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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor, Senior IT Architect and Event Content Manager for [IBM Systems for IBM Systems Technical University] events. With over 30 years with IBM Systems, Tony is frequent traveler, speaking to clients at events throughout the world.
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Day1 -Monday Morning Keynote Sessions
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This week, I will be in Las Vegas for the 30th annual [Data Center Conference]. For those on Twitter, follow the conference on hashtag #GartnerDC, and follow me at [@az990tony]. IBM is a Global Partner and Platinum Sponsor for this event. Here is a recap of some of the Monday morning keynote sessions:
Monday morning kicked off with a welcome introduction from the conference coordinators. This is the highest attendance for this conference in its 30 year history, with 60 percent of the attending for their first time, and 18 percent only once before. This is the fourth time I am attending. Half of the attendees represent corporations with 20,000 employees or more, the other half from smaller companies and government agencies. The top five industries represented are financial services, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy.
This conference uses a clever "interactive polling" where hand-held devices can be used to select choices, and results of over 800 voters are presented immediately on the big screen. For IT budgets, 42 percent plan to increase next year, 32 percent flat, and 26 percent lower, which are similar to the numbers last year. Of nine different IT challenges, the top three were managing storage growth, power/cooling issues, and adopting a Cloud strategy.
Top 10 Trends and how they will impact Data Center IT
The analyst presented top 10 business, technology and societal trends that will impact IT. He added a last-minute eleventh issue that he felt will impact everyone in 2012:
Consumerization and the Tablet. Back in 1997, a GB of flash memory cost $7,992 US dollars, and today that same GB costs only 25 cents. Employees are bringing their own devices to the workplace, and expecting IT support.
Infinite Data Center. You may never have to expand your floorspace again. Improvements in server and storage density can allow you to continually upgrade in place.
Energy Management. Data centers consume 100x more energy than the offices they support. The cost of energy is on part with IT equipment. Energy management is becoming an enterprise-wide discipline. A key performance indicator (KPI) can be "compute per kW" or "compute per Square foot".
Context Awareness. There are hundreds of thousands of apps for Android-based smart phones and iPhones. Context awareness allows an app to help business travelers in airports know what restaurants are nearby, their flight status, and alternate flights available, based entirely on their location.
Hybrid Clouds. By 2013, over 60 percent of cloud adoption will be to redeploy existing apps like email. Some 80 percent of cloud initiatives will be private or hybrid configurations. Customers want "good enough" technology, and thus Cloud will be mostly an augmentation strategy.
Fabric Computing. The opposite of fully-integrated stacks is the notion of having compute, memory and storage joined together via an interconnect fabric with software to manage the entire environment.
IT Complexity. Robert Glass's Law states that for every 25 percent increase in functionality, there is a 100 percent increase in complexity. See Roger Session's whitepaper [The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity] for more on this.
Patterns and Analytics. Big data and business analytics is a key platform. This is expected to grow 60 percent CAGR.
Impact of Virtualization. Virtualizing your environment should be considered a continuous process, not a one-time project. Many companies are running x86 servers at less than 55 percent, which the speaker considers under-utilized. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a trade-off, may cost more but have other business benefits to consider. The problem is that many IT shops are organized vertially (a server team, storage team, network team) but problems surface horizontally, and there is no "ownership" for the resolution. Some use "tiger teams" to address this. Companies should reward lateral thinking.
Social Media. Of the ommunications on cell phones by college students, 98.4 percent are text messages, and only 1.6 percent voice phone calls. People search Google for "what was", but they search Twitter for "what is". Most of the growth on Twitter are in the 39-52 year-old demographic. The analyst felt that if your company is blocking or restricting access to facebook, twitter, youtube or other social networking sites, then shame on you. I agree!
Flooding in Thailand. Over two million square feet of HDD production space were flooded, and this will impact HDD prices for 2012. Already, a 2TB drive that was selling for $79 at local store is now selling for $190.
How To Get Your CFO's Support For Strategy and Funding
In the first of a series of "mastermind interviews", the analyst interviewed their own CFO Chris Lafond. Ultimately, it is about business results. They have grown annual 15-20 percent, from 250 million in 2003 to 1.3 billion US dollars in 2011 for annual revenue, 4600 employees, doing business in 85 countries. The company is focused on three business areas: Research, Consulting, and Events like this one. Chris does not approve 3-5 year projects, and instead requests projects be broken up into year-long phases. ROI can be very misleading, and he asks instead for benefits and contributions to initiatives.
It is important to keep the horse in front of the cart. Accounting departments should not drive business decisions. For example, companies should not move to the public cloud just so that the accounting department can shift from CAPex to OPex. Try to depreciate as soon as possible. Likewise, green technologies and social responsibility are factors, but not drivers of business decisions. Acquisitions are a natural evolution of the market, so risk mitigation strategies should be in place in case your vendor of choice is acquired by someone you don't like.
For BC/DR planning, the analyst has a single Data Center approach, but Chris indicated that IT is looking to expand this. Their single datacenter for one part of their business was in Florida, and the other in Massachusetts, and both impacted by Hurricanes or Earthquakes recently.
The "lightning round" asked Chris his thoughts, either thumbs up, thumbs down, or neutral, on single ideas or concepts. I liked this part of the interview!
Chargeback? Thumbs down. He doesn't feel you should have internal fighting over charge rates. He prefers showback instead.
BYO Device with stipend? Thumbs down, but inevitable. Giving people a chunk of money to buy their own laptop, smart phone or tablet of choice may wreak havoc on the IT department for support and service.
Telepresence? Thumbs down. Cool, but very expensive. I don't think people are prepared to exploit the benefits of this.
Corporate apps on public "app stores"? Thumbs down. Concerns over security and integration is main issue.
Access to Social Networks? Thumbs up. This is how employees communicate and collaborate. Don't stifle them doing the right things just because you are afraid they might waste 20 minutes on Facebook per day.
Your IT budget? It's up slightly 1-5 percent for 2012.
Cloud? Promising, some challenges related to integration and security.
Chris finished up with a story about an application team that indicated that they would need to make 100 customizations to an off-the-shelf general ledger financial application. Chris and the other executives asked to be presented each and every customization, and he was able to eliminate most of them.
Positive comments I heard from the audience was that these keynotes had real "meat" to them, and not just full of cliches and platitudes that is common for keynote sessions. I would have to agree.
technorati tags: IBM, #GartnerDC, Tablet, Consumerization, Hybrid+Cloud, KPI, Thailand, HDD, Chargeback, Showback, CFO
Tags: thailand hybrid+cloud tablet #gartnerdc chargeback kpi showback consumerization ibm hdd cfo
Day 3 - Wednesday Morning Sessions
Continuing my post-week coverage of the [Data Center 2010 conference], Wednesday morning started with another keynote session, followed by some break-out sessions.
Realities of IT Investment
Tighter budgets mean more business decisions. Future investments will come from cost savings. The analysts report that 77 percent of IT decisions are made by CFOs. Most organizations are spending less now than back in 2008 before the recession.
How we innovate through IT is changing. In bad times, risk trumps return, but only 21 percent of the audience have a formal "risk calculation" as part of their purchase plans.
Divestment matters as much as investment. Reductions in complexity have the greatest long-term cost savings. Try to retire at least 20 percent of your applications next year. With the advent of Cloud Computing, companies might just retire it and go entirely with public cloud offerings. Note that this graph the years are different than the ones above, in groups of half-decade increments.
It is important to identify functional dependencies and link your IT risks to business outcomes. Focus on making costs visible, and re-think how you communicate IT performance measurements and their impact to business. Try to change the culture and mind-set so that projects are not referred to as "IT projects" focused on technology, but rather they are "business projects" focused on business results.
Richard Whitehead from Novell presented challenges in moving to Cloud Computing. There are risks and challenges managing multiple OS environments. Users should have full access to all IT resources they need to do their jobs. Computing should be secure, compliant, and portable. Here is the shift he sees from physical servers to virtual and cloud deployments, years 2010 to 2015:
Richard considers a "workload" as being the combination of the operating system, middleware, and application. He then defines "Business Service" as an appropriate combination of these workloads. For example, a business service that provides a particular report might involve a front-end application, talking through business logic workload server, talking to a back-end database workload server.
To address this challenge, Novell introduces "Intelligent Workload Management", called WorkloadIQ. This manages the lifecycle to build, secure, deploy, manage and measure each workload. Their motto was to take the mix of physical, virtual and cloud workloads all "make it work as one". IBM is a business partner with Novell, and I am a big fan of Novell's open-source solutions including SUSE Linux.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cloud....
Bud Albers, CTO of Disney, shared their success in deploying their hybrid cloud infrastructure. Everyone recognizes the Disney brand for movies and theme parks, but may not aware that they also own ABC News and ESPN television, Travel cruises, virtual worlds, mobile sites, and deploy applications like Fantasy Football and Fantasy Fishing.
Two years ago, each Line of Business (LOB) owned their own servers, they were continually out of space, power and HVAC issues forced tactical build-outs of their datacenters. But in 2008, the answer to all questions was Cloud Computing, it slices and dices like something invented by [Ron Popeill], with no investment or IT staff required. However, continuing to ask the CFO for CAPEX to purchase assets that were only 1/7th used was not working out either. That's right, over 75 percent of their servers were running less than 15 percent CPU utilization.
The compromise was named "D*Cloud". Internal IT infrastructure would be positioned for Cloud Computing, by adopting server virtualization, implementing REST/SOAP interfaces, and replicating the success across their various Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Disney is no stranger to Open Source software, using Linux and PHP. Their [Open Source] web page shows tools available from Disney Animation studios.
At the half-way point, they had half their applications running virtualized on just 4 percent of their servers. Today, they run over 20 VMs per host and have 65 percent of their apps virtualized. Their target is 80 percent of their apps virtualized by 2014.
Bud used the analogy that public clouds will be the "gas stations" of the IT industry. People will choose the cheapest gas among nearby gas stations. By focusing on "Application management" rather than "VM instance management", Disney is able to seamlessly move applications as needed from private to public cloud platforms.
Their results? Disney is now averaging 40 percent CPU utilization across all servers. Bud feels they have achieved better scalability, better quality of service, and increased speed, all while saving money. Disney is spending less on IT now than in 2008,
UPMC Maximizes Storage Efficiency with IBM
Kevin Muha, UPMC Enterprise Architect & Technology Manager for Storage and Data Protection Services, was unable to present this in person, so Norm Protsman (IBM) presented Kevin's charts on the success at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center [UPMC]. UPMC is Western Pennsylvania's largest employer, with roughly 50,000 employees across 20 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites. They have frequently been rated one of the best hospitals in the US.
Their challenge was storage growth. Their storage environment had grown 328 percent over the past three years, to 1.6PB of disk and nearly 7 PB of physical tape. To address this, UPMC deployed four IBM TS7650G ProtecTIER gateways (2 clusters) and three XIV storage systems for their existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) environment. Since they were already using TSM over a Fibre Channel SAN, the implementation took only three days.
UPMC was backing up nearly 60TB per day, in a 15-hour back window. Their primary data is roughly 60 percent Oracle, with the rest being a mix of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and unstructured data such as files and images.
Their results? TSM reclamation is 30 percent faster. Hardware footprint reduced from 9 tiles to 5. Over 50 percent reduction in recovery time for Oracle DB, and 20 percent reduction in recovery of SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, and Epic Cache. They average 24:1 deduplication overall, which can be broken down by data category as follows:
29:1 Cerner Oracle
18:1 EPIC Cache
10:1 Microsoft SQL Server
8:1 Unstructured files
6:1 Microsoft Exchange
UPMC still has lots of LTO-4 tapes onsite and offsite from before the change-over, so the next phase planned is to implement "IP-based remote replication" between ProtecTIER gateways to a third data center at extended distance. The plan is to only replicate the backups of production data, and not replicate the backups of test/dev data.
The presentation and supporting case study details on this is available on the [IBM Literature Fullfilment] website.
The show floor closed after Wednesday's lunch, so many people made their last attempts to meet the folks at the booth.
technorati tags: IBM, CFO, Novell, WorkloadIQ, Disney, UPMC, ProtecTIER, TS7650G, deduplication, XIV, Kevin Muha, Norm Protsman, Bud Albers
Tags: cfo xiv protectier workloadiq upmc kevin+muha novell deduplication bud+albers ibm norm+protsman ts7650g disney
IBM DI Executive Summit - Day 3 Final Sessions
Wrapping up my coverage of the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure Executive Summit at the Fairmont Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, we had a final morning of main-tent sessions. Here is a quick recap of the sessions presented Thursday morning. This left the afternoon for people to catch their flights or hit the links.
Data Center Actions your CFO will Love
Steve Sams, IBM Vice President of Global Site and Facilities, presented simple actions that can yield significant operational and capital cost savings. The first focus area was to extend the life of your existing data center. Some 70 percent of data centers are 10-15 years old or worse, and therefore not designed for today's computational densities. IBM did this for its Lexington data center, making changes that resulted in 8x capability without increasing footprint.
The second focus area was to rationalize the infrastructure across the organization. The process of "rationalizing" involves determining the business value of specific IT components and deciding whether the business value justifies the existing cost and complexity. It allows you to prioritize which consolidations should be done first to reduce costs and optimize value. IBM's own transformation reduced 128 CIOs down to a single CIO, and from 155 host data centers scattered were consolidated down to seven, and 80 web hosting data centers down to five. This also included consolidating 31 intranets down to a single global intranet.
The third focus area was to design your new infrastructure to be more responsive to change. IBM offers four solutions to help those looking to build or upgrade their data center:
Scalable Modular Data Center - save up to 20 percent than traditional deployments with turn-key configurations from 500 to 2500 square feet that can be deployed in as little as 8-12 weeks to an existing floorspace.
Enterprise Modular Data Center - save 40 to 50 percent with 5000 square foot standardized design for larger data centers. This modular approach provides a "pay as you grow" approach that can be more responsive to future unforeseen needs.
Portable Modular Data Center - this is the PMDC shipping container that was sitting outside in the parking lot. This can be deployed anywhere in 12-14 weeks and is ideal for dealing with disaster recoveries or situations where traditional data center floor plans cannot be built fast enough.
High Density Zone - this can help increase capacity in an existing data center without a full site retrofit.
Here is a quick [video] that provides more insight.
Neil Jarvis, CIO of American Automobile Association (AAA) for Northern California, Nevada and Utah (NCNU), provided the customer testimonial. Last September, the [AAA NCNU selected IBM] to build them an energy-efficient green data center. Neil provided us an update now six months later, managing the needs of 4 million drivers.
Virtualization - Managing the World's Infrastructure
Helene Armitage, IBM General Manager of the newly formed IBM System Software product line, presented on virtualization and management. Virtualization is becoming much more than a way of meeting the demand for performance, capability, and flexibility in the data center. It helps create a smarter, more agile data center. Her presentation focused on four areas: consolidate resources, manage workloads, automate processes, and optimize the delivery of IT services.
Charlie Weston, Group Vice President of Information Technology at Winn Dixie, one of the largest food retailers in the United States, with over 500 stores and supermarkets. The grocery business is highly competitive with tight profit margins. Winn Dixie wanted to deploy business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) while managing IT equipment scattered across these 500 locations. They were able to consolidate 600 stand-alone servers into a single corporate data center. Using IBM AIX with PowerVM virtualization on BladeCenter, each JS22 blade server could manage 16 stores. These were mirrored to a nearby facility, as well as a remote disaster recovery center. They were also able to add new Linux application workloads to their existing System z9 EC mainframe. The result was to free up $5 million US dollars in capital that could be used to remodel their stores, and improve application performance 5-10 times. They were able to deploy a new customer portal on Linux for System z in days instead of months, and have reduced their disaster recovery time objective (RTO) against hurricanes from days to hours. Their next steps involves looking at desktop virtualization.
Redefining x86 Computing
Roland Hagan, IBM Vice President for IBM System x server platform, presented on how IBM is redefining the x86 computing experience. More than 50 percent of all servers are x86 based. These x86 servers are easy to acquire, enjoy a large application base, and can take advantage of readily available skilled workforce for administration. The problem is that 85 percent of x86 processing power remains idlea, energy costs are 8 times what they were 12 years ago, and management costs are now 70 percent of the IT budget.
IBM has the number one market share for scalable x86 servers. Roland covered the newly announced eX5 architecture that has been deployed in both rack-optimized models as well as IBM BladeCenter blade servers. These can offer 2x the memory capacity as competitive offerings, which is important for today's server virtualization, database and analytics workloads. This includes 40 and 80 DIMM models of blades, and 64 to 96 DIMM models of rack-optimized systems. IBM also announced eXFlash, internal Solid State Drives accessible at bus speeds.
The results can be significant. For example, just two IBM System x3850 4-socket, 8-core systems can replace 50 (yes, FIFTY) HP DL585 4-socket, 4-core Opteron rack servers, reducing costs 80 percent with a 3-month ROI payback period. Compared to IBM's previous X4 architecture, the eX5 provides 3.5 times better SAP performance, 3.8 times faster server virtualization performance, and 2.8 times faster database performance.
The CIO of Acxiom provided the customer testimonial. They were able to get a 35-to-1 consolidation switching over to IBM x86 servers, resulting in huge savings.
Top ROI projects to Get Started
Mark Shearer, IBM Vice President of Growth Solutions, and formerly my fourth-line manager as the Vice President of Marketing and Communications, presented a list of projects to help clients get started. There are over 500 client references that have successfully implement Smarter Planet projects. Mark's list were grouped into five categories:
Enabling Massive Scale
Increase Business Agility
Manage Risk, Compliance and Security
Organize Vast Amounts of Information
Turn Information into Insight
The attendees were all offered a free "Infrastructure Study" to evaluate their current data center environments. A team of IBM experts will come on-site, gather data, interview key personnel and make recommendations. Alternatively, these can be done at one of IBM's many briefing centers, such as the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona that I work at.
This wraps up the week for me. I have to pack the XIV back into the crate, and drive back to Tucson. IBM plans to host another Executive Summit in the September/October time frame on the East coast.
technorati tags: IBM, dyninfra, summit, Scottsdale, CFO, rationalization, PMDC, AAA, NCNU, CSAA, PowerVM, AIX, RTO, HP
Tags: rationalization pmdc hp scottsdale csaa powervm ibm aaa rto ncnu aix cfo dyninfra summit
Day2 IBM Executive Sessions
This week several IBM executives will present at the 28th Annual Data Center Conference here in Las Vegas. Here is a quick recap:
Steve Sams: Data Center Cost Saving Actions Your CFO Will Love
A startling 78 percent of today's data centers were built in the last century, before the "dot com" era and the adoption of high-density blade servers. IBM Vice President of Global Site and Facility Services, Steve Sams, presented actions that can help extend the life of existing data centers, help rationalize the infrastructure across the company, and design a new data center that is flexible and responsive to changing needs.
In one example, an 85,000 square foot datacenter in Lexington had reached 98 percent capacity based on power/cooling requirements. They estimated it would take $53 million US dollars to either upgrade the facility or build a new facility to meet projected growth. Instead, IBM was able to consolidate servers six-to-one, an 85 percent reduction. IBM also was able to make changes to the cooling equipment, redirect airflow and changed out the tiles, re-oriented the servers for more optimal placement, and implement measurement and management tools. The end result? The facility now has eight times the compute capability and enjoys 15 percent headroom for additonal growth. All this for only 1.5 million US dollar investment, instead of 53 million.
IBM builds hundreds of data centers for clients large and small. In addition to the "Portable Modular Data Center"(PMDC) shipping container on display at the Solution Showcase, IBM offers the "Scalable Modular Data Center", a turn-key system with a small 500 to 2500 square foot size for small customers. For larger deployments, the "Enterprise Modular Data Center" offers standardized deployments in 5000 square foot increments. IBM also offers "High Density Zones" which can be perfect way to avoid a full site retrofit.
Helene Armitage: IT-wide Virtualization
Helene is IBM General Manager of the newly formed IBM System Software division. A smarter planet will require more dynamic infrastructures, which is IBM's approach to helping clients through the virtualization journey. The virtualization of resources, workloads and business processes will require end-to-end management. To help, IBM offers IBM Systems Director.
Helene indicated that there are four stages of adoption:
Physical consolidation - VMware and Hyper-V are the latest examples of running many applications on fewer physical servers. Of course, IBM has been doing this for decades with mainframes, and has had virtualization on System i and System p POWER systems as well. A quick survey of the audience found that about 20 percent were doing server virtualization on non-x86 platforms (for example, PowerVM or System z mainframe z/VM)
Pools of resources - SAN Volume Controller is an example solution to manage storage as a pool of disparate storage resources. Supercomputers manage pools of servers.
Integrated Service Management - in the past, resources were managed by domain, resulting in islands of management. Now, with IBM Systems Director, you can manage AIX, IBM i, Linux and Windows servers, including non-IBM servers running Linux and Windows. Service management can provide monitoring, provisioning, service catalog, self-service, and business-aligned processes.
Cloud computing - Helene agreed that not everyone will get to this stage. Some will adopt cloud computing, whether public, private or some kind of hybrid, and others may be fine at stage 3.
For those clients that want assistance, IBM offers three levels of help:
Help me decide what is best for me
Help me implement what I have decided to do
Help me manage and run my operations
With IBM's compelling vision for the future, best of breed solutions, leadership in management software, extensive experience in services, and solid business industry knowledge, it makes sense to tap IBM to help with your next IT transformation.
technorati tags: IBM, GDC09, LSC28, Steve Sams, Helene Armitage, CFO, PMDC, SVC
Tags: gdc09 lsc28 pmdc ibm steve+sams cfo svc helene+armitage
Inside System Storage
Purchase IBM Storwize V5000E


