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The BCAFM is here to serve the needs of our member farmers' markets. We are committed to developing and strengthening the capacity of farmers' markets in all regions of British Columbia, so you, our members can continue to support local farmers and artisans and provide British Columbians with fresh healthy local food.
Learn more.
Baked Brie with Cranberry
- 1 wheel brie cheese (8-12 ounces)
- citrus rind, mint leaves, or whole cranberries for garnish
- assorted crackers or bread rounds
- 1/2 - 3/4 cup cranberry sauce (recipe below)
Cranberry Sauce:
- 1 cup orange juice or apple cider
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 bag fresh or thawed frozen cranberries (12 ounces)
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove outer wrapping from brie wheel. Using a very sharp knife, remove the rind from the top of the wheel only, leaving the rind on the sides and bottom intact.
- Place brie in a shallow pie plate or casserole dish that is slightly bigger than the brie itself. Spread the cranberry sauce over the top of the brie, to within 1/4 inch of the edge all the way around.
- Bake brie in the preheated oven until heated through; about 12-15 minutes.
- Serve in the casserole dish or transfer carefully to a serving plate. Serve warm with crackers or bread. Makes about 12-14 appetizer-sized servings.
- In a medium saucepan, combine juice and sugar.
- Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves.
- Add cranberries and continue simmering until cranberries pop and mixture has thickened; about 10-12 minutes.
- Stir in cinnamon, if desired.
- Serve warm or store in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to one week.


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Since it's the weekend I might as well go ahead and show you something that is definitely not safe for work. I like Sarah Silverman okay and Matt Damon so-so but liked them both so much more after watching this. I always thought Matt Damon was bland and uninteresting but maybe I've been getting him confused with Ben Affleck.
Since I'm always looking for smart conservation ideas that require no work from my end, I really like the idea of recycling sewage into drinking water. It is a little gross to consider your glass of water once floated Mr. Hanky, but when I read what kinds of scary junk is in non-recycled tap water, I had to reconsider.
Josie got her stitches out today, so she is now funnel-free. I've never seen a cat delight so in licking herself. Now that she can actually play without getting her cone snagged on things, she and Gus are tearing around the apartment in such a lunatic fashion I long for a helmet and protective eye gear.
Part of my grief program involves drinking wine every evening. While I was at home I really enjoyed a Malbec that my sister had bought, it was so yummy without any of that moisture-sucking quality of a cabernet. I bought a bottle at Trader Joe's from Argentina, for $2.99. A suspiciously low cost for a bottle of wine, right? But it was good. I know nothing about Malbec, so I looked it up and saw this crazy graph which prompted immediate eye-rolling about the nutty oenophiles.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Matt Damon?
1 comment:
i saw it and loved it...so funny
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subset: commoncrawl


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DatePad 2.4 - Detailed description page
DatePad combines the power of a calendar with the ease of a text editor. DatePad can be used in a large number of ways. It's main function is to store text which is specific to a certain date. You can also store text specific for certain times. It is the perfect way to keep track of whatever you are interested in of your own history.
Use DatePad to keep a diary, use it to manage a project, write down your thoughts, keep a record of your dreams.. and for sure there are a lot more possibilities.
Keywords: Datepad, Editor, Calendar, Diary, Planner, PIM, Personal Information Manager, Documentation, Notes, Project Notes, Record, Memory, Plan, Analyse, Future, Past, Medical History
Recent Changes: Added formatting options
Install Support: Install and Uninstall
Supported Languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French
Additional Requirements: n/a
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Copyright © 2006-2019, by Software Download, All rights reserved. Privacy statement | Terms of use


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CONCORD — In more than 60 years as a Concord resident, Carol Longshore said she had yet to see a Concord Museum. Soon, her wish will finally be granted.
Someone had to get the ball rolling on the project to get a historical museum, so 10 years ago, when Longshore joined the Concord Historical Society board, she expressed the urgent need for one.
"We were looking for possible places for a museum," said Longshore, a 1963 Mt. Diablo High School grad. "Thanks to a generous trust the CHS received from the late Betty Barnes, who was a local history advocate and daughter of a local developer, the CHS was able to acquire the Masonic Temple to fill a longtime niche for a historical museum in Concord."
The building was relocated across Clayton Road in May 2013, and now sits adjacent to the Galindo House, the former residence of one of Concord's founding families.
This past June, the society hosted an ice cream social as volunteer docents offered tours of the Masonic Temple, which is currently being renovated. Another tour is set for Aug. 14, at 1, 2, and 3 p.m.
"The tours are to show the public the future site of what will be the Concord Museum and Event Center so guests to the ice cream social can see our progress, see what's going on and see if they want to get involved with the historical society," said Longshore. "We'll be renting out the event center for people who want to have celebrations there."
Fellow Mt. Diablo High School alum Chuck Gabrysiak, project co-manager, said the historical archives which are currently stored in the CHS building on Farm Bureau Road will soon have a permanent place in the future museum at 1928 Clayton Road. The numerical address was specifically chosen to commemorate the year when the Masons first occupied the building, Gabrysiak said.
The Masonic Temple was, until early 2013, owned by the city of Concord. Previously, the building was owned by the Masons organization and several private parties, including at least one development company.
The historical society negotiated with the city of Concord about preserving or demolishing the building. After much discussion over several years, a City Council committee suggested giving the Galindo House, plus its 1.5-acre site, and the Masonic Hall to the Concord Historical Society, subject to two extensive agreements and several significant conditions. After due deliberation, CHS agreed to the city's proposal and conditions, he said.
"But the building move did not evolve as the parties first envisioned," Gabrysiak said.
The historical society purchased a 60-foot-wide parcel abutting the Galindo property for the Masonic Temple move, and renovation of the building began at that time. Old wooden roof trusses were repaired and reinforced, a new roof was installed, and new foundation and seismic upgrades were constructed, he said.
"The first floor community room will again be an event venue," Gabrysiak said, noting its one-time use for social functions. "CHS is changing the name of the building to Concord Museum and Event Center (CMEC). The first floor room will be available for rent by community groups and individuals. The event center will also be used for CHS activities, fundraising activities and a wide variety of other events."
Other portions of the building are also being renovated, and will include first floor ADA needs, and restrooms on both floors. Some restoration will be in keeping with the historic uses in the building, like keeping the fireplace room.
The second floor main room previously used by the Masons and related clubs for meetings will be for the CHS Museum. A new addition will be constructed at the back or the south end of the existing building.
The addition will include a basement for CHS artifact storage and utilities, new stairway and elevator for required access to the second floor, first-floor catering kitchen to support events, and second-floor CHS office and resource center, Gabrysiak said.
Longshore said she and longtime residents of Concord are thrilled their dream to finally have a museum is taking shape, and she also noted younger community members involved in the historical society and its board. . She invites residents and surrounding cities to the Aug. 14 tours to see what exciting opportunities are possible.
WHO: Concord Historical Society
WHAT: Tour and Ice Cream Social fundraiser
WHERE: Concord Museum and Event Center, 1928 Clayton Road
WHEN: 1, 2 and 3 p.m. Aug. 14 (another walk-through tour is slated Oct. 15)
INFORMATION: Free tours. Visit concordhistorical.org


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Past, Present and Future, pt. 2
Past, Present and Future, pt. 1
Sermon Guide:
Key Scripture: Psalm 77.11 - 12 |"I will remember the deeds of the Lord; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds."
1. Read: Psalm 145
In this Psalm, David invites us to reflect back on our lives and acknowledge through praises all the ways that God was present. For the ways he moved and worked and carried us through. Spend time reflecting both on Psalm 145 and your 2015 year. What were the joys and disappointments? What are the things that bring up praises (or questions) to God? What encouragement can you gain as you enter this upcoming year?
2. Read: John 14.26 & Mark 13.11
In these passages we're reminded that one of the many works of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life is to help us remember. Specifically, the Holy Spirit helps us remember the works and teachings of Christ so that both our actions and confession will be properly aligned with Him. Have you ever had an encounter where you sensed the Holy Spirit leading you to remember Jesus in the midst of your circumstances? If so, what happened? What was the end result? How can this insight into the Holy Spirit's activity in our lives become an encouragement?
3. Psalm 111.1 - 5; Isaiah 63.7 - 14; 1 Cor. 11.21 - 26
All throughout scripture we find God commanding his people to remember: to remember his good works, his love, his compassion, his purposes. Do you currently have a practice of remembering the works of God in your life or in your church? If so, what have been some of the benefits of this practice? Are there ways you feel the Lord asking you to take it deeper? If not, what are some ways that you can begin to carve out time to start practicing this discipline of remembering?


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Hi everyone! Happy Tuesday!
It's time for the May MFT & Friends feature! This release is SO fun, and I had a blast playing with the new Basic Shapes Circles Stencil and Congrats Die-namics!
I began with a panel of Smooth White Card Stock cut using the A2 Rectangle STAX 2 Die-namics, and then, using the new Basic Shapes Circles Stencil, I sponged on Picked Raspberry Distress Oxide Ink, Squeezed Lemonade Distress Oxide Ink, Twisted Citron Distress Oxide Ink, Peacock Feathers Distress Oxide Ink and Wilted Violet Distress Oxide Ink. I added highlights using a White Gel Pen.
I cut "congrats" four times from Smooth White Card Stock using the new Congrats Die-namics, and then layered them together. I adhered the die-cut to my card and then stamped "YAY, YOU!" from Essential Sentiments using Extreme Black Hybrid Ink. I added a trio of Sparkling Crystals to finish off the card.
Thanks SO much for stopping by! Please head over the MFT Blog to check out what the rest of the team, and our friends, have created today!!


