Fire in a local, historical building on East Carson Street in Pittsburgh's South Side

Wow.

Fire on the South Side

Fwd: 4 Learning Theories Every Online Educator Should Know

4 Learning Theories Every Online Educator Should Know Today's Blog Post 4 Learning Theories Every Online Educator Should Know Because understanding how we learn influences how we teach. by Laura Lynch on February 3, 2021

Fwd: [Art-All-Night] Art All Night 2021 Planning Committee

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Art All Night <info@artallnight.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 8:54 AM
Subject: [Art-All-Night] Art All Night 2021 Planning Committee
To: <art-all-night@artallnight.org>

Greetings Art All Nighters,

Art All Night is embarking on its 24th year of celebrating art, music, and performance in a free, non-juried, non-censored show!

Because of the pandemic, 2021 will be our 2nd virtual show, this time at the end of April.  Art All Night needs one thing in order to be successful: a planning team of dedicated people to take on the responsibilities required for show preparation.

Planning members meet most Wednesdays on Zoom from now until the end of April to discuss everything that goes into planning our virtual show. We are especially excited for new virtual ideas to incorporate in 2021 and new ways to do some of the old favorite things.

If you are interested in helping please reply to this email and we will send you the Zoom link for the meeting this Wednesday, February 3rd at 7:15 pm.

Any questions or comments? We would like to hear from you. Please email info@artallnight.org or visit www.artallnight.org.

If the planning team is not for you, know that you may still be needed in the future when we can have the show in person once again.

The Art All Night Planning Committee.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ArtAllNight

Art-All-Night mailing list
Art-All-Night@artallnight.org
https://mail.artallnight.org/mailman/listinfo/art-all-night

Fwd: How EdTechs and higher ed institutions partner for rapid innovation

Hear how EdTech tackles the biggest challenges facing students and educators.

Webinar Evolution to revolution with D2L and Northcentral University       Innovating in a new virtual education landscape   Join John Baker, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the EdTech D2L, and Dr. David Harpool, President of Northcentral University, as they discuss how using education technology (EdTech) is now a revolution that upends the way institutions think about learning. Wednesday, February 3, 2021 Live webcast available across multiple timezones     Register now     About IMAGINE: The New World of Education This online series elevates key conversations with leaders from across the global education community. Join us each month to discover how education institutions and organizations are currently innovating in the cloud to deliver more engaging learning environments for students and teachers.       Access on demand content at any time   Explore additional IMAGINE webinars »

Fwd: The GameStop rebellion

Tomorrow on the Tom Woods Show I'll be talking to economist Bob Murphy, with whom I used to co-host the podcast Contra Krugman, about what's going on with GameStop stock, hedge funds, and government.   It's been quite something to watch, though.   If the average American suffers a loss, that's a darn shame. If big players suffer a loss, shut everything down!   Hedge fund Melvin Capital just closed out its short position after suffering a massive loss.   How could this have happened? A bunch of newbs on Reddit coordinated something this massive?   I'm not sure that they really are newbs. They sound pretty darn informed to me.   Regardless, what a moment this is. How much more obvious can the elites make it? Things are supposed to go the way we want. When they don't, we go crying to regulators to save us. And the media can be counted on to report our version of events.   These days I think a lot of people have become so demoralized that they think they have no power. The Establishment dominates everything, and there is no hope.   But that isn't so.   If the Establishment had things well in hand, they wouldn't need to propagandize us so relentlessly.   And I hope it's obvious that this is true also in your own life and your own business: even in this day and age, the little guy can prosper.   Yes, the bad guys have been making some disturbing moves lately. But you can still do things -- like run your own store from your computer! -- that would have seemed out of science fiction a generation ago.   The first of the two encore presentations of our workshop on running eCommerce stores as an excellent newbie entry point into online business starts in under an hour: 10am Eastern.   Register for that one or the one later today at the link, and start 2021 off on a note of hope:    http://www.tomwoods.com/encores   Tom Woods

Cousin Celebration

Happy Summer To All

Past Project and News of Visit to Florida

Thanks for all the materials and contributions to our photo album for Aunt Audrey of Florida. The photo book turned out great with many photos covering the entire family. Aunt Audrey loved it.

We spent an afternoon with Audrey, Barbara and her children (David and Melody), Diane & Phil and their children (Joe and Jennifer), and Linda & Chuck (with Andrew and Chester). It was a wonderful visit, but too short a time.

New Members

It is exciting to learn that our extended family has grown in numbers with two new members. Stephen Taylor in July of 92 and Jennifer Marie Kirby in August 92.

Reasons to Celebrate

We’ve got good reasons for a celebration, now lets have one. A party is planned for Saturday, October 3, 1992 at noon (to whenever) at Duff Park in Penn Hills.