The Nanticoke Indian Association's 32nd annual powwow will be held Sept. 12-13 near Millsboro. The 2009 powwow marks the 32nd year of the event.
Although an acquisition of NRG Energy Inc., owner of the Indian River Generating Station near Millsboro, has been reported in recent months as a possibility, Exelon Corporation will not be acquiring the company after all.
Despite out-of-order opposition, the Sussex County Board of Adjustment approved an application by Mountaire for a 'resource recovery' or rendering plant near Millsboro on Monday, May 4.
The Delaware State Police announced Thursday, March 26, that they are being inundated with telephone calls regarding a text message that has been circulating throughout Central and Southern Delaware and portions of Maryland.
The recent approval by Sussex County Council of a yard-waste compost facility means the new Sussex facility could be up and running by summer.
The Route 26 Mainline Improvements Project has long been a hot topic for locals living and working near the beach, and for visitors to the southern Delaware shore, as it is a main way to get to there.
The Delaware State Police are seeking the public's help in locating a 41-year-old Millville man wanted in connection to a Failure to Stop at the Command incident and home-improvement fraud.
BREAKING NEWS: Dense Fog Advisory until 8 p.m.
Delaware State Police detectives on Tuesday, Nov. 4, arrested a 14-year-old Millsboro girl following their investigation of an alleged assault that occurred on Saturday, Nov. 1, about 1:10 p.m.
What is a rain garden? How is it different than a pond? Who should plant one?
The Board of Directors for the Center for Inland Bays bypassed a resolution put forth by the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) on Tuesday, Sept. 23, and instead passed a different motion, with a vote of 3-2.
On Wednesday, Sept. 17, many area professionals and residents had their questions (and prayers) answered as state and local officials unveiled the new plans for the long-anticipated Indian River Inlet Bridge project.
Officials at the Sussex County Emergency Operations Center announced Wednesday that they were closely monitoring Tropical Storms Hanna, Ike and Josephine in the Atlantic Ocean.
Organizers of the Nanticoke Indian Association's annual powwow said this week that one of the best things about the powwow is the air of happiness and joy in renewing old friendships and seeing relatives for the first time since last year.
The Delaware State Police are investigating a serious crash that injured a 15-year-old boy early Sunday morning and are now looking for another passenger who was apparently injured.
The Millville Volunteer Fire Company will be holding a Texas Holdem Poker Tournament on Saturday, Aug. 23, at its firehouse on Route 26. Entry fee is $100, with two $25 re-buys available.


