CARLOS F. MÁRQUEZ

Conservacion de Patzcuaro

Above is a link to a very interesting and informative article about Enrigue Luft and the historic conservation of Patzcuaro. Because the article is in Spanish I would like to provide a brief summary as follows.

Last Friday tribute was given to Enrigue Luft for his effort to preserve the history and culture of Patzcuaro. It is noted that the city has been designated a prime tourist center been highly published as such the Pueblo Magico ads but the federal government. Those that really love Patzcuaro and its history have come to realize how trying to push the city into becoming a more modern city have hurt more than helped it destroying what it really should be. It should hold true to it’s history of old churches and a people that value it’s culture and traditions.

Enrique’s has realized in Patzcuaro the important work of restoration, conservation, and promotion of the rich culture and architecture of the city. And that is why he was honored.

He did not have kind words for what has become of the city and so we are admonished that the  conservation of Patzcuaro should part of the political agenda. There is so much more in this article that we should take note of, such as the criticism of the governments Pueblo Magic program but is you are interested please go to the actual article why does a great job of telling it like it is!

And if you don’t read Spanish maybe I can help translate a bit.

Posted By Rich Mont to FREE HOLE ERO at 9/06/2009 12:41:00 PM

Mexico offers health insurance for migrants’ kin

Sat Sep 5, 12:42 am ET

MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s Health Department says it will launch a pilot program to encourage migrants working in the United States to sign up their families in Mexico for the Mexican government’s low-income health insurance program.

The department says the program will start in the state of Colorado, and will eventually be extended to other states, mainly through Mexican consulate.

The "Seguro Popular" insurance program offers low-cost coverage to people not covered by other plans.

The department said in a statement Friday the program was part of a plan to achieve full health coverage for Mexicans by 2012.

Nearly 12 million Mexicans live in the United States.

View this message as a web page.

Dear Ricardo,

Millions of students around the country are returning to school this month.

But now there’s a new R in addition to the three old ones: Recruitment.  By law, schools must give recruiters access to students, and the military often targets teens from poor neighborhoods young people who may not know what their alternatives are.  

The conscientious objectors who founded the American Friends Service Committee during World War I believed there were peaceful, honorable alternatives to military service.  We still believe that today.

That’s why I’m eager this month to share stories about our work to broaden the dialogue in schools across the country to include peace.

With violence in Afghanistan escalating and military leaders calling for more troops, our peace work with teenagers has gained renewed importance.  We’ve had victories in Georgia and North Carolina and have brought together teens from many cities to learn how to refute recruiters’ claims and share the truth about military service with their peers.

Perhaps William Penn said it best: “Force may make hypocrites, but it can never make converts.”  This month, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating our victories over military might.

Peace,

Mary Ellen McNish,
General Secretary,
American Friends Service Committee

Peace wins in NC
Students in North Carolina’s Wilkes County now can access AFSC resources on alternatives to the military.

Go (away), Army!
On September 12, activists plan a protest at the Army Experience Center in Franklin Mills Mall near Philadelphia.

Meet up in Chicago
This summer, about 100 teenagers gathered in Chicago in an effort to learn to stop war before it starts.

Rebel with a cause
The Marines offered a high school that would turn out disciplined students with high test scores.  AFSC’s Tim Franzen wasn’t so sure.

Get your own It’s My Life
Buy AFSC’s resource on alternatives to a career in the military for your local youth groups, school, or library for $9.95 (20% discount on packs of 10)

American Friends Service Committee
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
http://www.afsc.org/

Please follow this link to unsubscribe or change your email preferences.

Now I don’t have much of a problem with the trucks being there. They keep the place reasonably clean. The noise of the trucks early in the morning starting up to go on their rounds may deprive us of the extra hour of sleep. The annual fair held on this grounds last year was fun at first but got to be a bit much when the crowds started to thicken and along with that the increase in the crowd noise. The huge fun rides towering over us were just that, fun! The bright lights from the rides were cool! It was just the really loud and noisy bands playing on the same property that really did us in! Hopefully the city will abandon holding such event to this lot but I seriously doubt if they will take the average citizens’ concerns to heart.

