text:
Turning a Situation Around
When certain things happen to you, they can make you feel rubbish.
For example when my big client cut my contract and only gave me two weeks notice, it made me feel like a bad employee and left me feeling unemployable…If they don't want me….who will??? Other situations – such as finding out you have an illness, being dumped by your partner, being put down on a regular basis by your boss – these can make you also feel really bad.
They can make you see yourself in a certain way and make you feel like you have no choices.
Remember though, you have the freedom to choose how you feel, or react in a situation.No one can make you feel anything.
This is definately easier said than done – I know! When I was feeling like a cut-employeed, when you are feeling sad because you don't have the right partner, or like you are not good enough to get anywhere in your company or you are feeling like the victim of your body (if you have an illness), it's not easy to say to yourself, "Hey, I have a choice here."
It's easier to to trust the message you are getting from your company, from your ex-partner, from your doctors, from your boss, than to trust in yourself. Why is that??
When is it that we learn to trust what everyone else says about us and our life – over what we feel,over what our heart tells us is right for us?Society tells us that life is hard and that each day should be a slog, where you don't have the time or the money to live life the way you want to live it.
What if there is a BIG ADVENTURE out there waiting for each of us, but we have to trust ourselves enough to carry on making the moment by moment choices which will lead us there?What if our lives could be filled with ease and magic, instead of hardship and slogness?"Shoo," I hear you say, "My life is nothing like that. What are you talking about?!!" I know what you are saying, I'm not quite there yet either, but there are some people right here, right now, who are living a different life. I promise to find those people and interview them so you can see with your own two eyes that there is another way.
Anyhow, my last day at my big client dawned, and as I walked in the door I was literally shaking in my boots. I had worked there for three years – they were part family to me. Thing is though, through out those years of working there, I'd always longed to be 'doing my own thing'. Soooo, if I looked at it from another way, this was my opportunity to start to create the LIFE OF MY DREAMS.
Perhaps I too could have a life of adventure, of freedom, of fun and of magic. That thought turned me from Mrs No-Hoper to Mrs Adventurer.
In that moment, I decided to do something completely out of character and potentially risky and tell the whole company about my blog. In my goodbye email I told the whole company that there was more to me than just my role at the company (I think some people were really shocked to hear this:-) and that I was writing a blog. I didn't just want to give my blog address to everyone,so I asked people to e-mail me if they wanted to see my blog. Like I said, most of the employees only knew me from my role in the company, so I was pretty sure not many people would be interested.
I was BLOWN AWAY that day as I had about 20 people email me and ask to see my blog. Who'd have thought that!! Thank you to all of those people who had a look at my blog. I was totally amazed.
What was even more exhilerating was that my last day there felt more like the start of a big adventure, than the end of a contract.
That day I felt like the queen of my world.When I walked out of the office in the afternoon, rather than walking out as someone who has been terminated, I walked out as someone who had done something for myself, something that I could be proud of.
I walked out as someone who was more than just one of their suppliers, I walked out as someone ACTIVELY WALKING ON THE PATH OF THEIR DREAMS.That's the person I want to be all of the time.


text:
I've been reading some articles that suggest I should sit down with my whiteness, so I'm doing that. I'm doing this in the spirit of working toward a society without racism. I started working on this last week, but it got pretty long, so I'm writing it in two parts. This is part 1.
Here goes:
American white people don't start of thinking of themselves as white and, if I may be so bold as to speak for all white people, we don't even end up there. To start out, we learn about where we're from, like our city or town or whatever, and what that place is about, and how we're part of it and what it means to have that place be part of us. We learn about our ancestors. In many cases, these ancestors are immigrants, and we learn about the places they came from. For me, I learned about Massachusetts, I learned about New England, I learned that my paternal grandfather's side of the family has deep roots there, going back to colonial days. I learned about my paternal grandmother's Norwegian heritage, where her parents were both from. I dressed in a Norwegian costume for cultural day, or just for fun, I don't remember, but there are pictures. I felt proud of this background– old timey New England and Norwegian, not that I could tell you much about why. I think it had something to do with the cold.
I felt like those cultures were part of me, that I came from them. I learned too about my mother's parents, born and raised in Brooklyn, and I thought Brooolklyyyn! Alright! My mom's grandparents were from different parts of Italy, Naples and Sicily respectively, and I felt a kinship with those people and where they were from. I looked to see if my nose was Italian or Nordic or New England, and I'm still the only one in the family with this nose. I was in high school when I learned about whiteness, and it's not because I didn't have non-white friends. It just never occurred to me that their non-whiteness was something other than having different ancestors, that my family hailed from someplace other than theirs.
Whiteness in high school turned out to be a real thing. I switched schools, moving from the hegemonic South Shore of Massachusetts to Philadelphia, and a much more elitist school. The school was dealing with whiteness and blackness and otherness. There was a multi-cultural students union which, from the outsiders perspective, looked like the club for black kids. It was clear that my Italian Norwegian New England multi-culture was not what the founding charter had in mind. I didn't feel like I needed a club. I fell in with a group of white and Asian girls who made art. Eventually we made a feminist zine.
There was much tumult, as happens when you have a bunch of smart kids with big emotions feeling things about themselves and their identity. Listen, I had no beef, I had no reason to have issue with anyone or what they were feeling. Other people had issues, made a big deal out of things, made jokes. I don't know if it was worse that I just didn't really care. I was in choir, other kids were in the MSU, some kids did both. Cool. Our school had a few town meetings to talk about diversity, and how the school needed more of that, more scholarships for people of color. What was interesting to me was that this was the single most diverse environment I'd ever been in. I started noticing race in numbers, and was surprised to find that many of my classes were comprised solely of white kids, and my beloved drama department was racially hegemonic.
The thing that I found confusing about being a white person is that this seemed to mean something to people. It seemed to mean something to a very good friend, a new friend, who I wanted to know better. But my whiteness always seemed to get in the way. Or was it her blackness. I don't know, and I didn't care, I didn't see what the big deal was, and that was a big part of the problem. As the years went by it was clear that I just didn't understand anything, as far as she could tell, and that was that. We're not friends now. I still don't know what I didn't get, or what she didn't get. High school is also when I learned that police brutality was a thing, because someone told me about it. I was flabbergasted, really shocked. In my life, police brutality had never come up. I was 17.
In college I decided I wasn't white. Being white hadn't served me very well, it had always been a problem. I stopped checking off the little 'white' boxes on ethnicity testers and started writing in New Englander on the line for 'other.' People would ask me where I was from and I would say America. They would say before that, digging for information about my ancestors, a common get-to-know-you question, and I would get specific, I would say Brooklyn and Boston. I took women's history courses and studied women writers, because I was in search of an identity, and I figured 'woman' must be it. It wasn't quite. It felt forced to turn my biological reality into a cultivated identity. Using 'white' as part of my identity never occurred to me, and even thinking about it now, I can't think of a more unpleasant concept to include in my identity. 'White' is the purview of Nazi's and white supremacists and noblesse oblige and the KKK. I want absolutely no part of any of that.
I left school for a while, and ended up with a job at an Au Bon Pain. Of the 10 people working at the shop, 3, including the manager, were black men, 3, including me, were white women, and 4 were black women. I felt completely singled out, although this was not, and continues to not be, unusual. I rather always feel singled out, separate, observing. There are a few memories from that job that come up in my consciousness with relative frequency. The manager liked to grab my ass and tell me that 'black men liked blonde girls,' even though I repeatedly pointed out to him that it was a dye job. If any of the girls on the line had actually communicated, we could have got him instantly fired for sexual harassment— he was doing similar stuff to all of us. On my break I would sit and read in the break room. An older black woman, who was skeptical of me from the beginning, came up to me one day and asked what I was reading. She was surprised to find that I was reading a book by a black author, and when she saw it was, a play by one of my college playwriting professors, she said with surprise "that's a black book."
I never felt more white than working in that shop, and feeling that the other women didn't accept me as another co-worker, but took me on as a special case, a white college girl. When I left there, it was because I took an internship at the local international film festival, staffed entirely by lefties, who were entirely white women. I made less money, and worked toward achieving much higher workplace expectations. Meanwhile Debra at Au Bon Pain lost her washer/dryer because she was late with one payment. I did my laundry at my parents' house, and my mom subsidized my meager film fest pay. After the film festival ended, I got a job at a hat shop, an internship at a theater company, a job at a record shop, and then went back to school. In that one year I had five jobs, and after I got the first one, at Au Bon Pain, each one was increasingly easy to get.
I didn't think of myself as a white person, I didn't think of myself as a woman. I identified as an artist, a citizen of the world, free from identifiers, conditions, and prejudices. That was the goal, and I lived under the assumption that I'd achieved it.
Part 2 next time.

subset: commoncrawl


text: Turnitin slowness reported –by mmaxson · Published March 29, 2018 · Updated March 29, 2018This has been reported fixed now.Turnitin is experiencing degraded service. Unfortunately, we do not have much detail on exactly what is effected. Turnitin engineers are working to resolve all issues. We will post an update once we have further information.