Just a month ago, Todd Farley had lunch at a Chinese restaurant and dinner at a Pizza Hut in Joplin, Mo.
He was there for a one-day emergency management class.
When he arrived Sunday night, he recognized little.
Farley, assistant fire chief for the Central Jackson County Fire Protection District, and about 25 other rescue team members from CJC were deployed to the tornado-ravaged city, where on Sunday night a massive EF5 tornado, the strongest to strike the country in at least 60 years, killed 125 people and wounded hundreds. CJC is one of several departments that belong to the Kansas City Regional Heavy Rescue Team.
Arriving at about 1 a.m. Monday, Farley and team members waited in staging areas before they were assigned specific areas. Fanning out, crew members began searching the rubble west of Wal-Mart and Home Depot. While they worked in relative darkness, Farley said they could still see enough to understand the utter destruction.
Farley and crews searched about 20 blocks in about two hours. Their search turned up nothing in the way of victims or survivors.
They returned back to the staging area and were assigned another area, this time off Main Street. Crews began searching about 70 blocks, and this time they were able to locate victims, many of whom were found in nursing homes and apartment buildings.
By this time, many volunteers had begun to show up.
By the time the crew was released and sent back to Blue Springs on Tuesday, they had worked about 25 hours with little to no sleep.
That CJC and other local departments were able to assist was due mostly to government funding. Through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, local agencies like CJC, since 2003, have received money to help fund rescue efforts. Without such funding, Farley said CJC would not have been able to travel to Joplin and offer help.
CJC was notified on May 19 that for the first time since 2003, the Kansas City urban area will not receive the Urban Areas Security Initiative grant funding. In Kansas City, the area had received $71.4 million since 2003.
For 2011, the homeland security funding was reduced by $780 million to $2.1 billion, according to information provided by Farley. The number of urban areas included in the UASI program was reduced from 65 to 31, Kansas City being eliminated altogether.
Hannes Zacharias, who leads the Regional Homeland Security Coordinating Committee and who is the county manager for Johnson County, expressed his disappointment in the homeland security's decision, specifically because the Midwest area could be the target of terrorist attacks.