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Jarrod Harbrow
|Jarrod Harbrow
|Personal information
|Full name
|Jarrod Harbrow
|Date of birth
|18 July 1988
|Place of birth
|Cairns, Queensland, Australia
|Original team(s)
South Cairns Cutters (AFL Cairns)
Murray Bushrangers (TAC Cup)
|No. 27, 2007 Rookie Draft, Western Bulldogs
|178 cm (5 ft 10 in)
|74 kg (163 lb)
|Club information
|Current club
|Gold Coast
|Playing career1
|Games (Goals)
|Western Bulldogs
|70 (21)
|Gold Coast
|154 (33)
|224 (54)
|Representative team honours
|Games (Goals)
|Indigenous All-Stars
|International team honours
1 Playing statistics correct to the end of 2018.
2 State and international statistics correct as of 2015.
|Career highlights
|Sources: AFL Tables, AustralianFootball.com
Jarrod Harbrow (born 18 July 1988) is an Australian rules footballer who plays for the Gold Coast Football Club in the Australian Football League (AFL).
Early life[edit]
Harbrow was born in Cairns to an Indigenous Australian mother from Cairns and a Caucasian father from Mooroopna, Victoria.[1] His indigenous ancestry can be traced to the Yirrganydji, a rainforest tribe in Far North Queensland.[2] He grew up in the town of Cairns, in Queensland and began playing junior football with the Manunda Hawks and then the South Cairns in the AFL Cairns competition.
During his teenage years, he moved up and down between his father's town of Mooroopna, Victoria and Queensland and gave his brother bone marrow to survive leukemia.[1]
Harbrow represented Queensland at both the 2004 AFL Under 16 Championships and 2006 AFL Under 18 Championships, both sides winning the respective division titles.
In 2005, at the age of 16, he moved to Victoria where he played for the Mooroopna Football Club before joining the TAC Cup side the Murray Bushrangers in a bid to nominate for the AFL Draft. He was overlooked in the 2006 AFL Draft, however had already attracted the attention of AFL talent scouts Peter Dean and Scott Clayton.
AFL career[edit]
Drafted as a rookie, Harbrow was picked up by the Bulldogs in the 2007 rookie draft.
Following only a short time in development playing for the Bulldogs VFL affiliate Werribee, Harbrow was called up for his AFL debut against the Richmond Tigers in Round 4, 2007.
He has since become a senior regular and impressed with his pace, skill, defensive pressure and evasive running abilities.
In 2009, after struggling to get a game in the first few weeks of the season, he was thrown into defence against North Melbourne. Since then, he was often seen among the Bulldogs' best, became a regular senior player. He had many highlights in 2009 and shut down some of the league's best small forwards, including Matt Campbell, Stephen Milne, Brad Dick, and Mathew Stokes.
At the conclusion of the 2010 season, the Bulldogs confirmed Jarrod would be the newest uncontracted player to join the Gold Coast Suns. Jarrod wasted no time with the announcement to the football world, coming just days after the Bulldogs' loss to St Kilda in the preliminary final. After being the subject of much speculation all year, the lure of returning home to Queensland proved too strong, despite the Bulldogs' best efforts to retain the rebounding damaging defender.
Jarrod was the fifth uncontracted player from an AFL club to join the Suns.
Jarrod played his 100th AFL game in Round 18, 2012 against Sydney. In round 7, 2016 he became the first Gold Coast player to play 100 AFL games.[3]
In round 19, 2018, Harbrow became the first Gold Coast player to play 150 games for the club. The club board ratified the decision to award him life membership.[4]
- ^ a b "Home - AFL Queensland". AFL Queensland.
- ^ AFL Record. Round 9,2009. Slattery Publishing. pg 75.
- ^ 'Jarrod Harbrow the first Gold Coast Suns player to reach 100 games' - Courier Mail
- ^ "Gold Coast Suns on Twitter".
External links[edit]
- Jarrod Harbrow's profile on the official website of the Gold Coast Football Club
- Jarrod Harbrow's playing statistics from AFL Tables
- 1988 births
- Indigenous Australian players of Australian rules football
- Australian rules footballers from Queensland
- Gold Coast Football Club players
- Western Bulldogs players
- Werribee Football Club players
- Murray Bushrangers players
- People from Cairns
- Living people
- Australia international rules football team players


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The following links are intended to provide student readers with access to useful resource sites, facilitating the research process, and covering a wide range of topics such as: referencing, citing, writing skills, publishing, presenting, group work and much more. Your ideas and suggestions for materials to include on this page are very welcome. Please complete the form on the Feedback page to submit your suggestions or email Dr Jason Truscott
- Engage - an interactive research resource for bioscience students
- Intute - free Internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the Web for your education and research
- Learning Development - Support, advice and resources to help you with your studies
- Internet Detective - a light-hearted free online tutorial for developing internet skills to help with studying and research
- WritingHelp-Central - A summary of the American Psychological Association (APA) Rules for the Preparation of Manuscripts
- Wrasse - The Writing for Assignments E-Library project is a resource to help people learn about writing at university. It includes examples of student essays and other university assignments from a number of subject areas; and comments from lecturers about why the writing is good - or how it could be improved
- Bitesize Bio - provides short articles, web seminars and community discussion on technical and vocational topics that are essential to the development of every researcher's career
- Student Consent Form - For completion prior to submission of an article by authors. Print off and obtain project advisor signature before returning to Dr Jason Truscott, Room 102, 3 Endsleigh Place, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA.
resep nasi kuning resep ayam bakar resep puding coklat resep nasi goreng resep kue nastar resep bolu kukus resep puding brownies resep brownies kukus resep kue lapis resep opor ayam bumbu sate kue bolu cara membuat bakso cara membuat es krim resep rendang resep pancake resep ayam goreng resep ikan bakar cara membuat risoles


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Why Choose Breast Implants? Why Not?
Implant-based breast reconstruction is performed for 85% of women in the United States who undergo breast reconstruction. It seems as though everyone has implants and many women think "so should I".
Dr. Marga has participated in both major implant manufacturer FDA mandated trials and has extensive experience with Alloderm / Implant based reconstructions with excellent cosmesis. Her unplanned re-operation rate falls within the national average of a 50% failure rate at 7 years. This statistic, when it was revealed during the FDA moratorium on silicone breast implants, motivated Dr. Marga to join the staff at the Center for Microsurgical Breast Reconstruction. Dr. Marga makes it no secret that she prefers perforator flap breast reconstruction over implant-based reconstructions due to the high failure rate and need for multiple revisional surgeries in your lifetime when a woman chooses breast implants.
Regardless of this astonishing national failure rate and Dr. Marga's personal belief, we do note there are several reasons why breast implants may be the best reconstructive choice for you:
a. If you are an unusually thin young woman who has not had children, who wishes to avoid a scar on the buttock;
b. If you are a woman of any weight who wishes to avoid a donor site scar;
c. If you have had full body liposuction and do not have an appropriate donor site;
d. If you wish to have a large-sized breast reconstruction that can not be attained given your body habitus, i.e. you do not have enough fat to make the size breast you desire;
e. If you have a complicated medical condition that limits your ability to safely complete a 4-6 hour general anesthetic;
f. If you have a documented pro-thrombotic state requiring systemic anticoagulation;
g. If you have had a prior abdominoplasty and prefer not to have tissue removed from your buttock (a common situation for African American and Latino patients);
h. If you always win at Roulette in Las Vegas and you believe you will be in the 50% of women who make it 7 years without the complications of capsular contracture, infection, device rupture, malposition, asymmetry, pain, etc.
i. If you are unable to travel to receive care in the hands of a microsurgery fellowship-trained perforator flap breast reconstructive surgeon in an experienced hospital;
Regretfully, many women who initially choose breast implants and present for a secondary perforator flap breast reconstruction due to implant failure, relate that they were never informed of the potential for perforator flaps when they met with their initial plastic surgeon. Many were never told the national failure rate of 50% at 7 years, even after several revision surgeries. Can you imagine having repeat implant surgeries one after another never knowing that perforator flap breast reconstruction could correct the problem?
We hope that our website will help women be more informed about all forms of breast reconstruction so you will be able to make an informed choice regarding your reconstructive options. If you choose breast implants, Dr. Marga would be pleased to assist you with the joint knowledge that should you have an implant problem, all options will still be available to you at a later date. She will be eager to support you on your individualized journey.
If you are one of Dr. Marga's patients and are having a problem with your breast implants, please contact us so we can help.


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Homemade NutellaPosted: January 25, 2015 Filed under: Desserts, Happy Gut Recipes | Tags: dairy free, gluten free, nutella, spread, vegan Leave a comment
I'm always looking for new recipes to use in my Blendtec – this one has to be on of my favs!
This was so delicious, the whole batch lasted a total of 2 days in our fridge 🙂
3 cups hazelnuts
4 tbsp cocoa powder
1/4 – 1/2 cup coconut sugar or honey
pinch of salt
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (176°C) and place the hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet. There should only be a single layer. Use more baking sheets, if necessary.
2. Roast the nuts for 15 minutes, stirring after every 5 minutes. The hazelnuts will be fragrant when ready and the skins will start to crack.
3. Place the nuts in the centre of a spread-out clean kitchen towel. Bundle it up and then rub the nuts together to remove the skin. This should remove about half of the skin and that's enough. The nuts should still be warm but not super hot at this point. If they are hot, wait for a few minutes, until they're just warm, before placing in the food processor. Also be sure not to let the nuts cool down completely – it'll process quicker if the nuts are still warm.
4. Transfer the roasted nuts to the Blendtec or food processor and process until it's very creamy like peanut butter. It'll depend on what your using, but it takes about 30 seconds to 1 minute in the Blendtec.
5. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix again.
6. Spoon the butter into a glass jar and refrigerate for up to 2 months (if it lasts that long).
Courtesy of Texanerin Baking


