I hope that the lessons, reflections, and connections stick. That L., the T.'s and others are people that I will see again. The weekend was a success. I think that besides race or gender, age is also an arbitrary designation. What if there were other means to distinguish how we all advance? What if rather than number of years on earth we could be promoted by the divine/spirit/energy? We could achieve certain levels of distinction by the way we think or treat others and ourselves? Because age and energy certainly do not correlate. I learned that this weekend. A learned soul could be four-and-a-half or 92. It just depends how you look at things. I wish to enhance my being by staying in tune with that information. I want to carry it like a satchel in my brain. To know that we never lose our own individual essence. And to know that we do have say or input on when we stop living our lives. And that among the living there are just as many dead and as living among the dead. It is all in the way you choose to look at things. I’m glad to keep advancing on this vision quest. Or should I say knowledge quest? I like the constant flow of changes to my beliefs and thoughts. I like searching for being above and beyond the pettiness those in power try to suppress us with.

I'm off...

to Annville, Pennsylvania. I signed up for the Friends Conference on Religion and Spirituality a couple weeks ago after I picked up the booklet before meeting one Sunday. I saw that the interest groups planned were congruent to my own spiritual interests and queries so I registered the next day. The deadline, in fact. (Serendipity says what? what?) This jaunt outside the city is long overdue.

Eugenia Last, you talkin' to me?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Someone from your past can play a prominent role in your life today.

Today I received a classmates.com quicknote from my high school frenemy. Well we were mostly friends, but we definitely had our moments. Much of it was due to our school being a homogeneous environment where two girls from similar geographic, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds inevitably had to outdo the other in order to be liked by (read: amuse) the cool kids and upperclassmen.

I'm not sure how prominent the role will be but considering the lengthy and complicated (as if there was such a thing as an uncomplicated high school thing) past we share, I'm pretty sure this'll stir up some of that lingering emotional detritus.

I sent a note back. Unless you subscribe to their site your choices are pretty wack. This is what I had to choose from:

Just wanted to say "hi." Drop me a note and let me know how you've been. (This is the one she sent me. I thought it'd be weird to reply with it, so I chose the last one.)

I'm so glad to see your name here—it's been too long. Send me a message!

Are you going to the reunion this year? Send me a note and let me know.

Hey, it's been a while! What's going on? Let's get back in touch. (But now I regret it. Whatever, it's done. No sense lamenting sent quicknotes. Ugh, I hate being a premature quicknoter...)

URGENT URGENT URGENT CALL YOUR SENATORS NOW!

URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT URGENT

Friends,

It is URGENT you contact Senators Hillary Clinton (http://clinton.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm?subj=issue ; In DC Phone: (202) 224-4451), Chuck Schumer (http://schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWebsite/contact/webform.cfm; In DC: 202-224-6542) and any other senator from where you reside (see: http://www.senate.gov and click on "Senators" at the top left to find your senators' names and their offices' direct phone numbers.) to oppose the Senate bill 2611 the Hagel-Martinez-Specter compromise NOW. The bill, which is being voted on today, would among other things:

call for the deportation on undocumented immigrants
Establish a temporary worker program
Provisions like restricting due process to those accused of violating immigration laws would further erode the human and civil rights of immigrants.

You can see the complete text summary here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SN02611:@@@D&summ2=m&


Republicans are pushing to add additional punitive enforcement provisions and further restrict access to citizenship, with few Democratic Senators standing up to them.

Yesterday by a vote of 83 to 16, the Senate voted to construct a 370-mile wall on the Southwest border. If Bush's proposals are incorporated, too, it will be a major victory for the far right.

Call them, email them, snail mail them anything just tell them that you oppose the so-call “Compromise,” that Senate B.2611 is no compromise at all.
Tell your Senators to remove the provisions from Senate Bill 2611 (the Hagel-Martinez-Specter compromise) that criminalize undocumented immigrants and restrict their rights and ability to gain citizenship.
Tell them to reject the Bush administration's proposals for sending National Guard troops to the border and new punitive enforcement provisions.
Instead of undermining civil rights and civil liberties, our elected officials should support real immigration reform that:
· increases the number of available family visas
· enables all undocumented immigrants within the U.S. to legalize their status and gain a path to citizenship
· provides due process, including restoration of access to the courts and meaningful judicial review for immigrants
· stops mandatory deportations and indefinite detentions
· allows undocumented immigrants and their families to remain together in this country
· protects the rights of both immigrant and native-born workers
If efforts to radically amend Senate Bill 2611 in a progressive, pro-immigrant direction do not succeed, it must be defeated.

