I’ve finally found the time and the motivation to get this blog moved to WordPress, so if you notice some funkiness over the next few days, that’s why. Also, if you don’t see any posts from me for a couple of weeks, then you may need to update your RSS feed, though I’ll try to find a way to make my current Feedburner feed move to WordPress with me.
Category: General Updates
Commentary on people, places, things, the news, current events, etc.
Guatemalan Woman Attempts to Secure US Anchor Baby for Immigration
I just saw a report on ABC about a woman who claims that the US government stole her child. She entered the country illegally, which is a felony and an insult to the national sovereignty of this country, and when she was caught, she was deemed to be an unfit mother for smuggling her child across international boundaries. In his 2008 decision, terminating Encarnacion’s parental rights, Circuit Court Judge David C. Dally wrote that the biological mother’s “lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child…A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run.”
Her son was taken away from her and has been adopted out to a family that has had him for 5 years. Now this illegal immigrant, Encarnacion Bail Romero, is trying to get her son back. She’s trying to play the ‘broken family’ card to get sympathy from the American public. She’s trying to get us to overlook the fact that she’s a convicted felon who disregarded the sovereignty of our nation by ignoring our legal immigration procedures. She wants to use our own court system against us.
This excerpt from the article sums up my opinion fairly well:
“When parents break the law, they undertake a certain amount of risk that there are going to be consequences,” said Daniel Stein of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
“Anyone can feel for the torment that this poor woman is going through, recognizing that she doesn’t have the educational and the language capabilities to fully defend and vindicate her rights,” said Stein.
“Nevertheless, she knew she came to this country illegally, she knew she broke the law,” he told ABC News.
This illegal immigrant will get no sympathy from me. If she didn’t want her family to be broken, she shouldn’t have broken federal laws. We have borders for a reason. We have immigration procedures for a reason. It’s too late. The ship has already sailed. If this kid (formerly called Carlos and now named Jamison) has been adopted out and with a new family for 5 years, she should let the boy enjoy his life, because she would be a stranger to him. What she wants to do would totally destroy this kid’s life, because he would be emotionally scarred forever. I can’t imagine why she would imagine that fighting for custody of the kid would be in his best interest, since he doesn’t even know her and doesn’t speak Spanish (the biological mother speaks no English), unless of course she’s looking for an anchor that she can use to stay in the United States herself.
Original Story on ABC: “Adoption Battle Over 5-Year Old Boy Pits Missouri Couple Vs. Illegal Immigrant“
Citibank Protects Big Business First, Bank Customer Second
Today, I opened up my Citibank account online to do a transfer and I noticed I had a message. I opened it up and saw that it was a message telling me that Citibank had recently discovered that my debit card had been compromised and they had put a block on my card, for my own protection.
My immediate response was suspicion and confusion, because I had just used my card to purchase an Amazon Instant Video rental and the message was dated yesterday. If my card was blocked, how was I able to make a purchase with it?
I didn’t trust the message. I wasn’t sure (and really I’m still not sure because I forgot to ask) if those messages only come from bank employees, or if they can be spoofed somehow. I used the Live Chat feature to connect with an online representative who immediately told me to call a phone number, which I thought was a little silly. What’s the point of having a Live Chat if you can’t get anything done through it? Maybe it’s just for asking basic questions.
Anyway, the first guy I talked to asked me questions about my account, which was normal. Then he started asking questions that seemed a little unnecessary. When he asked me for the security code on the back of my debit card, I started questioning the whole phone call and wondering if I’d accidentally gone to a fishing site and screwed myself. So, I politely declined to answer any more questions, hung up, double checked everything and called back using their regular number.
The second time I called, the guy that answered had a thick Indian accent, which, oddly enough was completely reassuring. I was in familiar territory again.
Jokes aside, the guy basically told me I needed a new card and arranged to have it shipped overnight to the nearest branch. That’s cool. I get that.