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Home › Womens Clothing › Skirts › Nomads Clothing › Nomads Clothing CORD SKIRT
This bestselling Cord Skirt is back in our captivating teardrop print inspired by the East. Fully lined, side zip and pockets make this just above the knee cord skirt a stand out from the rest. Wear with cosy knitwear and leggings for walks in the winter sunshine
Fully Lined
Side Zip
Cotton Needlecord
Length approx 56cm
Cotton needle cord
Machine Washable
If you require any additional help or information, please do not hesitate to contact our dedicated customer care team, Monday to Saturday 10am – 5:00pm (GMT).
To contact our Customer Care team please click here
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01722 238618
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The Art of Loving
Open Road Media, 26 fťvr. 2013 - 133 pages
The landmark bestseller that changed the way we think about love: "Every line is packed with common sense, compassion, and realism" (Fortune).
†The Art of Loving is a rich and detailed guide to love—an achievement reached through maturity, practice, concentration, and courage. In the decades since the book's release, its words and lessons continue to resonate. Erich Fromm, a celebrated psychoanalyst and social psychologist, clearly and sincerely encourages the development of our capacity for and understanding of love in all of its facets. He discusses the familiar yet misunderstood romantic love, the all-encompassing brotherly love, spiritual love, and many more.
A challenge to traditional Western notions of love, The Art of Loving is a modern classic about taking care of ourselves through relationships with others by the New York Times–bestselling author of To Have or To Be? and Escape from Freedom.
†This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author's estate.
Avis des internautes - Rťdiger un commentaire
LibraryThing ReviewAvis d'utilisateur - keylawk - LibraryThing
Erich Fromm as a love therapist. Blunt statements about the barriers which society erects between its members and any possible achievement of any kind of love -- parental, brotherly, erotic, onanist, divine. They are all problemmatic. Consulter l'avis complet
LibraryThing ReviewAvis d'utilisateur - yarnspinner - LibraryThing
Every Fromm title is a masterpiece. This small book is an insight into the psychology of interpersonal relations, that, is relevant to all of us. To look at love as an art, to understand the dynamic ... Consulter l'avis complet
Pages sťlectionnťes
Table des matiŤres
Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western
The Practice of Love
A Biography of Erich Fromm
Autres ťditions - Tout afficher
Expressions et termes frťquents
achieved act of giving activity anxiety art of loving aspect attitude become believe brotherly capacity to love capitalism character character structure child concentration concept concern condition contemporary courage culture discipline Erich Fromm erotic love Escape from Freedom existence experience expressed fact father fatherly feel Freud Fromm function God's happiness helpless hence Ibid idea important inasmuch individual intense knowledge labor lack libido lies live loved person man's marriage masochistic mature means Meister Eckhart modern monotheistic mother mother's motherly love narcissism narcissistic nature neurotic never Nineveh object one's oneself orgiastic overcoming separateness paradoxical logic patriarchal personality market polarity practice principle problem productive rational faith reality reason relationship religion religious Rinehart & Company self-love selfishness sense sexual desire sexual satisfaction Simone Weil social society specific Taoist theory things thinking thought transcend transformed ultimate unconditional union unselfishness Western woman


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Thank Your for Joining Us!
SFI held our Annual Conference - Forests. A Way of Life - September 27-29, 2017 in Ottawa. It was the largest ever, with hundreds of attendees. SFI's diverse network was represented during three days of meetings. Presentations covered topics critical to the future of our forests, including:
- The Power of Community Partnerships
- Boreal Watersheds and Wildlife Conservation
- Progressive Aboriginal Relations
- Driving Innovation in Canadian Forestry
- Connecting Youth to Forests
- Species at Risk
- Provincial Perspectives
- Conservation of Managed Forest Landscapes
- Fiber Sourcing
- Global Policies and Markets
- Sustainable Building
We were proud to be in Canada for its 150th Birthday. SFI held a joint session with the Canadian Institute of Forestry that brought more than 500 people together. Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Jim Carr, joined us to discuss the importance of the Canadian forest sector, and told the audience: "there is no global solution to climate change without the forest sector."
It was a truly Canadian celebration, including showing respect for Canada's Indigenous peoples. We were privileged to be welcomed by Elder Claudette Commanda to unceded land belonging to the Algonquin Nation.
This was the first conference since Project Learning Tree became an SFI program and the synergies between youth education, sustainable supply chains, and conservation of working forests continue to strengthen.
The conference had multiple examples of innovation in the forest sector - from cross-laminated timber to new measurement tools in conservation, to discussions on maximizing opportunities in the bio-economy. Conservationists and government officials played a key role and their voices were represented on topics such as caribou, biodiversity, birds, and forest health.
In addition to representation from across Canada including the Assistant Deputy Ministers and other provincial officials from British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick, we had a wide range of speakers from leading international and conservation organizations. These speakers represented the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), and the Sustainable Biomass Program (SBP). Leaders from the Nature Conservancy of Canada, World Resources Institute (WRI), and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) also joined the program.
SFI also recognized key members of the community by awarding Craig Blair of RMS the SFI President's Award, J.D. Irving the SFI Leadership in Conservation Award, and the Maine committee the SFI Implementation Committee Award.
In 2018, join us for our Annual Conference in Colorado, and please plan to bring a customer or friend! In the meantime, please let us know your thoughts about this year's event, so we can continually improve and build value for our attendees.
Highlights from Past SFI Annual Conferences
Watch the highlights from past SFI Annual Conferences held in Clearwater Beach, Florida, Olympic Valley, California, Montreal, Quebec and San Antonio, Texas – key speaker take-aways, awards ceremony, conference participants, exhibitor booths, and all the fun that was had by all.


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Detailed Review With The Montblanc 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter WatchSubmitted by perfectionwatches on Wed, 03/15/2017 - 03:58
Historically,Swiss Montblanc was most closely associated with luxury pens, the Meisterstück being its most iconic and successful. The brand's watchmaking debut didn't come until 1997, when it opened up its watchmaking division in Le Locle, Switzerland. The name of its first timepiece? The Meisterstück.


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This publication is your
opportunity to receive regular updates on
the work and the issues that I have been
involved with, both in Harrisburg and
throughout our community.
Please visit my website,
where you will find a comprehensive overview
of our work, various phone numbers and
contact information to assist you in solving
problems, opportunities to volunteer and
assist us in our programs and opportunities
to give your feedback.
A devastating fire in West Philadelphia on January 10, which killed 1 person and displaced eight, has rocked a community and highlights the need for fire safety and prevention as well as the need to properly store important documents. It is critical to keep yourself and your family, as well as important, irreplaceable documents, safe.
The Philadelphia Fire Department asserts that establishing a well-organized emergency plan is one of the most important things that you can do in your home. They offer extensive information on residential safety on their website.
. I urge all citizens to check out the information and develop your own safety plan for your residence and practice your home escape plan often.
The Philadelphia Fire Department also offers important information on:
A few moments gathering information could mean the difference between life and death if there is a fire emergency in your home.
For more information on how to prepare for emergencies, find evacuation routes, learn how to Shelter In Place and to sign up for emergency text alerts, visit http://www.phila.gov/ready.
Residents can also call 311 to request a FREE Lithium Smoke Detector. The operator will ask name, address, telephone number and dwelling type. The operator will give you a confirmation number at the end of the call. The fire department will call and set up an appointment to come out and install the detectors.
Click the links below for more important information on fire safety and prevention:
You can learn more or provide your feedback on my website at senatorhughes.com as well as on Facebook and Twitter (@SenatorHughes).


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Instagram is fast becoming a revenue-based social channel and is predicted to outperform Twitter and Google in advertising sales by 2017.
Now is the time to establish your Instagram strategy and start growing your account and driving leads to your website.
Instagram traffic is considered higher quality traffic than most other social media platforms, because users have to take that extra step of clicking the link from your bio instead of directly from your post.
If you are already using Instagram to reach new people and want some new tips and tools to help extend your reach, sign up below and we'll send you our 5 Tips and 5 Tools to help with your Instagram Marketing.
If you haven't yet started using Instagram as a marketing tool, fill in the form below and we will send you the 5 Tips and 5 Tools to review so that you'll get an idea of how Instagram can help you grow your business in one more way.