text: The baby has such performance is going to bed – Sohu mother really don't know sometimes novice mother baby at this time what to do, for example, there will always be a mother asked Tina, how can I know the baby to sleep. In fact, the mother wants to understand the needs of the baby, the first thing is to learn to observe. When the baby wants to sleep, there will be a series of physical performance. Today, Tina and you treasure mom said, I hope to help you. First, we observe the body language through observation, summed up the following is the baby on behalf of the performance when you want to sleep oh…… 1 head shaking or constantly nod (Tina's daughter has such a good physical performance). 2 eyes red, slowly close your eyes and then open the fierce, repeated this action. Or open your eyes but don't blink, stay away. 3 the most direct performance to yawn. 4 strong but uncoordinated kicking. In addition, the famous American parenting experts Dr. Hoge also summarized, on different stages of the baby to sleep in different ways: 1 when the baby can control the head, will face be sleepy straws from the object or person. Will slowly drop their small arms. If you were in my arms, they will face buried in my chest. 2 when the baby can control his limbs, fatigue will catch ear, scratched my face. 3 when the baby can move, holding the baby will be like after the leaning arch back. Rolling back and forth on the bed. Or crouching in a corner of the bed, leaning his head on one side. 4 when the baby can crawl or walk around, when the baby will appear poor physical fatigue signs. These are the performance of the baby when you want to sleep Oh, the mother can be observed under contrast to see what the situation is consistent. Please pay attention to more good [WeChat public number: good maternal infant (mhtina)] in Himalaya FM dragonfly FM litchi FM search for "senior maternal and child care teacher Tina" free to listen to public lecture. Disclaimer: This article is for a better pregnancy baby senior maternal and child care teacher Tina original article, if necessary please contact the authorized or micro signal infringement.相关的主题文章:


text:
|Coat: £10, New Look sale, shoes: £49.99, New Look, Jeans: £20, Miss Selfridge sale
|Burgundy Melton coat, £20, down from £49.99, New Look website.
|Black notch collar Melton coat, £22 down from £49.99, New Look website.
|Jeffrey Campbell Lita black platform ankle boot in suede, £120 from Office.
|My New Look alternatives, £49.99


text:
Serving Washington County, ME
Adams Real Estate
Bangor, Maine
Largest Broker services in Maine with the largest service area!
Individuals and companies listed here claim to be an authorized business transaction
intermediary. While BizBuySell does not doubt these claims, BizBuySell has not verified
them and makes no guarantee, warranty or representation about them. It is your responsibility
to independently confirm the claims made by individuals and companies listed here.


text:
Retrospecs.co.uk to sponsor Jazz FM show
Retrospecs.co.uk, the online vintage glasses retailer, is to sponsor the Big Band and Trad show on Jazz FM.
The ten-week deal starts tomorrow (6 November).
Themed competitions will appear on the digital-only station's website and the show will feature a bespectacled jazz great each week, and will tell the story of their music.
The station, which receives a significant proportion of its revenues through sponsorship, has agreed a number of commercial deals recently, including a joint venture with home style website Mydeco.com to develop a style channel, a Southern Comfort-branded Saturday evening show and a tie-up with The Financial Times.
Earlier this year, Jazz FM was the subject of a management buy-out led by current chairman Richard Wheatley.
The Wheatley-led team bought the station from the Local Radio Company and Guardian Media Group.
It was relaunched as a digital-only station last October and is available online, on DAB and through Sky and Freesat.


text:
|Jere and I at Success School
AdvoCare's new endorser Colt McCoy had one dream from time he was a little boy, to be the quarterback that lead his team to a national championship. On January 7, 2010 he was face to face with his dream. It was the last game of his college career as a Texas Longhorn. The day was perfect and as quarterback to win the most games in college history, he was hours from achieving his dream. His plan was solid. However, God had different plans for him that day. In one play Colt was hit and his shoulder was numb. To shorten the story he was taken out of the game and Texas lost to Alabama. Then Colt made a decision that effected millions. He decided that day how to react to his reality. Here is what he said seconds after the game was over:
Thousands have written, emailed, and shared this story of faith. Because of his decision to trust that everything happens for a reason and to voice that on National TV Colt touched more lives than he could have ever if they would have won.
How many times have you missed the opportunity to make the right decision?
Don't get me wrong we don't have to be incredible starting quarterbacks to make a difference. We all make a difference. I use to think that my decisions would only effect me and some of the people in my life. Don't make this mistake. Settling for less than your best, not chasing your dreams, being "realistic", not challenging the "way we do things" when they don't seem right does not do anyone a favor. Clarification; I'm not saying quit your job and move to Mexico because that is your dream, I'm saying make small conscious decisions every day to get you closer to that dream. Be grateful for what you have, enjoy every second of your life (good and bad), take a stand for what you believe in and fight for your dreams. If your plan is to go to college, get into debt, settle for a job to pay off your debt, live pay check to pay check, switch jobs every time you are offered a little more cash, live for the weekends, trade the precious hours of your life for dollars, and build your retirement fund so you can finally live your passion at the age of 65, I strongly urge you to find a new plan. Even if you truly love your job your future depends on someone else. Pension plans, benefits, retirement are all things of our past they will not be around long. This system is failing and we are seeing the effects. Be smart and create multiple streams of income, get out of debt so that you do not owe anyone anything and prepared. Become financially independent so that you can be a contribution not just a cog in the big business machine living for your pension.
This is not an advertisement for AdvoCare, but it is an endorsement for direct sales. I don't know any other way for an average person to create an abundance of wealth. Find one that fits your passion and start creating a second stream of income. There are thousands of great companies out there. If you're into Makeup, especially if you are into organic non-toxic makeup, Arbonne, is a great company. There's ones for jewelry, tupperware, house decorations, cell phone services....do some research and find one that pays well, has a value system that you believe in and is filled with people that you want to be around. Our AdvoCare team is like our family. Beware of companies that promise quick easy money. It's not easy. You will work if you want to be successful. Here's my question, if you are going to work hard for the next 5-10 years why not build something that is going to pay you for the rest of your life?
|3 of the most amazing people we know
The question isn't will I make a difference, the question you should be asking is what kind of difference do I want to make?


text:
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Dan Gordon, ex-Merrill Lynch chief energy trader, pleaded guilty Friday to charges including money laundering and wire fraud, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York confirmed. Gordon admitted to setting up a phony trade between Merrill MER, +0.94% and an offshore company, allowing him to embezzle $43 million from the broker. Under the plea agreement, Gordon has agreed to forfeit the $43 million. He faces a prison term of 55 years in prison and fines of $1.25 million for the three charges, which include conspiracy to falsify books and records.
Have breaking news sent to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Bulletin emails. Sign up here.


text:
Well, most analysts expect Modern Warfare 3 to outperform its predecessor Black Ops - both in terms of pre-orders and sales - but analysts Cowen & Company are claiming that Battlefield 3's pre-orders are doing incredible numbers, roughly on par with Black Ops last year.
It says a lot about a franchise that is really taking the fight to the Call of Duty franchise, and perhaps a lot about disillusionment with the Call of Duty brand - It also says plenty about Battlefield's brand penetration among less 'core' gamers. People are seemingly well aware of Battlefield 3 and aware of the hype surrounding it.
BF3 pre-orders on a par with Black Ops [Eurogamer]


