry, eastern Mexico, it’s going to visit you again too.

NOAA and the NWS has also put together a page  on New Orleans/Baton Rouge/Deepwater Horizon which has every sort of weather graphic you’d want to see on this.  Satellite, radar, wind, wave, trajectories,  37 different weather maps and charts to gawk at.

Bookmark this:

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lix/?n…

Works So Well In Pakistan, So On To US- Mexican Border & Gulf

drone

The future is now.   Got some crazy, yellow Gasden snake flag flying neighbors, who are arming themselves for the 2nd Coming ? Is your Congressman or Senator a birther, or just an exuberant alien exporter?

How would you like the Tea Party or the uber right wing of the CIA telling Homeland Security where to deploy these next ?

With Nixon, it was the  National Guard.

With Obama, during an election year, one day after sacking his Afghan general,  it’s the   Drones.

Atty Gen Holder: Shooting of Mexican Teen “Extremely Regrettable”

A cell phone video taken by a bystander through a chain link fence may have changed the impetus of the investigation of the Border Patrol shooting death of 15 year old Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereka Monday, on the border between El Paso Texas and Cuidad Juarez Mexico.

Attorney General Eric Holder today called the shooting of the teenager “extremely regrettable.”  The FBI is now investigating the death.

“..blood of Mexicans is primarily American Indian.”

As a previous editor of the Classic Progressive Historians, I was trying to get a historian I had met on line to post there. He was in Mexico and as we corresponded, he told me that at least 80% of “Mexicans” are Lipan Apache. Who is Arizona wanting to “send back to where they came from?”


http://www.indiancountrytoday….

The privileges of citizenship were slow to come for Indians while the responsibilities came right away. It’s hard not to think of the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, some of the toughest combat of WWII. The Navajo code talkers served though that campaign at a time when Arizona was still denying them the vote. Now, it appears that Arizona Indians who visit the cities will have to be careful about being brown in a no-brown zone, whether or not they are veterans.

Feliz Dia de San Patricio

Listen to the classic “CanciĆ³n Mixteca,” sung in Spanish by the Mexican supergroup Los Tigres del Norte, accompanied by [Irish] accordion, bajo sexto, tin whistle and uilleann pipes.

“How far I am from the land where I was born! Immense longing invades my thoughts, and when I see myself as alone and sad as a leaf in the wind, I want to cry. I want to die of sorrow.”

It’s Time to Invade Canada

Crossposted at Daily Kos

“Strike while the iron is hot.”

“Make hay while the sun shines.”

“Take time by the forelock.”

Or, as they say it in French, “Il faut battre le fer pendant qu’il est chaud.”

All are time-tested phrases in the English and French languages amounting to the same thing: the time to act and take advantage is now.  For timing is everything in peace, love, politics, and war.  Once the opportunity slips by, one may never get the chance again.  Simply put: use it or lose it.  



Patrick Corrigan, Toronto Star, Buy this cartoon

 

Why the urgency?  What is this terrific opportunity that’s been given to us and why must we act upon it right now?    

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