Well that was not what I was going to write about but may still tie in with the mysterious structure that I am seeing going up alongside this property. I cannot make heads or tail of it purpose! It sometimes resemble a maze. At other times it appears to be a very sturdy loading dock. I tried to find out exactly what it is to be. But when I went to the city’s planning department in el centro I found out that they had moved somewhere else. They used to have posters and picture of ongoing projects. Raise suspicions that they may not want the public to know what they are up to.

Maybe someone can give me a clue as to what they are building?

Now I don’t have much of a problem with the trucks being there. They keep the place reasonably clean. The noise of the trucks early in the morning starting up to go on their rounds may deprive us of the extra hour of sleep. The annual fair held on this grounds last year was fun at first but got to be a bit much when the crowds started to thicken and along with that the increase in the crowd noise. The huge fun rides towering over us were just that, fun! The bright lights from the rides were cool! It was just the really loud and noisy bands playing on the same property that really did us in! Hopefully the city will abandon holding such event to this lot but I seriously doubt if they will take the average citizens’ concerns to heart.

Well that was not what I was going to write about but may still tie in with the mysterious structure that I am seeing going up alongside this property. I cannot make heads or tail of it purpose! It sometimes resemble a maze. At other times it appears to be a very sturdy loading dock. I tried to find out exactly what it is to be. But when I went to the city’s planning department in el centro I found out that they had moved somewhere else. They used to have posters and picture of ongoing projects. Raise suspicions that they may not want the public to know what they are up to.

Maybe someone can give me a clue as to what they are building?

So-and-so has added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know So-and-so in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

I’m almost sure that many of you have gotten a similar message and dealt appropriately with it. For that past year or so I have been getting such requests and for the most part ignoring them.

Now don’t get me wrong, I could probably use all the friends that I can get! The problem is that I value my privacy more than my desire to acknowledge my circle of friends or to try to add to it.

I valued my privacy so much that I opted to get out of Facebook some time ago. So I am not sure why the requests kept coming and coming and coming! Well things had to change even though I was not too keen to making that change. I have loads of family members on Facebook. And, my oldest boy want to be a part of his circle. So of course I had to go along with that request!

One the one hand I am glad that I did because I’ve gotten to catch up on things with family and friends whom might have thought that I had passed on to a better life. I have even connected to an old buddy that I had lost touch with wondered how on earth I was ever going to find again. That is the good part of my acquiescing to the many requests that I join Facebook.

I’ve even shared lengthy comments with my son about computers. I had missed these chats. Even managed to say brief “hellos” with others with which I have wanted to share brief hellos with.

But I do not really want to be friends with everybody on Facebook! I’d rather have a following of twenty or so close friends and family than to open my doors to the whole world. Who really needs one thousand or more friends? There are very few people that I want to know what I am doing at any particular time. Guess that I am kind of funny about that.

Communicating with someone using the internet is what brought me here and were it not for being able to talk with family and friends through this medium I might have found it hard to remain here. So I must say “Viva el Internet”!

Key milestones in the development of Internet

• Key milestones in the development and growth of the Internet:

1969: On Sept. 2, two computers at University of California, Los Angeles, exchange meaningless data in first test of Arpanet, an experimental military network. The first connection between two sites — UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. — takes place on Oct. 29, though the network crashes after the first two letters of the word "logon." UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah later join.

1970: Arpanet gets first East Coast node, at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Mass.

1972: Ray Tomlinson brings e-mail to the network, choosing "at" symbol as way to specify e-mail addresses belonging to other systems.

1973: Arpanet gets first international nodes, in England and Norway.

1974: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn develop communications technique called TCP, allowing multiple networks to understand one another, creating a true Internet. Concept later splits into TCP/IP before formal adoption on Jan. 1, 1983.

1983: Domain name system is proposed. Creation of suffixes such as ".com," ".gov" and ".edu" comes a year later.