text:
The human ?-globin gene locus consists of five genes that are expressed in a developmental stage- and erythroid-specific manner and regulated by a locus control region (LCR) located far upstream of the genes. Mutations in the ?-globin gene locus are quite frequent in the human population and associated with mild to severe anemias. Most of these mutations are located within the coding region of the adult ?-globin gene or within regulatory sequences affecting expression of the adult gene. Among the most prominent of ?-globin associated diseases are sickle cell anemia (SCA) and ?- thalassemias. Current treatments for these diseases are unsatisfactory and much effort is being invested in developing novel forms of therapies. We anticipate that further knowledge of how the globin genes are activated during development will create new opportunities for the treatment of hemoglobinopathies. For example, recent evidence suggests that the regulatory elements of the globin locus, including the LCR and the gene promoters, come in close proximity during activation of gene expression. If it is understood how genes are brought into close proximity to the LCR it may be possible in the future to modulate these interactions in such a way that associations of the ?-globin genes are favored over that of the adult ?-globin gene in definitive erythroid cells. We propose to perform a comprehensive analysis of the composition and function of protein complexes containing transcription factors involved in globin gene regulation. In these studies we will utilize novel methodology, including expression of biotin tagged proteins in differentiating erythroid cells and in transgenic mice, to examine the role of transcription factors and associated co-factors in the regulation of chromatin accessibility, globin locus conformational changes, and recruitment of transcription complexes. Biotinylated transcription factors will be isolated from cells using streptavidin coated magnetic beads and subjected to mass-spectrometry for identifying associated proteins, to chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) for identifying associated DNA sequences, and to a combined ChIP and chromosome conformation capture (3C) assay for identifying proteins that function in the context of a globin locus configuration in which the LCR and promoters are in close proximity.
The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of transcription factors involved in ?-globin gene regulation using novel methodology. Biotin-tagged transcription factors will be expressed in erythroid cells, isolated using streptavidin coated magnetic beads, and subjected to various biochemical and molecular assays to identify interacting proteins and DNA regions they bind to as well as to determine whether the proteins are part of and required for the formation of """"""""looped"""""""" chromatin configurations that bring regulatory elements of the ?-globin locus in close proximity.
|Papageorgiou, Dimitris N; Karkoulia, Elena; Amaral-Psarris, Alexandra et al. (2016) Distinct and overlapping DNMT1 interactions with multiple transcription factors in erythroid cells: Evidence for co-repressor functions. Biochim Biophys Acta 1859:1515-1526
|Stees, Jared R; Hossain, Mir A; Sunose, Tomoki et al. (2015) High Fractional Occupancy of a Tandem Maf Recognition Element and Its Role in Long-Range ?-Globin Gene Regulation. Mol Cell Biol 36:238-50
|Hossain, Mir A; Barrow, Joeva J; Shen, Yong et al. (2015) Artificial zinc finger DNA binding domains: versatile tools for genome engineering and modulation of gene expression. J Cell Biochem 116:2435-44
|Amanatiadou, Elsa P; Papadopoulos, Giorgio L; Strouboulis, John et al. (2015) GATA1 and PU.1 Bind to Ribosomal Protein Genes in Erythroid Cells: Implications for Ribosomopathies. PLoS One 10:e0140077
|Fan, Alex Xiucheng; Papadopoulos, Giorgio L; Hossain, Mir A et al. (2014) Genomic and proteomic analysis of transcription factor TFII-I reveals insight into the response to cellular stress. Nucleic Acids Res 42:7625-41
|Barrow, Joeva J; Li, Ying; Hossain, Mir et al. (2014) Dissecting the function of the adult ?-globin downstream promoter region using an artificial zinc finger DNA-binding domain. Nucleic Acids Res 42:4363-74
|Papadopoulos, Giorgio L; Karkoulia, Elena; Tsamardinos, Ioannis et al. (2013) GATA-1 genome-wide occupancy associates with distinct epigenetic profiles in mouse fetal liver erythropoiesis. Nucleic Acids Res 41:4938-48
|Papageorgiou, Dimitris N; Demmers, Jeroen; Strouboulis, John (2013) NP-40 reduces contamination by endogenous biotinylated carboxylases during purification of biotin tagged nuclear proteins. Protein Expr Purif 89:80-3
|Rosenberg, Michael; Fan, Alex Xiucheng; Lin, I-Ju et al. (2013) Cell-cycle specific association of transcription factors and RNA polymerase ii with the human ?-globin gene locus. J Cell Biochem 114:1997-2006
|Stees, Jared S; Varn, Fred; Huang, Suming et al. (2012) Recruitment of transcription complexes to enhancers and the role of enhancer transcription. Biology (Basel) 1:778-93
Showing the most recent 10 out of 13 publications


text: Coming with a pull-down spray head that reaches all corners of your basin without difficulty, this tap will facilitate your tasks in the kitchen, whether it's washing vegetables or rinsing dishes. Its high spout provides ample space for you to fill or clean large pots. A swivel range limited to 100 degrees gives you full operating control, preventing the spout from colliding with any surrounding cupboards or walls. Thanks to the integrated GROHE SilkMove technology, the operating lever moves smoothly and precisely. The durable GROHE StarLight chrome finish is highly scratch resistant and easy to clean without losing its lustre. Complete with flexible connection hoses and a clear set of instructions, you will find its installation to be quick and hassle-free. Enjoy the comfort and convenience of this kitchen tap.


text:
This website accompanies our Team App smartphone app available from the App Store or Google Play. Download Team App now and search for NorthWest Arkansas Black Diamonds Lacrosse to enjoy our team app on the go.
To access all the features of this site you need to Log In or Sign Up.


text:
Answers from an Experienced Santa Clarita Painter
At Bill Zemba, we value the importance of maximizing our customers' experiences. This means that we go above and beyond in our efforts to answer and address all of their questions and to ensure that they know exactly what they want and how we can deliver those results. As we hear a number of similar questions from our customers during residential and commercial projects, our crew of Santa Clarita painters has provided answers to some frequently asked questions we receive to provide you with more information about our company and the nature of our services.
What services do you provide?
At Bill Zemba, we take pride in the fact that our skilled and experienced crew is able to offer much more than painting alone. While interior and exterior painting is our company's staple, we are also able to provide drywall repair services, custom finishes, and others. You can view a list of the various services we provide on the house painting page of this website.
How do I choose the right color?
There is no doubt that choosing a color for the interior or exterior of your property can be a difficult process. This is why our company makes the extra effort to help you make a decision that will produce the results and effect you've dreamed of. Experienced in color matching and interior design, we offer free color samples and color consulting services to our customers.
Will the inside of my home / business get messy?
Not when you work with Bill Zemba. As we handle the entirety of your project from start to finish, you can be sure that our crew will prepare your home or business for painting. This includes taping and sealing off all areas thoroughly and moving furniture, appliances, and paintings. We are always clean, courteous, helpful and considerate in our work.
What kind of paint is used for exterior painting?
For exterior painting projects, your home will be beautified with 100% acrylic paints form the Dunn Edwards Paint Corporation.
Why shouldn't I just choose the company with the lowest quote / price?
The lowest price rarely uses the best materials or delivers the best results. The fact is that, as with any trade, the price is only part of what the contractor brings to your project. At Bill Zemba, we make it our mission to not only use quality material and deliver the results you want, but also to make sure that you have the customer service you deserve.
Contact Bill Zemba Today
Easily accessible and available to our customers, we make sure to answer all of your questions and address all of your concerns. From start to finish, we are here to make sure that your project is completed successfully and that you have the results you want.
If you would like more information about the services we provide or if you would like to learn how we can be of assistance during your project, contact Bill Zemba today.


text:
Gabrielle Union Finally Knows She's 'Dope and Fly and Amazing'
On going from feeling like "a joke and a loser" to realizing her self-worth.
On going from feeling like "a joke and a loser" to realizing her self-worth.
What's more popular? "Let's Dance" or "Life on Mars"?
"I really do owe everything to [Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan]."
According to insiders on the red carpet.
And the folks behind the dating-show satire say the same goes for The Bachelor.
We asked celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Tyler Perry, and Sarah Paulson to give us their picks.
"There are worse things than to be compared to Matt Bomer."
"You bring every last drop out of today because you may not get another one."
And Franco's foreskin is actually Zac Efron. Who knew?
"I don't think I'm a convincing woman, but I'm a convincing character."
"It's very aggressive."
The cast of Scream Queens on the scariest generation of all.
Same for Darlene.
From Nick Kroll and Ken Marino to the Lucas Bros. and David Cross.
Starring January Jones! Judd Apatow! Jimmy Fallon! And more!


text:
HORSHAM � Germantown Academy joined the 23-team field this weekend in the 13th annual Ralph Wetzel Holiday Classic for the first time.
After the Patriots� third-place finish in the two-day team competition and a pair of weight-class championships Saturday by juniors Brady Riley (138) and John Grossi (170), they gladly would consider making a new holiday tradition out of this tournament at Hatboro-Horsham High School.
GA coach Steve Hill summed up the difference between the Wetzel Classic and the A.I. DuPont Tournament in Delaware, where the Patriots had competed in previous years.
�The DuPont tournament was bigger and had teams from multiple states, so we saw a lot of different styles: we wrestled some Virginia kids who are really good on their feet, and some Delaware kids were good at using their legs, � Hill said. �This is just hard-nosed Pennsylvania wrestling, and that�s what we wanted to see.�
Riley said this tournament allowed the entire lineup to be challenged, something lacking in the Inter-Academic Athletic League schedule.
�A lot of Inter-Ac teams have a few strong guys, but here, there are a lot of strong whole squads, like Downingtown East and Perkiomen Valley,� said Riley, referring to the two squads that finished ahead of GA in the team standings. �That�s a change.�
GA senior Jared Gober�s was the Patriots� third-highest finisher, as he reached the 145-pound final, but Central Bucks East senior Francesco Fabozzi earned a major decision victory, 16-4.
Fabozzi, who had finished fifth last year at 132 in the PIAA Class AAA state tournament, said he likes holiday tournaments such as the Wetzel Classic, which allow him to focus �on little things.�
�Even the little things, if you�re doing them wrong here, are going to be the big things at Hershey (during states),� Fabozzi said. �Any competition you can get is good competition � (Gober) was a tough wrestler, and he pretty much dominated the rest of the competition.�
Gober kept the match close, trailing only 2-0 after the first period.
The experience of facing Fabozzi will be helpful going forward, Gober said.
�A lot of the stuff that he was doing on (offense) was pretty unpredictable,� Gober said. �He worked me pretty well, and he started to catch onto what I was doing (defensively).�
The host Hatters finished fourth overall, highlighted by a pair of second-place finishes from senior Phil Torresani (120) and junior Zach Tuerke (180), along with a pair of third-place victories by seniors Matt Swiacki (132) and Brad Humski (145).
Abington sophomore Keshon Guiellmo was the Galloping Ghosts� highest finisher, winning three matches, including a pair of consolation bouts, to earn seventh place in the 195-pound category.
As holiday tournaments create memories that will last these wrestlers the rest of their lives, some will be more memorable than others.
Torresani and Tuerke earned their medals the hard way, as both wrestlers suffered minor facial injuries during their championship matches.
Looking like Sylvester Stallone after the original Rocky movie, Torresani was holding an ice pack over his bruised and swollen right eye.
�I got this bottom (bruise) in the championship, and I got the top (bruise) in the semifinal, so now this whole eye is messed up,� said Torresani, who had won the 106 championship as a sophomore and had finished second last year at 113.
�I still tell myself to have fun and to do my best, and whatever happens, happens. I had a lot of fun and I worked hard.�
During Tuerke�s championship match, he was poked in the eye 20 seconds into the second period during a collar-and-elbow lockup. The infraction allowed Tuerke to tie the score at 1.
�(St. Joseph�s Prep�s Tom Johnson) said it was an accident, so I guess I�ve still never been poked intentionally,� Tuerke said. �But that got me mad.�
With 1:25 left in the third period, one of Johnson�s feet hit Tuerke in the mouth during Tuerke�s attempted takedown, causing one of his teeth to gash the inside of his lip, requiring another injury timeout, but giving him a 2-1 advantage.
A two-point takedown with seven seconds left ultimately decided the match.


