The President Introduces Free Community College.

I spent more than half of 2005 in Iraq.

I was four years into my service in the Marine Corps, and as is the case with most of our young enlisted military members, I had enormous responsibilities for a twenty-two year-old. Grateful for the opportunity to serve, and thankful for the experiences the Marine Corps gave to me, I left active duty in 2006, excited at the prospect of new cities, new jobs, and the chance to go to college.

The Marine Corps gave me excellent job skills, world-class leadership training, and a ton of willpower and ambition. Still, academia was somewhat intimidating. Trading a base for a campus, and military leaders for professors felt like a huge step. To make the transition a bit easier I moved back to my home state of Florida, and found Valencia Community College -- where I was able to use my GI Bill education benefits to attend for free.

I found diverse classrooms full of people with varying backgrounds and experiences -- from kids straight out of high school to seasoned professionals pursuing a career change. I fit right in. Community colleges were made for people like me; they're designed to take persons from all walks of life and help them embark on their next adventure. People like Dr. Brooks and Professor Zuromski made me love learning and sparked a hunger for knowledge I didn’t know I had.

More Americans should have this opportunity. Today, the President is announcing a campaign called “Heads Up,” and the idea is simple: Let’s make two years of community college free for anyone willing to work for it.

Watch the President announce it -- and ask Americans to join the movement.

At Valencia, I wasn’t just in the classroom -- I was leading fellow students in groups like Model UN, where I studied diplomacy and foreign affairs. I was an editor for The Phoenix, Valencia’s annual literary magazine, where I honed my writing skills and learned the value of creative expression. While I was there I also earned my place in the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society. It was all a valuable part of my academic, personal, and professional growth.

Valencia Community College also prepared me to tackle classes at one of America’s oldest and most rigorous academic institutions -- Columbia University, where I finished my undergraduate degree. I majored in philosophy, a discipline I wasn’t exposed to until I took Professor Wallman’s amazing Intro to Philosophy class at Valencia. Not only did community college make Columbia possible for me, it gave me the tools to experience it to its fullest measure.

Today I work at The White House as an Associate Director in the Office of Public Engagement. I have the privilege of being the President’s liaison to military service members, veterans, and their families. I can’t express in one message how grateful I am to have been given this opportunity, and how fulfilling it is to work with, and for, a group as deserving as they are.

It’s hard for me to fully grasp the incredible things that have happened in my life in the eight years since I first stepped foot on a community college campus, but I feel confident that taking that step made it all possible.

More people should have that chance. That’s what the President thinks, and I agree.

Watch him launch a new campaign to make community college free for anyone willing to work for it, and call on Americans to join the movement.

Up until now I’ve shared my story with a largely military and veteran audience, encouraging those with the ambition to take advantage of their education benefits because you never know where it’s going to lead. I’m sharing my story with you now because we have the chance to make sure that everyone has the opportunity I did. We should do what we can to ensure everyone in America who wishes, has the chance to go to community college for free.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

Ryan Robinson
Associate Director of Public Affairs
The White House

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THE CASE AGAINST STEPHEN HARPER.

" Until recently, Canada’s upcoming election seemed headed for a three-way tie, with potential for constitutional turmoil if Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to stay in power. Harper’s Conservatives, Opposition Leader Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals each hovered around 30 percent in the polls ahead of the October 19 vote.

Then the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed ashore on a Turkish beach, and initial reports suggested relatives had been trying to bring the Syrian boy and his family to Canada, only to be rebuffed under new, Harper-imposed rules that have slowed the admission of Syrian refugees to a trickle. The real story turned out to be more complicated. Canadian immigration officials had actually rejected a refugee application from Alan’s uncle’s family, although Alan’s aunt in Vancouver said the application had been part of a two-stage plan to eventually resettle the entire extended family in Canada.