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A wand is the most basic magical tool of a thaumaturge -- indeed, the section of the Thaumonomicon dealing with wands and related magics, is simply titled "Thaumaturgy". Wands and their variations gather and store magical energy ("vis"), and use it for various purposes.
The career of a thaumaturge will normally begin with an iron-capped wooden wand. The only virtue of this crude tool is that it can be crafted on the vanilla crafting table, with no magical tools needed. This first wand is not only inefficient, but offers a risk of damaging the nodes upon which a thaumaturge depends for vis. At the first opportunity, a player should replace their wand with a gold-capped greatwood wand, and discard the iron/wood one. By this point, the player should also have mastered the "Node Preserver" ability, so that they own abilities will back up the potential of their tools. More advanced thaumaturges will combine cores of silverwood or elemental materials, with caps of mystical thaumium or void metal. They will also find more use for scepters and staves, which grant greater vis storage at the cost of more specialized functionality.
Crafting Wands Edit
Each wand is crafted from a wand core, and two metallic wand caps, which are assembled on the arcane workbench. They can also be equipped with interchangable wand foci granting additional abilities.
Each of these components can be made of various materials which affect the abilities of the wand: The metal used for the caps controls the level of efficiency when using vis, providing a surcharge or discount for magical costs. The material used for the core determines the storage capacity of the wand, and some materials also allow wands to regenerate small amounts of vis while held. Naturally, more effective wands are more difficult and expensive to craft. including the final assembly of core and caps.
Advancing thaumaturges can also craft two variations on the wand theme, each of which requires a Primal Charm in their crafting. These are the staff and the scepter:
A scepter is crafted from a wand core, a primal charm, and three wand caps. Any sort of core or cap may be used, but the caps must match each other. A scepter cannot hold a focus, but holds 150% as much vis as a wand with the same core, and gives an additional 5% discount for costs, beyond any discounts from its caps or the user's worn equipment.
A staff requires an extra step for crafting: Two (matching) wand cores must be combined with a primal charm, to produce a staff core. (While the recipes are all similar, each type of staff core requires a separate research topic to be learned.) This staff core then is equipped with two wand caps, just as for making a wand. A staff cannot be used for crafting, but holds 250% as much vis as a corresponding wand. It can even serve as a backup weapon for melee (however, it cannot receive weapon enchantments).
There is also one special staff core, the "Staff Core of the Primal" (there is no matching wand core). Merely researching this staff core is difficult: Besides being forbidden research in its own right, just seeing the topic requires having learned the researches for all previous wand and staff cores, experiencing the Eldritch Epiphany, and scanning a Primal Focus. Creating it requires a massive infusion, to combine all seven advanced wand cores, large amounts of essentia, and a couple of primal charms for good measure. The resulting Staff of The Primal can hold 250 vis in each aspect, and will regenerate up to 10% of that total in all aspects.
As the materials involved become more advanced, the final binding of caps to a wand or staff becomes rapidly more expensive. In particular, binding thaumium caps to a silverwood core takes slightly more vis than a gold-capped greatwood wand can contain. However, a greatwood-and-gold scepter, can hold enough vis. This pattern can be continued for still more advanced craftings, such as the silverwood/voidmetal staff and Primal/thaumium staff. Sadly, as of version 220.127.116.11 there is no combination of discounts and crafting scepter sufficient to produce a Void Aspected Primal Staff.
As a curious note, it is also possible to create a bizarre hybrid of staff and scepter (sometimes called a "staffter"), by using a staff core instead of a wand core in the scepter recipe. The resulting device can neither hold a focus nor be placed in a crafting table, but it can still be used to activate constructs, or as a "vis battery" for Repair-enchanted equipment or Runic shielding.
Charging with Vis Edit
To be useful for anything but the simplest constructs, a wand, staff, or scepter must be charged with vis. It collects vis separately for each aspect -- for example, a wand could be full of Ignis while being empty of Perditio. In all cases, only primal aspects of vis can be stored. Whenever holding a wand etc., you will see a graphic display in the upper-right of your screen showing how full your wand is in each aspect. Pressing "shift" will show numbers for how many full points are in each aspect, and hovering over the wand in your inventory will show the exact values with fractions.
There are several ways to charge these tools, depending on the level of their user's advancement. The first few methods apply to all three varieties of the tool:
Nodes: Edit
The "classic" way to charge a wand (etc) is to point it at a node and hold right-click. This will charge the wand while draining the node. However, if the node is drained to 0 in any aspect, it can be permanently damaged: regenerating that (or all) aspects more slowly, or losing the aspect entirely. To avoid this, the user must have learned the Node Preserver research, and their wand must not be made with a wooden core nor iron (or copper) caps. If the node is not damaged, it will recover its strength over time (though only while its chunk is loaded).
Aspect Orbs: Edit
There is a "backup" charging method which is likewise available to all players. When any mob (hostile or tame) is killed, it will drop "aspect orbs" of various primal aspects. The selection of primals will depend on the natural aspects of the mob, being components of those aspects. If the player moves near these orbs with a wand (etc.) in their hotbar, the they will pick up the aspect orbs much like items, but instead of their inventory, the vis will be gathered into the wand. If there is more than one wand in the hotbar, the leftmost one will take priority, but once that is full in a given aspect, the next wand will take the energy, and so on.
Recharging Pedestal: Edit
With some research, a thaumaturge will learn to build a Recharging Pedestal. When placed near a node, a wand etc. can be placed in the pedestal, and will automatically drain from all nearby wands. (The hazard of draining the node dry still applies for low-quality wands.) An additional accessory can be added to the pedestal, called the Compound Recharing Focus (no relation to wand foci). With this in place, the wand can also drain compound aspects from a node, receiving one point of some primal (a component of the aspect) for each compound point drained. Once the thaumaturge has learned the Node In a Jar construct, they can collect nodes from the landscape to create a Node Room for easy recharging of all aspects. See the article on nodes for more details on node rooms.
Vis Charging Relay: Edit
Once an Energized Node has been researched and created, it can be used to distribute energy through Vis Relays. A special version of these relays is the Vis Charging Relay, which can be placed atop an Arcane Workbench. Once this is set up, the relay will rapidly charge any wand or scepter placed in the workbench. However, since staves cannot be placed in a workbench, they cannot be charged this way.
Vis Storage Amulet: Edit
A moderately advanced crafting, this amulet can store a large amount of vis. (There are also "apprentice" versions found in loot chests, which store only a few points but are otherwise similar.) The vis amulet itself can be charged in only two ways: By placing it in a Recharging Pedestal like a wand; or by wearing it while the player stands near an Energized Node or active Vis Relay. (Note that the charging range for the amulet is shorter than usual, pershaps 3-4 blocks.) After (and while) being charged, the amulet will slowly feed vis into any wand, staff, or scepter which is being held in hand (that is, active tool). This method is much slower than using a Charging Relay directly, but it does work on staves.
Arcane Crafting Edit
A wand or scepter, but not a staff, can be placed in the special slot of an Arcane Workbench. When the ingredients of a magical recipe are arranged in the workbench, the wand will be checked to see if it has enough vis of the proper types for that recipe. Only if it does, the result item can be taken, and the appropriate amounts of vis will be used up. If the wand does not have enough vis in any aspect, this will be indicated in the GUI, and the aspects which are short will flash.
Constructs Edit
The very first use of a wand is to activate various magical constructs, devices built in the world and then transformed with a right-click from any wand, staff, or scepter. The simplest of these constructs are single blocks, which require and use no vis from the wand:
- Creation of a Thaumonomicon produces an item rather than a block, but is otherwise similar to the others.
- Activating a Table produces an Arcane Workbench, which thereafter acts as any other block -- it can be mined with an axe and placed elsewhere.
- Activating a vanilla Cauldron produces a Crucible. This is likewise a block which can be mined (with a pickaxe) and placed elsewhere.
The more advanced constructs are multiblock constructs (described in the Thaumonomicon), which require considerable amounts of vis from the wand to be activated.
- The Node In a Jar, referred to above, is used to convert a node into an item which can be picked up (mined) as an item, and later placed elsewhere. However, the node is more likely than not to be damaged by this handling, reducing it one level from Bright to normal to Pale to Fading. When a jarred node is rightclicked with a wand (etc), the jar is opened and the node is released.
- The Infusion Altar is a complex construct which provides Thaumcraft's most advanced form of item crafting. Once activated, if any or the original blocks is mined, the construct will be broken and deactivated, though it can be remade if the block is replaced.
- The Infernal Furnace represents a major advancement in smelting, being able to smelt items with no fuel except Ignis essentia or centivis. Again, if any block is mined, the construct will be broken; in this case, a Blaze will also be released and likely attack the player.
- The Thaumatorium is an automated version of the crucible which pulls essentia from jars rather than items, meaning that there is no wasted essentia. And no flux. Again, it will be broken if any block is mined.
- The Advanced Alchemical Furnace is an Eldritch level construct that melts blocks and items and turns them into essentia. It needs Ignis, Aqua and Perditio in vis form to run. In particular, it needs to build up a buffer of Ignis vis, which means that it takes a while to start for the first time.
Vis Battery Edit
Vis is also needed for certain equipment features: Tools and armor with the (Thaumcraft-special) Repair enchantment can automatically repair themselves, but to do so, they require vis. Likewise, items which provide Runic Shielding use vis to regenerate the shield after it has absorbed damage. This vis will automatically be taken from any wand, staff, or scepter in the player's inventory. In this case, it will be taken first from such items in the player's main inventory, rather than those in the hotbar. (This avoids having one's "working" wand or staff accidentally drained.) These items can also be supplied with vis by a Vis Storage Amulet, but this must actually be worn in its proper slot, not merely held in the inventory.
Wand Foci Edit
A wand or staff, but not a scepter, can be equipped with any of several wand foci. When the focus-equiped wand is right-clicked, it will activate the special ability ("spell") of the focus, using up vis.


text:
The Queen's (Royal West Surrey) Regiment was raised by the Earl of Peterborough in 1661 to garrison Tangier. This formed part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, on becoming Queen Consort to Charles II.
From 1751 to 1881, the regimental title was the 2nd (Queen's Royal) Regiment.
On 1 July 1881 it became the Queen's (Royal West Surrey) Regiment. A second battalion was raised in 1857.
In 1921 the title changed to the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey).
In 1959, the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) amalgamated with the East Surrey Regiment to form the Queen's Royal Surrey Regiment.


text:
It seems that a lot of high-rated sites got stuffed into the Google trash can. Everybody went into panic except Kyle at Wealthy Affiliate. He said to just hang on, that Google was probably just testing a new algorithm and the sites would pop back up in the rating. So what really happened here? They scared the heck out of a lot of folks. Well, Google can be wonderful or scary. But I'm happy to see that real people work at Google and can error just like the rest of us.
Fly Old Glory?
248 total views, 1 views today


text:
Woman's Prayer
Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray for a man, who's not a creep.
One who is handsome, smart and strong.
One who loves to listen long.
One who thinks before he speaks.
When he says he'll call, he won't wait weeks.
I pray that he is gainfully employed.
When I spend his cash, he won't be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door.
Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! Send me a man who'll make love to my mind, and knows what to answer to "How big is my behind?"
I pray that this man will love me to no end,
And never ever attempt to hit on my friend.
A Man's Prayer
I pray for a deaf-mute nymphomaniac with huge breasts who owns a liquor store and a boat.
Source: http://www.avolites.org.uk/jokes/prayer.htm
Woman's Prayer
2 коментара:
- Jerry Critter said...
Sounds about right to me, except for the boat part!
- November 01, 2009
- addicted to life said...
so, you don't need a boat, yeah?
- November 02, 2009


text:
Magento® Upgrade
Our team of Magento experts is available to upgrade your current installation of Magento Community or Enterprise Edition, leaving you time to focus on other important things. Magento upgrades are being done and administered in a Development Environment before implementation to your live environment so compatibility can be validated without affecting your live environment. We keep our eye for quality assurance testing of main development stages and the publication stage to deliver a final result which is perfect and worry-free. Upgrade your Magento website today and enjoy Increased Functionality, Speed and Security.
- Some extensions can stop working on new versions of Magento. It is possible that updates or fixes will be needed for such extensions.
- There is a chance that not all of claimed features of new Magento version will be available on your current theme.