text:
Sails Ashore Ulva Island Tour
Part of the Sails Ashore "Stewart Island Experience" is a Guided Tour of Ulva Island Open Sanctuary. Your host Peter is also your guide, and the tour draws on my over 45 years of experience on Ulva Island, initially as Ranger in Charge, then as a very regular visitor and latterly as a natural history guide.
Yesterday I took a Wellington couple over to Ulva. Not a wonderful day, and we came back more than damp. It's been some time since I had a really bad weather day guiding, as usually I can manage adjust tour times to work around the worst of it. But I have to say the tour went well, in spite of the wind and rain. Stewart Island is, after all, temperate rain forest.
But still a good afternoon, and among other things we found an Oystercatcher nest. But I have to say I doubt this nest will survive. These birds will generally nest just a metre of so beyond the spring tide mark, and lay just after the top of the big springs. Incubation is around 26/28 days, so hopefully they hatch before the next big tides. But this one has nested under a bank and worse, a couple of days before the top of the tides. The tide is undermining the beach, and less than a metre away. So not looking good. But I've known a pair to have 3 attempts before success, so maybe not so bad.
& Orchids
The orchid season is well underway, and in fact the Dancing Spider and Red Spider Orchids are all finished. But lots of Bamboo Orchid (Peka a waka) Erina Mucronata are out.
Our New Zealand orchids are not particularly well known, apart from real plant enthusiasts, and showing them to New Zealanders is really special.
Pterostylus "Bluff" and Green Bird Orchids are showing well around the village. And the Odd Leafed Orchids appeared about 2 weeks ago and are now well in leaf.


text: I just got a new Droid incredible after my old one crapped out. I can't remember if my old one did this but I don't think it did. My weather on the main screen doesn't update unless I refresh it. When I go to settings, and check automatic updating, as soon as I leave that screen and go back, it is unchecked when I look. Therefore, not auto updating ever. Why is this? I have an unlimited data plan so I don't know why this is happening, I'm pretty certain it didn't do this on my old phone. Sent from my ADR6300 using DroidForums App