RELATED STORY

The Delusions of the Canadian Mind

From his hermetically sealed campaign tour, where Harper permits only a handful of press questions daily, the prime ministerreacted to the outcry over Canada’s asylum policies grudgingly, insisting Syrian refugees had to be carefully vetted lest they pose security threats. The real solution, he said, lay in the continued bombing of the Islamic State, a military campaign in which Canada has a minor role. Under aggressive questioning by a CBC reporter, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander refused to say how many Syrians had been admitted to Canada—apparently because the number is so embarrassingly small.

The response seemed stubborn and mean-spirited—a far cry from the days when Canada sent transport planes and squads of immigration officers to speedily admit Vietnamese refugees. A survey released amid the controversy showed the Conservatives slipping into third place in the polls.

The episode only served to underscore the intense animosity Harper inspires among voters who believe he has diminished national attributes they cherish and the rest of the world admires: Canada’s time-honored posture of friendly (and occasionally not-so-friendly) independence from U.S. foreign policy, replaced by feckless, me-too saber-rattling; its once-proud role as lead supplier of UN peacekeepers, already hollowed out under previous Liberal governments, nowreplaced by frugal financial contributions to support troop deployments by poorer countries; a reputation among its leaders for courtesy and compromise, replaced by a disagreeable, winner-take-all attitude. Previous governments thrashed out major domestic issues at annual conferences featuring the prime minister and provincial premiers, but Harper has refused to attend any. Instead, he has picked unseemly fights with premiers who challenge his policies, once reportedly telling Danny Williams, who was premier of Newfoundland and Labrador at the time, “You’re not going to fuck with my country.”

Harper’s acolytes have taken to mocking the indignation the Canadian leader inspires as Harper Derangement Syndrome: “an ideological hatred of Prime Minister Stephen Harper that is so acute its sufferers’ ability to reason logically is impaired.”

Given Harper’s offenses to the country’s tradition of political and social liberalism, it’s hard to believe Frum’s mystification is sincere.

Recently, readers of The Atlantic got a genteel version of this trope when the magazine’s Toronto-reared senior editor, David Frum, posted a rebuttal to a heated New York Times op-ed by the Toronto-based novelist and social commentator Stephen Marche excoriating Harper’s tenure.

 Marche’s column hit many highlights of the case against Harper: repeatedscandals involving election fraud; a perversely titled “Fair Elections Act” thatdefanged the independent agency responsible for administering elections and barred it from promoting voting among underrepresented groups; tightened voter-ID rules that target young and aboriginal citizens not prone to voting for the Conservative Party; defunded medical and scientific research; the muzzlingof government scientists; a bizarre, almost universally decried debasement of Canada’s census; a prison-building spree that coincides with plummeting crime rates; a preoccupation with promoting dirty Tar Sands oil production to the detriment of the rest of the economy.

Frum, a sometime advisor to the Conservative Party, expresses befuddlement at Marche’s failure to appreciate Harper’s calming grip on the Canadian tiller. Given Harper’s many offenses to the country’s long tradition of political and social liberalism, it’s hard to believe Frum’s mystification is sincere. He zeros in on minor examples of grievances against the prime minister as if they were the totality of the argument, then ridicules them as “micro-transgressions” unworthy of more than mild reproach—certainly not “how Francisco Franco got his start.”

No serious commentator thinks Harper is a nascent Franco, but two aspects of his behavior are especially troubling: his casual disregard for parliamentary norms, and his seemingly willful suppression of information that might conflict with his ideology-driven policies.

Harper’s government is the first in the history of the Commonwealth to be found in contempt of Parliament.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows has written about the importance of traditional norms, as opposed to written rules, for the proper functioning of Congress and international diplomacy. Norms are even more important in parliamentary systems, many aspects of which are guided solely by convention. The prime minister is the most powerful actor in the Canadian government, but Canada’s written constitution mentions the position only in passing. Caucus whips enforce party-line voting on almost every vote in Canada’s House of Commons, so prime ministers of majority governments face few obstacles to passing whatever measures they want. Voluntary restraint on the part of the government is the main check on this exceptional power, and a key area where many voters feel Harper has come up short.