The thing about the whole process that upsets me is why it happened. More specifically, the fact that I don’t know why it happened! When I asked the first guy I talked to for details, to explain to me why my card was blocked, he said that a retailer had alerted Citibank that they might have been compromised and it immediately flags any Citibank cards that might have been used not only at that retailer, but anywhere in that area. That could have been a diversion though, because when I asked specifically who was compromised, he refused to tell me the name of the company. When I asked him why, he said it was to protect the business.
Now, I’m not opposed to forgiving a business that might have had their online storefront hacked, or accepting that once in a while a brick & mortar might have had a bad employee. I appreciate the fact that the business took the time to notify the bank. However, I feel that as a customer I should have the right to know what business it was, so that I can make my own decision about whether or not I feel comfortable shopping there again.
It’s my money. It’s my card. It’s my discretion. The bank shouldn’t protect businesses. It should protect its consumers by letting them know that it may be unsafe to shop at certain stores.
I can guess that the reason Citibank won’t release that information is because they have an agreement with businesses that if they guarantee anonymity, the businesses will guarantee reporting of potential fraud or theft of credit card information.
So, I don’t know that I can really blame Citibank. The only entity I can blame is Congress, because if my theory is right, then the fault lies with a lack of appropriate legislation to require reporting and require informing customers of where their account information was compromised.
It should be the customer first, all the time. I shouldn’t have to keep getting my account compromised until I can guess which company is at fault based on my shopping history. Having my debit card locked is a big issue. What if it were a day when automatic payments for bills were supposed to be withdrawn? Those would have all been declined, and I would have been up shit creek, and Citibank would have apologized but said they did it for my own good. As it is, I’m almost going to miss a good sale on a camera bag I need. Thankfully, they ship the new card overnight (which means Saturday, since it’s late in the evening already).
Well, at least there’s no debit card fee yet. I wonder how Hitler would react to this?
NYPD Overkill: More Police than Protesters
What ever happened to the Occupy movement? Reports about the activities of the group used to be on television on a daily basis. Did people lose interest after the eviction from Zuccoti Park? Was that the end of the high drama that could keep viewers coming back to tune in to the news reports?
Or did the Occupy movement kill itself off? The Occupy movement’s most touted feature could also have led to its own downfall. Without a single leader to unify the movement and the ideology, the movement was just a static mob occupying nothing but time and space, but presenting no social change or even a unified list of demands that I ever remember hearing about.
Without a leader, everything was voted on by the entire group. That sounds good in theory, but fails in implementation, which is why the US is a representative democracy and not a direct democracy (which is what they were implementing in Zuccoti Park). A quick search of the web shows a recent Wall Street Journal article that talks about the Occupy movement and their current financial woes. It also mentions that issues are being decided by a General Assembly now, so maybe problems associated with a lack of leadership became apparent even to them. Or, maybe the problem was that when large sums of money started being handled, it required some sort of leadership and accountability.
Either way, when I think about all of the important movements in history, there have always been figureheads for movements, charismatic leaders that drew attention and promoted the desires of the masses. South Africa and India had Gandhi. The Civil Rights movement had MLK. Who does the Occupy movement have that can present a unified ideology and a unified front, that can actually form a coherent ideology and set of demands to place before the US government and the people? It’s fine to have a lot of issues under one roof, but without some set of concrete plans or desires, the whole movement begins to feel like a waste of time, and no one likes having their time wasted.
Soap boxing aside, I happened to run into a group of protesters on Monday at Union Square. The group seemed tiny compared to what I remember seeing on the news and the only thing that really made the moment memorable was the absurd ratio of police officers to protesters. In fact, I think there might have been more police present than there were protesters. Perhaps it wasn’t without reason, since there was some commotion that caused a lot of them to run into the crowd before they even crossed the street into Union Square, but I can’t help but feel that more than anything, the police presence was exaggerated and a waste of tax payer money.