1988: One of the first Internet worms, Morris, cripples thousands of computers.

1989: Quantum Computer Services, now AOL, introduces America Online service for Macintosh and Apple II computers, beginning an expansion that would connect nearly 27 million Americans online by 2002.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web while developing ways to control computers remotely at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

1993: Marc Andreessen and colleagues at University of Illinois create Mosaic, the first Web browser to combine graphics and text on a single page, opening the Web to the world with software that is easy to use.

1994: Andreessen and others on the Mosaic team form a company to develop the first commercial Web browser, Netscape, piquing the interest of Microsoft Corp. and other developers who would tap the Web’s commerce potential. Two immigration lawyers introduce the world to spam, advertising their green card lottery services.

1995: Amazon.com Inc. opens its virtual doors.

1996: Passage of U.S. law curbing pornography online. Although key provisions are later struck down as unconstitutional, one that remains protects online services from liability for their users’ conduct, allowing information — and misinformation — to thrive.

1998: Google Inc. forms out of a project that began in Stanford dorm rooms. U.S. government delegates oversight of domain name policies to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Justice Department and 20 states sue Microsoft, accusing the maker of the ubiquitous Windows operating system of abusing its market power to thwart competition from Netscape and others.

1999: Napster popularizes music file-sharing and spawns successors that have permanently changed the recording industry. World Internet population surpasses 250 million.

2000: The dot-com boom of the 1990s becomes a bust as technology companies slide. Amazon.com, eBay and other sites are crippled in one of the first widespread uses of the denial-of-service attack, which floods a site with so much bogus traffic that legitimate users cannot visit.

2002: World Internet population surpasses 500 million.

2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.

2005: Launch of YouTube video-sharing site.

2006: World Internet population surpasses 1 billion.

2007: Apple Inc. releases iPhone, introducing millions more to wireless Internet access.

2008: World Internet population surpasses 1.5 billion. China’s Internet population reaches 250 million, surpassing the United States as the world’s largest. Netscape’s developers pull the plug on the pioneer browser, though an offshoot, Firefox, remains strong. Major airlines intensify deployment of Internet service on flights.

2009: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer becomes the first major daily newspaper to move entirely online. Google announces development of a free computer operating system designed for a user experience that primarily takes place on the Web.

AP – 2 hrs 58 mins ago

AP

WASHINGTON – A leading GOP negotiator on health care struck a further blow to fading chances of a bipartisan compromise by saying Democratic proposals would restrict medical choices and make the country’s "finances sicker without saving you money." Full Story »

It could very well be that this is not the time and that Democrats should just bide their time increase their numbers and then go it alone?

The Whig Party (see link) (That is the Republican Party) will soon fade away and we will not have to deal with them in the near future!

Fri Aug 28, 11:56 pm ET

Link to story at AP

MEXICO CITY – A Mexican official says discrimination against Mexicans in the United States is growing and is most pronounced in areas where immigration is relatively new.

Director of Consular Affairs and Protection Daniel Hernandez says that "where we are seeing the most complex, hard and deep-seated discrimination is in areas where immigration is new, where there may be fewer Mexicans."

Hernandez says "precisely because there are fewer Mexicans, the discrimination is tougher," although he did not cite specific examples or causes for the trend in a talk Friday.

He says there appears to be less discrimination in areas like Texas or California, with long-standing Mexican immigrant communities. Almost 12 million Mexicans live in the United States.

Most of my kids live in Texas with a daughter in Florida. So my concern is for my son and his family in Nebraska. My son and his children do look “Mexican”! They live a community that is inclusive and very welcoming but what about other places around the country who hold the attitude of “they are not like us”?

Ted Kennedy was not saint but he did a lot of good for many.

Viva Kennedy!