text:
"IBM does not discuss its staffing plans publicly," IBM spokesman Douglas Shelton said last week. "However, we are constantly managing resources across a base of more than 400,000 employees as client demands evolve." That count is global. The company stopped reporting its United States head count as of March 2010, when it would normally have reported the 2009 count. The company's last formal reported employee count was 115,000 in the United States for 2008. An executive told Congress in late 2009 that it was then 105,000. "IBM does this in order to hide the declining population numbers in the U.S.," suggested Lee Conrad, national organizer for the Alliance. "I believe we're well under 100,000 in the U.S." ...
The jobs are mostly in the United States but may include some in Canada, Conrad said, based on comments received from Canadian employees. He said people losing their jobs have often reported that their work is being shifted to other nations. One of the newer ones is Argentina, he said, and other countries gaining work include the Philippines , India and Brazil. Details of where in the nation the cuts are being made and how many in a given area are not provided in the packages.
In International Business Machines Corp. v. Visentin, Case 11 cv 399, Judge Loretta Preska of the U.S District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against IBM and denied its motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent Visentin from working for HP for one year. The court specifically noted that IBM's fact witnesses "failed to provide specific examples of confidential or trade secret information that could actually be used to IBM's detriment if Mr. Visentin were allowed to assume his new position at HP." Judge Preska also noted that some IBM employees who worked with purported trade secret information were not bound by any non-compete or confidentiality agreements, weakening IBM's claim that it took reasonable measures to maintain confidentiality. The judge also took note that an IBM employee testified that the non-competition agreements are "retention devices" intended to pressure IBM's employees from leaving their jobs.
So in that picture, where don't you see layoffs and cuts in pay, bonus, awards, benefits, pension, etc???
Sam and upper management met their goals and thus should get paid more and make more off their stock options. How did you (and I) contribute to those goals? Oh look our Salary's went up 1-2% and we still cost IBM in terms of our Bonus checks. We should be punished further.
As they say, the beatings will continue until morale improves...
Large print for media consumption: "IBM GIVES EMPLOYEES $1K BONUS"
Small print - The 1K 'bonus' isn't payable for 4 years and will be taken out of this year's (and following years?) GDP. You have to wait 4 years for $ you earned over the previous 4 years, gee thanks!
POK ISC had 'whackings' this week also. Lost 1 person in my dept. Mfg group I work with lost about 24 heads under the 3rd line. I know a bunch of them and many were retiring this year anyway (including a married couple). I almost think that management did them a favor by whacking them (but somehow I doubt it).
I look at my org chart and see 9 'managers' from me to Sam. I see that IBM still has a helicopter and at least 2 Gulfstream jets. But still has to F* the American worker. How I despise these people
It's getting close to release of the PDF of the annual report and the shareholder's proxy. I highly recommend the part of the proxy dealing with executive compensation. Last year's covered almost 10 pages.
I also was one of the one's who found an internal IBM job prior to being RA'd by Global Services. I was denied the job unless I had a transfer or a 2-year contract. What baloney. I appealed to corporate HR (Randy) and was shifted to upper HR in GS where HR finally admitted that the job was marked to be offshored. And a twin-job that had a multi-year expert in it was also marked for offshore, so that person ended up being RA'd as well. So the RA are clearly not a skills rebalancing or better matching skills to jobs. It is all cheap labor. I was also denied a job at an account because, as I was emailed by IBM's resource deployment manager, the account was first considering people in group "A" - landed resources. Americans were in group "C". So it is pretty clear - all about cheap labor and IBM long ago stopped hiding that fact contrary to what they tell the media.
When Sam Palmisano writes his memoirs (you know they always do), may I suggest that Mr. Palmisano title his book, "The Soulless New IBM".
To be successful in today's IBM, managers have to be soulless. Beryl, I applaud you for getting out before the company and/or alcohol destroyed you.
The rest of us are tracked to the "growth from year year". The growth was up but not enough to meet the target. Like all IBM targets, it is set to make sure we know where we stand...at the bottom.
Sam got 2X from last year. A couple of other execs did real well from what I have read in the finance sections.
Cons: It seems more and more evident that everything at IBM comes down to "the bottom line" (money/revenue). Earnings per share (and the resulting Executive compensation) seems to have become more important to the corporation than their employees.
The company cuts back costs (staff, equipment, contract services) at the expense of the workers. Meaning we are expected to "do more with less." This mentality seemed reasonable at first, but it has perpetuated into a vicious cycle where we expect more and more (and more!) out of our people. Many/Most people are overworked, and work-life balance seems to be a distant memory.
While the culture has traditionally supported employee career development, in harder economic times managers can be reluctant to let their good employees pursue opportunities, for fear of losing the head count - Finance will see it as a chance to save money (and not allow you to backfill the position)... So if somebody leaves your group, more likely than not, one of the existing team members will just have to absorb the additional work... again adding to the overworked staff.
There are MANY corporate practices/processes that have been put in place over many years. Most (not all) of these processes were meant to make sure that the teams delivered a high quality product that met certain industry standards/regulations. Though we cut back on staff, and we have to do more with less, we never seem to cut back on process. This is a double-edges sword... Cutting back on some of these practices/process may cause us to deliver a poorer quality product, or to not meet certain standards/regulations... But not cutting back on process means that more and more of our time is spent navigating process. Spending time on this, and trying to get your "real work" done adds to the problem of an overworked staff.
While there is a system in place to compensate based on merit, over the years the differentiation between the best employees and the average employees has become laughable (corporate funding for these programs seem lower than expected, especially considering reported company earnings). The minuscule difference between compensation for the best and the average employees have made many people question the point of working so hard (If you can put in less effort and get compensated the same, why kill yourself working 60 hour weeks???).
Finance seems to be making many decisions which they are not qualified to make. All they care about revenue versus expense. They have been given power to dictate our expenses, though they do not understand the impact of cutting certain expenses. Penny pinching today may cause you revenue for the next few years if we don't have enough resources to put out a product.
Advice to Senior Management: Most of the lower level managers are just trying to get by (survive) in an environment where we are expected to "do more with less." Upper level management (Executives) need to realize that we are at a breaking point and we can continue down this path. Many of our good people will look for opportunities to leave the company as soon as the economy gets better.
Cons: Can be difficult managing work life balance - many of us are bogged down by a utilization number that we need to aim towards - but the system is flawed because the number goes down when we go on vacation, get sick, etc, so we are bound to work more hours on average just to keep our utilization up. This makes work life balance hard because we are constantly thinking about our utilization when we are working and on the bench. It can be argued that this is used to improve productivity - but I feel work morale is low from it, and gives us more stress than needed.
Pay can also be higher :) -IBM isn't as generous to the employees as one may think, bonuses also aren't very high. Also getting promoted is quite a difficult process from what I hear (cannot say for sure since I have not tried yet though).
Advice to Senior Management: I think we need to improve work morale - make work life enjoyable. This may include setting up a social committee and going out once in a while to get to know each other, or taking the new employee out to lunch as a team. Make people feel like they aren't just working numbers.
Greg Anrig outlines the ten reasons to not cut Social Security benefits:
"The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents," said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement specialist at the New School for Social Research in New York. "And the next generation of retirees will do a lot worse; they fall off a cliff," largely because so few of them will have the traditional pensions that many of their parents and grandparents had.
Americans planning to retire in five to 10 years could see their golden years tarnished by a confluence of circumstances, including depressed housing prices, soaring health costs and a fitful stock market that has pummeled 401(k) plans. Not only that, company after company has frozen or eliminated its pension plan, and many members of Congress are pushing to scale back Social Security benefits — even though half of the nation's retirees receive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security. Its benefits average $14,000 a year. So perhaps it should not be surprising that 45 percent of America's baby boomers are "at risk," without enough to maintain their living standards after they retire, according to the nation's leading center on retirement studies, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. ...
Karen Friedman, executive vice president for the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit group, is urging Congress to create what are often called guaranteed retirement accounts, to which employees and employers would contribute, with each giving perhaps 3 percent of an employee's pay. She also said the federal government should provide a tax subsidy to give workers, especially low-income ones, an incentive to contribute. "Congress," Ms. Friedman said, "shouldn't be focusing on cutting Social Security — that's the part of the retirement system that works best — but on strengthening the private side of the system to make sure everyone has adequate and secure benefits for retirement."
My 32-year-old son, however, is RABIDLY anti health-care reform of the sort being offered, and doesn't want toe government to touch health-care in any way. We can't even have a discussion on the issue!
The president told the nation's governors on Monday that he supported a bipartisan bill — sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, and Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana — that would allow states to fashion solutions right from the start of full-scale reform in 2014, rather than waiting until 2017, as the law requires.
The catch is that a state's plan must cover as many people as the federal law does, provide insurance that is as comprehensive and affordable, and not increase the deficit. That won't be easy for the governors to accomplish, and House Republicans seem unlikely to pass the bill to let them try. They would much rather repeal the reform law — or have it declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — than join Mr. Obama in improving it. ...
The president's new olive branch is not apt to change the legal arguments over whether the mandate in the reform law is constitutional. But it can't hurt to bring forcefully to everyone's attention that there are alternatives to the mandate if states want to pursue them. Republicans ought to rise to the challenge.
Community pharmacists in New York are lobbying state lawmakers to pass legislation that would prevent health plans from requiring patients taking medications for chronic ailments to fill their prescriptions through the mail.
While some plans had shifted to mail delivery long ago because it was often cheaper for both employers and consumers, drugstores have been offering more competitive prices and pushing lawmakers to level the playing field by ensuring that people can still visit their local pharmacy for their drugs.
The new site, called healthcareandyou.org, is intended to steer clear of the heated politics behind the legislation and focus instead on what the plan means for consumers. People who log on to the site can click on their state, their age group, and their circumstances — like whether they're a small business owner or not — and find explanations of the law's intricacies and a timeline pointing out when various provisions will take effect. ...
But the site, which began on Tuesday, faces something of a challenge: studies show that many Americans who think they understand how the law works are thoroughly misinformed, and some are not even aware it is still in effect. ...
The National Council on Aging last year also found that 42 percent of seniors believed, incorrectly, that the law would cut their basic Medicare benefits, while another 37 percent said they did not know how it would affect their coverage. ...
Six other groups, in addition to the family physicians' academy and AARP, make up the coalition that created the site. Among them are the American Medical Association; the American Nurses Association; the Catholic Health Association; the National Community Pharmacists Association; the American College of Physicians; and the American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network. Several of these groups supported the health care law itself.
"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.
And there are clear justifications for doing so, from practicality to fairness. Though many multi-millionaires fancy themselves self-made men (and women), the truth is that they all have profited from investments that American taxpayers have made over the decades, and even centuries.
For instance, President Dwight Eisenhower's inter-state highway system enabled companies to move their goods more cheaply; President John Kennedy's space program spurred the growth in computer sciences; the Pentagon created the Internet (yes, with critical support from Al Gore when in Congress), which revolutionized commerce and spread information. ...
An even-stronger tax justification applies to Wall Street, where the greed and gambling of bankers tipped the economy into a severe recession just three years ago, costing millions of Americans their jobs and homes. To avoid an even worse outcome – a new depression – the federal government and Federal Reserve authorized trillions of dollars in bailouts. To further calm Wall Street, the authorities essentially gave the bankers a "get out of jail free" card. Not a single prominent player in the sub-prime securities scandal has been prosecuted or forced to surrender much in ill-gotten gains.
Instead, many of the top Wall Street bankers are lining up again for massive paydays in the tens of millions of dollars, essentially skimming off profits that were achieved only because the U.S. government poured vast sums of public money into the financial sector. Yet, many of these same bankers insist that their taxes remain at historically low levels.
Other wealthy Americans have enriched themselves through holdings in multinational corporations that fattened their bottom lines by laying off middle-class Americans and hiring cheaper replacement workers overseas. Not only did these American workers see their lives damaged by the exporting of their jobs but they face the indignity of helping to foot the bill for the gigantic U.S. military which protects the global interests of these multinationals. ...
But today's U.S. political/media dynamic makes any discussion of higher taxes on the rich a non-starter. Instead, the debate is all about handing out more tax breaks to the rich, slashing government spending, canceling transportation projects, abandoning environmental goals, and busting unions that represent teachers and other public workers. ...
Already, most of us scramble to make ends meet, with fewer protections in the work place as unions shrink, with the 40-hour work week disappearing, with cell phone and e-mails putting us on call virtually 24/7, and with retirements postponed sometimes indefinitely. This era's great irony may be that an earlier generation thought that technology would create so much wealth and comfort that life would be easier for the human race, giving us more time to play with the kids, to read a book, to travel or to just take it easy. ...
While the middle- and working-classes have seen the American dream recede for them, the upper stratum of the super rich has watched the benefits of the high-tech global economy flow disproportionately into their stock portfolios and trust funds. The tiny fraction at the top – the richest 0.01 percent – has raised its collective income by 400 percent, adjusted for inflation, over the past two decades, while seeing tax rates for the rich decline.
But it wasn't teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets — it was Wall Street. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, which is organizing some of today's UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have "one dollar" in your wallet, you're paying more than the "combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America." ...
In the coming months, politicians across the country are going to tell Americans that the only way to stave off huge deficit and balance the budgets is by gutting programs for the poor, eviscerating support for the middle class, eliminating labor rights, and decimating the government's ability to serve the public interest. This is a lie. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and income inequality is higher now than it has been at any time since the 1920′s, with the top "top 1 percentile of households [taking] home 23.5 percent of income in 2007."
But across the border from Wisconsin in Minnesota, Democratic Governor Mark Dayton has proposed an alternative idea: Raise taxes on the rich to help close the budget gap. Dayton's budget plan would increase taxes to 10.95 percent on Minnesota families earning over $150,000 a year (or single adults earning more than $85,000). He would also add an additional 3 percent surtax on the superrich - those earning more than $500,000 - for the next 3 years.
Even raising taxes on the rich to these levels would only cut Minnesota's budget deficit in half, and Dayton has also proposed cutting the state workforce by 6 percent and removing 7,200 childless adults from Minnesota Care, moves that should be fought by progressives. Nevertheless, Dayton's "Tax the Rich" plan shows that there is nothing inevitable about the limited option of breaking public unions proposed by Scott Walker and some other GOP governors. ...
According to Tea Party activists and others on the right, they are just harkening back to the vision of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, standing up for individual liberty in the face of government tyranny. Never mind that perhaps the biggest concern of many early American leaders was the negative effects of concentrated wealth on liberty and democracy.
In reality, the efforts of Gov. Walker, the Koch brothers, Beck, and others are aimed at taking us back to the 19th century era of the Robber Barons. The Kochs, who the Center for Public Integrity's Charles Lewis likened to "the Standard Oil of our times," are shrewder (and richer) than railroad magnate Jay Gould, who famously remarked, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." But their divide-and-conquer strategy of pitting private-sector workers against the public sector reveals a similar spirit. And just to make sure that we understand the comparison, Indiana's Deputy Attorney General tweeted a helpful call for the police to "use live ammo" on protesters in Wisconsin's Capitol Building.
Unfortunately, the attempts to go back in time by the Koch brothers and right wing, while pathetic, are far from "feeble." The forces arrayed against working people in the US and globally have been strengthened enormously over the past three decades thanks to the concerted political efforts of big business, along with increased global competition for profits. The Democratic Party has largely gone along with this process, seeking to position itself as the more far-sighted and responsible party of 21st century capitalism, against the more rapacious and narrow-minded Republicans. ...
If we want to see budget deficits dealt with through raising taxes the rich rather than hammering the poor and working class, that will mean hitting the streets. The Koch brothers know this. Jane Mayer quotes one of the Kochs' closest allies, Matt Kibbe, president of the Tea Party group Freedom Works, in her New Yorker expose of the billionaire brothers: "We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions - Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates."
It turns out that the only income group among those polled by Gallup that favors the governor's proposal to roll back public employee bargaining rights are those who make over $90,000.
The median average in the United States is around $50,000. The average salary for a Wisconsin public school teacher is around $48,000. ...
Months ago, Politico reported that conservatives were supremely confident they'd be able to make "political targets out of what was once a protected liberal class of teachers, cops, and other public servants." The idea was to make public employees scapegoats for the nation's dramatic economic downturn, which seemed to go hand in hand with a time-honored political PR tactic of identifying a group, demonizing it and making it the enemy as part of the long-term game plan to either defeat it or destroy it.
But they may not be such easy targets after all. What may change in the landscape is a growing realization that the more accurate divide in the conservative war against unions isn't political or ideological, but economic. In public reaction to the events in Wisconsin, one finds a strong bipartisan consensus among most income groups that Walker's proposal goes too far and that demonizing the likes of teachers, nurses, peace officers and firefighters may come with a political price. Indeed, several GOP governors have already begun to back away from the most onerous of anti-public union proposals.
Governor Walker continues his obdurate opposition to the state's public employee unions' right to collective bargaining, despite a willingness on their part to concede pension and health givebacks he claims would help close Wisconsin's alleged deficit. Meanwhile, there has been a decided increase on the sleaze end of the cheese vs. sleaze quotient, as evidenced in part by the prank phone call to the governor in which an online newspaper editor impersonating right wing billionaire David Koch elicited from Walker a proposed scheme to lure back, then double cross Democratic state senators who have prevented a quorum by retreating to Illinois. ...
But of course, this isn't really about saving taxpayers money but consolidating political power. Walker and such leading lights of the GOP leadership as Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and Ohio Governor John Kasich, among others, have decided that public employee unions make great punching bags, effective scapegoats for an outraged electorate and a satisfactory diversion from the real culprits of this grim, economic melodrama -- the Simon Legrees of banking and finance who got us into this meltdown mess in the first place. ...
As Josh Dorner reported on the progressive ThinkProgress website this week, "Instead of making the tough choices necessary to help their states weather the current crisis with some semblance of the social safety net and basic government services intact, Republican governors are instead using it as an opportunity to advance several longtime GOP projects: union busting, draconian cuts to social programs, and massive corporate tax breaks. These misplaced priorities mean that the poor and middle class will shoulder the burden of fiscal austerity, even as the rich and corporations are asked to contribute even less." ...
Writing in the February 23 Boston Globe, Mark Erlich, executive secretary-treasurer of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters asks, "While there are legitimate and critical public policy issues about education reform, spiraling health costs, and pension liabilities at a time of state and municipal budget deficits, why is the fault laid at the feet of teachers, police, and firefighters? Today's pension obligations are the product of massive investment losses, not excessively generous public pensions that, in fact, average about $19,000 a year. For that matter, a 2010 Economic Policy Institute study showed that, controlled for educational achievement, public sector workers actually earn less than their private sector counterparts."
For example, both are going after the very useful program that helps low-income Americans pay the ever-rising cost of heating their homes in the dead of winter. This budget cut will literally cut off the heat to some of the most vulnerable people in our society. But hey, say Congress critters whose workplace is always kept toasty at taxpayers' expense, everyone must sacrifice.
Well...not really everyone. Washington's ferocious ax-wielders are sparing assorted corporate subsidies. Take the Market Access Program--please! It hands $200 million a year to huge processors and exporters of agricultural commodities like Sunkist and Welch's so they can advertise their products abroad. Hello--these "free enterprise" giants have plenty of money to make their own ads.
Even wackier, this subsidy often is frittered away on pure nonsense. Last year the Cotton Council used a big chunk of its $20 million handout from Uncle Sam to promote U.S. cotton sales in India. India? That country produces twice as much cotton as us and is a major exporter of the stuff, so it has no interest in buying ours.
Nonetheless, such outfits are in line for more federal advertising dollars, while poor folks are literally to be left in the cold. Why? It's the perverse power of political money at work. The corporations getting ad subsidies give more than $8 million a year in campaign donations and spend about $10 million a year on lobbyists.
His report comes on the heels of a similar analysis last week by the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which predicted that the Republican spending cuts would cause even greater damage to the economy, slowing growth by as much as 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of this year.
Performance reviews corrupt the system by getting employees to focus on pleasing the boss, rather than on achieving desired results. And they make it difficult, if not impossible, for workers to speak truth to power. I've examined scores of empirical studies since the early 1980s and have not found convincing evidence that performance reviews are fair, accurate or consistent across managers, or that they improve organizational effectiveness.
Think about it. Performance reviews are held up as objective assessments by the boss, with the assumption that the boss has all the answers. ...
Under such a system, in which one's livelihood can be destroyed by a self-serving boss trying to meet a budget or please the higher-ups, what employee would ever speak his mind? What employee would ever say that the boss is wrong, and offer an idea on how something might get done better? Only an employee looking for trouble.
Rep. Betty McCollum says her work could save American taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. But Defense Department officials and lawmakers from NASCAR country say the sponsorships help military recruitment, and that the tax breaks could save jobs in the struggling economy.
In an interview Friday, McCollum said it doesn't make sense to keep the benefits for NASCAR teams and track owners when other cuts are being made to community health care, programs for homeless veterans and Head Start.
"I started to look what is in this large defense budget to see what's not related to security that we could redirect to critical supplies or mission support," she said. "Or in the case of racetrack owners, what are some of the special tax perks that some of the special interests are getting?" She plans to file legislation to prohibit Pentagon sponsorships of dragsters, Indy cars, stock cars and motorcycle racing, affecting just about every level of motorsports. ...
Her amendment failed, 281-148.
Meanwhile, racetrack owners received tax breaks worth $45 million in 2010 and 2011, aimed at helping them make improvements to their facilities. A two-year extension of the program was included in the tax cuts compromise that President Barack Obama forged with Congress in December. McCollum said she'll file legislation to repeal the tax benefit. "It's an earmark," she said.
The Birchite billionaire Koch brothers and Walker, their gubernatorial hatchet man in the Badger State, have unwittingly done a tremendous favor for our country's progressive movement. Thanks to them, America's workaday majority has been awakened. With eyes wide open, middle-class working folks everywhere now have their attention riveted on Wisconsin, where a plutocratic, autocratic conspiracy between uber-wealthy corporate elites and obsequious GOP politicos has raised its ugly head for all to see.
Even before Walker was sworn in, Koch operatives were working with his transition team on a proposal that would summarily strip state and local workers of their hard-won right to bargain with their governmental bosses. Blinded by their flaming arrogance, the co-conspirators blithely assumed that Wisconsinites would just sit still for this, like sheep being fleeced. Bad miscalculation.
Collective bargaining literally is democracy at work -- not something that working families take lightly. Nor should employers, for the process works, allowing 98 percent of union-employer disputes to be resolved with no strife.
Without it, workers know that they would be reduced to "collective begging," so Wisconsinites saw the governor's no-bargaining bill for exactly what it is: a raw attempt to extend authoritarian executive rule over the workplace, stifling the voice of workers and further shrinking middle-class possibilities in America. ...
Walker is little more than a hireling in the Koch brothers' extremist political enterprise. They invested $43,000 directly into his gubernatorial campaign last year, making them his second largest donor. David Koch also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, a donation that leveraged a $5 million RGA expenditure in the Wisconsin race. In addition, a Koch-funded front group, Americans for Prosperity, pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the state in an AstroTurf campaign to benefit Walker.
Just before the election, Koch Industries opened a lobbying office only a few doors down the street from the Wisconsin Capitol. Will it shock you to learn that shortly after taking office, the grateful governor quietly tucked two very special provisions into his union-busting bill that could cause the Koch's political investment to pay off handsomely?
One provides favorable new regulations for pipeline transporters. The second is a stunning proposal allowing the governor to sell, without legislative oversight, publicly owned power plants to private corporations on a no-bid basis. Guess who just happens to be in the pipeline and power plant business? Right. ...
Astonishingly, the governor has tried to rationalize his radical assault on worker rights by claiming that he's merely doing what voters elected him to do. Two problems with this assertion: First, two-thirds of Wisconsinites say they oppose such a power grab, with only 24 percent favoring it; and second, Walker never mentioned a word about gutting bargaining rights during his campaign. If he had, says a recent poll, he would've lost.
It's a lie. ...
The budget "crisis" is a phony construction, the result of right-wing "starve the beast" ideology. There is plenty of money out there--but the pols don't want it. There is no need to lay off a single teacher, close a single library for an extra hour, or raise a single fee by one red cent. Every government can not only balance its budget, but wind up with a surplus. The solution is simple: tax the rich.
Over the last 50 years tax rates for the bottom 80 percent of wage earners have remained almost static. Meanwhile the rich have received tax cut after tax cut after tax cut. For example, the rate paid by the top 0.01 percent--people who currently get more than $6.5 million a year--fell by half (from 70 to 35 percent). Times are tough. Someone has to pay. Why not start with those who can most afford it?
Europe has the world's best food, its best healthcare system and its best vacation policy. It also has one of the fairest ways to generate revenue for government: a wealth tax. In Norway, for example, you pay one percent of your net worth in addition to income tax.
What if we imposed a Norwegian-style wealth tax on the top one percent of U.S. households? We're not talking upper middle class here: the poorest among them is worth a mere $8.3 million. This top one percent owns 35 percent of all wealth in the United States. "Such a wealth tax...would raise $191.1 billion each year (one percent of $19.1 trillion), a significant attack on the deficit," Leon Friedman writes in The Nation. "If we extended the tax to the top 5 percent, we could raise $338.5 billion a year (one percent of 62 percent of $54.6 trillion)." ...
Business shills whine that America's corporate tax rate--35 percent--is one of the world's highest. But that's pure theory. Our real corporate rate--the rate companies actually pay after taking advantages of loopholes and deductions--is among the world's lowest. According to The New York Times, Boeing paid a total tax rate of 4.5 percent over the last five years. (This includes federal, state, local and foreign taxes.) Yahoo paid seven percent. GE paid 14.3 percent. Southwest Airlines paid 6.3 percent. "GE is so good at avoiding taxes that some people consider its tax department to be the best in the world, even better than any law firm's," reports the Times' David Leonhardt. "One common strategy is maximizing the amount of profit that is officially earned in countries with low tax rates."
FACTS: Wisconsin had a $120 million surplus when Walker came into office in January. Had the newly-elected Republican-dominated Legislature in January not given about $140 million in special tax breaks (also known as "corporate welfare") to business, the state could have had a surplus, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. About two-thirds of all Wisconsin corporations pay no taxes at all, according to the Wisconsin Department of Revenue.
Wisconsin could also save significant expenses by having state-employed fiscal analysts, not Wall Street investment counselors, handle the entire pension investment portfolio. Wisconsin pays about $28 million to state managers to handle about half the portfolio; it pays about $195 million to Wall Street investment brokers to handle the other half, according to the 2010 annual report of the Wisconsin Investment Board.
Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now," correctly points out, "the population in the United States is angry, frustrated, full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They're the ones who created the current crisis." The Great Recession has cost states revenue, not because of the workers' salaries and pensions but because the values went down because of lax oversight primarily during a Republican administration. Even with the Wall Street crisis, and lower-than-expected revenue, the Wisconsin pension fund is fully funded, able to meet its obligation for several years, according to the independent PEW Center for the States.
Wall Street developed with no regulation. Abuses abounded. Financial markets were corrupt. Then came the 1929 Crash, a wealth destruction event that ended the dreams of an American generation. The Pecora hearings exposed self-dealing and fraud by Wall Street bankers. Wall Street faced ruin. But instead of wiping out Wall Street or nationalizing the banks, we chose to save capitalism and protect investors -- by creating a new system of highly regulated financial markets.
Congress created the SEC to oversee stock exchanges, require honest accounting and disclosure by corporations and broke up (and strictly controlled) the Wall Street banks. In time, this new regulatory framework created the greatest age of economic growth and prosperity in history. Despite periodic recessions and bear markets -- there were no more investor wealth destruction events.
As the U.S. became the world's financial powerhouse, no one got more powerful than the Wall Street banks and their corporate allies. Then they set about undoing the very regulatory framework that had saved them. As politics came to depend on massive infusions of cash, no one provided more of it than corporations and Wall Street banks. They complained that regulation was restricting American competitiveness and economic growth -- our citizenry was seduced by promises of greater growth and prosperity. Government, which had actually been the key to the solution, became portrayed as the problem. They captured Congress. And then came the regulatory teardown. ...
The inappropriate investments that caused these massive pension fund losses were not an accident. The pension fund field caught the Wall Street contagion -- financial corruption. It's called "Pay to Play." The SEC saw it years ago but, controlled by anti-regulation political appointees, it did nothing. So a nationwide system of political contributions to elected officials who sit on fund boards and payoffs and kickbacks to politically well-connected "Placement Agents" to steer fund money to Wall Street became widespread. Not surprisingly, the investments obtained by "pay-to-play" kickbacks and contributions have generated horrific losses. ...
The conservatives will "scapegoat" public employees as a privileged -- protected -- class. But it was not firemen, cops, clerks, or teachers (or their unions) who lost trillions of dollars in risky investments in an under-regulated stock market over the past 20 years. The Wall Street money managers lost it in investments acquiesced in by the pension fund trustees they had wined and dined. It's the same old story. The bankers pocket gigantic fees. The privileged few get fat. Ordinary people get run over. And now are even to be blamed -- even punished -- for a mess they did not create.
This site is designed to allow IBM Employees to communicate and share methods of protecting their rights through the establishment of an IBM Employees Labor Union. Section 8(a)(1) of the National Labor Relations Act states it is a violation for Employers to spy on union gatherings, or pretend to spy. For the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act, notice is given that this site and all of its content, messages, communications, or other content is considered to be a union gathering.