When he was in the political opposition, Harper spoke eloquently against the Liberal government’s use of an omnibus bill to cobble unrelated measures involving several government departments into a single package. That bill ran to 21 pages. And yet as prime minister, Harper has made Brobdingnagian bills the default method for implementing his agenda, starting with an 880-page monstrosity in 2010. Two omnibus bills that passed in 2012 ran to a combined 900 pages and amended 135 unrelated laws.

 As Harper pointed out before rising to power, omnibus bills “go to only one committee of the House, a committee that will inevitably lack the breadth of expertise required for consideration of a bill of this scope.” They limit debate and force legislators to cast a single up-or-down vote on disparate policies they may support, oppose, or think worthy of amendment.

The Supreme Court of Canada has frequently overturned sections of lawspassed in this manner. When the Court found a Harper appointee ineligible for one of its three Quebec seats, Harper and Justice Minister Peter MacKay responded with an unseemly broadside against the chief justice, falsely accusing her of an improper attempt to interfere with the appointment. This drew a sharp rebuke from former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, a Progressive Conservative who now supports the Conservative Party, and demands for an apology from the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists. No apology came.

When a career foreign service officer warned that Canadian troops were turning Afghan prisoners over to the Afghan Army to be tortured, MacKay, then serving as Harper’s defense minister, attacked the officer in the House of Commons as apatsy for the Taliban.

After Parliament’s veterans’ ombudsman criticized the government for replacing injured soldiers’ disability benefits with inadequate lump-sum payments, his appointment was not renewed                                                                            Equally troubling are Harper’s efforts to control and suppress government

information, especially that which could run counter to his political agenda.                    

 A year after scrapping Canada’s mandatory long-form census, 

Harper’s government became the first in the history of the 

British Commonwealth to be found in contempt of Parliament, 

for failing to provide documentation on several budget items. 

The independent parliamentary budget officer grew so frustrated with his

 inability to access

 the government’s financial records that hesued for them. 

Like the veterans’ ombudsman, 

he was not reappointed.

The only “difficulty of explaining Harper’s horribleness” involves deciding which of his retrograde policies and postures to leave off an ever-lengthening list of grievances.

The Prime Minister’s Office and its adjunct, the Privy Council Office, micromanage government activities in the farthest-flung outposts. Responses to the most minor media inquiries are subject to intense vetting that blurs the line between partisan political operations and the traditionally nonpartisan civil service.

Micromanagement has been especially intense during the election campaign. This encompasses not merely, as Frum dismissively describes it, a few rules to make press conferences “less rowdy.” Local Conservative candidates have reportedly been discouraged from taking part in debates or giving interviews. Rigidly enforced media arrangements at Harper campaign stops seem designed not only to keep reporters away from the prime minister, but also to keep them from his carefully vetted supporters and anyone who shows up to protest. This in a country where informal interactions between politicians and the public have long been commonplace. As a former New Democratic staffer now working as a lobbyist wrote in August:

Stephen Harper may become Canada’s first political leader to have conducted an entire national election without once meeting an unvetted, non-partisan ordinary voter; nor encountered a national reporter who had not paid for his seat and the promise of an occasional question. (And only if your question has been vetted and approved and you behave yourself, mind.)

The approach isn’t working. Too many Canadians are embarrassed at having theworst record on climate change in the industrialized world. They recoil at the Harper government’s decision to remove environmental-assessment requirements from the development of most of the country’s waterways. They shake their heads at the corruption trial of a buffoonish Harper-appointed senator (charged with accepting a bribe from Harper’s former top aide, who was inexplicably not charged with proffering the bribe). Even after a lone wannabe jihadist shot a Canadian soldier dead and invaded Parliament to terrorize lawmakers before dying in a shootout, many Canadians object to Harper’s latestanti-terror legislation, which increases domestic surveillance and imposes preventative detention.

