Thank you universe for weekends.

Your True Sign Is Gemini

Charmer Adaptable Never Boring Fun and Friendly Commitment-Phobic Eternally Youthful The Life of the Party Intellectual and Witty

Dept of Homeland Security is requesting a proposal from the inventor of a bracelet boarding pass that can shock the passenger on command. from Want Some Torture with your Peanuts? at the Washington Times.

At the Canadian inventor's website see a video about the bracelet and letter (page 1, page 2) from Homeland Security expressing interest in a broader application of the technology beyond airline security to prisoner detention, detainee control & military uses and requesting a purchasing proposal.

The US should know what they need to control people, eh?  When it comes to detention, the US is number one!  At least in pure numbers.  They have more prisoners than any other country in the world.  Seriously, 1 in every 100 adults in the US are in jail.  That is 2.3 million people! China, which has more than four times the US population only has 1.6 million prisoners.  And speaking of detainees... we are hearing that word a lot with Guantanamo Bay, but another place it is used is in Immigration Customs Enforcement.  In 2007, they had a population of over 300,000 in detention (about 32,000 on any given day.)  In 2007, the ACLU sued over the horrific conditions for families & children.  Here is an interesting article, "Immigrants are fastest growing sector of the US prison population" by Tom Barry.  It is about the switch in illegal immigration policy from "Catch & Release" to "Catch & Detain."

While looking that up, I also found a strange factoid... that there have been and still are "non-detainees" at Guantanamo Bay called "Migrants."  These are people that have been seized at sea in the Caribbean and are waiting to be processed into a third country instead of the US.  At one point, more than 45,000 people were held there. Right now there is supposedly only about 30.  The picture on the right is from a the "Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation" back in 1991. 

Now that Gitmo is about to be gutted of its 235 remaining detainees from the gulf wars, a future plan for Guantanamo is emerging.  Here comes a military base for 3500 marines for Central American "interventions." from telegraph.co.uk

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Personal update.  After being sick for 3 weeks, I got almost better for a week- my voice came back and stopped coughing. And now whammo, I'm sick again.  *cry*

"the definition of recession is when your neighbor loses his or her job. The definition of depression is when you or your spouse loses his or her job."
from Microeconomic Explosion by Damon Carr
- http://www.stretcher.com/stories/08/08jun30c.cfm

Well, we just signed our lease for the next year.  Our rent went up $100/month.  It was already double our monthly mortgage payment in the States. 

When we sold the house & cashed out hubby's 401K to move to Canada, I was planning to depend on the savings for 6 months, not 18 months. Oofta. Seems like everything here takes 3 times longer than I expected.

We deposited our June paycheques a week ago and we are still waiting for them to clear.  Grrrr.  Once my permanent residency card comes, we are switching banks! 

The Province of Alberta awesomely subsidizes child care workers wages according to whether or not the daycare has accreditation and the worker's level of early childhood education (experience is not relevant to their process.)  Licensing has my transcripts and I'm still waiting to hear back on my level, so I just got paid the base wage.

Getting the subsidy will make the difference between going in the hole or starting to save again each month. The difference between starting a family and getting on with life and our own personal microeconomic explosion. 

Screen shots from a little dress-up game coming soon to Fashionmash.com