text:
Sliding windows can give any home a classic look, traditional vertical sliding sash windows are particularly valuable in older properties especially if it is listed or in a conservation area.
However, anyone who has a property will be aware of the issues which can occur with sash windows, such as rotting or swollen wooden frames, rattling panes or jammed windows which may have been painted shut or have faulty mechanisms.
Vertical sliding windows were first installed in the 18th century and were once considered something of a status symbol on properties of the era. They offered a better alternative to the windows of the day. However, their design and manufacture in softwood with old fashioned paint treatments left them susceptible to wood rot, issues with the weights and panes causing the windows to stick or rattle and they require considerable ongoing maintenance. The alternative is replacement uPVC sliding sash windows which give you the classic, stylish look of vertical sash windows but with none of the problems of older windows.
You may not be aware that you can now replace your old, rattling and rotting vertical sliding windows with modern uPVC replacements. They provide all the stylish look of the classic window, however have none of the maintenance problems you may remember from traditional windows. uPVC is a highly stable and easily cleaned material, a quick wipe with a cloth is likely the only maintenance you will ever need for your new windows, and with the tilt-back system you can easily clean the frames and the glass from inside your house so no more climbing ladders.
Supplied with 'A' rated, energy efficient glass and excellent weather seals, you will find that your new windows will remove issues with drafts and water leaks. You can be confident that you will be saving on your energy bills with your new uPVC sliding sash windows, keeping the heat in your home where it belongs! Windows installed by West Country Windows all have high U values - this is a measure of how much heat passes through the window. A higher value means the window will allow less heat to escape your home. You may additionally choose to use Pilkington K glass which has a special coating which reflects heat back into your room whilst also letting in heat from the sun, a process known as passive solar gain.
Vertical Sliding Windows provided by West Country Windows are built by craftspeople with many years of experience so you can be confident that you will have the perfect windows for your property. Our skilled surveyors can advise you of the best choice from the selection of styles available which includes swept or arched heads. Astragal bars can be fitted, these are uPVC bars which are placed onto the window glass both internally and externally giving you the look of period style small panes of glass. The advantage is you have a single sheet of glass and decorative bars giving the impression of glazing without any potential thermal loss. They can be fitted to the sealed glazing units to give stunning effects.
Vertical sliding windows can be manufactured as traditional triples, bay windows or unequal splits where one sash is deeper than the other. Additionally, they are available either in white, cream or a selection of wood-effect, factory applied foils, in rosewood or oak allowing you the flexibility to create the look you want for your home. You can be sure that your windows will be secure, with inbuilt locking and latches available in a range of styles including traditional style catches.
West Country windows are the leading local replacement window professionals in the region, they were established in 1977 and have 40 year's experience in fitting windows, doors and conservatories and provide a personal and friendly service backed up by a no quibble guarantee, they are the name you can trust. You can be confident that uPVC sliding sash windows fitted by their team will be installed to the highest standards. They understand how important your home is and will work with you to ensure they deliver the finest uPVC sliding sash windows to match your design brief and exceed your expectations.Back to list
Free upgrade to composite door when placing an order over eight windows*Click Here to Get This Offer


