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Wednesday, August 31, 2016
This sounds like a wonderful idea. A twist to CodeCamp, SF style. You're Invited to Startup In Residence 2016 Demo Day // September 16th
Friday, August 19, 2016
Fwd: [DW] CNet: Australia keeps refugees in technology limbo
From: "Steven Clift" <clift@e-democracy.org>
Date: Aug 17, 2016 12:39 PM
Subject: [DW] CNet: Australia keeps refugees in technology limbo
To: "newswire" <newswire@groups.dowire.org>, "inclusion@forums.e-democracy.org" <inclusion@forums.e-democracy.org>, "A List for Open Knowledge Networks in Australia." <okfn-au@lists.okfn.org>, "poplus" <poplus@googlegroups.com>
Cc:
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Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Fwd: Between Worlds: The Moth Mainstage in Pittsburgh on August 31st
From: Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures <info@pittsburghlectures.org>
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301 S Craig Street Suite 200
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 15213
United States
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Fwd: Celebrate-Friday, August 12th, 3 pm--Successful Teens
PLEASE JOIN US this Friday, August 12th, 3:00 pm at 5321 Penn Avenue to celebrate the summer achievements of youth in our community.
These achievements include:
· 170+ young adults successfully completed a summer Learn and Earn internship at local businesses and summer camps in the area,
· 22 high school students earned college credits in the Carlow Summer College Program,
· 3 young adults led financial literacy trainings for 100+ students thanks to support from Citizens Bank
· 100+ students recovered failed high school credits to get back on the path to graduating on time,
· and MUCH MORE.
This is a great OPPORTUNITY to hear positive testimony from youth who participated in these programs. We will also have free food and music.
This is also an opportunity to thank the sponsors and partners who made these programs happen, including: 3 Rivers Workforce Investment Board, City of Pittsburgh—Pittsburgh Partnership, Neighborhood Learning Alliance, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Citizens Bank, Eastside Neighborhood Employment Center, Allegheny County, and the 70+ businesses and organizations that hosted summer learn and earn interns!
Sincerely,
Rick Flanagan
Youth Development Director
Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation
Saturday, August 06, 2016
Fwd: AAU SKWIM
From: Kevin McCarthy <kevin@skwiminternational.org>
Dear Michael:
I hope you are having a great summer with family friends and AAU activities! This is Kevin McCarthy with SKWIM International and SKWIM USA. I am reaching out to you today in the wake of several local North West youth drownings this summer, to open a dialogue with you about the AAU and regarding the new and growing water-sports game entitled SKWIM.
SKWIM™ (pronounced like 'swim' but with the added 'k', 'skwim') is an internationally growing 8-year old water-disk sports game for the whole family and all of the community. The game dynamic and equipment allows the activity to be enjoyed from ages 5 to 95. SKWIM is played in both shallow and deeper water, both recreationally and competitively, and by beginning, intermediate and advanced swimmers. SKWIM is the very first water sport game to invite all ages and abilities to participate despite their ability or inability to swim, and therefore has the growing potential to quickly become the most widely played and enjoyed water activity ever. SKWIM programming includes learn-to-swim, open water safety and lifesaving curriculum and is coached by certified lifeguards.
I am reaching out to you in this 'Olympic' season because I want to learn more about the AAU and any interest the AAU might have locally and nationally in helping to enhance water safety through game play. Unlike any other physical activity, swimming provides simultaneous full-body exercise and therapy. Also unlike any other physical activity, water exposure takes the lives of thousands each year in the USA and hundreds of thousands internationally. SKWIM USA was founded in 2010 as a 501c3 non-profit dedicated to significantly reduce the drowning rate in the USA and to also help curb the international drowning rate, by offering an engaging and interactive team game that both teaches and certifies youth and adults in water safety and lifesaving aquatic skills.
The game of SKWIM promotes swimming, communication and teamwork within an exciting and engaging structure, while encouraging individual self-expression and style. SKWIM shares the vital success traits of soccer, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, football, hockey and cricket, which are globally the most popular sports activities for participation and for spectatorship – and all interactive team games.
THE COMMON ELEMENTS OF INTERACTIVE SPORTS GAMES
Games provide the vast majority of player, spectator, media, retail, wholesale, commercial, and fan engagement, of all the athletic and physical activities.