Geez, does he work on commission?

"Bush Turns to Big Military Contractors for Border Control"

By ERIC LIPTON
Published: May 18, 2006, New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 17 — The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers.

"This is an unusual invitation," the deputy secretary of homeland security, Michael Jackson, told contractors this year at an industry briefing, just before the bidding period for this new contract started. "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."

The effort comes as the Senate voted Wednesday to add hundreds of miles of fencing along the border with Mexico. The measure would also prohibit illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors from any chance at citizenship.

The high-tech plan being bid now has many skeptics, who say they have heard a similar refrain from the government before.

"We've been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful," Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. "How is the S.B.I. not just another three-letter acronym for failure?"

President Bush, among others, said he was convinced that the government could get it right this time.
"We are launching the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history," Mr. Bush said in his speech from the Oval Office on Monday.

Under the initiative, the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection division will still be charged with patrolling the 6,000 miles of land borders.

The equipment these Border Patrol agents use, how and when they are dispatched to spots along the border, where the agents assemble the captured immigrants, how they process them and transport them — all these steps will now be scripted by the winning contractor, who could earn an estimated $2 billion over the next three to six years on the Secure Border job.

More Border Patrol agents are part of the answer. The Bush administration has committed to increasing the force from 11,500 to about 18,500 by the time the president leaves office in 2008. But simply spreading this army of agents out evenly along the border or extending fences in and around urban areas is not sufficient, officials said.

"Boots on the ground is not really enough," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday at a news conference that followed Mr. Bush's announcement to send as many as 6,000 National Guard troops to the border.

The tools of modern warfare must be brought to bear. That means devices like the Tethered Aerostat Radar, a helium-filled airship made for the Air Force by Lockheed Martin that is twice the size of the Goodyear Blimp. Attached to the ground by a cable, the airship can hover overhead and automatically monitor any movement night or day. (One downside: it cannot operate in high winds.)

Northrop Grumman is considering offering its Global Hawk, an unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan nearly as wide as a Boeing 737, that can snoop on movement along the border from heights of up to 65,000 feet, said Bruce Walker, a company executive.

Closer to earth, Northrop might deploy a fleet of much smaller, unmanned planes that could be launched from a truck, flying perhaps just above a group of already detected immigrants so it would be harder for them to scatter into the brush and disappear.

Raytheon has a package of sensor and video equipment used to protect troops in Iraq that monitors an area and uses software to identify suspicious objects automatically, analyzing and highlighting them even before anyone is sent to respond.

These same companies have delivered these technologies to the Pentagon, sometimes with uneven results.

Each of these giant contractors — Lockheed Martin alone employs 135,000 people and had $37.2 billion in sales last year, including an estimated $6 billion to the federal government — is teaming up with dozens of smaller companies that will provide everything from the automated cameras to backup energy supplies that will to keep this equipment running in the desert.

The companies have studied every mile of border, drafting detection and apprehension strategies that vary depending on the terrain. In a city, for example, an immigrant can disappear into a crowd in seconds, while agents might have hours to apprehend a group walking through the desert, as long as they can track their movement.

If the system works, Border Patrol agents will know before they encounter a group of intruders approximately how many people have crossed, how fast they are moving and even if they might be armed.

Without such information, said Kevin Stevens, a Border Patrol official, "we send more people than we need to deal with a situation that wasn't a significant threat," or, in a worst case, "we send fewer people than we need to deal with a significant threat, and we find ourselves outnumbered and outgunned."

The government's track record in the last decade in trying to buy cutting-edge technology to monitor the border — devices like video cameras, sensors and other tools that came at a cost of at least $425 million — is dismal.

Because of poor contract oversight, nearly half of video cameras ordered in the late 1990's did not work or were not installed. The ground sensors installed along the border frequently sounded alarms. But in 92 percent of the cases, they were sending out agents to respond to what turned out to be a passing wild animal, a train or other nuisances, according to a report late last year by the homeland security inspector general.

