Unofficial calls to boycott precious stones and jade from Myanmar appear to be taking their toll on the country’s annual gem auction. According to this morning’s New York Times the traffic at the show is down and traders are nervous about the future of their businesses if formal sanctions take hold in North America and Europe.

Officially, the government-sponsored gem auction that opened this week in Myanmar is a success, with 2,667 traders browsing the country”s renowned rubies, jade, sapphires, and other precious stones, the New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper, reported Thursday.

“Business is very slow, not like before,” U Kyaw, a gem merchant in Yangon, said by phone.

The treat of sanctions is real and the buyers know it.

Adisak Thawornviriyanan, director of the Gems and Jewelry Traders Association of Chanthaburi, a province east of Bangkok that is a center for cutting and polishing Burmese gems, has taken part in the gem auctions for the past four years but decided not to attend this one.

A bill in Congress seeks to close a loophole that allows the import of Burmese gems polished or cut in a third country. It was passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee last month and awaits approval by the Ways and Means Committee before going to the full House. A Senate bill is in committee.

The bill in the U.S. House is HB 3890 (aptly named the Junta’s Anti-Democratic Efforts, or JADE, Act) and in the Senate the bills are S. 2172 and S. 2257

Please write your congressional representative and encourage them to support these bills.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the border between science and spirituality by John Horgan.

[Ken] “Wilber”s work has been favorably reviewed by Skeptical Inquirer, which normally eviscerates writers who give off even the faintest whiff of New Ageism.” p. 64

Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: We all have routines that with a few adjustments could bring us better control. A good question for you to ask yourself is, What other routines in my day could I change? p. 115

I finished reading Mary Pipher’s Writing To Change The World last week and I’m in the process of copying out my notes into my chapbook. One long passage on pages 30 and 31 struck a chord with me, one that three-month ago I probably would not have noted. Pipher writes of a life-altering event in a Myanmar market.

A few years ago, I visited a market on the Burmese border. It was a profoundly unsettling experience. I walked past frightened, impoverished people hawking Leonardo DiCaprio beach towels, dried fish, Nike knockoffs and counterfeit cigarettes. Old women with no teeth sat behind piles of peppers or rice.

He dared to make a connection with a westerner. He used heroic words to carve out a magic-slate-sized piece of freedom, which he then shared with me. I have never felt more honored and more humbled. When I think of the man with the magic slate, I write for him.

Ah mein.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Nation Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented.

It was working out fine until Mr. LaTourette, the authoritarian, panty-assed Congressman from the Cleveland area, found out a blogger named Jeff Coryell was one of the progressives. Coryell had, in the past, written things critical of LaTourette (Heaven’s To Betsy!). He had also given a small amount of money to his opponent (there were never any preconditions at The Plain Dealer about this). Cliff Schecter

The Usual Suspect: I’d been itching to get back on the ground for some time. Always driving, the same places over and over again. The same routine. Gear up, open the truck, wait, drive, wait, drive, fuel it up, close it down, sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Gargle, swish, and spit. The Groundhog Day Effect in near-lethal doses. During these mind-numbing excursions…,

This year, for the first time in more than a decade, Congress raised the minimum wage. It was a long over due raise for Ohio families. I am proud that we were able to achieve that important goal.

While those pieces of legislation have not yet become law, I will continue working with my Senate colleagues to move these critical issues forward. Sen. Sherrod Brown

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

The World Clock

Why can’t we be more like Canada? Our neighbor to the north announced yesterday that it was imposing the toughest sanctions of any nation on the military dictatorship of Myanmar and its Foreign Ministger Maxime Bernier called upon the rest of the free world to follow suit: there is no more room for compromise with this odious regime.

From Agence France-Presse:

“The regime in Burma is abhorrent to Canadian values (and) we are going to impose the toughest sanctions in the world,” Bernier said in a policy speech.

“The repression in Burma has grown worse in the past weeks. People are being arrested, tortured and killed. Peaceful demonstrations by unarmed Buddhist monks were met with bullets,” he said.

[Snip]

The Canadian sanctions include a ban on Canadian investment, trade and transfer of technical data to Myanmar. Bilateral trade is estimated to be less than 8.5 million dollars annually, down from 47 million dollars in 2002, said officials.