text:
It's not just CNN clusterfucks.
Take the Bezos Post and a Peter Principle reporter.
It has never been the "north star" as a goal of the GOP, because PR head fakes, to eliminate the deficit. Yet a Peter Principle reporter claims it has been. Reality? Not true since Ike's day. That said, the Bezos Post never fact-checks itself, so that will still stand.
Next, the Hill, reporting that Veep Mike Pence said the US would talk to North Korea without pre-conditions. The Hill ignores the very visible snubs Pence gave to North Korea during opening ceremonies for the Olympics.
Third? The old gray lady of the New York Times, "normalizing" JoyAnn Reid, one of the dumbest fucks of #TheResistance. Here, this follows normalizing neo-Nazis, giving Bret Stephens a spot on op-eds, and handing over a whole issue's op-eds site to letters from East Trumpistan denizens.
From less than 20 years ago, there was Judith Miller, conniving with portions of the Bush Administration, to provide the drumbeats for war in Iraq.
The real issue, which the MSM and its clickbaiting show, is that, for a century or more, the media has actually been involved with the creation and dissemination of fake news. Kenan Malik discusses the Zinoviev Letter, directly relevant to today's Russophobia, and other examples.
No, it hasn't always or regularly done this. But it has done this.
That said, as Malik also notes, the alternative — the government, either by law or by brow-beating — determining what counts as fake news is even worse. (Worst of all is the Miller example — media and government working hand in hand. Malik says that's not new either.)
Hence, the two-siderism over things like the Nunes Memo from places like Consortium News is itself not a solution.


text:
Photos by Amin Arjmand, Mehr News Agency
These photos show harvesting of Rutabaga in the city of Sirjan in Iran's province of Kerman.
Rutabaga is a root vegetable that originated as a cross between cabbage and turnip. The roots are prepared for food in a variety of ways, and its leaves can also be eaten as a leaf vegetable. Rutabaga is a cool-season crop. Since it is harvested during fall, rutabaga makes a great crop for winter storage. Being rich in vitamin C, dietary fiber, potassium and antioxidant compounds, it is believe that rutabaga helps decrease the risk of several serious medical conditions and it may help prevent osteoarthritis, cancer, hypertension, age-related macular degeneration, and grippe as well as heart disease (read more on wikipedia)
... Payvand News - 12/15/12 ... --


text:
5 Clever Mother's Day Gift Ideas
Mother's Day will be here before you know it, and it's time to start thinking about that special gift for that special lady who sacrifices so much for you every day.
If you're sick of getting her the same thing year after year (there are only so many appliances one kitchen can hold!), consider these five clever gift ideas instead:
Over the Counter Medications: What to do when you are pregnant or breastfeeding
Women, during pregnancy or lactation you may experience a flood of different emotions, but fear of harming your baby due to over the counter medication use should not be one of them. Unfortunately, our bodies are not always in perfect health during this time and you may experience a variety of different symptoms from the common cold, to nausea, heartburn, pain or constipation. There are many dietary and lifestyle changes you can make to help relieve some of your symptoms, but when you decide a medication is necessary how will you know which one is the safest?
We tend to associate stress with bad feelings, but did you know that not all stress is negative? Stress is just the way our body responds to change. So, whether it be on-going or a one-time feeling of pressure, such as meeting a deadline, it is important to pay attention to our bodies response to these factors. Stress can help in motivating us to overcome big challenges in our lives, but if it is chronic, it can certainly be harmful to our minds and bodies.
Below are 10 simple ways you can keep your stress under control:
4 Ways To Make Health Fun For Kids
We all know how challenging it can be to get our children to care about eating well and being healthy, especially since they often feel invincible. By making healthy choices fun for them, however, you as parents can create positive habits in their youth to carry them throughout their life.
Here are four ways you can get them to gobble that broccoli right up:
We love spring, but unfortunately for some of us, this season means the onset of outdoor allergies. The good news is that there are ways to prevent allergic reactions. Here are a few:
The Gatti Blog
Information, tips and more from the Gatti Pharmacists and staff.
January 2019


text:
Make: Fime / Molot
Model: VEPR FM-AK47-11
Caliber: 7.62x39
Location (SF Bay Area):
Price: 1500
Will ship (NO):
Other info: Featureless:
(AIM Sports fin grip, Tapco AK74 style muzzle break), factory 5 round magazine, 0 round count
Sorry I had to dump the box due to space.
Includes manuals.
Currently looking for the cleaning rod and field kit, but may not be included if I can't find it.
Stored in a rifle stock and tucked away in the safe.
Make: Fime / Molot
Model: VEPR AK74 Rifle
Caliber: 5.45x39
Location (SF Bay Area):
Price: 1300
Will ship (NO):
Other info: BNIB, Kydex grip wrap over thumbhole, 0 round count, everything included when purchased from LGS (5 and 10 round factory mags,
cleaning rod, and field tool kit)
Was going to convert to militarized configuration but deciding to sell to fund another project.
Stored in a rifle stock and tucked away in the safe.
Deciding to let these go because I have 1 too many AKs in 7.62x39 and don't want to stock up on 5.45x39.
Currently not willing to ship.
I can meet in the
following areas:
South Bay (Milpitas) - RMB Enterprises
North/East Bay (Vallejo) - Triple A Sports
East Bay (Livermore) - Solar Tactical
Willing to trade for the following with cash up/down:
Benelli M2 Tactical
IWI Tavor X95
Ruger LCP2