A more recent test with an unmanned aerial vehicle bought by the department got off to a similarly troubling start. The $6.8 million device, which has been used in the last year to patrol a 300-mile stretch of the Arizona border at night, crashed last month.

With Secure Border, at least five so-called system integrators — Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop, as well as Boeing and Ericsson — are expected to submit bids.

The winner, which is due to be selected before October, will not be given a specific dollar commitment. Instead, each package of equipment and management solutions the contractor offers will be evaluated and bought individually.

"We're not just going to say, 'Oh, this looks like some neat stuff, let's buy it and then put it on the border,' "Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Skepticism persists. A total of $101 million is already available for the program. But on Wednesday, when the House Appropriations Committee moved to approve the Homeland Security Department's proposed $32.1 billion budget for 2007, it proposed withholding $25 million of $115 million allocated next year for the Secure Border contracting effort until the administration better defined its plans.

"Unless the department can show us exactly what we're buying, we won't fund it," Representative Rogers said. "We will not fund programs with false expectations."

Spring/summer semester-end seasonal sojourn starts...

F.'s the first to go. He leaves tomorrow and won't be back until mid-August.

It's the beginning of that transitional time when students and others start spreading out the five boroughs across the country and globe. I feel a little sad because it feels as if I'm getting left behind. This time last year I was in Europe; hanging out with S. in the French countryside. I haven't left since I returned from that trip. I suspect I have a little NYC-cabin fever. But I guess it's up to me to get out if I truly wanted to do so. It's hard to remember that though.

That's my thing, I think. I teeter between escapist fantasies and anchoring itches (my need to create a stable, secure, safe and static sense of stasis ... snore). It's a struggle. There's also that nutty thing I do where I imagine everyone else in the world partying it up on a beach without me. And everyone is wearing hawaiian shirts and/or gigham swimsuits, those 80s glasses that the Corey Feldman made famous, sipping frozen drinks...

Okay, obviously I have abandonment issues. I'm human. But this annual activity isn't my favorite. Not only do I not like being left, but I hate missing people. If I had a Dolorean I would go back to an era where moving entailed the construction of a new dwelling adjacent to your current one. A time period where travel took so long you actually forget about the person by the time they return.

I am looking forward to getting through my reading list though. Paperback traveller, indeed.

April 30, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Save a Tree, Don't Plant One
By WILLIAM ALEXANDER

IN case you missed it, Friday was a holiday — National Arbor Day [April 28th] — although in my opinion, calling a day with no white sales, no extended store hours and no Hallmark card, and which you celebrate by swinging a pickaxe for half a day, a "holiday" is a bit of a stretch. Still, before the weekend is over I will have dutifully planted a shrub in the rocky clay that masquerades as soil on my Hudson Valley property. Or, as my son once put it as he watched me plant a rose bush, "That's not gardening, Dad — that's mining."

Despite my affinity for this quaint tradition, I do wonder if Arbor Day has outlived its relevance, and if 21st-century America wouldn't be better served if the focus shifted from planting a tree to saving one, or a thousand.

Arbor Day originated in Nebraska in 1872, the brainchild of J. Sterling Morton, a journalist who, recently arrived from Michigan, was alarmed at the lack of trees on the plains. (Just think: if he had ignored Horace Greeley and gone east instead of west, we might be observing Woodcutting Day today.)

Some 90 years later, when I was 7, my father observed the spirit if not the letter of Arbor Day in his own fashion, taking me into some woods a few miles from our Roslyn home with a shovel and a roll of burlap. After walking for a while, we came upon a beautiful young dogwood, standing alone in a small clearing.

"This is it," my father proclaimed, as he started to dig. We wrapped the roots in burlap and dragged the tree out of the woods.

"Dad, whose property is this?" I asked repeatedly, but he avoided answering. "We're stealing a tree," I finally concluded.

"We're saving it," he replied, his face tight.

Within a few weeks, bulldozers had transformed what was left of the once glorious Mackay estate — which had boasted a 70-acre farm, formal gardens surrounding a Stanford White house and more than 500 acres of parkland — into first, 19th-century Nebraska, and then, 20th-century suburbia.

