The galloping horses stopped in their tracks.
What they saw, I really don't know.
Their eyes were wild, they dropped their packs,
And they put on quite a show.
People of all sorts stood three in a line
To see the herd kick up dust.
I watched from a stairway sign nearby
That said "We Plan to Win or Bust".
It seems the horses once ran a race,
But betting was not now allowed.
And habits slumber at a slow pace,
So some lost esteem they borrowed.
More horses appeared from hills here and there
To form a camp and decide.
Their goal was to protest and share
Opinions about where to abide.
Because rumors shot over their heads about storms,
They sought to find places to stay,
And frightened the neighbors who set their alarms
And managed to stay away.
They locked their doors and hid in places
Until the herds of horses got tired,
And somehow disappeared and quit the races.
They suddenly all retired.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Sunday, June 7, 2009
City and County of San Francisco Says Church Trying to Skip Taxes
According to San Francisco's tax assessor, the Archdiocese of San Francisco has moved the ownership of various assets to a new nonprofit organization in order to shield the properties from being seized or sold for potential lawsuit payouts.
The church has refused to pay the taxes for transferring the 232 properties, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting said. The tax bill, which the church has appealed, could reach $15 million - one of the largest in city history.
Nonprofits are exempt from property and federal income taxes but subject to property transfer taxes, which are collected if they sell or transfer properties.
At issue is whether the church is moving those San Francisco properties from one Catholic nonprofit organization to another, was transferring the assets to a separate entity, as the city argues, or simply undergoing internal reorganization, as the church contends.
The properties in question include some of the diocese's most famous, such as Mission Dolores, Old St. Mary's Cathedral, and St. Francis of Assisi, as well as empty lots and commercial land throughout the city.
At the upcoming hearing, Ting plans to argue that the church moved 232 properties into a new nonprofit created expressly to protect the archdiocese from losing those assets,
The diocese has sold other peoperties in recent years to help pay out more than $40 million in settlements related to dozens of sexual abuse lawsuits, but church official strongly rejected Ting's accusation.
Ting compared the practice to a private business creating a limited liability company or corporation in order to protect owners from bankruptcy or other legal judments. He said the move is completely legal but that the church cannot have the asset protection and also escape the tax bill. The case could have wide-ranging implications for other churches and nonprofits who decide to reorganize their holdings. Tuing said he has received calls from other religious organizations "who are thinking about doing similar things and are looking eith quite a lot of interest at what happens in this case."
A city appeals board - made up of the city controller, treasurer and head of the real estate division - will hold the hearing on June 16 to determine whether the church owes the taxes. If his office is successful, Ting estimates the arachdiocese could owe between $3 million and $15 million in taxes.
___________________________
The above was based on article by Marisa Lagos,
Chronicle Staff Writer
The church has refused to pay the taxes for transferring the 232 properties, Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting said. The tax bill, which the church has appealed, could reach $15 million - one of the largest in city history.
Nonprofits are exempt from property and federal income taxes but subject to property transfer taxes, which are collected if they sell or transfer properties.
At issue is whether the church is moving those San Francisco properties from one Catholic nonprofit organization to another, was transferring the assets to a separate entity, as the city argues, or simply undergoing internal reorganization, as the church contends.
The properties in question include some of the diocese's most famous, such as Mission Dolores, Old St. Mary's Cathedral, and St. Francis of Assisi, as well as empty lots and commercial land throughout the city.
At the upcoming hearing, Ting plans to argue that the church moved 232 properties into a new nonprofit created expressly to protect the archdiocese from losing those assets,
The diocese has sold other peoperties in recent years to help pay out more than $40 million in settlements related to dozens of sexual abuse lawsuits, but church official strongly rejected Ting's accusation.
Ting compared the practice to a private business creating a limited liability company or corporation in order to protect owners from bankruptcy or other legal judments. He said the move is completely legal but that the church cannot have the asset protection and also escape the tax bill. The case could have wide-ranging implications for other churches and nonprofits who decide to reorganize their holdings. Tuing said he has received calls from other religious organizations "who are thinking about doing similar things and are looking eith quite a lot of interest at what happens in this case."
A city appeals board - made up of the city controller, treasurer and head of the real estate division - will hold the hearing on June 16 to determine whether the church owes the taxes. If his office is successful, Ting estimates the arachdiocese could owe between $3 million and $15 million in taxes.