Frum has it backwards. The only “difficulty of explaining Harper’s horribleness” involves deciding which of his retrograde policies and postures to leave off an ever-lengthening list of grievances. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the electorate want his government sacked. At the moment, they are evenly divided between two competing center-left parties. In October, voters may choose the one most likely to bring Harper’s nine-year reign to a close, or the Liberals and New Democrats may face pressure to cooperate in forming a new government—a government, let us hope, that is far more respectful of the norms and values that have long made Canada the country that it is."

Glyphosate is deadly dangerous. Stop eating it!

Monsanto’s weed-killing Roundup has just been classified as a likely carcinogen. Tell Amazon to stop selling Roundup and other glyphosate products immediately. Sign the petition Joseph, The active ingredient in the world’s most widely used weed killer, Monsanto's Roundup, has just been classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the World Health Organization. But Amazon is still selling the stuff. The evidence against glyphosate, the dangerous ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, is mounting and the bio-tech giant is furiously scrambling to discredit the science. Luckily, we have a surefire way to fight Monsanto and stop the spread of Roundup -- target its biggest retailers. Imagine if we could get the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, to stop selling glyphosate. The impact would be enormous. And what’s more, this strategy has worked before -- after nearly 750,000 SumOfUs members asked huge North American retailers to stop selling bee-harming pesticides, both Lowe’s and Home Depot listened. Tell Amazon to stop selling Roundup and other cancer-causing glyphosate products immediately. Glyphosate has been linked to toxicity in our food and water. Wherever it’s used, this long-lasting powerful herbicide can be found in surface water, groundwater, soil and even in humans. It may be pushing some crops and species to the verge of extinction, including monarch butterfly populations and amphibians. If we want to protect wildlife, biodiversity and our water supplies, we need to stop the sale of Roundup. We know that Amazon listens to public outcry. In 2013, the giant online retailer agreed to stop selling foie gras on its UK website after animal welfare campaigners piled on the pressure. And people power works -- after 185,000 of us called on Amazon to treat its workers better and we showed up at the company’s AGM with a shareholder resolution in hand, its top executives were forced to respond to us. Now let’s get it to stop selling Roundup. At this point, the only reason Amazon is selling Roundup and other glyphosate products is to pad its bottom line. But this chemical has no place in the 21st century -- and a 21st century retailer should have nothing to do with it. Lets get the world's largest online retailer to stop selling Monsanto's Roundup now. Thanks for all that you do, Angus, Liz, and the SumOfUs team

ALL THE ENERGY THAT EVER WAS STILL IS.

ALL THE ENERGY THAT EVER WAS STILL IS.

All the energy that ever was still is constantly changing within the eternal energy of the Universe. This magnificent concept of eternity has intrigued human imagination for centuries and because the human brain has trouble understanding an eternity of changing energy, we humans have created imaginary Gods to give us a sense of tranquility. All religious beliefs have evolved from a fear of change and are based on the hope for eternal life after death. Religious beliefs, unfortunately, have created more death than peace on Earth during our human history and thankfully today millions are abandoning the indoctrination and fear based imaginary concepts imposed upon them as children.

Unfortunately, many are also abandoning the strict rules and guidelines and basic Ethics that religious authorities imposed over centuries to create civilized behavior. Those moral guidelines and Ethics are now often badly enforced by civil authorities around the world who continue to punish unlawful behavior using the same dangerous and antiquated penal systems created by the ancient religious authorities. That needs to be updated with better education and better humanitarian correctional methods.

Today, parents and educators are looking up at the galaxies and pondering new and marvelous questions. What are light years? What are: Nebulas and Star formations and Gas giants and Black Holes? With magnificent modern technology giving us the ability to see far-off galaxies we can now give to our children science-based facts and a new sense of wonderment. Science is replacing fear based religious fantasies with a magnificent new understanding of the universe. With provable facts, we can now see what was once hidden to our parents and space has become a new playground for those who possess high intelligence and the courage to explore where no human has gone before.