Directions to the Park and Party

Take the Penn Hills exit off of the Parkway East. Take the exit which blends into Rodi Road. Follow Rodi Road and turn LEFT off of Rodi Road onto Duff Road. The corner of Rodi and Duff has Alway Tires, Ryan Auto Glass and Newport Square.

Follow Duff Road up a long hill, and at the crest of the hill at a baseball field, make a sharp left turn. The road is before the school and beside the tennis courts. This road leads directly to the Park Pavilion and our party.

Bringing Things

If Uncle Joe’s family wold bring deserts and Aunt Margaretmary's family would bring salads, Uncle Leo’s family will do the rest.

RSVP

Please RSVP before September 25 and if you are unable to attend, please send news and pictures.

Love, Aunt Audrey

George, get a grip. The media needs to do its job in a much better way if this country is to heal

Fwd from John: My thoughts on MLK day and beyond

--- Forwarded message ---------

From: John H. 

Date: Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 10:38 PM
Subject: My thoughts on MLK day and beyond

Martin Luther King was Angry and So Am I

 

As I sit here in the prelude to Martin Luther King Day I am angry, frustrated and depressed.  This morning I tuned into our church service only to be advised that while we, as a predominately  white church, were singing some black spirituals this was not to be seen as an appropriation of 'blackness' and that we shouldn't be ashamed to do so.  But why should we ever have to be reminded of such a thing.  Singing another culture's songs should always be seen as a celebration of that culture's traditions and a spreading of understanding.  It made me upset insofar as it was just one more example of the current trend being imposed on us to apologize for the accident of being born 'white'.  I refuse to be ashamed of who I am.  I am, however, ashamed and deeply saddened by what many whites have done both historically and currently to people of color both in this nation and around the world.

 

Yes, "Black Lives Matter", but so do Palestinian and Afghani and Syrian and Iraqi and Yemeni and Iranian and Indonesian and Congolese and Sudanese and Libyans and Venezuelans and Hondurans and Cubans and all of the other people of the world which we Americans have been directly and indirectly complicitly involved in murdering – and not just historically, but at this very moment in the support of corporate greed and the expansion of empire.  And, yes, this is an equal opportunity killing by Americans of all races and creeds, regularly celebrated in our corporate media as some perverted form of the defense of freedom.  But freedom for whom?

 

What we call freedom in this nation is not freedom in any real sense of the word.  It is an illusory meme draped over the our corporate killing ground to give us comfort while living in violent kleptocracy run by oligarchs and plutocrats whose only concern is grabbing everything possible regardless of the cost in human and environmental destruction.  They succeed by controlling what we are allowed to know and how we are allowed to know it.  They own the media which controls the propaganda which we are daily fed and they knowingly feed it to us in a manner to insure that we mere 'consumers' will always have reasons to hate one another – but never 'our betters'.  Thus, our media minders insure that class issues are never allowed to rise to the surface of the discussion.  We are always forced instead into issues of culture, race, gender or religious differences that are intended to separate rather than unite us.

 

One of the ways of doing this was devised by the CIA propaganda apparatus.  That was to promote the idea that anyone suggesting that a conspiracy might exist from within the government was a "conspiracy theorist" and then equating such a person with being nothing more than a fringe loony.  The problem is that there have been many actual historical conspiracies engaged in by high governmental officials of the United States – many by operatives of the CIA – which have been well documented – and they continue to this day.  The reasoning, of course, is that by creating the 'brand' conspiracy theory as a loony tune concept would eliminate any possibility of actual high-level conspiracies from being exposed.  And, for the most part, this has worked exactly as planned.

 

This is not to suggest that every conspiracy proposed is real or that some persons proposing them are not crazy as loons.  This is what gives the whole scheme credibility.  We know, for instance, that Bush's Iraq War started as the result of an actual conspiracy on the part of the Bush administration, planned well before 9/11, to 'cook the books' so to speak by creating fictitious evidence and by funneling false information to Judith Miller of the New York Times to gin up popular support for a devious and terrible undertaking.  But even before that, 9/11 was also used as an excuse for attacking Afghanistan in another attack planned long before 9/11 in an effort to drive out the Taliban because they had refused to agree to a proposed pipeline through their nation which would have benefitted Halliburton then chaired by Richard Cheney.  This too was a conspiracy, though never touted as such by the media.  Thus, 9/11 was an extraordinarily useful tool for the start and continuation to two never-ending illegal wars of choice which have resulted in the deaths and injuries to literally millions of people in multiple nations since 2001.