Today I arrive at the computer sore and chilly, so we're all in for a treat as I aim for today's post to remain simple. And luckily, it'll also be sweet—or at the very least, it holds a promise of sweet.
For today, we talk strawberries.
Specifically, we talk planting of bare-root strawberries. We also talk potatoes. We talk...lots of squatting. And biceps put to work. Some arms were lashed to a hoe for so long that certain McFarmers had no choice but to take a nap. Egads.
Aunt Susan plants out our Eclair varietal of strawberries. We're pretty sure they're cream-filled.
Strawberries are a beautiful thing. If you've never had them out of your own garden, pot or neighbor's yard, I say stop whatever you're doing and run. Run into the forest and search out the taste of a wild, fresh berry.
They are soft, vibrant rubies that make you believe in everything juicy and romantic.
But do this running-to-the-forest thing in, like, May or June. Don't go now, or you'll be sad and lonely for a long-time, and you'll probably run into some trespassing charges if you do it around these parts.
All I truly know is that when a friend of ours who is an ag-extension agent asked back in October if we'd like to be part of a strawberry-growing study, we said sure without hesitation. We put in our order for 200 free and lovely and free plants, and sat back for a delivery in December.
So we did. 200 strawberries to be planted into two 100 foot beds.
And then our friend came to the farm. Our friend came to the farm with 600 strawberry plants.
You can see the yellow flags demarcating the different varieties of strawberries. Six in all, we're excited to see what happens!
Hooray for aunts and uncles! Hooray for garden scooters!
And so it was that in barely over a day we all four planted 800 berry plants on plots designed for 200. Our agent pal said it wouldn't hurt 'em to be squeezed in, so squeeze we did.
We've never grown strawberries commercially before, so it should be an adventure, chock-full of trial and error. Probably lots of error.
But if we succeed, I wonder if there'll be anyone, anywhere, willing to help us harvest those sweet, soft rubies?
Just don't take my earlier advice too seriously and camp out like a wildling in our woods, twitching to get at those ripe berries. The chance at your first fresh strawberry might lose luster when partnered with bunking night after night with all those coyotes.
That would be a good place to end, I know. But I really have to return to something; my dear one, my muscle, my machine-like McFarmer.
It just wouldn't do our customers, friends and family justice if they didn't know--photographically, at least--of the manic, awe-inspiring work Alex did to make our potato trenches.
Around here, folks call our soil "gumbo clay." This isn't the catalog-quality, chocolate-cakey soil you see smirking back from tractor commercials or seed magazines. It is hard. It is sticky.
It is very difficult to dig a trench in.
But he did it, and we got our potatoes in on-time (well, nearly on time) for our Spring planting. They were also finished just in-time for us to only spend half an hour in freezing rain before high-tailing it home.
And boy, they were some good-looking trenches.
So when we bring bushels of creamy new potatoes to market in a few months, I want everyone to know now: a very sweaty and noodle-armed McFarmer is a part of every one of those spuds.


Because people have commented on it, I felt the need to announce a change to the BJS homepage.
The "Flashback" feature was originally designed to bring some of our "oldie but goodie" posts to your attention periodically. Unfortunately for a year or so it's been broken — one of the WordPress upgrades broke it; I didn't notice it immediately, and by the time I noticed it it was too late to try to figure out which update broke it.
Anyway, I finally got fed up with it and researched the problem and am pleased to announce that it's now fixed!
You will notice the 6th box down on the homepage has the Flashback graphic on the left side of it. Each time the homepage is replotted, 10 random posts are pulled from the "Flashback" category and cycle through that box. You can use the left/right buttons to go to a post you want if you see one you want to read more of.
You can also review all of our Flashback posts by clicking here or on the Flashback graphic to the left of the slider.
We would welcome recommendations for other posts that should be placed in this category .. since it has been non-functional for so long we haven't even attempted to classify any new posts, and we didn't do a complete survey of all our posts when we initially came up with the idea at our last redesign of the website. I'm sure we have many posts written since we first created this blog in June of 2008 that would welcome a reread. Of course, I'm sure there are some posts that we'd all rather forget about, but that the life of a blog.
Thanks for your attention, and a very blessed Reformation celebration to you!
P.s. sorry to all those who "complained" about it not working .. yes, I read your comments; I just couldn't fit the time in to dig into the code to figure out what went wrong.
What to do in the congregation concerning the LCMS?
Doctrine means nothing when Practice can mean anything.
With that flashback post showing up, do you have a lot of people trying to post replies to years old posts? Or, does the thread close to future comments after a period of time?


This is an Introduction to the Holy Koran of the Moorish Holy Temple of Science (Moorish Science Temple of America).
I made this for those who have heard about Prophet Noble Drew Ali, or The Holy Koran of the Moorish Holy Temple of Science (Holy Koran Circle 7), and are interested, but are a bit hesitant.
I had that same hesitation. I too was unsure if this was another religious group more focused on dogmatic ways than Truth.
But man knows not by being told. Read the information for yourself.
You hold the keys to your freedom. The question is, will you open the door?
The Loving G.S. and Mastermind Taj Tarik Bey bringing keys to all, but specifically for the black nation.
Don't know? No time like the present. Class is Allways in session.


text:
Cheney's Next War
The Bush administration has still more work to do in screwing up the Middle East and fomenting terrorism and Jihadism. Noah Schachtman notes the following developments in Anbar:
Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi'ite propaganda.
Arrests and killings of Shi'ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush's bellicose rhetoric towards Shi'a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs.
It makes sense if we are girding for a war with Iran. Having dismembered Iraq, the Bushies may now have an interest in polarizing it, as they have polarized the US. Rather than trying to stop a sectarian regional war, Cheney may be simply deciding to join it. The goal is to restrain Iran's growing clout. Eric Martin sees the danger. Rob Farley fears the worst. Hilzoy adds:
One interpretation that [Martin] doesn't consider is that we're supporting the militias in Anbar not just for the short term political benefits (having some progress for General Petraeus to report, etc.), but also to placate our various Sunni allies, who would presumably not be happy if we simply left the Iraqi Sunnis to the tender mercies of their adversaries. This would be short-sighted and strategically incoherent -- we are, after all, also trying to strengthen the Maliki government, which is to say the future enemy of the Sunnis we are apparently not just training but inciting to hatred. But I don't see that that's any reason to think that it's not exactly what the Bush administration is doing.
It's back to the 1980s. Instead of backing Saddam against Iran, we're now in danger of backing the Iraqi Sunnis, in league with Egypt and Saudi Arabia ... against Iran The border of the conflict has simply moved from the Iraq-Iran border to the middle of Iraq. And this time, we have 160,000 soldiers trapped in the middle. Yay! Just because it is hard to imagine how the situation in Iraq could get worse doesn't mean that Cheney isn't figuring out ways to do it. He's got more than a year to foment more chaos and bloodshed and sectarian hatred and anti-American hatred. Give him time.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


For GPS use 3956 State Highway 2 as our street address 12180 as zip.
Some GPS systems use 3956 New York Route 2.
Take 787 North to Exit 9 (New York RT 7). Follow 7 East (Hoosick Street) quickly out of Troy into Brunswick. Continue past all Brunswick's Plazas and car dealers. Just past Brunswick Harley Davidson take the Route 278 exit. 278 is only a mile long. At the traffic light at the end take a left onto Highway 2, immediately on your left is the Brunswick Central School Campus (Tamarac). Tipperary is the first building past the school on the same side. Accross the street from the Brunswick Soccer Complex. It takes 15 to 20 minutes.
Take Route 2 west from Williamstown over the mountain. When you get to the bottom (the first real flats) Tipperary is on the right. We are way closer than you think. It takes 25 minutes or less from Williamstown. If you get to the first traffic light in New York you went a block too far.
Did You Know: That Highway 2 is the very first Highway the US Gov't designated as a Scenic Highway!
Take 90 (the Berkshire Spur) to exit B1, Then take 90W toward Albany the 787 North to Route 7 East to the Route 278 exit. 278 is one mile long. At the light take a left onto Highway 2, immediately on your left is the Brunswick Central school. Tipperary is the first building past the school on the same side. It takes about 40 minutes.
If your familiar with the Southern Berkshire, Eastern Columbia and Southern Rensselaer Counties area just take Rt. 66 to Rt. 351. Take a right onto Rt. 351, it pretty much ends in our parking lot!
Take Route 7 West into Brunswick. Take a left at the traffic light at Route 278. Take 278 to the end (one mile) and take a left on Route 2. Tipperary is just one block, the first building past the school on the same side. It takes about 30 minutes.
Take 90 East to 87 N to 7E to 278 then left on Route 2. Tipperary is the first building past the school on the left. It takes about 90 minutes from Utica.
Did You Know: That Highway 2 is also known as The Mohawk Trail. One of Americas most traveled fall foliage destinations. It is the road the folks in Vermont take to see the best views while the tourists from Jersey invade their state.
Take 87N to Exit 23, Take I787 North t 8 minutes to Exit 9 which is New York Route 7 East 5 miles to Route 278, 1 mile to light at end, then left on Route 2. Immediately on left is the Brunswick Central School Campus. Tipperary is the first building past school on left, lawns adjoin each other. It takes approximately 60 minutes from Kingston.
Did You Know: That Tipperary is the only Irish Shop for 100 miles with it's own parking lot!
Same directions as Downstate except take 87 South. From Clifton Park You can be safely parked in the Tipperary lot and happily shopping in less than 20 minutes.
If for some reason you can not figure out how to find Tipperary from any of these directions, call (518)-279-TARA or 1-800-255-TARA and we will guide you in.