text:
This teaching page provides analysis of the work of art, background information on the artist, key ideas, discussion questions, and online resources for additional learning. You can also download a PDF of this teaching page and two large images (image 1, image 2) of her installation, in the space of elsewhere. Sonja Thomsen: in the space of elsewhere is on view through December 17, 2017.
Sonja Thomsen created her installation in the space of elsewhere expressly for the lobby of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Such "site-specific" art is the result of a collaboration between the museum and the artist, in which the artist has given careful consideration to the specifics of the space before making a unique work of art. Responding to the prominence of natural light streaming into MMoCA's lobby, Thomsen delved into the many ways light operates in this 2400-square-foot César Pelli-designed space, with its signature glass staircase and triangular architectural details.
Thomsen hung a variety of three-edged polycarbonate shapes in the lobby's 'icon,' the point at which glass walls come together to form a flattened apex and echo the shapes of adjacent buildings. Thomsen's triangular forms, some with mirrored and some with colored surfaces, can be seen from different vantage points within and outside the museum. Thomsen also used an unusual material―reflective Aluminet shade cloth (usually employed in agriculture as shade for growing plants)―to form elongated triangles that stretch across the glass atrium. Photographic wall murals cover two floors of the lobby and reiterate in large scale the colors, textures, and shapes of the installation's sculptural components.
Thomsen's installation explores the qualities of light for reflecting, or bouncing off surfaces; refracting, or bending and breaking into colors; and creating shadows where beams of light are interrupted in their passage. It invites visitors, as well as passersby, to wonder at the play of light within the museum's soaring architectural features, and to look for visual relationships between the building's triangular design and the installation's diverse elements. Thomsen has explained that her artistic interests are in "creating spaces that highlight the inaccessible. As we get closer, comprehension moves further away. . .There should always be a place for wonder; it is a direct line to new knowledge."
Sonja Thomsen was born in 1978. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Her practice combines photography, sculpture, interactive installation and site-specific public art. A resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Thomsen is a member of the international photography collective Piece of Cake and co-director of The Pitch Project, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Thomsen has been developing her expansive approach to photography for the past twelve years, finding inspiration "from photography's history of experimentation and alchemy." She has said, "Light makes time perceptible. It takes approximately eight minutes for the photons from the sun to reach us. We construct our own timelines by counting sunrises. We understand scientifically that light is both particle and wave. I use the language of light, in image, projection, reflection, and refraction, to create experiences that highlight the inaccessible."
- Site-specific art that results from a collaboration between artist and museum
- Installation that contains sculptural, photographic, and unusual, non-art materials
- Light as a subject and material of a work of art
- Art that evokes a sense of wonder and curiosity
- What are some ways that you use light in your daily activities? How is light useful to you?
- How does the quality of light change from morning to afternoon and evening? Where can you find patterns of changing light in your home, school, or outdoors?
- Sonja Thomsen wants viewers to feel a sense of wonder when experiencing her work. How do you define wonder? What places inspire you or spark your curiosity?
- Imagine that you have been asked to make a work of art using light as your material. How might you capture, guide, block, focus, or otherwise play with light in an interesting way?
On the Artist
Video interview with the artist
Essays on Sonja Thomsen's ideas and processes
Art Methods
History and examples of installation art
Description and examples of site-specific art