1) An implement for passing to teammates and scoring (a soft SKWIM Disk)
2) Interactive Strategic Team Play (The SKWIM Disk is played on the water)
3) A Score zone or goal for each team (enhanced by 360-degree scoring in SKWIM)
4) Personalized Uniforms and or headwear (SKWIM Team Headbands, Jerseys with numbers and names)
5) Specialized Footwear (PDF SKWIM Fins which increase speed, maneuverability and safety in open-water)
6) Lifetime and Generational Play (SKWIM Starts at age 5 and is easily played into late senior years)
SKWIM is the first game to feature all of these elements in aquatic play. SKWIM is governed by the nonprofits SKWIM USA and SKWIM international. The game equipment is distributed by the international lifesaving brand eLifeguard in Florida. I hope the AAU might find this game to be a great match for its mission in the water, and that we can explore ways to help youth find water safety, fitness, and aquatic team play. SKWIM is developing cooperative relationships with the Red Cross, USLA, USA Swimming, U.S. Aquatics Sports, YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, JCC, CYO, Special Olympics and Diversity in Aquatics. We hope to build a relationship also with the AAU for 2017 play.
Michael, if you would like to join in on a recreational SKWIM game, you are invited any Friday evening to join in at the Evans Pool Green Lake- Seattle at 6:45pm, which hosts a family SKWIM game for all ages!
Hope to see you there!
Play SKWIM,
Coach Kevin I. McCarthy
SKWIM® Global Development
Cell 1 - 425-802-2167 (USA)
Address: 1125 205th Avenue NE
Sammamish WA 98074-6654 USA
Transform your pool, your community, and public safety with SKWIM® game play!
- RESPONSE - ENDURANCE - DISTANCE -
International SKWIM® Certification
Water Safety, Spirit and Sportsmanship through SKWIM® Game Play
SKWIM® USA is a 501c3 non-profit
Saturday, July 16, 2016
Summer Reading for a LONG ROAD to the future
From: John Hemington
Many of us, myself included, are searching for some way of changing the destructive neoliberal domination of much of the world. It is now crystal clear that whomever is elected president in November will continue these neoliberal/ neoconservative policies which have devastated so much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia and wreaked havoc on non-elites in the U.S. and Europe.
This will mean that playing the game as structured by the dominant political parties in the U.S. will no longer be an option. Bernie Sanders demonstrated this by cravenly submitting to endorsing Hillary Clinton on her terms. It will mean that serious local community organizing will become an essential focus of any alternative strategy. If change is to come it will come from the bottom up and not from assaulting the powers-that-be directly on their turf. It will be a radical alternative to what is.
This is and will not be a simple quick fix for the multitude of systemic issues we face. It will require serious, hard-fought, slogging victories at local, state and regional level in order to succeed. Fortunately there is a model which can be followed, that of the religious right and the Tea Party operatives. It will take dedication and commitment on the part of all involved – and it will take time. But I can see no other alternative.
To succeed we need to work to elect committed folks to the "basement" offices at the local and state levels of government and, where possible, national representatives. Because of the difficulty of establishing working third-parties in this nation some of it may have to take place within the dominant political party structure. The key, however, is to find and elect people who will not sellout when elected – and, if they do, immediate defeat them at the next opportunity.
I believe that anyone seriously considering such an effort should first be well-grounded in the history and development of the current neoliberal/neoconservative worldview. I have just finished an excellent, informative and, in my opinion, essential book in coming to grips not only with the ideological precepts involved; but also the methodology utilized in converting large swaths of the American public into blind supporters of this ideological trap. The book is The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. Steve Fraser traces these developments from the end of the Civil War until the present. Whether you are familiar with this history or not this is an exceptionally revealing historical and current analysis of where we are and how we got here. It is the best source I have yet encountered explaining the existing divisions within our society and the reasons behind them. Following is some information about and a couple of reviews of the book:
A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.
From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?
THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razor-sharp, THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE will be one of the most provocative and talked-about books of the year.
"Steve Fraser is that rare writer who combines a deep knowledge of history with a penetrating analysis of our current political and social condition. Here, in the lively prose that marks all his writing, he probes the similarities and differences between America's two gilded ages – the late nineteenth-century and today – offering provocative observations about why the first produced massive popular resistance and the second resigned acquiescence."―Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
"Over the last few years, there's been a wealth of books describing our new Gilded Age and bemoaning the extreme economic inequality that now defines modern America. Steve Fraser's fascinating The Age of Acquiescence is indispensable because it explains how that happened, how America's long standing opposition to concentrated wealth was defeated. Steve Fraser, in other words, is Thomas Piketty with politics, providing a crucial guide in helping the ninety-nine percent understand the terms of their defeat and, more importantly, how it can once again go on the offensive."―Greg Grandin, author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
"A splendid and illuminating book. Fraser's writing is clear-headed and free of cant. I know of no better an accounting for the division of America over the last forty years into a minority of the terrified rich and a majority of the humiliated poor."―Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly and author of Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration
"Steve Fraser has given us a sweeping account of the economic and cultural changes in American society that combined to create an earlier era of working class struggle and hope, and then in our present moment have generated quiescence and despair. Read this book for its synoptic account of the ways that cultural manipulation have accompanied intensifying economic exploitation. But read it also to snatch glimmers of a better future from the past."―Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
About the Author
Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Nation, The American Prospect, Raritan, and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New York City.