 

The CIA has been involved in literally hundreds of conspiracies of various natures since its founding at the end of World War II including the smuggling of heroin and cocaine from Southeast Asia and South and Central America into the U.S.  But these are never discussed in polite company nor, heaven forbid, on mainstream media.  There is the current conspiracy, operating in the open, to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Venezuela and the one just defeated where Honduras took back its legitimate government following an overthrow by the CIA assisted by Hillary Clinton's State Department.  There was the conspiracy following World War II to save many high-level Nazi officers and scientists by moving them to South American, the U.S. and parts of Europe where they would be secure and available for our use.  But we don't like to discuss this too much.

 

I could go on and on, the list is almost endless.  There is the fabricated case against Julius Assange and Wikileaks for which Assange is still being tortured in Britain for the crime of publishing material he was handed – something the New York Times regularly gets away with as they and he should.  But because Assange released information which was embarrassing to the United States he must be severely punished if not murdered.  And on, and on, and on . . .

 

And now, as a result of the assault on the Capitol, Joe Biden is proposing a new Domestic Terrorism law to supplement the already terrible Patriot Act which gave widely broad surveillance powers to the national security state.  This is an awful idea which was, as with the Patriot Act, already in the official pipeline prior to the Capitol assault.  The official excuse is the need to go after right wing vigilante militarism.  But what the powers that be really fear is not the right, they are entirely comfortable with fascism in its various forms.  What they fear is the progressive left because it is the progressive left that is willing to call out the Democratic Party establishment for the neoliberal corporate posers that they are.

 

The Democratic Party establishment as well as the 'liberal' mainstream media have firmly and thoroughly aligned themselves with the national security state.  At this juncture there is essentially no separation between the two.  It now appears that at least half of the commentators on CNN and MSNBC are former or current members of the FBI, CIA, NSA, Justice Department, Defense Department or other military or security agencies.  The primary bastion of liberal news, the New York Times has long been a semi-official conduit of propaganda from the CIA as is NPR.  Sadly the right wing media and the Republican Party are no better.  They just spew a different brand of similar prowar pro-surveillance propaganda aimed to keep their particular audience angry and inflamed against the left.

 

So where does this all leave us?  It does, I believe, leave us in a form of Orwellian hellscape where nothing is true and everything subject to distorted propaganda.  If one dares question the prevailing dogma he or she is charged with being a "conspiracy theorist" and thus a "nut case" unworthy of consideration.  And now that private monopolies such a Google, Facebook and Amazon are being permitted to disappear any and everyone they chose from the Internet dissenting voices of whatever stripe are at great risk.  The probability of a new Domestic Terrorism Law threatens to clamp down and dampen dissident views even more.  These certainly make it appear that the United States is on the cusp of becoming a purely fascist society in the most horrendous Orwellian way imaginable – not by soldiers stationed on the street corners, but by very effective thought control managed by corporate overlords and their political heiring's with a hard-right Christian fundamentalist military standing guard in the background.

 

I don't know about you but the prospect of this makes me very, very sad and very glad to be old.  Perhaps you noticed that I made no mention of the imminent global climate catastrophe in this piece.  That was no accident.  I did so because in this scenario there is simply no possibility that the powers that be will take any meaningful action – even if such action is possible – to ameliorate the coming destruction of life on planet Earth, at least life so far as we know it. 

 

So as I write this, now in my late seventies, I realize that I have now lived through the highlight period post-capitalist wonder in the world.  Coming out of the Great Depression in the 1930s and 1940s and following the horror of World War II there was an optimism that humankind had embarked on a new and more enlightened course in the world – that prosperity for all could be at hand.  And yet here we are now, a scant 70 or so years later looking at an Orwellian present and desolate future if there will be a future for humanity at all.  How could it be that we have allowed our so-called civilization to collapse in on itself so catastrophically so quickly?  How can it be that we imposed on ourselves a system of greed and self-interest to the detriment of all life to take control of our very existence?  In the end it is nothing less than a form of self-immolation.  It is the Icarus myth writ to a civilizational level.  Who now will be left to write the obituary for humanity?

 

  John

 

"You're not to be so blind with patriotism

that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong,

no matter who does it or says it." 

- Malcolm X

 

 

--

--
Ta.
 
 
Mark Rauterkus       Mark@Rauterkus.com 

Webmaster, International Swim Coaches Association, SwimISCA.org

Executive Director of SKWIM USA, a 501(c)(3), SKWIM.us

The Pittsburgh Project - swim coach and head lifeguard

Coach at The Ellis School for Swimming, T&F and Triathlon

Pittsburgh Combined Water Polo Team & Renegades (Masters) 

CLOH.org & Rauterkus.com & 4Rs.org

412 298 3432 = cell

Reports say, Tom Brady tweeted this too

White Coat delivered in New Orleans

Fwd: Mark, see you in London this year?