___________________________
The above was based on article by Marisa Lagos,
Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Prayer of Franklin D. Roosevelt on D Day, June 6, 1944
This is the prayer originally entitled "Let Our Hearts Be Stout" written by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Allied troops were invading German-occupied Europe during World War II. The prayer was read to the nation on radio on the evening of D-Day, June 6, 1944, while American, British and Canadian troops were fighting to establish beach heads on the coast of Normandy in France.
The previous night, June 5, the President had also been on the radio to announce that Allied troops had entered Rome. The spectacular news that Rome had been liberated was quickly surpassed by news of the gigantic D-Day invasion which began at 6:30 a.m. on June 6. By midnight about 57,000 American and 75,000 British and Canadian soldiers had gotten ashore. Allied losses on D-Day included 2,500 killed and 8,500 wounded.
My Fellow Americans:
Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.
Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944
The previous night, June 5, the President had also been on the radio to announce that Allied troops had entered Rome. The spectacular news that Rome had been liberated was quickly surpassed by news of the gigantic D-Day invasion which began at 6:30 a.m. on June 6. By midnight about 57,000 American and 75,000 British and Canadian soldiers had gotten ashore. Allied losses on D-Day included 2,500 killed and 8,500 wounded.
My Fellow Americans:
Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.
And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:
Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.
For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.
Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.
And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.
Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.
Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.
And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.
And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.
With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.
Thy will be done, Almighty God.
Amen.
Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944
Monday, June 1, 2009
Air France Jet Feared Lost on Flight From Brazil to Paris
PARIS — An Air France passenger jet traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared after its electrical systems malfunctioned during a thunderstorm with heavy turbulence on Sunday evening, and officials said Monday that a search had begun for the wreckage in a vast swath of the Atlantic Ocean.
Relatives and friends waited on Monday at Galeão - Antonio Carlos Jobim airport in Rio de Janeiro to receive information about flight AF 447.
“We have received no news from Flight AF 447,” an Air France spokeswoman in Paris, Brigitte Barrand, said Monday.
The plane, an Airbus 330-200, was carrying 216 passengers, nine cabin crew members and three pilots, the airline said.
It took off from Galeão Airport in Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was at 10:33 p.m., according to a statement from the Aeronautica, the agency in charge of Brazilian air space. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling 520 miles per hour.
About a half-hour later, the plane encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” Ms. Barrand said. The last communication from the plane was 14 minutes later — a series of automatic messages indicating that the aircraft had suffered an electrical-system malfunction, Air France officials said in Paris.
The chief Air France spokesman, Francois Brousse, said “it is possible” that the plane was hit by lightning, The Associated Press reported.
“A completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,” Pierre Henri Gourgeon, the Air France-KLM chief executive, told France’s LCI television.
Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean between the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 186 miles northeast of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal, and Ilha do Sal, one of the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa. It is a huge area of ocean three times the size of Europe, officials said.
The Brazilian Air Force sent two planes to search for wreckage, an air force spokesman, Col. Henry Munhoz, told O Globo television in Brazil, and three ships from the Brazilian Navy were sent out. A French Air Force plane joined the search from a base in Senegal, Africa, as did a Spanish plane, news services reported.
The head of investigation and accident prevention for Brazil’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, Douglas Ferreira Machado, told O Globo that he calculated that, given its speed, the plane must have left Brazilian waters by the time contact was lost.
“It’s going to take a long time to carry out this search,” The A.P. quoted him as saying. “It could be a long, sad story. The black box will be at the bottom of the sea.”
The incident took place in a zone known to sailors and pilots as the ‘horse latitudes’ — an area of inter-tropical convergence close to the Equator particularly susceptible to storms and violent wind changes, said Julien Gourguechon, who has been an Air France pilot for a decade.
In the area, thunderstorms are possible at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet. Weather reports from the time of the incident indicated high clouds and isolated thunderstorms, CNN reported.
The plane was flying beyond the reach of Brazilian and Senegalese radar when it went missing — a gap that always occurs for aircraft on long trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights.
The automatic messages, which were possibly triggered by a number of alarms on the aircraft, were therefore likely received by satellite by the Air France maintenance system, Mr. Gourguechon said. He added that the cause of the plane’s “clearly exceptional” disappearance, apparently with no distress signal, was unlikely to be purely meteorological.
“Lightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane,” he said. “Turbulence alone isn’t enough to explain it. It is always a combination of factors,” he said.
All jets are built to withstand severe turbulence, especially at upper flying levels, as well as to withstand lightning strikes. The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on April 16, 2009, Air France said in a statement.
Pilots are trained to try to avoid flying directly through thunderstorms, and instead try to find an opening in a storm front through which to guide their plane. Ms. Barrand said that the pilot of the missing jet was very experienced, having clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets.
Air France's chief executive Pierre Henri Gourgeon spoke to reporters at the airline's headquarters, at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday.
The plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean near the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, Brazilian authorities said.
Planes have been brought down by lightning strikes in the past, though it is rare. In 1988, a twin-engine turboprop FA-4 was struck by lightning in the skies over Germany and crashed, killing all 21 people aboard. In 2006, a plane carrying Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was struck by lightning and had to land, his spokeswoman said at the time.
Flight AF 447 was scheduled to arrive at Paris’s Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives, weeping or hiding behind dark sunglasses, descended on terminal 2D at Charles de Gaulle airport where the airline on Monday established a dedicated crisis cell, plus another in Rio. A black robed priest could be seen making his way past hordes of police, passengers and media to comfort relatives at Paris airport.
Air France did not release a passenger list, but said that the passengers were 126 men, 82 women, seven children and an infant. The French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, said that there were about 40 French on board. Maria Celina Rodrigues, the Brazilian consul general in Paris said there were 44 Brazilians on board, along with 21 Germans and a host of others nationalities, including Chinese.
One man at the airport in Paris, Luis Carlos Machado, 40, a policeman from Criciuma, Brazil, was waiting to take an Air France flight to Rio which had been delayed by the disruption. One of his colleagues, Deise Possamai, 34, was on the missing flight. He said he had been indirectly in contact with her parents and said they had given up all hope.
“It’s a really strange feeling to have to fly this route now,” he said.
French and Brazilian aviation authorities are expected to lead the investigation, but the United States National Transportation Safety Board may be involved if the plane had American-made engines or had any American passengers on board.
The A330 jet, which carries about 250 passengers, is a workhorse of long-distance aviation, used on routes where passenger demand was not big enough to warrant the use of the larger Boeing 777.
No Airbus 330-200 passenger flight has ever been involved in a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network, though the seven-person crew of a test flight died in a June 30, 1994, crash near Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based. The test was meant to simulate an engine failure at low speed with maximum angle of climb.
In October 2008, an A330 operated by Qantas on a flight from Singapore to Perth had to be diverted for an emergency landing near the Australian town of Exmouth after suddenly losing altitude. Dozens of passengers and crew members were injured.
Air France said that people in France seeking information about the flight could telephone 0800-800-812. For those calling from abroad, the number is 33-1-57-02-10-55
__________________
The New York Times
Caroline Brothers reported from Paris, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alexei Barrionuevo from Buenos Aires, Micheline Maynard from New York, Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Andrew Downie from São Paulo, Brazil.
Relatives and friends waited on Monday at Galeão - Antonio Carlos Jobim airport in Rio de Janeiro to receive information about flight AF 447.
“We have received no news from Flight AF 447,” an Air France spokeswoman in Paris, Brigitte Barrand, said Monday.
The plane, an Airbus 330-200, was carrying 216 passengers, nine cabin crew members and three pilots, the airline said.
It took off from Galeão Airport in Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was at 10:33 p.m., according to a statement from the Aeronautica, the agency in charge of Brazilian air space. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling 520 miles per hour.
About a half-hour later, the plane encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” Ms. Barrand said. The last communication from the plane was 14 minutes later — a series of automatic messages indicating that the aircraft had suffered an electrical-system malfunction, Air France officials said in Paris.
The chief Air France spokesman, Francois Brousse, said “it is possible” that the plane was hit by lightning, The Associated Press reported.
“A completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,” Pierre Henri Gourgeon, the Air France-KLM chief executive, told France’s LCI television.
Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean between the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 186 miles northeast of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal, and Ilha do Sal, one of the Cape Verde islands off the coast of Africa. It is a huge area of ocean three times the size of Europe, officials said.
The Brazilian Air Force sent two planes to search for wreckage, an air force spokesman, Col. Henry Munhoz, told O Globo television in Brazil, and three ships from the Brazilian Navy were sent out. A French Air Force plane joined the search from a base in Senegal, Africa, as did a Spanish plane, news services reported.
