“If you can give yourself to someone, then you should.”

Dawes – A Little Bit of Everything (SLYT).

Youtube Link.

As a candidate for this office, I pledged to end this war responsibly. And, as President, that is what I am doing.

Since I became Commander-in-Chief, we’ve brought home nearly 100,000 U.S. troops. We’ve closed or turned over to Iraq hundreds of our bases.

As Operation Iraqi Freedom ends, our commitment to a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq continues. Under Operation New Dawn, a transitional force of U.S. troops will remain to advise and assist Iraqi forces, protect our civilians on the ground, and pursue targeted counterterrorism efforts.

By the end of next year, consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, these men and women, too, will come home.

Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest — it is in our own. Our nation has paid a huge price to put Iraq’s future in the hands of its people. We have sent our men and women in uniform to make enormous sacrifices. We have spent vast resources abroad in the face of several years of recession at home.

We have met our responsibility through the courage and resolve of our women and men in uniform.

In seven years, they confronted a mission as challenging and as complex as any our military has ever been asked to face.

Nearly 1.5 million Americans put their lives on the line. Many returned for multiple tours of duty, far from their loved ones who bore a heroic burden of their own. And most painfully, more than 4,400 Americans have given their lives, fighting for people they never knew, for values that have defined our people for more than two centuries.

What their country asked of them was not small. And what they sacrificed was not easy.

For that, each and every American owes them our heartfelt thanks.

Our promise to them — to each woman or man who has donned our colors — is that our country will serve them as faithfully as they have served us. We have already made the largest increase in funding for veterans in decades. So long as I am President, I will do whatever it takes to fulfill that sacred trust.

Tonight, we mark a milestone in our nation’s history. Even at a time of great uncertainty for so many Americans, this day and our brave troops remind us that our future is in our own hands and that our best days lie ahead.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

Congratulations to Dave Kalina and his team at Tiger Style Games for winning the IGF Mobile Best Game Award at the 2010 Independent Games Festival for their amazing iPhone game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. This review explains better than I could how well the game is designed. When I beta-tested the game last year, I knew it was something special and really showed the promise of indie gaming so I am so glad that it is receiving both the commercial and critical success it so rightly deserves. Bravo guys, you deserve it!

Buy it:

Follow live updates at the Guardian.

Update 6/20: New evidence emerges of fraudulent election results. Washington Post

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map painted on a wall at Becker Elementary on 906 West Milton St., Austin, Texas. [Google Map].

“Unlike most other projections, the Dymaxion is intended purely for representations of the entire globe. It is not a gnomonic projection, whereby global data expands from the center point of a tangent facet outward to the edges. Instead, each triangle edge of the Dymaxion map matches the scale of a partial great circle on a corresponding globe, and other points within each facet shrink toward its middle, rather than enlarging to the peripheries.”
– Fuller, Ideas and Integrities (1969 ed., p. 139) [via Wikipedia].

Here it is with Google “street view.”

View Larger Map

If you are the painter of this mural, please contact me, so that I can give proper credit on this page.

From their coverage during the Democratic National Convention, we can assume these fences will also be used to detain protestors who march outside of Denver’s sanctioned Free Speech Zones. These “processing centers” are the perfect weapon for any future power-hungry administration that require a built-in infrastructure to suppress mass dissent, all built underneath the political cover of anti-immigration policies. Here’s a map showing where over 32,000 immigrants are detained on any given day. The alphabetic rows of empty cages in this Denver warehouse just gives me the creeps. See for yourself by watching the clip on YouTube:

Recent raids in Postville, Iowa and Laurel, Mississippi involved the detention of 400 and 350 workers respectfully. Reports have also circulated that in the event of a hurricane hitting Texas, evacuees would need to prove their citizenship to avoid detention and deportation. We should be more respectful to members of our community who work and contribute to our country, than to lock them up in detention centers and ship them away from their families. Have we no sense of our past, to realize that immigration has always been our future?

These detention centers must be shut down. Further, we should hold any new leadership accountable so that they renounce the mass dentention centers, mass immigrant arrests and suppression of dissent policies of the failed Bush presidency. Make no mistake, a government that detains innocent people in mass detention facilities has the capability to detain you as well.

History has shown us many times over what happens when a country allows its government to pick and choose which of its inhabitants belong. It never ends well. Our culture should not rely on locking up large groups of people in unknown/undocumented mass detention facilities to enforce an unfair system that offers only potential citizenship, while the same detention centers become potential weapons of mass suppression.

The new citizenship test (CNN, MSNBC) became law on October 1, 2008. New test, but same broken naturalization system (PDF from Reason Magazine).

Also on October 1st, the United States has stationed a military unit for domestic use to serve as an on-call emergency unit. “This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.” Let’s hope the third infantry first brigade combat team serves only in an emergency capacity and not used to round up immigrants, or to quell the public’s dissatisfaction with its government or the upcoming election results.

Please register to vote and please vote for Obama.

tags: detention, dissent, election, immigration, detention-centers, obama, naturalization, free-speech, citizenship