--- Forwarded message ----

New live stream announced!

View this email in your browser 2021 has arrived and I hope this message finds you well and in good spirits. The Uxbridge Folk Club in Hillingdon (West London), England has invited me to perform for their online concert series!  The very first solo show I did in the UK was at this club, so it holds a special place in my heart.  I will probably focus on some of my songs that have a connection to the British Isles in one way or another, and the show time should be convenient for my British and European friends (8pm London time, and 9pm on the Continent).  As usual, the concert is free to watch on YouTube Live, but donations are very welcome!  If you sign in to YouTube you can participate in the chat.   Hope to "see" you there, Dave LIVE FROM NACHVILLE - LONDON EDITION Thursday, January 28, 2021 8 PM UK time (3 PM US Eastern, 12 PM Pacific) Presented by the Uxbridge Folk Club Watch on YouTube Live Donate Here

Fwd: Economic Impact Payments Are Underway

From: Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr.

Dear Mark,  You likely have heard that a second round of Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) has been approved. I understand that many constituents have a number of questions. The IRS started to distribute the second EIPs on December 29. Direct deposit payments should be deposited within the next two weeks. Distribution of paper checks began on Wednesday, December 30, and should continue through the end of January. If you received an initial EIP, no additional action is required to receive this second payment. The income criteria for the second round of payments is the same as the first. If you are a U.S. citizen or permanent resident making under $75,000 a year (single) or $150,000 a year (married filing jointly) and are not claimed as a dependent on someone else's tax returns, you likely will qualify for the full $600 payment ($1,200 married couples). Families with qualifying children will also receive $600 for each dependent under age 17. Eligible individuals do not need to take any action to receive the EIP. In addition to checks and direct deposits, Treasury will also be sending a limited number of payments out by debit card. The Economic Impact Payment debit card will be sent in a white envelope that prominently displays the U.S. Department of the Treasury seal. It has the Visa name on the front of the card and the issuing bank, MetaBank®, N.A. If you did not receive one or both EIPs, but believe you are eligible, you will be able to claim the equivalent "Recovery Rebate Credit" when you file your 2020 federal income tax return. You can learn more about the second round of EIPs on the IRS website. My staff is also happy to help answer questions or provide assistance, and can be reached through my website or at 866-461-9159. While I am glad that some measure of relief is finally reaching Pennsylvanians, it is nowhere near enough. Please know that I will continue to fight in the new Congress to ensure that those who are struggling receive the additional economic support they need and deserve. Sincerely, Bob Casey

Rauterkus family Christmas Letter - December 2020

Letter in Google Drive.

Letter in one page PDF.

Fwd: Reminder: Important news about SUUSI 2021

A message from the Board and Core Staff.

Dear beloved SUUSI community, The Board and Core Staff would like to express our profound gratitude for all who are part of our SUUSI community, whether you have attended once or fifty times. You are the heart and soul of SUUSI.  The Board and Core Staff are charged with making decisions that are in the best interests of public health, the safety of our community members, SUUSI's financial stability, and the strength of our bonds with each other. Given the lengthy timeline needed to put together all the elements of SUUSI, we have found ourselves with the dilemma of needing to make decisions now based on incomplete information about next July. It is impossible to know at this time whether it will be safe to hold an in-person gathering in July of 2021. We cannot predict how widespread Covid-19 will be next summer, how broad the availability and acceptance of a vaccine will be, or how many people would be willing to attend a SUUSI that might require strict social distancing. Our host location, Western Carolina University, doubts whether they will be able to host on-campus gatherings next summer, and they will not have a definite answer in time to allow us to plan. Under these circumstances, we have come to the difficult decision that we cannot plan for an in-person SUUSI 2021. The SUUSI Board has voted that SUUSI 2021 will be an entirely virtual event. Many will be disappointed to hear this news. Many will be relieved to know that we are prioritizing safety. Many will feel a complicated mix of these emotions and others. This was a painful decision for SUUSI leadership to make. All of us value the traditionally immersive in-person SUUSI experience. We will miss playing together at Community Time or in a song circle, dancing together, sharing a table in the dining hall, and joining hands in worship. Yet we are confident that "Love Brings Us Together," as our 2021 theme reminds us. We know that, whatever the format, love will bring us together in the summer of 2021. The Core Staff are already making plans to improve and build on the virtual format we developed for SUUSI 2020, and we hope that, once this news has had some time to settle, you will be ready to join us in making our shared virtual experience the best that it can be. Find the latest information about SUUSI at suusi.org

SUUSI | Western Carolina University, July 18-24, 2021, Cullowhee, NC 28723