After a good night's sleep and a leisurely breakfast at Uhuru Hostel in Moshi, we exchanged our dollars for TZ shillings ($1 =1490 Tanzania shillings) and were on our way to Same (pronounced "sa-may") by early afternoon.
Our first visit was with Bishop Mjema, the newly-elected Bishop of the Pare Diocese in Same. We had an excellent conversation with the Bishop and Mr. Tumaini Chambua regarding our partnership with Mramba Parish, a more in-depthconversation than we have had before with diocese staff. It is very clear that education of the children and youth of the Pare Diocese is of great importance to the bishop. The Diocese is very interested in how the Children's Club established in Mramba for the Most Vulnerable Children is progressing. This Children's Club is looked upon as a pilot program for all other parishes wishing to establish something similar. The bishop is also interested in setting up a scholarship program for vulnerable children to go to secondary school and in building or repairing a girl's school in Pare.
Later, as we relaxed at the Elephant Hotel, the coach of a local children's soccer team came by to meet Jim Hammer and collect the 35 soccer shirts and 11 soccer balls Jim had brought for the local teams. It was quite a sight to see the coach climb onto his bicycle and head down the driveway with 35 shirts and 11 balls in a bag on his back. His smile said it all!
On Friday, we loaded up our treasures and headed up the mountain to Mramba Parish to meet the new Pastor, Justin Mchome, and our host families. It is exciting to be so warmly welcomed by old and new friends. Some of us stayed with the host families we met during our first trip in 2008, so it truly was like coming home. The hospitality we experience at Mramba is beyond compare, and once you have made the journey, you will understand what we mean.
Saturday was devoted to the official opening of the Most Vulnerable Children's Club which is held at Vuje Primary School just a short walk down the mountain from the church. There we met 50 beautiful faces singing welcome songs in English. The children had written a poem about their experiences, and also a drama about a girl who received the opportunity to attend the Children's Club. The drama reflected the lives of each one of the children there, and portrayed a girl praying for someone to help her so that she could attend school. The prayer was answered through the Children's Club. The program teaches children life skills, supplementing what they learn in school (if they attend school), provides two nutritious meals and a snack, and also helps the children help their families. The children have planted a 12' x 20' garden with trench irrigation and were already growing beans! The food will be used on Saturdays, and the extra will be sent home with the children. Pastor Rachel officially opened the Most Vulnerable Children's Club after a festive lunch, and presented the newly-trained teachers with graduation certificates…It was an amazing day! St. John's will provide financial support for the Children's Club (in partnership with Empower Tanzania, Inc.) when other start-up funding comes to an end this summer.
Monday we spent visiting Mgombo sub-parish and briefly helped move stones for the construction of a retaining wall. St. John's has contributed funds for the expansion of the church building at Mgambo, and new walls have been built and they are preparing to put on the new roof. We also visited some secondary schools and Dindimo Teachers Training College that afternoon, and ended the day with a brief visit to Gonja Hospital. We delivered 25 baby quilts (made by a member of St. John's) and toured the hospital.
Our time in Mramba came to an end with a farewell meal and thank-you speeches on Tuesday. We returned to Same that afternoon. Five of the members of our group then spent a few days with coffee farmers on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, before we were reunited for visits to two other projects – the Usangi Leadership Institute and a safe motherhood project in a remote Masai village.
Our last day was spent at Ngorongoro Crater, which was green and full of animals - zebras, giraffes, elephants, lions and even a couple of cheetahs! On the evening of March 1, we boarded the plane for our long journey home, arriving safely the next evening.
Our travelers will be presenting photos and more information on this most recent visit to Mramba Parish in the weeks ahead. Please feel free to ask questions and, consider joining the next group to visit Mramba in 2012!


Perennial herb, 20-50 cm tall, growing from corms, usually solitary but sometimes in clumps. Leaf single, linear, 9-15 mm wide, channelled below, shorter than the stem at flowering time, much longer later. Stem unbranched. Flowers blue-purple with yellow nectar guides. Outer tepals lanceolate, 4-6.5 cm long, spreading to slightly reflexed. Inner tepals lanceolate, 3.5-4.5 cm long, erect.
Habitat: Occurring in grassland, vleis and marshy places.
Worldwide distribution: Angola, Nigeria, Cameroun, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Baumann, G. (2005). Photographic Guide to Wildflowers of Malawi Wildlife and Environmental Society of Malawi Pages 208 - 209. (Includes a picture).
Burrows, J.E. & Willis, C.K. (eds) (2005). Plants of the Nyika Plateau Southern African Botanical Diversity Network Report No. 31 SABONET, Pretoria Page 313.
Goldblatt, P. (1993). Iridaceae Flora Zambesiaca 12(4) Page 24. (Includes a picture).
Shone, D.K. & Drummond, R.B. (1965). Poisonous Plants of Rhodesia Ministry of Agriculture, Rhodesia Pages 26 - 27. (Includes a picture).
Hyde, M.A., Wursten, B.T., Ballings, P. & Coates Palgrave, M. (2019). Flora of Zimbabwe: Species information: Moraea schimperi.


Today we're having a look at a tablet that's very familiar, yet a whole new concept in Acer's brand of tablet releases. Here with the Acer Iconia A-830-1633, you're getting an Android tablet that's working with a 7.9-inch display with a moderate resolution, brightness, and a processor under the hood that should be able to bring you the best in news-reading apps and video. So what's the holdup?
With the Acer Iconia A1-830 you're working with a display that's just 1024 x 768 pixels sharp. That means you're not on the high end, but you're not working with a display that's unbearably pixelated. If you've only ever used a laptop before – one from several years ago, for example, you'll likely find this tablet to be more than sharp enough.
This machine works with a 7.9-inch display with the same amount of pixels across it as the non-retina iPad mini. The iPad mini also works with a 7.9-inch display, making these two units quite similar when it comes to screen sharpness. Both devices also have LED backlighting, making the experience similar if you're working with the exact same content — but unless you're just the web-browsing type, you've got completely different experiences as it were.
This device works with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and is powered by an Intel Atom dual-core processor (Z2560). We've seen this machine roll with a number of benchmarks in which it did OK, and every app we've seen it run, it's run with great ease.
Note above that benchmark scores are relative – make sure you have a peek at our hands-on video below for a show of real-life functionality. This device is swift and functional in everyday tests without a doubt.
Inside you'll find 16GB of internal storage and you've got a microSD card slot for storage expansion, and this device has 1GB of RAM to keep your processor humming. There's a 5-megapixel back-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and you've got what Acer calls "dual speakers".
In practice all this means is that you've got two speaker grilles on the back of this device, both of which are in generally the same area – they don't compare to, for example, the NVIDIA Tegra NOTE 7 – not by a long shot.
This tablet is 8.43″ (L), 5.04″ (W), 2.52″ (H) in size and weighs in at a tiny .83 lbs. | 375g (system unit only). You'll also have a G-Sensor & Gyroscope as well as GPS with GLONASS.
This device comes with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean with a build that's Acer's own. Most of the user interface looks very much like Google built, while a number of apps have been added by Acer. Below you'll see the full collection right out of the box.
WildTangent Games brings on a set of games Acer knows will work well, while e-reading functionality is provided by Zinio and Amazon Kindle Play Books. Google presents all the standard fare: Play Store, Play Music, Play Movies, and Google Maps as well as YouTube, while you'll also be able to play your media locally with Acer's own Music app. This tablet also connects with your other Acer devices with the Acer Cloud app.
This device is also a standard Google Android device, meaning you'll be able to download and work with most any Android app from the Google Play app store. This is also true of your Google account, bringing you every Android app you've ever purchased in the past to this tablet as well, free of charge.
Most functions on this device are still handled by Google, regardless of Acer's make. It's more of Acer's show in the hardware department, really, while Acer leaves Google and Amazon to handle the software show (for the most part.) In the end, the right people are left up to the right tasks.
The Acer Iconia A1-830 works with a 5-megapixel camera at its back with no flash. It's simple, and it's not really meant to compete with your high-end cameras, or indeed even your smartphone. Instead it's made for the most basic photos and video.
Here you'll see a number of examples of video and photos from the Acer Iconia A1-830 taken in a number of environments. This device presents a camera that's just good enough, with a camera up front that's good for video chat, and not much else.
While this device isn't going to last more than a couple full-length movies before you need a charge, standby time is astounding. We've had the Acer Iconia A1-830 on standby mode for 10 days at a time – really top-notch.
If you're looking for a device to play solitaire or Angry Birds on when you fly from one end of the country to the other, this is certainly it. Working with the entire Google back-catalog of Android apps and 4000 mAh battery under the hood – paired with a relatively low-needs display – you'll be set for the full trip.
Acer has really come out swinging with this device. Not unlike what Motorola did with the Moto G, here Acer creates a tablet that looks great and works great at its price point. At $180 USD, this device is ready to take on the rest of the market at that point without a doubt.
NOTE: Above you're also seeing a rather fabulous folding cover from Acer official as well. We recommend buying one if you get the other, for sure.
While the cheapest iPad mini costs $299 USD (that's non-retina) and the Google Nexus 7 will cost you a cool $229 USD, Acer's device is sitting at the perfect place for new users. The only real competition we see at this point for this device is the NVIDIA Tegra NOTE 7, working with a $199.99 price point and a slightly smaller display.
If you want a new tablet with Android and a set of specifications that are more than worth their price and you're not about direct spec-for-spec comparisons, the Acer Iconia A1-830-1633 is your winner. Have a peek at the device above and let us know what you think.