Maybe they expected more people to be there? It’s always better to be over-prepared than under-prepared, but … they even had half a dozen of those little Interceptors lined up waiting, as well as additional units stationed around the park…
US Government’s Illegal Torture Policies in the Middle East
A friend of mine came across this documentary and passed along the link. I’m studying Middle Eastern history as my major, so he thought it would be relevant to my interests. It’s 79 minutes and the audio gets steadily further and further out of sync with the video, but hey, it’s free, and it’s worth the information you’ll glean from it.
What I saw in this video is nothing more than what I expected. I have little faith in the US government anymore. I mean, seriously. They can’t fix our economy. They can’t stop giving tax breaks to huge corporations. They can’t take care of Americans. They can’t do anything but blow up other countries to hide their own deficiencies. It also bothers me how caught up most people are in glorifying war and the military in this country. I think Americans are losing sight of what this country is supposed to be about. War isn’t a destination. War was a means of achieving a free society where people have inviolable rights. All people. Not just the ones we like. War is not glorious, and just because someone is from another country, they don’t lose their human rights. They’re still human beings. Why would we take someone for whom we have no evidence of wrongdoing and then treat them worse than we treat serial murderers, rapists and child molesters in the US?
I can understand the situation that was created in these prisons and it’s completely absurd to blame the front-line soldiers. In the military, there’s a whole other culture, distinct from regular American culture, and there’s a separate legal system and even a different way of thinking about things. For the most part, you do what you’re told, even when things start to spiral into the absurd, because that’s what you get trained to do: follow orders. When soldiers question orders, they’re reprimanded, disciplined and sometimes humiliated in front of their peers. They can lose pay, rank or status. So, there’s a lot of pressure to just follow orders, and I’m sure first-hand experience with public humiliation makes it easier to take the first step towards severe humiliation of prisoners whom your told have no rights and are something less than human.
So, things just get done because that’s what was ordered, and because everyone else is doing it. What I’m describing is just based on what I remember from my experiences in non-combat units. I can’t imagine the added pressures involved in dealing with people that you’re told are enemy combatants. This whole situation seems like something Stephen King would have cooked up for a horror novel, rather than reality. In the end, though, the unit commander should be ultimately responsible for the actions of the unit, both good and bad. A common saying in the Army is that “shit rolls downhill,” meaning from the top of the chain-of-command to the bottom, but it should also roll back up when something goes wrong like this.
Instead of trying to find ways to justify unwarranted violence and illegal torture, our politicians should be finding ways to stop blowing up other countries, defend our own, and fix our financial issues.
Alabama Attempts to Usher in a New Dark Age
Officials in Bay Minette, Alabama delayed a new program that would allow some nonviolent offenders to choose church over jail after a civil liberties group objected.
The “Operation Restore Our Community” initiative was slated to begin this week, but the southwest Alabama city’s legal team will take another look after the American Civil Liberties Union sent a cease-and-desist letter Monday.
via Reuters
What were they thinking? The officials in Bay Minette, I mean.
I saw a small article about this tucked into a corner of an issue of the NY Daily News a few days ago and decided to look up more information about it online. The Daily article didn’t mention anything about the ACLU or a protest; it was just all glowing and positive, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the reporter had suddenly forgotten about the separation of church and state provision in the US Constitution.
Reading the Daily article, I was mentally transported back to a time (a.k.a. the Dark Ages) when the Church presided over the sentencing and punishment/rehabilitation of criminals. I thought we’d covered this ground already and gotten past it with that whole Enlightenment thing that happened in Europe. The founding fathers of this country didn’t introduce the separation of church and state into the Constitution on a whim.
The officials mentioned in the article are trying to hide the obvious, that this is a drive to get criminals on the ‘right path’ by converting them to Christianity through extended exposure. They’re instead claiming the weekly ‘check-ins’ are just for the purpose of accountability, and to access community based resources to help them fix their lives.
I wonder if such a thinly veiled excuse to get people into local churches will stand up in court? I wouldn’t be surprised, since people can win lawsuits over spilled hot coffee, but I can’t believe that anyone would have thought that this would be OK, or that it would be true to the principles that this country stands for. I’m not against churches. I’m not against Christians practicing religion, but when you give someone an option of going to jail or going to church for a year, it’s not really a choice at all. It’s more like a European telling natives in a newly ‘discovered’ land that they can either convert or be sold into slavery, or perhaps killed. Freedom under a new religion will be preferable to a loss of liberty for most people.