For the rest of us who need some form of a comfort zone to find inner peace, I suggest we all do as our ancestors did and worship Nature. I specifically recommend protecting and growing trees and flowers and pesticide free vegetable gardens. I also recommend love as a natural comfort zone. Do you remember this message from the past? "If you can't be with the one you love then love the one you're with." For our young and young at hearts who enjoy love and sex, be careful and protect your emotions from unscrupulous corporate mind benders. They usurped sex and commercially use it to exploit so-called consumers. Sex has become a modern form of religious indoctrination utilizing repetitive advertising to sell consumer products and it is not, I repeat, a good thing! I repeat again! Many companies want to win and maintain economic power utilizing sex to sell their products even while they continue to pollute us off the Earth!

In conclusion, our human economic and political power should be invested on and for the protection of all life on this our small planet earth if we wish to continue enjoying our own conscious human energy forms. If not, we can imagine how energy will continue to change with or without us!

Thanks for reading and have a great life!.

Signed: Joseph Raglione. Friday, September 11, 2015

Tidal Waves of Human Misery Could be Avoided!

   The world today is filled with misery and the tidal wave of refugees now escaping Syria is another example of what can happen when psychopathic dictators gain political and military power.

  After the second World-War, the United Nations was created to avoid and stop the kind of human misery created by that war. Today, however,  member nations of the U.N. are not truly united and once again there is an on-going crime against humanity. Syria is in civil war because the dangerous and psychopathic leader of that country, Asaad, has aligned himself with another dangerous dictator, Putin of Russia, and they are both ruling with impunity and by force. All it takes is for small countries like Syria or Iran or Iraq to align themselves with larger and more powerful countries like Russia, or China or even the United States and they hamstring the United Nations. The U.N. becomes helpless to stop civil wars and crimes against humanity. All through human history wars were created when smaller countries joined forces and created military pacts with one another and with larger countries. At the start of World War One for example, all it took was one shot to start a Domino effect and a massacre and a few years later, at the start of World War Two, psychopathic Hitler created military pacts with Austria, Spain, Italy and Japan and went on to cause the deaths of Fifty million people!

 When the most dangerous and powerful government leaders feel they can ignore the dictates of the U.N.. the world faces trouble! With economic and military strength, a few government leaders within the United States, Russia, China, and Canada become dangerous and self-serving human beings. Today the leaders of these countries are basically business people looking for Oil and other natural resources and when one or two become drunk with power, they must be discovered and removed from power before they create a civil war or genocide or a brutal tidal wave of refugees!

 After World War Two, a court at the Hague was created for suspected war criminals. That court must once again become fully operational to discover and confront as early as possible psychopathic government leaders attempting to rule with dangerous impunity. In fact it would be safer for the world if all potential national leaders were forced to pass medical and psychiatric examinations sponsored by the United Nations before they took power within their home countries.

Beautiful music for wonderful people who like to take pictures!

I understand it is not a beautiful nature photograph but it is magnificent music and it creates beautiful feelings!

For all my photographic friends, here is music that will fill your hearts with wonderful emotions!
Andre Rieu & Friends - Live in Maastricht  V11 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiwI5k-gFwc

Give them five minutes and you will be stuck to your seats. It is absolutely magnificent music!

Remind PM Harper: Canadians welcome refugees‏

Remind PM Harper: Canadians welcome refugees‏

Remind PM Harper: Canadians welcome refugees

Alex Neve, Amnesty International Canada

 

 

9/03/15

 

 Newsletters

To: human4us@bell.net

Yesterday the body of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi washed a shore on a Turkish beach

 

REMIND Prime Minister Harper & Party Leaders: 
CANADIANS WELCOME REFUGEES

Dear Joseph,

Such an event of sorrow, disgrace, and fury.

Yesterday the body of 3 year old Aylan Kurdi washed ashore on a Turkish beach, along with his mother and his young brother  -- all believed to have drowned as they tried to make a perilous, nighttime crossing to safety in Europe. 

Aylan’s family set out on their dangerous journey from Syria after an application made by his uncle to resettle with an aunt in Canada was rejected for unknown reasons. 