For immigrants, Kennedy remained tireless advocate

AP – FILE – In this Sunday, Aug. 10, 1980 file photo, Sen. Edward Kennedy gestures as he stands with Cesar …

By RUSSELL CONTRERAS, Associated Press Writer Russell Contreras, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 45 mins ago

BOSTON – Before 1965, Leticia Hermosa had little chance of crossing the Pacific to the U.S. from the Philippines. Hermosa, a nurse, and others like her just couldn’t get through the strict U.S. immigration quota system, which favored Western Europeans and essentially excluded those from Asia and Latin America.

But after Sen. Edward Kennedy pushed through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the door opened for her to immigrate in 1973 to Boston, where she eventually finished school, got a law degree and became a U.S. citizen.

On Thursday, Hermosa stood in line with thousands of others at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum to pay her respects to the late senator. "If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today," said the 55-year-old Hermosa, who now lives in Westwood, Mass.

As the nation mourns Kennedy, who died this week of a brain tumor at age 77, historians and immigrant advocates are remembering the senator — perhaps more than any other — as championing legislation that directly benefited immigrants, their children and their grandchildren. The 1965 law that he sponsored fundamentally changed the demographics of the country and transformed many urban enclaves into majority-minority cities.

But they say Kennedy also remained a "point man" in the Senate for immigrant advocates and minorities throughout his career, even supporting recent proposals to overhaul immigration laws aimed at undocumented workers.

"Sen. Kennedy was always committed to us and also tried to do what he could on our behalf," said Arturo S. Rodriguez, president of the California-based United Farm Workers, a group co-founded by the late Cesar Chavez.

Kennedy advocated for the children of immigrants and minorities by pushing legislation on voting rights and health care for uninsured children, Rodriguez said.

Tatcho Mindiola, the director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston, said Kennedy remained an ally for immigrants and minorities, even though Massachusetts didn’t have a sizable Latino or Asian population.

"He had no constituency he was trying to serve, other than what he saw was fair and just," Mindiola said.

Ignacio M. Garcia, author of "Viva Kennedy: Mexican Americans in search of Camelot" and a history professor at Utah’s Brigham Young University, said Kennedy developed strong ties with advocates during his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign.

While campaigning as the point person for "Viva Kennedy" clubs in the American Southwest, the youngest Kennedy brother saw firsthand the effects of Latino segregation, Garcia said.

"He established relationships even before his brothers did, and in a more direct way," Garcia said. "John F. Kennedy would disappoint, Robert Kennedy never really got the chance, but Ted would become the go-to guy."

William Bonilla, 79, a lawyer in Corpus Christi, Texas, and former national president for the League of United Latin American Citizens, said that whenever Latino groups invited Kennedy to speak, the room was packed.

"He spoke more for us than our own senators we elected from Texas," Bonilla said.

Political observers say Kennedy’s most lasting legacy may be the rarely mentioned 1965 immigration law. Before its passage, a national origins quota system was in place to mirror the largely white-ancestral makeup of the U.S.

Rep. Charles A. Gonzalez, D-Texas, whose late father, Henry, served in Congress and worked with Kennedy on the legislation, said the bill would not have passed without Kennedy.

"He was huge and instrumental," Gonzalez said. "There’s no way you can describe the importance of his involvement. He put all of his talents to make it work."

In 1965, the U.S. was around 85 percent white, according to various estimates. Today, a third of the country is minority, and nonwhites are on track to become the majority sometime in the 2040s.

Minority populations have grown by leaps and bounds because of high birth rates among those first generations of immigrants and a steady flow from Latin America, Asian and Africa since.

Some political observers even credit the election of President Barack Obama to the political maturation of those populations.

Syndicated editorial cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz said Kennedy’s death has "reawakened" interests in Kennedy among the children and grandchildren of immigrants. He said that when his wife, Victoria Landeros-Lopez, heard of Kennedy’s passing, she pulled out an old "Viva Kennedy" button her mother wore during the 1960 campaign.

That gave Alcaraz the idea this week to draw a cartoon of a young Sen. Kennedy with the old 1960 slogan underneath.

"When my wife left to take the kids to the orthodontist, I kissed her and said ‘Viva Kennedy,’" Alcaraz said. "She just looked at me and said back, ‘Viva Kennedy’."