text:
World of Matter: Mobilizing Materialities is the culminating programming for a two and half year cycle of work funded by the University of Minnesota's Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities. Since 2014 an interdisciplinary group of faculty from the University of Minnesota (organized by faculty from the School of Architecture and Department of Landscape Architecture) have hosted a number of symposia, workshops, speakers and related coursework themed around ideas of infrastructure, resiliency, resource extraction/manipulation and climate change. These events have included assisting in the hosting of Dredgefest Great Lakes in August of 2015 ( www.dredgeresearchcollaborative.org), sponsoring a design workshop lead by Leah Buechley (MIT) + Diane Willow (UMN), conducting interdisciplinary coursework in the Iron Range and Northern Minnesota ( inArchitecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning,), co-ordinating a series of workshops on envisioning information, on visualizing landscape conditions as well as developing and running a speaker series that that included Professor Shannon Mattern (Media Studies, New School, New York), Professor Dilip Da Cunha (Architect and Urban Planner, Penn Design, Philadelphia) and Professor Karen Lewis (Designer and Architecture faculty, the OSU).
This cycle of programming for the Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities is co-lead by Professor Karen Lutsky (University of Minnesota, Landscape Architecture) and Professor Ozayr Saloojee (Carleton University, Architecture). Professor Saloojee, as the 2014-2016 Imagine Chair, is helping complete this series of events that begin with a graduate workshop (by Professors Buechley and Willow) and the sponsorship and hosting of Dredgefest Great Lakes at the University of Minnesota in August of 2015. The 2016-2018 Imagine Chairs in the Arts, Design and Humanities at the University of Minnesota are Professors Arun Saldanha (Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Geography, Environment and Society) whose project is titled "Prince from Minneapolis: A Symposium at the University of Minnesota" which will combine outreach with teaching, research, and scholarly debate to conclude in April 2018 and Professor Tracy Deutsch (Department of History) whose Imagine Chair project focuses on food, its narratives of production, identity, mobility and justice. You can see a timeline of Tracey's anticipated projects here.
World of Matter: Mobilizing Materialities began in 2014. The initial vision was to connect multiple modes of inquiry, research, creative practice, teaching and public outreach themed around the title of "Resilient Infrastructures: World of Matter". The application was framed as follows:
The purpose of the project is to engage in cross-disciplinary exchange with academics, artists, researchers, designers, community members, public and private stakeholders that will concentrate on exploring the spatial, artistic, socio-cultural and geopolitical implications of the processes that are involved with resource extraction – and in particular with:
(A) Extraction – whether as physical material (as in the case of ore-mining on the Iron Range Mining, moving villages due to mine encroachment)or ephemeral (as in notions of loss of identity, of language and history, of displacement, of memory due to evolving post-industrial landscapes, rapidly changing cultural demographics… ) and;
(B) Resilience – either as the capacity of a system or group to maintain boundaries through durability, change and stasis (as is the case of infrastructural interventions to mitigate climate change or storm events such as dams, spillways, locks…) or as the potential of an ecology (whether human or not) to be resilient through kinetic change, dynamic equilibrium and flux (adaptive building surfaces, landscapes and flexible socio-cultural and economic systems…
This proposal seeks to explore how a varied group of stakeholders can help generate new methods of dialogue, exploration and representation to foster critical, critical and cross-disciplinary discourse that may help us re-frame contemporary discussions of resiliency, community and extraction is a more broadly connected human ecology. This project aims to investigate how we may investigate these particular notions through lenses that are both conceptual and physical, grounded and speculative, academic and civic, at scales both small and large.
In March of 2015, we sponsored a week long workshop – a Catalyst – in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. This 'vertical' studio combined first, second and third year M.Arch students into a single cohort to explore and investigate Ephemeral Facades. Lead by Leah Buechley, a designer, engineer and artist who taught at the MIT media lab where she founded and directed the "High-Low Tech Group (and is also the inventor of the Lilypad Arduino toolkit) and Professor Diane Willow, a multi-modal artist who works at the nexus of art, technology, media, architecture and science (also an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota). Their workshop invited participants to:
…imagine resilience as a temporary modality and facades as elements that transform, leaving only traces of their existence. This matter of resilience might ignite when charged with electricity, melt upon the accumulation of solar energy, deflate when pressures abide, or shift surfaces through dynamic changes in transparency, texture and color, or rattle and fragment in response to low rumbles or high pitches. While exploring environmental and social conditions that shape ephemeral facades we encounter as well the ones that preclude or conclude their material existence. A life cycle perspective in this context does not anticipate how best to sustain an enduring facade, rather it attunes us to how a façade might emerge and then become immaterial. What does this intentional transformation offer and how might it influence our experience of facades. Inspirations for this matter of resilience include cultural traditions that involve fire, wind, and water, strategies for adaptation among plants and animals, and the capacity for response, reaction and interaction when materials, computation and electricity unite.
Our programming enabled us to help bring "Dredgefest" to Minneapolis and Duluth in Minnesota. After hosting two previous events – Dredgefest NY and Dredgefest Louisiana, the Dredge Research Collaborative developed Dredgefest Great Lakes, which was hosted at Rapson Hall at the University of Minnesota.
DredgeFest Great Lakes is a symposium, field expedition, and speculative design workshop about the human manipulation of sediments. It is an encounter between government agencies, designers, theorists, academics, corporate practitioners, industry experts, students, and the public.It will be held in two Minnesota cities, Minneapolis and Duluth, from August 14-21, 2015. The theme for DredgeFest Great Lakes is Shifting Baselines. The phrase "shifting baseline" was introduced in landscape architect Ian McHarg's famous manifesto Design With Nature. It has since become a key conceptual tool in environmental circles. In 1995 a paper by Daniel Pauly showed that fisheries experts tended to think in terms of the state of the environment at the beginnings of their career. Baselines shift as new generations grow up thinking that whatever they grew up with was natural, ignoring exactly how much things has already been changed before they were born. But 'shifting' needn't be a passive verb. Baselines can be shifted with care and intent. For DredgeFest Great Lakes, we propose to think both about how baselines have been shifted and how they could be shifted in the future.
DredgeFest will bring together practitioners and stakeholders from a range of groups deeply concerned about these issues and offer participants an opportunity to explore the strange current conditions and long term future of the region. This year, we are very pleased to announce that Mark Smout – of the renowned London based office Smout Allen will be leading one of the workshops. Kristi Cheramie (a landscape architecture and faculty member at the OSU) will be leading a second workshop and Matthew Spremulli (an architect from Toronto and faculty member at the University of Waterloo) & Fionn Byrne (a landscape architect and faculty member from The University of Toronto) will be leading a third.
The first DredgeFest was held in New York City on September 28 and 29, 2012. DredgeFest NYC was organized in partnership with Studio-X NYC, an arm of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; sponsored by Arcadis, TenCate, and TWFM Ferry; and featured speakers and content from agencies including the US Army Corps of Engineers, National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency, and New York City Economic Development Corporation. The event was covered in The Atlantic Monthly, Wired Design, Urban Omnibus,Dredging Today, Scenario Journal, Landscape Architecture Frontiers China, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. The second DredgeFest was held in Louisiana from January 11 to 17, 2014. Partners included the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, the Coastal Sustainability Studio at Louisiana State University, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gulf Coast Public Lab, and Scenario Journal.
DredgeFest Great Lakes is organized by the Dredge Research Collaborative, in partnership with the University of Minnesota's School ofArchitecture and Department of Landscape Architecture. DredgeFest Great Lakes is supported by funding from the University of Minnesota Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities and and the University of Minnesota Imagine Special Events Fund.
The organizing team and the Dredge Research Collaborative secured additional funding (both internal to the University and external to it) to help support Dredgefest Great Lakes programming, and included the assistance of the College of Design, AIA-MN, MN-ASLA and others.
In the following year, we organized a series of workshops and lectures – jointly hosted by the School of Architecture, the Department of Architecture and the Department of Art. The lecture series began with Professor Shannon Mattern (Media Studies and Communications from the New School in New York City) who lectured on "Mining Spatial Practices." Professor Mattern also participated in a series of conversations with students and faculty on data, archives, and archival methods during design reviews for an interdisciplinary graduate studio.
Professor Mattern's lecture was followed up by a workshop and lecture by Professor Karen Lewis from the Ohio State University. Professor Lewis lead a workshop on visualizing information, where students read a text by John McPhee and were required, while working in teams, to develop a set of visualizations that helped communicate the complex narrative of the infrastructural system that McPhee writes about. In addition, Professor Lewis also presented a lecture that explored her work – which works at the intersection of architectural design, graphic design and graphic communication.
The lecture series concluded with Professor Dilip da Cunha – an architect and urban planner teaching in Philadelphia where he is Adjunct Professor in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also visiting faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, and Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009); and Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). His most recent book (in review) is titled The Invention of Rivers: Alexanders's Eye and Ganga's Descent. Professor da Cunha's lecture was titled "After Rivers / After Landscape" and posited that:
Rivers are not natural entities. They are products of design that follow from the act of separating water from land with the help of a line in a chosen moment of the hydrologic cycle when water is not precipitating, seeping, soaking, evaporating, transpiring, etc. in ways that defy delineation. So today when rain from storm events, melting snow and receding glaciers exacerbated by climate change are defying riverbanks and coastlines with increasing frequency across the world, it is an opportunity to look beyond rivers. This presentation will explore design in the moment of rain when what is had is not a landscape divided between land and water but a ubiquitous wetness.
This lecture series programming was followed up by a workshop lead by by Michael Gordon (from AWH Architects in Minneapolis and a 2014 Jerome Fellow in Printmaking from the Highpoint Center for Printmaking) as well as the Landscape Architects Maura Rockcastle and Ross Altheimer from Ten x Ten Landscape Architecture + Urbanism (Minneapolis). Maura, Ross and Michael lead a weekend long workshop with graduate students aimed at exploring and testing how we can represent, speculate and imagine new landscape and spatial forms and drawings from modelling exercises using concrete, plaster, paper and plexiglass. Students who participated in this workshop were enrolled in the multidisciplinary graduate design studio titled "Design Duluth," which featured as one of the core "vectors" in the original program diagram (at the top of this post). This workshop was also co-funded through an internal School of Architecture grant (to an additional $10,000).
This design studio has been running since 2012 and has historically focused on the City of Duluth, Minnesota, as a site for a community engaged design studio. Working closely with city officials, the office of the Mayor and a network of over 40 public, private, business and individual stakeholders, the Design Duluth Studio was awarded a $192,000 Bush Foundation Community Innovation grant to look at resilient futures for the Lake Superior city. This project has included faculty from the UofMN's Twin Cities and Duluth campuses and was a core component of the Imagine Chair's programming to emphasize the University of Minnesota's commitment as a Land Grant University but also of the creative potential of interdisciplinary faculty and students working with – and in – communities in our own backyards. As part of the studio, faculty and students assisted in developing a series of pop-up events in and around Duluth – including linking to the history of the Iron Range with historian-lead tours of Morgan Park, current parks and city initiatives, clean-up and restoration efforts along the St. Louis River Estuary and more.
This cycle of the Imagine Chair programming linked together these workshops, lectures, public engagement efforts, teaching and research to leverage a creative and multi-disciplinary approach aimed at exploring the themes of the proposal. The first year of the programming was seen as "generative," producing material, connections, relationships and links between people, processes and content and the final part of the program was meant to act as synthesis – pulling together these elements into a final project that fully embraces the nature and spirit of the Imagine Chair mission and its desire to catalyze research, scholarship, artistic and creative practice at the University of Minnesota. All this builds to World of Matter: Mobilizing Materialities. We hope you see you in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota in September of 2017.
As a catalyst, the Imagine Chair has afforded the opportunity to expand this work over the past three years into a momentum that has propelled multiple initiatives beyond the end of the symposium and exhibition in 2017. These include:
- Our recent designation (a collaboration between the Center for Sustainable Building Research, School of Architecture, Department of Landscape Architecture, Center of Changing Landscapes, Institute on the Environment, CURA's Resilient Communities Project and professional partnerships with HGA Architects and Engineers and Perkins & Will Architects) as the Upper Midwest National Resiliency Studio – one of six currently in operation in the United States.
- Continued interdisciplinary teaching and research across the University of Minnesota with our efforts in the Grand Challenges Curriculum.
- National and international partnership efforts aimed at critical research, scholarship and creative practice around water and our watersheds, including collaborations with the Great Lakes Design Lab [GLDL], in development at the University of Minnesota), as well as the Carleton Urban Research Lab [c.url], at Carleton University's Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa, Canada.


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The chance to earn a diploma in computer-programming can be obtained to students who would like to enter a job in a number of fields. Students can train to have an exciting career by signing up for a certified educational training course. There are a variety of colleges and colleges that permit students to pursue a job designing, maintaining, testing and dealing with assorted software. Students can attend an associate's, bachelors, or master's degree level.
Affiliate Degree
Students can gain the abilities needed to initiate numerous careers by having an accredited associate's degree in computer-programming. Gaining instruction only at that level often takes 2 yrs of study. Students may have the opportunity to study a number of subjects including programming, JavaScript, desktop publishing, web-based programming, object-oriented programming, data structure, plus much more. By acquiring a certified affiliate level degree in this subject students' can pursue various careers. Career possibilities include computer programmer, software applications engineer, computer support specialist, plus much more. Students who get the associates degree can go into the workforce or sign up for a bachelor's degree program.
Bachelor Degree
Practicing a bachelor's degree in computer-programming can be achieved within 4 years. By signing up for a certified bachelors degree program students can train for various careers. Possible employment could include being employed as software applications engineers, system analysts, computer engineers, software engineers, systems managers, computer consultants, and much more. To be able to pursue a job in this subject students' have to study courses like computer languages, database programming, personal computers security, bandwith systems, VisualBASIC, and lots of various other subjects. By having an accredited bachelors degree training course students will be ready to begin their career or sign up for a master's degree training course.
Masters Degree
Going after a certified master's degree in computer-programming can be achieved by finishing yet another 2 yrs of study. Students can gain the understanding and skills required to enter their preferred career by studying C , software design, prototype testing, os's, website design, multimedia, and lots of other relevant subjects. By training in a masters degree degree of study students may have the abilities to pursue numerous careers within the field. A certified master's degree allows employment in game art and style, web development, gaming design, and lots of other computer related career areas. Having a masters degree students can pursue the job of the dreams.