DELILAH'S LISTENING TO . . .
Summer's here, school's out, suntans are in, and Delilah has your Gen Z summertime playlist—oh, and the older folks will like it, too.
The Shacks "Fly Fishing" is a candy-sweet, quintessentially dreamy teen summer track that will give any generation the nostalgic feels for those perfectly lazy summer days where life's greatest dilemma was whether it was beach day or a pool day.


text:
Why It's So Hard to Tax Billionaires
Posted By Christopher Orlet On November 17, 2021 @ 1:56 am In articles 2015,Leading Article | Comments Disabled
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A recent NPR story attempted to explain why it is so hard to tax billionaires. The expert NPR interviewed for the story ticked off the usual ways the 1 percent avoids paying its fair share of taxes:
Billionaires have the best accountants who know all the loopholes. Their wealth isn't in income, but in assets. They often move to states (like Texas) that don't have a state income tax, and move their money to offshore tax havens. They live off tax free loans. Legislation to tax billionaires goes nowhere because wealthy coal barons like Democratic Senator Joe Manchin don't believe in taxing the "job creators," a notion that has been debunked again and again. (Basically a thriving middle class creates jobs, while billionaires invest their profits in real estate.)
What NPR didn't say, and what the corporate and corporate-sponsored media never say, is that it is hard to tax billionaires because billionaires rule America and they don't want to be taxed.
"We live in a nation owned and controlled by a small number of multi-billionaires," says U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Our political system is now "an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery," says former President Jimmy Carter.
Americans like to think they live in a democracy, but a peek behind the curtain shows the real power lies not with the people, but the super rich. This fact seems obvious, but in the corporate media and corporate-sponsored media, this basic truth is still considered a radical notion fit only for magazines like, well, this one.
Thomas Picketty and other left-leaning thinkers have long maintained that the billionaire ruling class is hostile toward democracy because true democracy means sharing power with the masses. While a few prominent billionaires (Bill Gates, George Soros, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg) like to portray themselves as pro-democracy and socially responsible, the overwhelming majority are anti-democratic and ultra-conservative, especially on economic issues. As Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew Lacombe wrote recently in The Guardian, "Most of the wealthiest US billionaires – who are much less visible and less reported on – more closely resemble Charles Koch…Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes – which apply only to the wealthiest Americans."
These conservative billionaires don't talk publicly about their politics because the self-interested economic policies they work to implement are highly unpopular with American people. Take the wealth tax, a recent poll found that two-thirds of voters approve of it. You would think then that a wealth tax would be a slam dunk.
Not so much.
This billionaire class runs the country stealthily (through dark money groups, campaign contributions, owning the media, etc.), because doing so outright would make Americans wake up to the fact that their democracy has been hijacked by oligarchs.
Instead we find shadowy billionaire-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity spending millions to get their hand-picked candidates into elected office, candidates who have agreed to promote the billionaires' agenda—like no wealth tax.
Recently, however, this reluctance to speak out has begun to fade. More and more, today's super rich don't even try to hide their disdain for paying their fair share. Elon Musk recently whined that U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden's call for higher taxes on billionaires was targeting people like himself. "Eventually, they run out of other people's money and then they come for you." New York supermarket magnate John Casimatidids said politicians who are peddling a wealth tax—Wyden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren— "are just nuts. They're trying to change our way of life, and it's not going to happen. If they don't like the United States the way it is, I'm buying them a one-way ticket to Venezuela."
Hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman recently complained that paying his fair share of taxes would be unfair. "The idea of vilifying wealthy people is so bogus," he said.
Catsimatidis and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus penned a recent piece in the Wall Street Journaltitled, naturally, "Making Money is a Patriotic Act." "[W]e have nothing to apologize for, and we don't think the government should have more of our profits," they wrote.
That more and more billionaires are speaking out publicly shows how little concerned today's real ruling class is about public opinion.
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/17/why-its-so-hard-to-tax-billionaires/


This app is super fun but I agree with other reviews that a select group of players run the app. Packs and cards are gone before I'm even notified that there are new releases . The trade feed can be quite a joke . I rarely find fair traders. I know money rules all but I'd love a chance at some true desirable cards. The nightly and weekly contests are fun but I've never placed below 300 because of certain upper echelon players who collude and collect the higher scoring cards before others even have a chance .
This is my favorite game to play Topps did a nice job!!!
Too expensive and constantly crashing. Every time I open a free pack I have to force quit the app.
Whatever has been done to the latest version of this and all Topps Apps is garbage. Cannot navigate through the app, open packs or offer trades without constant crashing. Apparently the developers do not use their own apps.
When this app began it was fun to save coins to get the card you wanted. Now it's just a cash grab. Every single new release requires this new form of payment called "diamonds" which cost real $. The new releases usually cost 1,500 diamonds for guaranteed stuff or better odds, which will cost you $20. I have given up on this app as I no longer am interested. It was fun being able to get things for free after a while, but now you need to put a ton of money into DIGITAL cards. This app is kept alive by the small amount of players who flow 100s of dollars for digital cards, I can't keep up with that.
I thought I was going to be able to play games but apparently not, that was the only reason. Got this game because I wanted to play a game.
Great App! Missing a Key Feature!
Great App! However, I would rate 5 ⭐ if it had the Prize Wheel Feature that Bunt and Huddle have!


The dream of a United Europe has shattered in France, the country where it was born.
The French have turned a referendum on the European constitution into a protest against unemployment, globalization, market liberalization, and Turkey joining the European Union.
It is also a massive repudiation of French President Jacques Chirac.
"We all have a good reason to vote no," said the far right Eurosceptic Philippe de Villiers when asked to explain why French Trotskyists, anarchists, Communists and members of the racist National Front all marked the same box on their referendum ballot. They were joined by a majority of Greens and Socialists.
With all of the votes counted last Sunday, Dominique de Villepin, France's interior minister put the no vote at 54.87 percent. The turnout was around 70 percent.
"Out of nationalism, xenophobia, dogmatism or nostalgia, they wanted to get rid of this Europe that … imposes change," suggested Jean-Marie Colombani in a Le Monde editorial (May 30).
Fifty-four years ago, France was a founding member of the six-country precursor to the current European Union.
Today, France is turning its back on the Union in the hour of its greatest triumph — the reunification of all Europe, east and west. French fears of losing jobs to Eastern Europe contributed to their decision.
Pollsters said that voters fear the constitution would not only worsen unemployment in France — already over 10 percent — but endanger its social safety net as well. Workers and farmers voted overwhelmingly against it. Younger people mostly said no.
In an interview with Les Echos (May 26), D'Estaing complained that European leaders did not help the document with their overall attitudes to Europe. "When we meet difficulties they often blame Europe. So how can we be surprised then that the French have a bad idea of Europe?" he said.
The document that would unite 25 countries under one flag contains 448 articles so riddled with ambiguity that France and Britain are rejecting it for opposite reasons.
Chirac sees the constitution as "largely inspired by France and French values," and a defense against a purely economic, free-market version of Europe.
But many French have opposed it for being "ultraliberal" in the economic sense and an invitation to savage "Anglo-Saxon" or Thatcherite competition. British Eurosceptics, by contrast, believe the exact opposite: That it does not do nearly enough to liberalize markets or increase competition.
The democratic shortcomings of the proposed constitution begin with the preamble. While the United States Constitution uses the phrase "We the People of the United States," the European constitution invokes" His Majesty, the king of the Belgians." The king and other European heads of state have "agreed on the following dispositions," etc.
"Unity [in Europe] cannot be imposed in vacuo by the treaty-making of some superannuated French aristocrat," scoffed Boris Johnson, M.P. for Henley-on-Thames and editor of the Spectator.
At times during the debate between the yes and no camps, the French seemed to be turning back the clock, dusting off the Gaullist, statist and Communist slogans of previous decades. Anti-globalization movements such as Attac successfully revived the anti-capitalist arguments rejected by François Mitterrand in 1983.
Hence the objections by left-wing no campaigners to the constitution's articles on "free and fair competition" and "free movement of goods, people and capital" — the very basis on which the European Union has been built for the past 47 years.
"No one has dared tell the French left that we live in a world of market forces," commented Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green co-leader in the European Parliament.
Libération editor Serge July, like most of the mainstream French press, was shocked by the seeming convergence of far left and extreme right. "It was partly a referendum on enlargement, in which foreigners, from the ... Turk to the unfortunate Polish plumber, were asked to stay at home. This type of xenophobia is common currency for Jean-Marie le Pen, but it was unthinkable that the left also made it part of their campaign territory ... " (May 30).
The failure of the referendum calls into question the French-German partnership at the heart of the European Union. Europe's two biggest economies are now underperforming and their political leaders are on the defensive.
"Bush is the one who would rejoice at the failure of the European constitution, for it would allow Europe to develop a common foreign and security policy with enough soft power to bolster opposition to the neoconservative view of global order, also within the United States," wrote the German philosopher Juergen Habermas (Nouvel Observateur, May 7, 2005).
The victory of the no camp in France's bitter referendum campaign is a body blow to France's mainstream political parties, the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (U.M.P.) and the opposition Socialist Party (P.S.). Leaders of both parties campaigned for the new constitution.
France's center-left Socialist party, the party of Mitterrand and the Maastricht treaty, is in disarray. It is not clear who, if anyone, can repair the fissures in its ranks. Certainly not party secretary Francois Hollande, whose appeal for a yes vote was rejected by 60 percent of the party's membership. Nor the anti-European Laurent Fabius, the former Socialist prime minister who made a comeback campaigning against the constitution.
The main beneficiaries are leaders of the far right and far left who will try to take advantage of the political vacuum in the middle to advance their strategies.
"It is no exaggeration to say that the future direction of an European Union of 25 countries and 455 million people has suffered grievous collateral damage in the battle for the soul of an agonized and unhappy France," commented Britain's Guardian (May 31).