Aylan's story is a heartbreaking and infuriating reminder that the Syrian refugee crisis isalso Canada's crisis. 

>>TAKE ACTION: Send a strong message to Prime Minister Harper and all party leaders: CANADIANS WELCOME REFUGEES.

Canada’s commitment to resettling refugees has so far been modest, and the processing rates painfully slow. It is time for Canada to act decisively and generously to open up places of safety for those fleeing conflict. It’s a matter of life and death.

Now more than ever, Syrian refugees need our voices to get LOUDER.

Please use your Social Media channels to ask your friends and family to take action today!  

Share  Tweet

Thank you for reminding our political leaders that Canadians care and want action now. 

With thanks,

Alex Neve
Secretary General
Amnesty International Canada

   

Our  international Index of great web sites.  If some links don't work, try copying and pasting directly into Google. This week I recommend you visit number 58 in our list for off this world pictures!    

 1.=    http://www.freeChess.org      

 2. =  http://www.netflix.com/WiHome </> 
 3.=   http://www.webcrawler.com/%E2%80%8E/support/addsearchtosite?qc=web&aid=c7d63d78-d17e-49d5-a735-4e642b7855ac&ridx=1 </>

4.=     https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=mKPmUor8O4zxrAGy44BY </>

5.=     http://www.Youtube.com</>   
6. =    http://www.Greenpeace.org </> 
7.=     http://www.human4us.net </>

8. =    http://www.NASA.GOV</> 
9. =    http://www.teamsternation.com </>

/2014/02/.html</>

10.=    http://www.Ted.com</> 
11.=    http://ca.yahoo.com/?p=us</> 
12. =   http://www.Reuters.com</>

13.=    http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles</>

14.=    http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/360-panorama-paris/index-en.html</>

15.=    http://www.greatwallchina.info/news/index.htm</>

16.=    http://www.geographia.com/russia/moscow02.htm</>

17. =   http://www.wwfindia.org/</> 
18. =   http://www.youtube.com/</>

19.=    theobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80167&eocn=te&eoci=index</>

20.=    http://www.un.org/en/</>      21. =   http://storyofstuff.org/  22. =   wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory </>

23.=    http://www.dalailama.com/  24.=    http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/francesco/ </>

25.=    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV4aB5EeN6o </> 26. =   http://www.bbc.com/news/health-24564446 </>

27.=    http://www.kijiji.ca/ </>        28.=    http://www.nytimes.com/ </>

29.=    http://video.canadiens.nhl.com/videocenter/console?catid=291&id=587397&lang  </>

30.=    http://www.iTooch.com </>  31. =   http://www.Netmaths.com </>    32. =   http://www.Evernote.com</>

33. =   http://www.abmaths.com</>  34. =   http://www.Sciences.com</>      35. =   http://www.iBooks.com </>

36. =   http://www.skitch.com</>  37. =   https://plus.google.com/u/0/  </>  38.=   http://www.jaccorde.com</>

39.=   http://www.Atlasdumonde.com </>  40.=   http://www.Echecs.com </>  41.=   http://mlb.mlb.com/home </>

42.=   http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/ </> 43.=   http://www.nfl.com/ </>

44.=   http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83650</>

45.=   http://crowdenergy.org/ocean-energy-turbine-kickstarter-video/</>

46.=   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVmmpGeR6nk</>

47.=   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events </>     48.   http://www.sierraclub.org/ 

49.        http://eol.org/ </>    50.       http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/</>
51.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiwI5k-gFwc
52.   http://www.emsl.pnnl.gov/emslweb/news/new-hypothesis-environmental-restoration.
53.   https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/sciencenews
54.   www.drbookspan.com/
55.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_lighthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light
56.   http://www.nova.org.au/space-time/dark-stuff-our-universe
57.   http://cosmicdiary.org/geminiplanetimager/2015/09/02/what-self-luminous-plan
58.   http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Collections/