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As you can see I went a little crazy with the fussy cutting! Am I the only one who loves to fussy cut?
Did you know the LCOM Store is open again and that Harvest Lane is in stock? Check it out here!
Supplies used: Lilybee Autumn Spice papers, Simple Stories Harvest Lane paper and stickers, twine.


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Explaining Violence in the Middle East: Is it Religion or Politics?
September 16, 2014
Host: The Stimson Center
Hisham Melhem, Washington Bureau Chief, Al Arabiya
Joyce Karam, Washington Bureau Chief, Al Hayat
Like any major world religion, Islam has a long history of theological divisions and arguments, which have in turn given rise to a wide variety of beliefs and outlooks regarding a single, unified definition of what "Islam" is. However, according to Mr. Melhem, the Sunni-Shi'a divide that is currently being exacerbated in Iraq, Syria, and throughout the Middle East, is not one of those ancient divisions. Instead, he believes that is a purely modern phenomenon, something that has only developed and grown steadily worse over the past few decades. The past failures of Arab nationalist leaders has given rise to ideologically based states, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, which have in turn given rise to religiously oriented militant groups like the Islamic State (IS) and Hezbollah. Although these groups and their supporters typically act out in the name of religion, it is important to realize that their actions are usually oriented towards very practical social, economic, and political goals. Despite their religious overtones, the divide between Sunni and Shi;a communities has never centered on theological doctrine but rather on very earthly and immediate gripes.
In recent years, the world has seen in Syria how demands for political and social rights quickly evolved into a sectarian conflict, due in large part because of the involvement of ideologically aligned third parties such as Iran, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, IS, and others. As the crisis has worsened, experts have been able to see how the outpouring of refugees have destabilized neighboring countries, hurt their economies, and given rise to sectarian clashes in what were previously peaceful locales.
Prior to the civil war in Syria, Lebanon – a country that is roughly 27% Shi;a, 27% Sunni – was relatively peaceful. However, since the war began and refugees began flocking to Lebanese cities, Ms. Karam and others have noted an uptick in Sunni-Shi'a conflicts. She does not however see these clashes as being religiously motivated. In Tripoli, the most restless and dangerous areas are also the poorest – in the most restive area, Bob al-Tabbaneh, 87% of the inhabitants are living in poverty. This reality, when coupled with the polarizing and more vocal rhetoric coming from Hezbollah – a Shi'ite group – and various Salafist groups, explains why levels of violence are rising. As those who are powerless and in poverty see these groups act unilaterally, and in pursuit of their own personal agendas, in Syria, they respond through the most basic means available to them, violence. In such cases, it is not so much religion that is driving conflict; it is the peoples' political and economic frustrations that are driving them to action.
Although it is easier to point to religious differences as the sole cause of conflict, it is doing a disservice to the region to look at it so one dimensionally. Further, for years, prior to the war in Syria and prior to the rise of Hezbollah, IS, and other extremist groups, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Kurds, and many other different religions and cultures throughout the Middle East were able to coexist peacefully and prosperously. To suggest that there are long-standing and historical divides that keep the people apart detracts from the real issues at hand, such as poverty, corruption, lack of political representation, etc. In order to achieve positive change, citizens and leaders, both in the Middle East and around the world, need to address their problems directly. Already, in the past, the region's tolerance and potential have been demonstrated. The people now need to remember that, acknowledged their current challenges, and move towards a unified and prosperous future.