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EBuild supports a range of command-line switches you can use to control the build, and also defines a number of build settings that make sense to override from the command-line, as well.
In general, the EBuild command-line expects a single file name parameter (which can be a .sln or .elements project file), as well as zero or more switches (which always start with --. Running EBuild without a file name parameter, or passing the --help switch, will show a summary of all available commands, and exit with a positive exit code.
EBuild can run one of three actions on the project (or solution), determined by one of the following three command-line switches being passed.
If none of the three switches is passed, --build is implied.
EBuild will exit with a 0 exit code if it successfully performed the action, or with a positive code if any errors or problems occurred.
Each switch can be followed by a semicolon-separated list of one or more project IDs (GUID) or project names (as specified in the project's <Name> setting or, when not set, the project's filename without extension.
When specifying --projects, EBuild will process the project or projects listed, as well as any other projects that the listed projects depend on.
When specifying --skip-projects, EBuild will process all projects in the solution, except those listed. If other projects depend on one or more listed projects, EBuild will try and resolve this dependency based on output from previous builds, but it will not, under any circumstances build the listed projects.
Each switch can be followed by a semicolon-separated list of target names.
When specifying --targets, only targets matching one of the names will be built. For projects with no target matching the name, no action will occur.
When specifying --skip-targets, only targets not matching any of the names will be built. For projects with no target matching the name, no action will occur.
By default, projects generate their final output to the folder specified by the <OutputFolder> or <OutputPath> project setting, which can be absolute, or relative to the project (and, if not specified, defaults to ./Bin/<Configuration>).
You can override this target folder with the --output-folder switch, which takes a path that can be absolute or relative to the current working directory (!!).
Optionally, you can also have the output folder appended by either the target name, and/or the name of the Mode or SubMode. This applies regardless of whether the base output folder was overridden from the command-line with the previously discussed switch, or is taken from the project.
Note that --output-folder-uses-submode-name or rather, the OutputPathUsesSubModes setting that this switch affects, already defaults to True for Cocoa and for Island projects.
Finally, you can also override the folder where EBuild will place and look for intermediate files and cache files generated as part of the build, using the --intermediatebasefolder switch.
You can enable Parallel Builds in order to build multi-project or multi-target solutions more quickly on multi-code systems, with the --parallel switch.
You can use the --setting switch to override any setting used by the build chain, including all the known and documented project settings normally stored inside the project. This includes settings that go into the compiler, as well as those handled by other parts of the build chain.
The --setting switch can of course be repeated as many times as needed, to override multiple settings. If the same setting name is provided more than once, the last occurence "wins".
Most settings that are core to the project will be set in the project file, and make very little sense to override from the command-line. For example, little good will come out of changing the Mode of a project for a build.
--setting:AdditionalReferencePaths=<list of folders> – a semicolon-separated list of additional folders where to look for references. This can be helpful e.g. if you run EBuild multiple times on different solutions, and want to to see files generated by earlier runs.
--setting:TreatWarningsAsErrors=True/False – make the build fail, if any non-fatal warnings are encountered.
--setting:CrossBox=<Name of your CrossBox Server> – pass a different CrossBox 2 Server to be used for the build of Cocoa projects.
--setting:Device=True/False – toggle whether to build an iOS, tvOS or watchOS project for device, or not (default is True).
--setting:Simulator=True/False – toggle whether to build an iOS, tvOS or watchOS project for Simulator, or not (default is True).
Note that you can pass both --setting:Device=True and --setting:Simulator=True to have both versions built in one go.
--setting:ToffeeSDKFolder=<folder> – pass an optional path to the Cocoa base SDK files, to use instead of the default.
--setting:IslandSDKFolder=<folder> – pass an optional path to the Island base SDK files, to use instead of the default.
--setting:Architecture=<list of architectures> – – a semicolon-separated list of architectures to build. You can also pass All, to build all architectures known for the platform and be future-proof.
--verbosity:Silent/Quiet/Normal/Verbose/Debug – control how chatty EBuild is as it does its work. Normal is the default, and should be fine in most scenarios. Verbose or Debug will enable additional levels of detail (but also clutter).
--statistics – emit statictics about which build phases took the longest times, at the end of the build.
--debug-caching – emit additional debug logging for cache resolving issues.
--debug-smart-copy – emit additional debug logging for incremental/smart copy.
--logger:Console/Fire – choose the layout of the console output. Console is the default and meant for human-readability; Fire adds additional machine-parsable output and is what is used by the Fire and Water IDEs to parse the output.
--xml:<filename> – emit an XML file with error messages, fix-its and other details about the build.
--help – emit a list of all available switches.
--wait – wait for a press of the Enter key after the build finishes.