As well, the assets of Burmese nationals in Canada connected to Myanmar’s government leaders would be frozen immediately, and Myanmar-registered ships or aircraft would be prohibited from docking or landing in Canada.

Ms. Rice?

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the border between science and spirituality by John Horgan.

“Seek My Face, Speak My Name,” R. Arthur Green. p. 39

Today, as I go about my tasks, I’ll think about: The preoccupied sit in meetings voicing objections to issues not raised, agreeing with ideas not presented and answering questions not asked.. p. 115

He went back to the village and told the village leaders what the Karen soldiers wanted, but he didn’t return to the soldiers. He didn’t bring anything to them.The Burmese Army found out that he had contact with the Karen soldiers. They arrested him. There was no investigation. The Burmese soldiers took him outside of the village. They told him to dig his own grave.

And then they shot and killed him.

That is the image that Mu Gay, a member of the Karen (pronounced ka-REN) people who make their homes in the mountains between Myanmar and Thailand, recalls of her home. Today, writes Rhena Tantisunthorn for the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, she is a refugee living in St. Paul, Minnesota.

[The Karen] are the second-largest ethnic group in each country, behind Burmese and Thais, respectively. In Burma, the military government is trying to eradicate the people and their culture. Its practices have been called genocide by members of the British Parliament. Armed Burmese soldiers occupy an area of the country called Karen State.

Flight from that genocide has led Mu Gay and others to the United States.

In the past few years, St. Paul has become home to the largest Karen population outside of southeast Asia, with their numbers anticipated to swell as more Karen in the camps apply for third-country relocation. Estimates of the number of Karen in St. Paul vary from 1,500 to 3,000. According to Sara Chute, a refugee health consultant with the Refugee Health Program in the Minnesota Department of Health, “We don’t have any good ways of estimating how many people are living here because we don’t track secondary refugees coming from other states. And there are quite a few refugees who move to Minnesota. Sometimes we find out when people show up at a health clinic or when people go to the school district.”

According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 584 refugees have arrived from Burma since the beginning of 2007, at least three times as many as in any previous year. And that number will continue to grow. Area organizations that work with the refugees estimate that anywhere from 500 to 1,000 more Karen refugees will arrive in St. Paul in the next year, and all of them will need help meeting basic needs such as housing, health screenings, job placement, education, and English-language training.

Given my own experience with integrating Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union (Cleveland made homes for more of these immigrants than any other city in the United States) I can understand the challenges and expenses Minnesota faces.

Even the most basic tasks-health screenings, registering for school, grocery shopping-can be a challenge for Karen whose have spent their lives in small villages, the jungle of Karen State, and in refugee camps. As project manager for the Karen Support Project, Baw helps refugees with housing and with job placement as machine operators, packagers, housekeepers, and at laundry services, and finds ESL classes for them. His work begins from the moment he wakes up, he says. “We cannot rest until we go to bed. We collect everything: food, clothing. We call for dental appointments. [We work] every day, including Sunday. They bring their paperwork with them to church.”

The work is getting harder because the make up of those seeking sanctuary is changing.

“The real issue I see now is that seven or eight years ago it was more, for lack of a better word, the intelligentsia that came first,” Englund says. “So what happens is they made pretty quick adaptations, from living in the church basement to buying a house in four or five years. That’s a pretty quick turnaround. What happens is that those people, after four or five years, are fully capable of sponsoring another family because they’ve got a place for them and the resources and the wherewithal to properly get them through, especially the first three or four months.

“Three or four years ago there was [another] pretty good influx of folk, and those folks know how desperate the situation is back on the border. And because they were able to find their way through the system with the help of people who came before, they said, well, we’re going to sponsor [other families still in the camps]. Well, they’re not in the same position as the first group. So what happens is, because we have weaker anchor families, it puts more burden on those who have been here for a while. Some things slip through the cracks.”

In the state that gave us Senator Paul Wellstone, I believe the people, with our help, will fill the cracks.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1450 Top 30 newspaper sites for 10/07
0617 Is media outlet being unethical?

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Pentagon Sued Over Mandatory Christianity.