The head of investigation and accident prevention for Brazil’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, Douglas Ferreira Machado, told O Globo that he calculated that, given its speed, the plane must have left Brazilian waters by the time contact was lost.
“It’s going to take a long time to carry out this search,” The A.P. quoted him as saying. “It could be a long, sad story. The black box will be at the bottom of the sea.”
The incident took place in a zone known to sailors and pilots as the ‘horse latitudes’ — an area of inter-tropical convergence close to the Equator particularly susceptible to storms and violent wind changes, said Julien Gourguechon, who has been an Air France pilot for a decade.
In the area, thunderstorms are possible at altitudes of up to 55,000 feet. Weather reports from the time of the incident indicated high clouds and isolated thunderstorms, CNN reported.
The plane was flying beyond the reach of Brazilian and Senegalese radar when it went missing — a gap that always occurs for aircraft on long trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights.
The automatic messages, which were possibly triggered by a number of alarms on the aircraft, were therefore likely received by satellite by the Air France maintenance system, Mr. Gourguechon said. He added that the cause of the plane’s “clearly exceptional” disappearance, apparently with no distress signal, was unlikely to be purely meteorological.
“Lightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane,” he said. “Turbulence alone isn’t enough to explain it. It is always a combination of factors,” he said.
All jets are built to withstand severe turbulence, especially at upper flying levels, as well as to withstand lightning strikes. The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last maintenance check in the hangar took place on April 16, 2009, Air France said in a statement.
Pilots are trained to try to avoid flying directly through thunderstorms, and instead try to find an opening in a storm front through which to guide their plane. Ms. Barrand said that the pilot of the missing jet was very experienced, having clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets.
Air France's chief executive Pierre Henri Gourgeon spoke to reporters at the airline's headquarters, at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Monday.
The plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean near the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, Brazilian authorities said.
Planes have been brought down by lightning strikes in the past, though it is rare. In 1988, a twin-engine turboprop FA-4 was struck by lightning in the skies over Germany and crashed, killing all 21 people aboard. In 2006, a plane carrying Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was struck by lightning and had to land, his spokeswoman said at the time.
Flight AF 447 was scheduled to arrive at Paris’s Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives, weeping or hiding behind dark sunglasses, descended on terminal 2D at Charles de Gaulle airport where the airline on Monday established a dedicated crisis cell, plus another in Rio. A black robed priest could be seen making his way past hordes of police, passengers and media to comfort relatives at Paris airport.
Air France did not release a passenger list, but said that the passengers were 126 men, 82 women, seven children and an infant. The French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, said that there were about 40 French on board. Maria Celina Rodrigues, the Brazilian consul general in Paris said there were 44 Brazilians on board, along with 21 Germans and a host of others nationalities, including Chinese.
One man at the airport in Paris, Luis Carlos Machado, 40, a policeman from Criciuma, Brazil, was waiting to take an Air France flight to Rio which had been delayed by the disruption. One of his colleagues, Deise Possamai, 34, was on the missing flight. He said he had been indirectly in contact with her parents and said they had given up all hope.
“It’s a really strange feeling to have to fly this route now,” he said.
French and Brazilian aviation authorities are expected to lead the investigation, but the United States National Transportation Safety Board may be involved if the plane had American-made engines or had any American passengers on board.
The A330 jet, which carries about 250 passengers, is a workhorse of long-distance aviation, used on routes where passenger demand was not big enough to warrant the use of the larger Boeing 777.
No Airbus 330-200 passenger flight has ever been involved in a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network, though the seven-person crew of a test flight died in a June 30, 1994, crash near Toulouse, France, where Airbus is based. The test was meant to simulate an engine failure at low speed with maximum angle of climb.
In October 2008, an A330 operated by Qantas on a flight from Singapore to Perth had to be diverted for an emergency landing near the Australian town of Exmouth after suddenly losing altitude. Dozens of passengers and crew members were injured.
Air France said that people in France seeking information about the flight could telephone 0800-800-812. For those calling from abroad, the number is 33-1-57-02-10-55
__________________
The New York Times
Caroline Brothers reported from Paris, and Sharon Otterman from New York. Reporting was contributed by Alexei Barrionuevo from Buenos Aires, Micheline Maynard from New York, Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Andrew Downie from São Paulo, Brazil.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Lumber in the Skies
The train chugged up the hill with a load of coal. Suddenly, the brakes broke loose and three freight cars full of coal derailed, jumped the tracks, and rolled into a pile of lumber.
Five degrees below zero in Montana and three freight cars and lumber were snowed under.
Spring arrived. The coal, lumber and three freight cars covered by an avalanche and formed into a cave-like substance much like found in Carlsbad Caverns, here sparkling bright, there pastel with dents, bulges, smoothness, rough edges, and heavy rocks gathered in the transformation process.
Plant life, moss, ferns, and a feeling of soft coolness prevailed with an aroma of lilies of the valley.
July solidification took effect, the mud became stony and cemented into evenly formed smooth shapess creating the impression of magnified honeycombs dropped by a giant bee.
A September cocoon formed, and instead of a butterfly turning into a caterpillar, the objects, including the freight cars, logs and coal reshaped themselves in the dry autumn wind, slowly emerging into one massive web, gradually disintegrating as a giant cloud suddenly lifted them up over the mountain surrounded on all sides by space.
Five degrees below zero in Montana and three freight cars and lumber were snowed under.
Spring arrived. The coal, lumber and three freight cars covered by an avalanche and formed into a cave-like substance much like found in Carlsbad Caverns, here sparkling bright, there pastel with dents, bulges, smoothness, rough edges, and heavy rocks gathered in the transformation process.
Plant life, moss, ferns, and a feeling of soft coolness prevailed with an aroma of lilies of the valley.
July solidification took effect, the mud became stony and cemented into evenly formed smooth shapess creating the impression of magnified honeycombs dropped by a giant bee.
A September cocoon formed, and instead of a butterfly turning into a caterpillar, the objects, including the freight cars, logs and coal reshaped themselves in the dry autumn wind, slowly emerging into one massive web, gradually disintegrating as a giant cloud suddenly lifted them up over the mountain surrounded on all sides by space.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Commentary Regarding Homeless In Marin County
While the current shelter system apparently provides services for the unhoused and unemployed, and considering the fact that funds for such services are often allocated to the County of Marin, the funds are often spent for overhead instead of providing housing and job training and/or employment.
Subsequently, the places and agencies receiving considerable funds and who claim to resolve social dilemmas while exacerbating the situations create a revolving door for homelessness.
Instead of being subjected to control, selfish interests and manipulation, the disenfranchised need a voice in their pathway to "normalcy" required by the management of the current shelter situation.
Since the church community has become involved in providing temporary housing for Marin County men and women, there has been improvement in the morale of the displaced persons, and there needs to be a continuation of respect and sincere interest in that regard.
The safety and health concerns for those who are at risk is considerable, and in addition to other suggestions in this proposal, there needs to be private study areas and a library as well as telephone and computer facilities for job seeking and also a recreational area for games such as card games and billiards.
Also, an issue that has not been previously addressed that exists in Marin County is the number of unemployed who loiter on the street corners creating a nuisance and illegally absorbing the resources that are intended for American citizens.
Perhaps there could be a re-evaluation of the funds for various causes instead of creating additional disbursement agencies.
Subsequently, the places and agencies receiving considerable funds and who claim to resolve social dilemmas while exacerbating the situations create a revolving door for homelessness.
Instead of being subjected to control, selfish interests and manipulation, the disenfranchised need a voice in their pathway to "normalcy" required by the management of the current shelter situation.
Since the church community has become involved in providing temporary housing for Marin County men and women, there has been improvement in the morale of the displaced persons, and there needs to be a continuation of respect and sincere interest in that regard.
The safety and health concerns for those who are at risk is considerable, and in addition to other suggestions in this proposal, there needs to be private study areas and a library as well as telephone and computer facilities for job seeking and also a recreational area for games such as card games and billiards.
Also, an issue that has not been previously addressed that exists in Marin County is the number of unemployed who loiter on the street corners creating a nuisance and illegally absorbing the resources that are intended for American citizens.
Perhaps there could be a re-evaluation of the funds for various causes instead of creating additional disbursement agencies.
The Cost of Illegal Immigration to the American Taxpayer
http://kevincolby.com/2008/07/27/the-cost-of-illegal-immigrants-to-the-american-taxpayer/
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