John
Monday, July 11, 2016
Fwd: First Meeting of the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee
From: "Health.gov" <health.gov@public.govdelivery.com>
Date: Jul 11, 2016 10:25 AM
Subject: First Meeting of the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee
To: <mark@rauterkus.com>
Cc:
This email was delivered to mark@rauterkus.com. To change your subscriptions or preferences or stop subscriptions anytime, log in to your User Profile with your e-mail address. For questions or problems with the service, please contact subscriberhelp.govdelivery.com for assistance. All other inquiries can be directed to odphpinfo@hhs.gov. This service is provided by the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. . |
Sunday, July 03, 2016
Great news on ballot access in PA
I had first hand experiences with the crazy requirements that have been part of the landscape in PA. Let's hope for sanity in the future.
----
By Chris Potter / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A federal judge has made it easier for third-party candidates to appear on the state ballot this November, possibly adding a new variable into an already dizzying presidential election.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lawrence F. Stengel of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued an order asserting that presidential candidates in three minor parties — the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and the Constitution Party — will need only 5,000 voters to sign their nominating petitions. That's roughly a quarter of the 21,775 signatures they would have needed under the old rules.
The order "restores voter choice to Pennsylvania elections, which has been absent other than the major parties," said Oliver Hall, an attorney who represented the minor parties. "Now people can decide if they want to vote for someone else entirely, and that's how our elections should work."
Major-party candidates need only 2,000 signatures to get on the primary ballot — where a win ensures a space in November. But previously, minor-party statewide candidates were obliged to meet a threshold equal to 2 percent of the previous statewide vote-count. In past years, that has required candidates to obtain up to 67,000 signatures.
Mr. Hall said that even under the old rules, it was “close to a certainty” that the third-party contenders would have won spots on the 2016 ballot. But Thursday’s ruling also makes it harder to remove them.
Previously, if the legitimacy of a candidate’s signatures was successfully challenged in court, the winner could recoup the legal costs of doing so. In 2004, for example, Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader was billed over $80,000 -- a crippling sum for smaller political parties.
Judge Stengel's ruling restricts the ability to assess such costs. That was "absolutely a load off our minds," said Shawn Patrick House, who chairs the state Libertarian Party.
Signature requirements for other races are also lower. Candidates for auditor general, treasurer, and attorney general — all of which are on this year’s ballot — must procure 2,500 signatures. Senate candidates must also produce 5,000 signatures. But the ruling may have the greatest impact on the race for president.
Pennsylvania is a potentially key battleground, and polling shows many voters discontented with both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
“Usually I discount third-party candidates,” said Muhlenberg College pollster Christopher Borick. “But the polls in Pennsylvania show the race as fairly close. Put that together with the high unfavorable ratings of both candidates, and a third-party candidate or two could be pivotal.”
A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed Ms. Clinton leading Mr. Trump by 39 percent to 36 percent, with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson garnering 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein with 4 percent. Mr. Borick said that while Ms. Stein would likely appeal to “disenchanted progressives” who might otherwise back Ms. Clinton, Mr. Johnson’s impact was harder to gauge: “Nationally, it seems like he draws marginally from both candidates.”
The legal dispute over the requirements dates back years. In 2015, Judge Stengel ruled that the high signature requirements, combined with the threat of financial penalties, meant "the ability of the minor parties to ... voice their views has been decimated.” Gov. Tom Wolf's administration appealed, saying it had no power to change election rules set by the courts and the legislature.
Judge Stengel’s order bridged that impasse, and in fact incorporated the administration’s own proposed signature requirements. “Governor Wolf ... wants to ensure greater ballot access for minor parties,” said Mr. Wolf’s office in a statement, “and he is pleased with Judge Stengel’s ruling.”
The state Republican Party sounded less pleased. "These are decisions that we believe are best left to the General Assembly,” it said in a statement.
In fact, Judge Stengel’s order applies “until ... the Pennsylvania Legislature enacts a permanent measure amending or modifying the process to place [minor parties] on the general election ballot.” A measure to do so, House Bill 342, was passed by the House, amended by the Senate last month, and is pending in the House again. The bill sets out petition requirements consistent with those in Judge Stengel’s order.
But for the time being, as Mr. House put it, "We have more than Coke and Pepsi candidates.”