There are reasons why church and state are separated in this country. The US is diverse. There are people of all faiths here and people who choose not to have any faith at all. It’s one of our freedoms, and we should never be forced to choose between going to church or going to jail, even if the person in question is guilty of a crime. A secular law system requires secular consequences.
New Semester, New Books
Fall Semester started yesterday. I didn’t have much of a break, since I took courses over the Summer, but two and a half weeks off seemed long enough to me. I spent most of that time rotting my brain with video games. I haven’t sat around playing video games for hours on end in years and it was great! Besides a game called Vindictus (by Nexon) that I’ve been playing casually since around March, I started using ‘Steam’ (My Profile) and played Team Fortress 2, Left For Dead 2, and Borderlands, among others. Hopefully I’ll still have a little time to hack up zombies and make bandits’ heads explode with a shotgun, but considering how thick some of the books are, I’m glad I have one of those nifty book lights that clips on, because I foresee a lot of late night reading.
Some good news is, I finally decided what I want to do and declared my major as History. I still have to figure out what particular area of history I want to focus on, though I’m leaning towards Islamic or Medieval History. I’m also considering doing a double major since a history major only requires 11 courses (33 credit hours) out of the total of 120 credit hours required to get a BA.
This semester I’m going to be taking two history courses that will count towards my major: Middle East Under Islam and Traditional Civilizations of India. The books in the picture above are for those two courses.
I’m also taking a 6 credit course involving English and Writing. It’s called ‘Our City’ and focuses on literary perspectives on New York City. I live here, so why not? It might help me discover some of the history behind New York City. Also, it fills a requirement. I’d rather have taken a course that covers dystopian literature, but it wasn’t available and I want to get that requirement out of the way.
I also wanted to mention that Hurricane Irene is affecting the school systems here in NYC, obviously. I got an SMS, an email and three phone calls from the CUNY alert system letting me know that CCNY will be closed today, tomorrow, and possibly Monday. I don’t really care that the school is closed today or tomorrow. In fact, it might not even be bad if it’s closed on Monday, since the first day of a class is usually a ‘get to know each other’ kind of thing.
Hurricane Irene has New Yorkers panicking. By now, all mass transit will have shut down, including the airports and Amtrak. There are mandatory evacuation zones and they may even cut power to prevent the power grid from being annihilated by salt water inundation. I also looked at a map and discovered that the block my apartment building is on is just inside an evacuation zone. The evacuation zone area cuts inland only for my block. I don’t know how to feel about that, but if the block south of me and the one north of me aren’t in an evacuation zone, then WTF? I can see them from the window and could hit them if I threw a stone. They’re also on the same level as this building, altitude-wise. I think I’ll stay put.
Three Years Further On – An Anniversary Dedication
Today is kind of a tough day for me. Three years ago, my wife and I got married in Singapore. I still remember walking down the street, holding her hand for the first time as husband and wife. I loved her then, with all of my heart, and now, after three years, I love her even more.
The reason today is tough, though, is because we aren’t together on our anniversary for the first time. A year ago, we celebrated this special day in Manila in the Philippines. The year before that, we celebrated in Singapore. This year, we’re separated by thousands of miles, and it really just sucks the joy out of the occasion. That’s not to say I’m not thankful for another anniversary, another year of having my wife in my life.
She’s an amazing woman. She’s my source of inspiration, my constant companion, and a source of motivation. She’s dedicated, passionate, sweet and kind. She’s a great cook. She’s full of great ideas and fun to talk to. She’s patient. She’s practical. She’s damn good looking too! She’s really the best I could have hoped for and everything I need.
I won’t try to sum up everything she means to me in a blog post, but I want to say that I love her more and more with each passing day. I can’t imagine life without her, and nothing brings me greater joy than knowing that soon we’ll be having coffee and sharing stories, going out and living our lives, together again.