This made my father immensely sad, a sadness matched only by the pride he took in tending his little piece of the vanished estate. Our purloined white dogwood, the last living thing remaining from those magnificent grounds, stood in our front yard for many years, surviving even the man who saved it from the bulldozer.

My father's lawless but victimless act was the only way he knew to respond to what he viewed as a crime against nature. Four decades later, even though everyone complains about development, similar "crimes" are still occurring with alarming frequency. Fueled by rising home prices and population growth, bulldozers are threatening farms, orchards and tracts of scenic lands in New Jersey and New York and across the nation.

On this Arbor Day weekend, there are some simple things — more effective than planting a tree — that ordinary citizens can do to observe the spirit of the day. No. 1, stop complaining about the price of milk. It seems that every time the price of a gallon of milk goes up a dime, our elected officials — often the same ones who scream the loudest whenever a farm is turned into a housing development — go before a television camera to demand action (and garner a few votes).

Milk pricing is a complex issue, but the fact is, small dairy farms are vanishing at an alarming rate, and the ones that remain are struggling for survival. If you don't want your local farms to become housing developments, you need to accept the reality that milk prices are going to rise because dairy farmers need to make a living. You can't have it both ways.

For the same reason, buy local produce. This may be a challenge. But insist that your supermarket carry black-dirt onions and Long Island potatoes. In season, buy New Jersey tomatoes and Hudson Valley apples. Or, if one is available, join a local farm cooperative. Your participation in community-supported agriculture will reward you with a supply of farm-fresh, often organic vegetables and greens throughout the summer.

Make a contribution to a land trust. Your tax-deductible dollars will go a long way to saving a piece of land from development.

And finally, when you feel powerless, take a page out of my father's book and respond in the only way you know how. Even if it flaunts the law. But you didn't hear that from me.

William Alexander is the author of "The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden."

*Sigh* Everything's gonna A-OK

Stuff like this restores my pride in my fellow Americans and in humanity in general...

Colbert Roasts Bush

&

Improv Everywhere: Mission Best Buy

Here's an excerpt for the Improv Everywhere's sum-up:

We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. More than a few came dressed in navy or teal, but with the belt and the khakis they still looked employee-like. After everyone arrived I explained the mission. The first step was for everyone to throw their newspapers away. The instruction to bring a newspaper was a red herring meant to throw people off the scent of the mission's true nature. I then revealed the plan, "We're heading up to the Best Buy on 23rd Street. We'll enter the store one by one. Once inside, spread out and stand near the end of an aisle, facing away from the merchandise. Don't shop, but don't work either. If a customer comes up to you and asks you a question, be polite and help them if you know the answer. If anyone asks you if you work there, say no. If an employee asks you what you're doing, respond 'I'm waiting for my girlfriend/boyfriend who is shopping elsewhere in the store.' If they question you about your clothing, just explain that it's what you put on when you woke up this morning and you don't know any of the other people dressed like you."

There is something about this photo that has captivated me. It's from the April 1st immigrants' rights rally. C took it. It's my desktop background and everytime I start up my computer I say to myself that I want to change it, but I still have it up. I wonder if it's the barefeet on asphalt? Or maybe the strong calves and legs? The shadows? Or that I don't see his face and yet I, the viewer, am following him.

Mmmmmm. Back to normalcy.

I finished my 20-page final. Other course assignments were turned in.

Done.

Complete?

Not quite.

I still have to conduct my master's project in order to be officially finished. But the course work portion of my degree is complete. I worked the hardest I could and in the manner I saw fit. It may have not been pretty. Or efficient. But it never is. The good thing is that my journalism professor gave me valuable feedback. And I'll definitely find ways to improve.

I didn't get to attend the local Mayday actions though. But I obeyed the boycott. I stayed home; deeply engrossed in my paper. I only consumed cable internet and Con Ed. (Hey, a girl's gotta live.)

I'm looking forward to moving on. All of this forced last-minute writing has got me jazzed about working on newer things. I really want to do a World Cup-themed story. I also want to send around stuff I've written to see if I could muster up any interest. For now, it's finishing waking up (I slept until 11 a.m.), return library books and videos, and hit the gym. I'm goin' swimming!