text:
A Welcome Message From Our Team
Here at Miracle-Ear, we're proud to help people reach their full hearing potential every day. It's our goal to make the process as easy and enjoyable as possible. We hope you will allow us to help you hear better days!Get In Touch
Our Location
690 Stewart Ave
Get Directions
Unit B
Garden City, NY 11530
Our Office
Specializes In
- Hearing Loss
- Hearing Aids
- Custom Fit
- Tinnitus
- Aftercare
How Can We Help?
Ready to experience Miracle-Ear hearing aids for yourself?
Call 516-342-5009 to schedule your first appointment.
We'll work together to find the best solution for you.
Miracle-Ear Hearing Aids in Garden City, NY
If you're having difficulties hearing in hard-to-hear places or understanding others around you, then it may be time to get hearing aids in Garden City, NY. When you come to Miracle-Ear®, you'll be working with hearing care specialists from America's most recognized brand of hearing aids. Our goal will be your total satisfaction, so you can test out our products during your 30-day, risk-free* trial.
Listening to Clear Conversations
Did you know that nine out of 10 people with hearing loss can be helped with a hearing aid? If you'd like to discover and experience the Miracle-Ear® Advantage, come to our location to get your free hearing test**. We want you to take interest in conversations no matter what environment you're in and be able to clearly understand your loved ones.
Finding Your Right Hearing Aid
We're the company Americans have grown to trust. Our hearing care specialists will help you find the best hearing aid that will match your needs. Our newest hearing aids with GENIUS™ Technology are not only comfortable but feature our industry-leading technology like better speech recognition, a focus on the direction of sound, and less noise interruptions. Depending on your range of hearing loss, we'll discuss the details of our different unit styles, including:
- Completely-In-The-Canal
- Behind-The-Ear
- Receiver-In-The-Canal
- In-The-Canal
- In-The-Ear
The Miracle-Ear Experience in Garden City, NY
Miracle-Ear has more than 1300 locations nationwide, but our local hearing aid center is able to serve customers from Garden City, Albertson, Cale Place, Franklin Square, Glen Oaks, West Hempstead, and the surrounding areas. Let us help improve your ability to hear clear, rich sounds better than ever before. We'd love to tell you more about the convenient, high-tech features our products have like wireless connectivity and smartphone app† controls. We also have more than 70 years of experience in the industry, so what are you waiting for? Contact us today to schedule an appointment.
Meet the Team
Debra Gargano M.S. Audiologist, Hearing Instrument Specialist
Professional Experience
Debra started her career as an audiologist in 1986. Debra worked with Miracle-Ear in the late 1980's in Brooklyn, and after staying home for a few years to raise her children, Debra happily returned to Miracle-Ear. Debra has worked for Miracle-Ear for 5 ... Read More About Debra Gargano M.S.
Professional Experience
Debra started her career as an audiologist in 1986. Debra worked with Miracle-Ear in the late 1980's in Brooklyn, and after staying home for a few years to raise her children, Debra happily returned to Miracle-Ear. Debra has worked for Miracle-Ear for 5 years.
Debra has a Master of Science in Audiology from Adelphi University. Debra also has a Master of Science in Exercise Physiology from Adelphi University. Debra specialized in working with the elderly and improving their hearing.
Favorite Part of working with Miracle-Ear
Debra's favorite part about working at Miracle-Ear is working with the patients and improving the quality of their lives.
Thomas C.-1/6/16
I've been pleased with my Miracle-Ear devices. I have to do a couple of things: clean my ears every day to make sure there's no wax build-up and clean the little devices more frequently. I have an assortment of batteries because we changed the configuration or shape of the left ear unit because it kept falling out. The battery size increased when the shape changed, so I had to live with this at two different battery sizes. The left ear takes a 312 and the right ear takes a number 10. After three days, the batteries seem to run down very much, but at the church on Sundays, I am able to hear every word the priest says the whole time he was talking. I'd recommend them.
Steve S.-1/3/16
I've had no problems with Miracle-Ear Hearing Aids. The staff seems to be very friendly and concerned about their patients so I've had excellent service and very fortunate to have these people working for me. I've been very very pleased.
Our customers rate us .
Tell us about your experience with this store.Write Your Review
Our Offers
Our Customer Stories
Learn why so many people trust Miracle-Ear to help them hear their best day.
Mary's Story
" My joy has returned. Life is good ... "
Read Mary's Story
Roy's Story
" I wanted to be able to hear her say 'I do.' ... "
Read Roy's Story
Amber's Story
" He said 'Okay, we have a solution for that.' He was very reassuring... "
Read Amber's Story


text:
Not literally running, figuratively.
Vocational programs, especially at the VA where I work at, have conflicting goals and therefore run with a team of horses that always don't work in unison.
First, there is the therapeutic side of rehabilitation. The veterans are referred to the vocational programs due to needs to make changes in their employment history.
Second, there is the business side of rehabilitation. The Medical Center contracts with our rehabilitation program to provide certain jobs to be filled by veterans in rehabilitation program.
Now, most of the time these horses play nicely. However, sometimes patients are referred to our vocational programs who are not ready to accept the yoke of employment for various reasons that will NOT be discussed in print at this time. Sometimes the referral source is not ready to accept that the patients who have a disability are able to work but CHOOSE not to work. Sometimes, patient who are referred are not able to fit into the types of programs that we offer which frustrates the referral source because they don't know WHAT to do.
Add to that mix, a little pressure cooker of the time of year, poor health on the part of yours truly, and we have a mess that is in the slow cooker at the present time.
Stay tuned.