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After great lack of motivation ... I finally drilled and countersunk all the holes in the AN970 washers to make the hubs. I then developed a streak of rash bravery ... and welded up the hubs. It was pure dumb luck that the first one came out with the holes alternating each other (end-to-end). The 2nd one, both end washer holes were lined up ... darn! It's wonderful to remember these things after they are welded.
So I put the cutting disk on the hand grinder and cut one of the end washers back off ... adjusted it so the holes were alternating opposite of each other ... and welded it back on. I'll probably get it right the first time ... on the next set of hubs that I make ... for the 26" wheels.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
2 x 20" Hubs
Labels: 20" hubs, DeltaWolf trike, hub
1 comment:
Awesome. -Dan
- July 16, 2008 at 7:19 PM
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By Larry J. Polivka
No nationally prominent spokesperson for older persons has emerged, since Senator Claude Pepper (D-Ala.), to pursue even a portion of the broad aging policy agenda that he did so much to advance. Since Pepper's death in 1989, aging advocates and policy makers have spent more time and energy fending off proposals to cut aging programs than they have spent pressing for improved or new programs—this, in advance of the impending increase in the ages 65 and older population. Such diminished interest in aging issues has occurred not only among Republican policymakers, who have historically been less supportive of aging programs, but also among Democrats.
Read this entire issue on AgeBlog
In his last several years in Congress, Claude Pepper was widely known as the leading advocate for the elderly. He was also in a position as a policy maker to shepherd much of his vision for improving the lives of older people into law. He, however, always thought of his policy advocacy and legislative initiatives as part of a larger campaign to change the image of older persons and free Americans from the negative stereotypes that distorted their views of older adults, and to impart how ageism harms everyone. He felt his greatest achievement in working on behalf of the elderly was that:
The national attitude toward old people has made a 180-degree turn. More and more, younger generations have come to realize that in their elders they have a precious and useful asset, not a burden. Old people are the same persons they were when they were young. Some may not hear so well, may have to wear glasses, [and] maybe are a step slower when they walk. But they are not useless, and they must not be treated as outcasts, as more and more Americans have come to realize (Pepper and Gorey, 1987).
Not all of this gratifying change in attitude stemmed from the efforts of the Select Committee, or from Claude Pepper. But they both helped.
The Advocacy Work of Claude Pepper
Sen. Pepper's legislative achievements on behalf of the elderly included the elimination of mandatory retirement, which was customarily set at age 65—excepting a few occupations like airline pilot. H.R. 4154 made it as illegal to discriminate against a person because of age, as it is to discriminate against a person because of sex or race.
He also successfully sponsored several other pieces of legislation during his years in the House as Chair of the Special Committee on Aging, which was established largely in response to his lobbying of the House leadership, and in the 1980s as Chair of the Rules Committee. These legislative initiatives included the expansion of home healthcare in Medicare; additional benefits like hearing aids, dentures, and eyeglasses in the Medicare and Medicaid programs; the Older Americans Act (OAA), with its many community-based programs; a stiffening of regulations regarding the quality of nursing home care; improved housing support for older adults; increased funding of jobs earmarked for the elderly under the OAA; the establishment of ten Alzheimer's Research and Care Centers, and more.
From when he entered the Senate in 1937, Pepper was a powerful advocate for Social Security. And in the early 1980s, he led a campaign to resist President Reagan's effort to address an imminent shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund through instituting benefits cuts. This campaign led to the establishment in 1983 of a Social Security Commission (the Greenspan Commission) to address the shortfall through an equitable mix of small benefit reductions and increases in the payroll tax. Pepper played a major role as a Commission member in keeping reductions as small as possible and, he opposed all reductions—as both a Commission member and a member of Congress.
Pepper was not in the Senate when the Social Security program became law in 1935, but he was in Congress when the big debate over Medicare was raging in the early 1960s, and was a sponsor of 1965 legislation establishing the program. By the 1970s, Pepper was widely recognized as a leading voice in support of both of these indispensable pillars of the U.S. retirement security system. He pushed for improvements in both programs, and furiously resisted any effort to cut benefits in either one. He played a critical role over the last twenty-five years of his life in making these programs the perceived "third rail" of American politics.
Pepper's last major aging initiative before his death in 1989 was a proposal to include in-home and community-based services as benefits in the Medicare program. His intention was to make non-institutional long-term-care services to be universal benefits funded through the Medicare program. This was an extension of his constant effort to improve home healthcare in both the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The Post-Pepper Years and the Decline of Aging Policy
Since Pepper's death, aging issues have gradually slipped from prominence as major public policy concerns and important issues in election campaigns. This slippage is one of the reasons Hudson and Gonyea have suggested that the older population, even as it grows and becomes a larger percentage of the electorate, may be losing its status as an advantaged group in American politics, and could eventually become just another contender status group among many (Hudson and Gonyea, 2011). This shift in status is a result of several factors, but the loss of a powerful political supporter and passionate advocate has clearly diminished the perceived importance of aging issues within the general public and among policy makers.
In 1998, President Clinton was apparently preparing to propose, through his Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, to Republican leaders a bipartisan plan to protect long-term Social Security Trust Fund solvency by cutting benefits. But Clinton was besieged by political difficulties before the plan could be fully developed and presented to Republican leadership.
In 2005, President Bush proposed the partial privatization of Social Security as a top priority for his second term. He fell well short, however, of getting enough congressional support for the proposal within months of introducing it.
President Obama has in the past proposed that the cost of living adjustment (COLA) be tied to the chained CPI (Consumer Price Index), rather the standard CPI. If implemented, this proposal would reduce benefits for the average beneficiary by about 7 percent by the time he or she reached age 80, and even more by age 90, when most beneficiary resources have been depleted, and Social Security is more critical than ever as a source of income.
Aging policy agenda falters
Besides these proposals to reduce or privatize Social Security, very little over the past twenty-five years has emerged as a national priority for action on behalf of older persons. It is certainly important to recognize the value of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions that improve Medicare benefits, especially the reduction of the doughnut hole in the Part D program. On the other hand, the proposal to create a universal social insurance long-term-care program, the CLASS Act, was first passed as a part of the ACA and then repealed in 2013. Funding for the Older Americans Act program hasn't risen much in more than twenty years, and Congress has failed to reauthorize the Act for the last two sessions. The Senate did vote for reauthorization, however, in July 2015.
In addition to the loss of Claude Pepper in 1989, I believe at least four other factors are responsible for the absence of support among policy makers for aging-related initiatives such as long-term-care reform, Social Security benefit increases for low-income beneficiaries, or even improvements in the smaller programs benefitting older Americans, like the Older Americans Act programs.
The major factor is the rise of a conservative economic agenda since the 1980s that prioritizes tax cuts or, at most, minimal tax increases on high incomes and wealth, cuts in spending on current programs and privatization of what remains (which has resulted in the austerity-focused federal budgets of the past five years), and the targeting of Social Security and Medicare as major sources of unsustainable future budget deficits.
A second factor, which is related to the targeting of Social Security and Medicare, is the intermittent effort since the 1980s to discredit these programs in the eyes of the public through media attacks on their fairness from an intergenerational equity perspective, and on their fiscal sustainability without ruinous tax increases. Since the 1980s, wealthy critics of these programs have financed such media campaigns at regular intervals.
These campaigns have contributed to the third fact, which is the gradual erosion of effective, sustained advocacy for aging issues over the past several years. The well-funded efforts to discredit aging-oriented programs like Social Security have not succeeded in achieving their major objectives, whether that might be privatization or major cuts in benefits, but they have made it significantly more difficult for advocates to make their case for program improvements or for new programs like comprehensive long-term care through the Medicare program. This recent erosion of aging advocacy is especially striking given the long history of strong public and often bipartisan policymaker support for aging programs, and may be the clearest evidence we have of how influential neoliberal ideology has become since the 1980s.
Finally, the role of money and wealthy contributors in political campaigns and policy development has made it increasingly difficult to place aging priorities on the policy agenda unless they reflect the interests of the major corporations and the wealthiest Americans (Hacker and Pierson, 2011; Gilens and Page, 2014). Aging policy priorities seldom reflect these interests.
If Pepper Were Here Now
This bipartisan indifference to aging issues, however, could change substantially over the next ten to twenty years with the aging of baby boomers and the doubling of the ages 65 and older population. A recent sign of this may be the March 27, 2015, Senate vote on the 2016 budget, when all but two Senate Democrats voted in support of an amendment by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to increase Social Security benefits. This is a dramatic turn away from the focus on cuts that has dominated the Social Security debate for many years (Meckler, 2015).
This is precisely the kind of stance Pepper would have pushed his colleagues in Congress to take long before that March Senate vote. He would also have pressed his party to support the provision of community-based long-term-care benefits in the Medicare program. He would have fiercely resisted the view that an austerity budget based on spending and tax cuts was a necessary remedy for budget deficits, making improvements in our system of retirement security and long-term care impossible. He was a strong proponent of the view that a deep recession was precisely when increased federal spending was needed to compensate for the loss of consumer demand in the private sector, and that spending on enhanced Social Security benefits and limited new long-term-care benefits in the Medicare program would benefit the economy and strengthen retirement security for millions.
Pepper would have used these and other aging-related policy issues to help change the narrative around the role of government in meeting public needs by anchoring it in a comprehensive political agenda for older adults and threats to their retirement security. Pepper's advocacy for older adults was founded on his long-held perception that a clear focus on helping other people was both good politics and good public policy. He thought that the Democratic Party's support for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid were enduring sources of political advantage for the party that should be carefully nurtured and never taken for granted.
I think this is a major reason Pepper would have been surprised and disappointed by his party's reluctance over the past twenty-five years to embrace major improvements in these signature programs, including the addition of long-term-care benefits to the Medicare program, which was a major priority for him during his last years. The long-term-care challenge has grown enormously since 1989, but policy makers remain reluctant to address it, even with the now rapid aging of the Baby Boom Generation.
Pepper would have seen this now long-standing reluctance to strengthen Social Security and improve Medicare as not just moral and policy failures, but also as a political failure. He would have pointed to the tendency in recent elections for older voters to strongly support Republican congressional candidates and to polls showing that the public is much less inclined than in the past to perceive Democrats as more supportive of Social Security than Republicans (Hudson, 2014). He would have considered these election and polling results closely related and insisted that the results are indications that the Democrats must regain the public's confidence in them as the party most devoted to protecting the interests of older Americans—before being able to reduce the large Republican advantage among older voters and become more competitive in future mid-term congressional elections.
If he were alive today, Pepper would emphasize that older voters are likely to dominate elections, especially mid-terms, for many years to come—new demographics notwithstanding—and the party most responsive to their rising anxieties about retirement security, healthcare, and long-term care is the likeliest to win most elections. I think he would have led efforts to achieve an ambitious aging policy agenda with the following policy priorities:
Make home- and community-based services (HCBS) a benefit in the Medicare program. At this point, HCBS often are provided through the Medicaid program as a waiver-funded program, as either a fee-for-service or managed-long-term-care (LTC) benefit.
This means that only those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid are eligible to receive these in-home or assisted-living services as alternatives to receiving care in the much more expensive and least preferred nursing home program. A Medicare HCBS benefit would reduce the need for expensive nursing home services, greatly enhance the quality of life of impaired older and younger disabled persons, and reduce financial pressure on families paying for LTC services, and on stressed state budgets. It would entail additional federal expenditures, but these would be manageable over a period of several decades. These expenditures could be paid for through a small increase in the Medicare payroll tax, or some other small tax increase. At a minimum, this proposal could play a major role in elevating the LTC issue to the level of importance it deserves as the nation prepares for a doubling of the older population by 2040.
Raise Social Security benefits for the poorest beneficiaries. Two-thirds of these beneficiaries are single women, ages 70 and older. More than 2 million beneficiaries are now officially poor, and a small increase in their monthly payments could raise them above the poverty level and provide them (and many of their family members) with an economic boost.
Increase funding for the Older American Act (OAA) programs. These service programs, since 1980, have collectively lost more than a third of their purchasing power. This means the gap between the need for these highly cost-effective programs and their availability has been increasing steadily for many years. Total funding for OAA programs is now about $2.4 billion, and increases of 5 percent to 10 percent for the next several years would at least prevent the gap between needs and services from growing.
Current and aspiring policymakers could use these and possibly other aging agenda priorities to enhance their electoral prospects and their ability to influence policy—just as Claude Pepper did throughout his long career. I'm certain that Pepper's advice to them would be, "What are you waiting for?"
The leadership opportunities available to anyone willing to take up these critical issues with a clear, strong voice are enormous. So, what are you waiting for?
Larry J. Polivka, Ph.D., is Claude Pepper Scholar in Residence at the Claude Pepper Foundation at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.
Editor's Note: This article is taken from the Fall 2015 issue of ASA's quarterly journal, Generations, an issue devoted to the topic "Ageism in America: Reframing the Issues and Impact." ASA members receive Generations as a membership benefit; non-members may purchase subscriptions or single copies of issues at our online store. Full digital access to current and back issues of Generations is also available to ASA members and Generations subscribers at Ingenta Connect. For details, click here.
Image via keyslibraries on Flickr.
Gilens, M., and Page, B. I. 2014. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens." Perspectives on Politics 12(3): 564–81.
Hacker, J. S., and Pierson, P. 2011. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon & Shuster.
Hudson, R. B., ed. 2014. The New Politics of Old Age Policy (3rd ed.), p. 89. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hudson, R. B., and Gonyea, J. G. 2011. "Baby Boomers and the Shifting Political Construction of Old Age." The Gerontologist 52(2): 272–82.
Meckler, L. 2015. "Democrats Rethink Social Security Strategy." The Wall Street Journal, April 5. Retrieved July 17, 2015.
Pepper, C. D., and Gorey, H. 1987. Pepper, Eyewitness to a Century. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.
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12 people who are extremely ready for January to be over
'Why has it been January for six years?'
The first month of the year is never easy: there's that long stretch between pay cheques, dark evenings, plus the pressure to reinvent yourself as a vision of health and wellness.
And although the first day of the year falling on a Monday gives you a proper blank slate to start with, it also means the 31 days of January stretch across five weeks.
To some people, that just feels way too long.
We can only hope that the rest of 2018 is going to go as slowly.
I HOPE THIS YEAR IS AS LONG AS JANUARY https://t.co/AhoHWmJMXo— AALIYAH (@NOTORIOUSAALI) January 27, 2018
But really, are we sure January even counts as one month? Surely it's more like one and a half?
no offence but how many months are in this month— beth mccoll (@imteddybless) January 22, 2018
And it just keeps going.
It's never ending.
It feels like months have passed since New Year's Day.
We six months into 2018 and it's still January.— #HOUSESTARKHIVEHOE (@Cindtrillella) January 27, 2018
Christmas 2017 feels like a distant memory.
why has it been january for 6 years— James Charles (@jamescharles) January 27, 2018
Time to make some new resolutions, since pretty much a year has passed since this month began.
What a long year January has been— . (@Neauxp) January 18, 2018
Is time still passing?
Every time i turn around it's still January 🙄— Jonica Booth (@Blu1x) January 28, 2018
You might have started to forget what getting paid feels like.
It's the fourth week of January. Pay day is a distant memory. People start believing they work for free & attempt to buy their coffee with the spare buttons you get with coats.— Bacardi Oakheart (@Midgetgems26) January 22, 2018
Some people were getting romantic inspiration.
I want a relationship as long as January— Terence Da Silva (@_Rizzer) January 22, 2018
It's lasting longer than some of the longest-lasting things known to mankind.
I swear January is lasting longer than the DFS sale.— Callum Lyon (@CallumLyon) January 23, 2018
It's only a few more days now, you can do it.
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