Speech Foundations Is Pretty Cool After All
When I signed up for the Speech Foundations class I’m taking right now, I assumed it would be lame. It’s a whole semester worth of one class packed into one month. I thought there would be a lot of work, a lot of speaking, and… I mean just what can you really do in a speech class that’s interesting?
Well, thankfully I was wrong. The way the Professor runs the class, with multiple group and class activities, seeing each other for 2.5 hours a day, we all got to know each other pretty quickly and I find myself looking forward to going. Every day the professor has a different set of activities for us, which often call on individuals in the class to put forward personal opinions which in turn stimulates a debate. Thankfully it’s all polite debate. Thankfully the class has a wide range of opinions, which keeps things interesting. The time goes by pretty quickly.
Somehow, we seem to find ourselves discussing religion quite a bit. I think it’s because we have Christians, Jews and Muslims all in the class together. It’s turning into a real learning opportunity. I learned from a Jewish girl that it’s not kosher to eat a cheeseburger, because it’s like bathing a dead baby cow (the meat) in the mother’s milk (the cheese), which, when you think about it, is pretty gruesome. I got to tell a guy from Turkey that the US wasn’t the first nation to import slaves. I met a guy whose grandmother escaped from the Nazis during WWII. I met a guy from Morocco. I met a girl that sings Jazz and is studying music.
I think what I like most about the class, though, is that it’s turning out to be a great place where we can all get together and bounce ideas around, from the history of Jazz to the treatment of women in Islam, and it’s all cool. No one freaks out. Not yet at least. I think I’ll actually be sad when this class ends, the same way I was a little disappointed when my World Humanities and Art History classes ended last semester. I’m looking forward to taking World Civ next month though. That should be pretty cool.
Anyway, expect a nifty update about how Jazz influenced the civil rights movement in the US in the next few days. It’s part of a group presentation project I’m working on for my ‘informative’ speech. For my ‘ceremonial’ speech, I wrote a fictional speech by Creon, celebrating the 5th anniversary of Thebes being liberated from the Sphinx. I’m considering posting that too.
A Shift in Self-Identified Important Virtues, In-Class Project
In my Speech Foundations class today we did an interesting class project. We were put into groups and we had to come up with a list of what we thought were common virtues that we thought were important as a group. When all of the groups were done, the lists were put on the board. Then the professor circled all of the themes, the virtues that showed up in most of the lists. What stood out was that people in the class value family, friends, religious tolerance, honesty and loyalty (to friends and family).
The professor said that this simple class project is an interesting way for her to judge society as a whole, since the things that are listed change over time. She said she’s been doing this same class project every semester since she started teaching, and she looks like she’s in her early 60s, so I imagine that goes back quite a ways.
She said that when she first started teaching, money was at the top of every list. Students were very concerned with money, both having it and making lots of it. Interestingly enough, the only list on the board that contained ‘money’ was from a group of people who were all first generation immigrants. I imagine it has to do with perceived financial capacity. Our economy may be faltering, but people are still generally taken care of, whereas people from other countries might not have those same safety nets, or might have family back home that they’re concerned about.
The next thing she pointed out was that most groups didn’t place family and friends on the list prior to September 11th, 2001. She said that ‘religious tolerance’ and similar ideas started showing up shortly after that. Her theory on the addition of family and friends is that after people died in an attack here in the US, it made people realize that they might not actually see their family or friends later. Something could happen, so people started to value those ideas more, and perhaps their friends and families too.
I think the appearance of religious tolerance on these lists comes from the deluge of information people are exposed to now, in light of the war with Middle Eastern countries. This conflict has been portrayed as a clash of civilizations and more often as a clash between religions. To combat rampant fear of every ‘other’, ideas of religious tolerance, especially towards Muslims, has become prominent in everything from TV to classrooms.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate what type of audience the class is. It’s a Speech class, and the most important part of writing a speech is knowing who your speech is intended for.
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