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Home | Blog | Medicare Beneficiaries Who Get Coronavirus May Face a Price Shock
Medicare Beneficiaries Who Get Coronavirus May Face a Price Shock
Originally Published on CNBC.com
Sarah O'Brien
These may be extra scary times for Medicare beneficiaries.
For the 62 million people enrolled — most of whom are age 65 or older, or younger with disabilities — the coronavirus generally poses a greater health risk. And while Congress and regulators have eliminated out-of-pocket outlays for testing — and taken other steps to improve access to care — treating the virus will likely emerge as the bigger cost concern.
"My sense is people are in a state of anxiety and shock," said Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for The Senior Citizens League. "This whole thing has moved so swiftly that the cost of treatment hasn't sunken in yet."
While some Medicare beneficiaries have additional insurance that covers the program's out-of-pocket costs — i.e., copays and deductibles — others pay more than their peers for hospital stays and various medical services.
Although most people recover from the coronavirus without requiring significant medicare care, here are costs that could come with Medicare coverage if treatment is needed.
Basic Medicare costs
About 37.5 million beneficiaries stick with basic, or original, Medicare. Many of them have additional coverage — e.g., Medicaid, an employer plan or a supplemental policy (Medigap).
Basic Medicare, which has no cap on out-of-pocket spending, consists of Part A (hospital coverage) and Part B (outpatient care).
If you don't have additional coverage beyond basic Medicare — 6.1 million beneficiaries did not, at last count — you'd pay a $1,408 Part A deductible for a hospital stay.
That would cover the first 60 days per benefit period. Beyond that, daily copays of $352 apply up to the 90th day. Anything above dips from "lifetime reserve" days at a rate of $704 daily. For patients moved to a skilled nursing facility, there is no copay for the first 20 days; it's $176 after that.
Medical services like doctor's visits are delivered through Part B. It has a $198 deductible and beneficiaries typically pay 20% of covered services.
If you have a Medigap policy, many of these costs would be covered, either partially or fully. However, Medigap policies have their own rules for enrolling, which can limit who has access to them. And, they can cost several hundred dollars a month.
Meanwhile, Medicare Part D (prescription drug coverage) also has no cap on out-of-pocket spending. The cost of medicine depends on the specifics of coverage. If there's a deductible with your plan, it can be up to $435.
It's worth noting that the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package signed into law on Friday requires Part D plans with quantity limits to allow 90-day supplies for medications.
"Having to go pick up prescriptions a lot could be a barrier to care," said Lindsey Copeland, federal policy director for the Medicare Rights Center. "We don't want [beneficiaries] to go out and about if they don't have to."
About 24 million Medicare beneficiaries get Parts A and B delivered through an Advantage Plan, which also usually includes prescription drug coverage.
These plans may or may not have a monthly premium on top of what beneficiaries pay for basic Medicare. They also typically have different deductibles and copays, and those costs can vary from plan to plan.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared the potential cost of a hospital visit for Advantage Plan enrollees vs. those with only basic Medicare (and no additional coverage).
While there's no certainty around how long a hospital stay could be from coronavirus treatment, the foundation's analysis shows the longer the stay, the more Advantage Plan enrollees pay in comparison to those with just basic Medicare.
Not much data is available for coronavirus-related treatment cost or length of stay in the U.S. yet. One group of researchers found that the average hospital stay in Wuhan, China, for patients who recovered was 10 days. However, a separate report looking at U.S. hospital stays for pneumonia shows an average stay of about 3 days, although patients that end up ventilators for more than 96 hours spend an average of 22.6 days in the hospital.
Regulators have instructed Medicare Advantage Plans that operate in states with emergency declarations in place must cover services at out-of-network facilities (that participate in Medicare) and charge the in-network rate.
Some insurers have implemented changes for Advantage Plans — such as waiving certain preauthorization requirements or expanding telehealth services — in an effort to expand access to care for beneficiaries. And on Sunday, two of the nation's largest insurers said they are waiving patient costs for treatment.
As of Monday, the U.S. had more than 143,000 coronavirus cases.
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Prestigious Canada Gairdner Award honours Dr. Antoine Hakim's championing of stroke prevention and treatment
Posted on Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Dr Antoine Hakim. Photo: John Major Photography
The extensive career of world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Antoine Hakim has not only helped transform stroke from a devastating condition to one that is treatable; it has also now earned him a major international scientific prize, a prestigious 2017 Canada Gairdner Award.
Each year, the awards honour the world's most significant biomedical and global health researchers. Today, the Gairdner Foundation has awarded Dr. Hakim, professor in Neurology at the University of Ottawa and Senior Neurologist at The Ottawa Hospital, the 2017 Canada Gairdner Wightman Award for "outstanding research into stroke and its consequences and championing stroke prevention and treatment in Canada and beyond." The Gairdner awards have been nicknamed the 'baby Nobels' as 83 winners have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
"We are pleased to bring Dr. Antoine Hakim into the Gairdner family of more than 360 laureates," said Dr. Janet Rossant, President & Scientific Director of the Gairdner Foundation. "His leadership in the area of stroke research has completely changed attitudes about the condition from devastating to one that is preventable and treatable."
Dr. Hakim's work to better understand the mechanisms of strokes, establish the Canadian Stroke Network and develop a national strategy for stroke prevention and treatment has shifted the paradigm of the disease. Patients and caregivers now recognize the signs and have the tools and know-how to take swift action. With quicker action and better care, more patients are going home to lead normal lives.
"The University is proud to support Dr. Hakim's leading-edge research on stroke prevention and treatment," said Mona Nemer, Vice-President, Research at the University of Ottawa. "Dr. Hakim's work demonstrates how research can have a direct and positive impact on outcomes for patients."
"Over the last 25 years, Dr. Hakim has played a leading role in stroke care and research at The Ottawa Hospital," said Dr. Duncan Stewart, Executive Vice-President of Research at The Ottawa Hospital and professor at the University of Ottawa. "He has saved countless lives, transformed our understanding of stroke and inspired a generation of researchers and physicians."
The University interviewed Dr. Hakim about his research and winning this prestigious award.
What is it about your work and career that has caught the attention of the Gairdner Foundation?
Research has shown that the brain tissue surrounding a stroke's core can 'hold its breath' and come back to life when a clot-busting drug is administered quickly. We needed to develop an action plan and educate people on how to recognize signs of stroke and act as quickly as possible to save lives. Assembling the Canadian Stroke Network and developing a national strategy, including toolkits, education programs, best practice guidelines and a better coordination of services, has played a tremendous role in reducing the devastating impact of stroke on citizens and society. I was very honoured to work with a committed and effective team.
So your work is directly saving lives and health care dollars?
Within five years of coming out with the national strategy, referrals to stroke prevention clinics in Ontario increased by 34% and stroke patient admissions decreased by 11%. By 2015, eight Canadian provinces had implemented stroke strategies using our models, helping lower stroke mortality. Happily, thousands of people are regaining their normal lives, and billions of dollars are being saved by the Canadian health care system.
What else can we learn from your extensive career researching the brain?
A dreaded consequence of stroke and vascular disease is dementia. By reducing vascular risk factors in individuals and populations, we can actually reduce the incidence of dementia in society. Years of observing the interactions between these conditions have enabled me to write a book compiling solid advice for patients and the general public to help ward off dementia and keep their brains operating at full capacity.
Read more about Dr. Hakim's research on the stroke-dementia connection
Read the Gairdner Foundation's news release (pdf)
The University of Ottawa—A crossroads of cultures and ideas
The University of Ottawa is home to over 50,000 students, faculty and staff, who live, work and study in both French and English. Our campus is a crossroads of cultures and ideas, where bold minds come together to inspire game-changing ideas. We are one of Canada's top 10 research universities—our professors and researchers explore new approaches to today's challenges. One of a handful of Canadian universities ranked among the top 200 in the world, we attract exceptional thinkers and welcome diverse perspectives from across the globe.
About The Ottawa Hospital: Inspired by research. Driven by compassion: The Ottawa Hospital is one of Canada's largest learning and research hospitals with over 1,100 beds, approximately 12,000 staff and an annual budget of over $1.2 billion. Our focus on research and learning helps us develop new and innovative ways to treat patients and improve care. As a multi-campus hospital, affiliated with the University of Ottawa, we deliver specialized care to the Eastern Ontario region, but our techniques and research discoveries are adopted around the world. We engage the community at all levels to support our vision for better patient care. See www.ohri.ca for more information about research at The Ottawa Hospital.
Amélie Ferron-Craig
aferronc@uOttawa.ca


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Casual Dining Group hungry for Las Iganuas acquisition
07 July 2015 by Janie Manzoori-Stamford
The Casual Dining Group (CDG) has enhanced its brand portfolio with the acquisition of South American-themed restaurant chain Las Iguanas for an estimated £85m.
The company already owns Bella Italia and Café Rouge.
Backed by Apollo Global Management, CDG was reportedly finalising the details of the deal with Las Iguanas current owner, private equity firm Bowmark Capital, last night.
Commenting on the acquisition, Steve Richards, chief executive of CDG, said: "Las Iguanas is a proven, high-quality restaurant business that has been carefully developed over 25 years. It is clearly differentiated and is positioned for significant further growth.
"It fits perfectly with our strategy to create a scalable restaurant group comprising compelling brands, with broad appeal, which deliver industry-leading consumer and financial metrics."
The acquisition of the 41-strong restaurant brand marks step towards the reversal of fortunes for CDG, which was renamed from Tragus Group in March.
The new name drew a line under a period of change for the business, which last year put three companies - Bella Italia Restaurants, Café Rouge and Café Rouge Restaurants - into Company Voluntary Arrangements (CVAs), and sold 43 Strada sites to Hugh Osmond for £37m.
The business also reduced its debt from £258m to £91m, having refinanced.
CDG plans to open 30 new restaurants over the next 10 months, of which most will be branded Bella Italia, a small number as Café Rouge and seven Las Iguanas.
Mos Shamel, the chief executive of Las Iguanas, will join the CDG board and will continue to lead and develop Las Iguanas. Shamel has worked at Las Iguanas for 12 years, in various roles, having joined when the business comprised just six sites.
He said: "This is a great result for Las Iguanas, which is a hugely successful business, and I'm looking forward to the next stage of its development and growth as part of CDG."
Martin Robinson, chairman of CDG, added: "This is another significant step in delivering on our vision of creating the UK's leading casual dining group. We are delighted to welcome Mos, who with founder Eren Ali, has developed an outstanding brand that is much loved by its customers."
CDG was advised by AlixPartners and Bowmark, by BDO.
Are you looking for a new role? See all the current restaurant vacancies available with The Caterer Jobs >>
Tragus Group renamed Casual Dining Group >>
Tragus boss set to depart >>
Three Tragus companies enter CVAs >>
Bella Italia to open 100 sites in five years >>
Hugh Osmond buys 43 Strada restaurants for £37m >>
TagsMergers & Acquistions and Restaurants
Tenderers invited for in-house catering services at The Building Centre in London.
Tossed launches £750k equity crowdfunding bid
Room to Reward charity urges hotels to donate vacant rooms
Serviced apartments evolving, according to HVS report


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Jean Baptiste Boussard, né le  à Paris, mort le  à Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), des suites de ses blessures, est un général de brigade de la Révolution française.

États de service

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Il est promu général de brigade le , et le , il est nommé commandant temporaire de Nantes. Le , il défend Le Perrier et il est blessé de deux coups de feu au bras droit et à la hanche droite. Le , à Challans, il repousse les Vendéens? et le , il commande l'attaque lors de la bataille de Chalonnes, où il reçut deux blessures au bras. En , il est attaché à la division Caffin, et les 3 et , il participe à la bataille de Mortagne, où il est blessé de deux coups de feu tirés par un insurgé.

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Références

Sources
 , 407-408. texte en ligne sur google livres.
 , 21. texte en ligne sur google livres
 Émile Gabory, Les Guerres de Vendée, Robert Laffont, 1912-1931 (réimpr. 2009), , 474
 .

Général de la Révolution française promu en 1793
Naissance en décembre 1758
Naissance à Paris
Décès en octobre 1795
Décès à Nantes
Guerre de Vendée
Décès à 36 ans

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia