Friday, May 29, 2009

CALIFORNIA HAS LOST ITS STATUS AS THE GOLDEN STATE: SHAMEFUL.

http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!

CALIFORNIA HAS BECOME THIS NATION'S PROVING GROUND FOR STATE GOVERNMENTS TURNING THEIR COLLECTIVE BACKS ON THE POOR, THE MIDDLE CLASS, THE SICK, THE ELDERLY, THE INJURED WORKER, THE STRUGGLING STUDENTS, THE DISENFRANCHISED, THE UNDOCUMENTED PEOPLE OF COLOUR, THE MENTALLY ILL AND THE SO-CALLED "MINORITIES."

Wayne Dennis Kurtz.

California could be the first state to cut student aid while hiking fees

BreeAnna Banks and SharRon Banks
Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times
High school senior BreeAnna Banks, 17, with mother SharRon Banks, had been counting on her Cal Grant to help with college costs. “This is taking away many people’s opportunity to become something in life,” she said.
Governor's plan would eliminate Cal Grants for 118,000 freshmen and cancel increases promised for 82,255 other students.
By Gale Holland 
May 29, 2009
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to dismantle the Cal Grant program would make California the first state in the recession-battered nation to eliminate student financial aid while raising college tuition, experts said this week.

"Other states are cutting back, but not a complete phase-out," said Haley Chitty, communications director for the National Assn. of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

 
The governor's proposal would end all new Cal Grants, eventually eliminating the state's main financial aid program for college students, and prevent existing awards from increasing. Grants awarded to 118,000 freshmen starting college in the fall would be canceled, as well as hikes in 82,255 continuing awards promised when the University of California and California State University raised fees this month by 10% and 9.3%, respectively.

At the University of California, among other options, students with university grants could see some of their money shifted to those who have lost Cal Grants, officials said. California State University and schools in the California Community Colleges System have yet to decide how to respond to the potentially devastating aid cuts, they said. The proposal would save an estimated $173 million in 2009-10 and $450 million in 2010-11, state officials said.

The Cal Grant program has existed in some form since the mid-1950s and was expanded in 2000 to cover virtually all low-income graduates of state high schools attending private or public two-year or four-year colleges or career institutes, officials said.

Higher education policy analysts rank the program among the best in the nation, both for its generosity -- top awards can cover full fees or tuition at public colleges -- and its focus on mainly low-income students in a state with an increasingly poor college-age population.

Until Schwarzenegger's plan was announced, it expected that 280,798 students would receive Cal Grants during the 2009-10 academic year.

"Why the poorest would take a double hit, I don't know," said Patrick M. Callan, president of the San Jose-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. "It makes no sense."

H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state's Department of Finance, said the governor took "no pleasure" in his plan and was open to other ideas. "We have been forced to put forward proposals that would have been unthinkable even a few short months ago," Palmer said.

Some observers asked whether the governor was using the popular Cal Grant program as a bargaining chip to get the Democratic-controlled Legislature to make other concessions. But state and higher education officials said the program really could be axed, if only because the alternatives are even more dire. "This is not a test," said Palmer.

"We're taking it very seriously," said Jonathan Brown, president of the Assn. of Independent California Colleges and Universities.

Some educators said the cutbacks would wipe out any gains from federal stimulus money for higher education.

Because the potential effect is so sweeping, those interviewed said, it's hard to assess how students might respond, but they may have to work more, live at home, go more deeply into debt or beseech their families for further sacrifices.

But at least one student said she could run out of options.

BreeAnna Banks, 17, of Carson had been counting on her $1,500 Cal Grant award to help with her plans to enter Mount St. Mary's College in downtown Los Angeles as a freshman in August.

Her father is a Boeing mechanic, and her mother, SharRon Banks, is a homemaker raising seven children, including four the family adopted because their birth mother couldn't care for them. Two of the children are disabled and need medicine, and the family just emerged from a bad loan foreclosure drama that sent their house payments soaring.

"We were eating rice and pot pies," SharRon Banks said.

BreeAnna said her family has only one car, so commuting is out, the college is tapped out of aid and loans could be hard to get.

"I understand California needs money . . . but this is taking away many people's opportunity to become something in life," she said.

"People in my community look around and say college must just be for people who have a lot of money. Maybe they feel Cal Grant is not a big factor in going to college, but it is.

"And I really want to go."

gale.holland@latimes.com
 



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Wednesday, May 27, 2009

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CHILD ABUSE.

THERE NEEDS TO BE CRIMINAL AND CIVIL REPERCUSSIANS FOR THE HIGHLY-IMMORAL AND ILLEGAL ACTS OF CHILD MOLESTATION IN OUR PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS, NOW!

Wayne Dennis Kurtz.

http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!



Children abused at Catholic-run schools in Ireland, report says

An Irish commission finds that students at more than 200 schools were molested and subjected to excessive punishment over a six-decade period while the church covered up misdeeds.
By Henry Chu 
May 21, 2009
Reporting from London -- Boys and girls in Ireland were beaten, sexually abused and emotionally terrorized for decades in workhouse-style schools run by the Roman Catholic Church where a "culture of silence" protected victimizers rather than the children in their care, according to a long-awaited report.

For more than half a century, chronic, excessive and arbitrary punishment created "a climate of fear" in which students at schools administered by Catholic religious orders lived "with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from."

 
Through it all, the report says, government inspectors failed to stop what was going on. The neglect came despite attempts by some individuals to bring their abusers to account in an effort to lessen the trauma victims suffered for years afterward and that still haunts many today.

These are some of the findings of the controversial 2,600-page report unveiled in Dublin on Wednesday after a nine-year investigation by Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse. Drawing on the testimony of nearly 2,000 witnesses, men and women who attended more than 200 Catholic-run schools from the 1930s until the 1990s, the commission painted a damning picture of a church engaged too often in covering up misdeeds instead of rooting out their perpetrators. 

The five-volume report is a major rebuke to a religious institution that continues to wield significant, albeit declining, influence on Irish society, especially on moral issues such as divorce and abortion. But the church's standing has been weakened since the abuse scandals began to become public in the mid-1990s, by which time many of the schools had closed. This loss of stature has undermined the church's ability to counter a rise in secularism that accompanied Ireland's leap in prosperity.

The investigating panel found that sexual molestation was "endemic" in the church, committed by offenders who were often transferred to other institutions rather than dismissed or turned over to authorities.

Nonetheless, the report was not tough enough for some of the victims. Many are angry that it includes no names of alleged offenders, an omission that one of the religious orders under investigation fought for and won in court. Only pseudonyms are used, making slim the chances of criminal prosecution based on the report's findings.

"We expected that these people would be named and shamed and that some of them would be convicted," John Barrett, who testified before the commission, told Irish radio station Today FM.

"At the end of the day, some of us won't sleep tonight. We're still nowhere near the truth," said Barrett, 55, who was sexually abused in the 1960s while at a school for boys with learning disabilities run by the Brothers of Charity in County Cork.

Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, offered an apology Wednesday for the abuses found by the commission. 

"I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions," Brady said in a statement released by the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference. "Children deserved better, and especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ."

Edmund Garvey, a spokesman for the Christian Brothers, whose 2004 lawsuit against the commission resulted in the shielding of names in the final report, told RTE Radio that the order was "deeply sorry, deeply regretful."

The Catholic Church sponsored scores of reformatories, orphanages and industrial schools where more than 30,000 boys and girls deemed to be delinquent or incorrigible were sent from the 1930s until the end of the 20th century. In some instances, the children's only "fault" was to be born out of wedlock.

The commission found that corporal punishment and other forms of physical abuse were standard practice at many institutions for dealing with any perceived misbehavior.

"Extreme punishment was a feature of the boys' schools. Prolonged, excessive beatings with implements intended to cause maximum pain occurred with the knowledge of staff management," the report says.

Girls also were subject to "ritualized beatings," often administered by the nuns in a way calculated to "increase anguish and humiliation," the report found.

"One way of doing this was for children to be left waiting for long periods to be beaten. Another was when it was accompanied by denigrating or humiliating language."

Some victims told the commission that seeing or hearing other children being beaten was a terrifying experience that has haunted them ever since.

"It's something you never forget," Tom Sweeney told Irish television, referring to the five years he spent in industrial schools, including two years at Artane, a facility run by the Christian Brothers in Dublin.

"Things didn't happen in your life after that," said Sweeney, 63. "Your life fell apart. Your marriage fell apart. Your communication with your children fell apart, and it all stems [from] being in Artane. We never got closure, and we never will get closure."
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

CHRONIC PAIN IS MY CONSTANT, INVOLUNTARY COMPANION -IT NEVER DOES AWAY, LIKE YOUR UNINVITED COUSIN FROM NEW YORK CITY.


http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!

THE SERENITY PRAYER
God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

 

 

An Existential View Of Loneliness

From an essay by Michele Carter, "Abiding Loneliness: An Existential Perspective," published by the Park Ridge Center for Health, Faith, and Ethics in Illinois.

"Many writers in the Western tradition portray...[the] existential form of loneliness as an unavoidable condition of our humanity. It resides in the innermost being of the self, expanding as each individual becomes aware of and confronts the ultimate experiences of life: change, upheaval, tragedy, joy, the passage of time, and death. Loneliness in this sense is not the same as suffering the loss of a loved one, or a perceived lack of a sense of wholeness or integrity. Further, it is not the unhealthy psychological defense against the threat of being alone, especially if being alone means we must confront the critical questions of life and death. Rather, existential loneliness is a way of being in the world, a way of grasping for and confronting one's own subjective truth. It is the experience of discovering one's own questions regarding human existence, and of confronting the sheer contingencies of the human condition. From an existential perspective, the lonely individual seeks to grasp some meaning in the face of life's impermanence, the angoisse of human freedom, and the inevitability of death. In his beautiful and tragic essay 'God's Lonely Man,' novelist Thomas Wolfe connects the intense loneliness of his own life to this universal aspect of humanity. He writes:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.

"For Wolfe, the experience of loneliness is neither strange nor curious, but 'inevitable and right' because it is part of the human heart. Just as the experience of joy is heightened by sorrow, loneliness, 'haunted always with the certainty of death,' makes life precious. Loneliness and death are thus inescapable facets of human existence, each ontologically necessary for a coherent human life.

"Loneliness is not the experience of what one lacks, but rather the experience of what one is. In a culture deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy and rights, the song of God's lonely man so often goes unvoiced and unheeded. It is ironic how much of our freedom we expend on power -- on conquering death, disease, and decay, all the while concealing from each other our carefully buried loneliness, which if shared, would deepen our understanding of each other."

 

Comment

Paul Tillich, in The Courage To Be, devotes many chapters to the issue of aloneness and existential anxiety. He offers this passage from one of Nietzsche's works:

Have ye courage, O my brethren?...He hath heart who knoweth fear but vanquisheth it; who seeth the abyss, but with pride. He who seeth the abyss but with eagle's eyes, -- he who with eagle's talons graspeththe abyss: he hath courage. (emphasis in original)

Tillich writes, "These words reveal the other side of Nietzsche, that in him which makes him an Existentialist, the courage to look into the abyss of nonbeing in the complete loneliness of him who accepts the message that 'God is dead.'"

Loneliness, on this view, is an experience to be welcomed rather than banished, for it brings us face to face with two of life's most important questions: What is life really all about, and how should I use my freedom to define myself? The line about God "being dead" is another way of saying that all the pressure and responsibility for leading a meaningful life lie squarely on our shoulders. We, not God, decide what we become. We and we alone are the authors and governors of our moral life. This is what the existentialists mean when they say that existence precedes essence; it is this realization, too, that is the most frightening of all.

Loneliness brings us to the abyss Nietzsche describes, and forces us to make a decision. The temptation to eradicate unpleasant subjectivity is irresistible for perhaps most people, and they seek out any experience that will enable them to forget about it. There is always the sense of belonging that membership in a group can provide. There is an existential safety in living a "relevant" life, being connected to the power center of one's society, having a respectable job, a family, a few material comforts. This path is not in and of itself false: that would depend on the person. Many find meaning and fulfillment in just such a life. But that path may also be chosen as a result of seeing one's own freedom and individuality as a threat: some would rather turn away from a life that holds out the hope of affirmation and creativity than endure the existential insecurity that it requires.

There are those individuals, however, who peer into the abyss and do not cower. We think of Gautama who gave up an opulent life and family in his late twenties to travel the world alone in search of meaning. Or Thoreau who retreated to the woods for a few years so that he might gain a decent perspective upon the world. Or to any number of fictional characters: for instance, Lester Burnham in the movie American Beauty, who comes to grips with the fact that he has spent his adult life in an emotional and moral coma, and who chases what bits of meaning and beauty are still available to him in acts of rebelliousness. Or, still yet, to Christopher Reeve, who knew that the odds of returning to a normal and happy life were slim to nil, but who resolved to turn an awful tragedy into a quest to ferret out scientific solutions to such debilitating diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So loneliness, on this reading, isn't something to be shunned or afraid of: it is, rather, a possible catalyst for a more purposeful and engaging life, and an avenue for heightened self-awareness.

-- Tim Ruggiero

Further Reading

"Philosophy And Depression"



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Monday, May 25, 2009

"GIVE PEACE A CHANCE" -MAKE MEMORIAL DAY A THING OF THE PAST.






THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ina2FBFZkNM

 The Unversal Soldier
Music video on the Buffy Saint-Marie song as performed by Eric Andersen 

EVEN IN DEATH, RACISM SEPARATES UNITED STATES SOLDIERS.

 32 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has praised the men and women of America's fighting forces as the "best of America."

The president spoke after participating in a solemn Memorial Day tradition, laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. It is the burial ground for American veterans dating back to the Revolutionary War.

In brief remarks after the wreath-laying, Obama wondered why the country's fallen warriors were willing to bear the heaviest burden.

He said a willingness to risk their lives for people they've never met "is why they are the best of America."

Obama also sought to avoid a racial controversy by sending flowers to a monument for Confederate soldiers and to a memorial honoring blacks who fought for the Union during the Civil War.


 Anitra Wetzel
Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land...
@ CSULA... a film screening
Hosted by: Dar Díaz The film Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land looks at dehumanization of Palestinians in U.S. news coverage. Are you interested in the Palestinian/Isr...
Host:The Humanists @ CSULA
Time:6:15PM Tuesday, May 26th
Venue:CSULA University Student Union, San Gabriel Room 313,(3rd floor)


INVEST IN PEACE -EDUCATION AND HEALTH AND SOCIAL WELFARE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiF5dtsB1Gc&feature=rec-HM-fresh+div

Pete Seeger sings "Guantanamera"

LYRICS: Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma Yo soy un hombre sincero, de donde crece la palma Y antes de morirme quiero echar mis versos de

Sainte Marie Buffy Lyrics

Universal Soldier Lyrics

He’s 5 foot 2 and he’s 6 feet 4
And he fights with missiles and with spears
He’s all of 31 and he’s only 17.
And he’s been a soldier for a thousand years

He’s a catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jane
A boarders, a Baptist and Jew.
And he knows he shouldn’t ‘ve killed
And he knows he always will kill
You’ll for me my freidn and me for you

He’s fighting for Canada.
He’s fighting for France.
He’s fighting for the USA.
And he’s fighting for the Russians.
And he’s fighting for Japan
And he thinks we’ll brought an end to war this way.

He’s fighting for democracy,
he’s fighting for the reds
He says it’s for the peace of all.
He’s the one, who must decide,
who’s to live and who’s to die.
And he never sees the writing on the walls.

But without him,
how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He’s the one who gives is body
as a weapon to the war.
And without him all this killing can’t go on

He’s the universal soldier
And he really is the blame
But his orders comes from
far away no more.

They come from him.
And you and me.
Oh, brothers can’t you see.
This is not the way we put an end to war.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGWsGyNsw00

Buffie Saint Marie sings 'The Universal Soldier."

an encore for the beautiful Buffie Saint Marie, singing live...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv9Oy7XoJJA&NR=1








Wayne Dennis Kurtz
Memorial Day
May 25, 2009.
How much time do we have left?


http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!


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Sunday, May 24, 2009

GO DADDY.COM IS A STUPID, SALACIOUS COME-ON!" SAYS LEO LAPORTE.


BOB PARSONS SELLS SOFT PORN SEX ADS, NOT DOMAIN NAMES...!

Exempli gratia = Danica Patrick.







http://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html







NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!




BOB PARSONS IS A SEXIST PIG.

PLEASE DON'T BUY HIS PRODUCTS...!

Wayne Dennis Kurtz.
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