Master bedroom (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Master bedroom (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Guest room (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Sarah’s office (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Conrad’s room (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
My office (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Living room (Taken with instagram)
Dining room (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Kitchen (Taken with Instagram at 17 south cedar, beacon ny)
Friedman’s ‘Average Is Over’: Blaming The Victim Again
Friedman drives me crazy. His newest nonsense is Average Is Over:
Thomas Friedman, Average Is Over via NYTimes.com
In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.
Ok, try the thought experiment: everyone who is now average ‘finds their unique value contribution that makes them stand out’. But if they all do, they can’t stand out. So what he is saying is crazy.
Or else it is a trick. Friedman may be implicly accepting the unstated: that most people won’t find their inner uniqueness, and will become obsoleted by cheap Chinese labor or automation. And the moral of the story is one of personal failure: the unemployed have failed because they lack the inability to rise to the challenge posed by the new world order.
But, as usual, Freidman does not touch on the fact that the economic system that we live in is not preordained: it is a system of laws and international policies that have benefited those that own and run the machinery tended by cheap Chinese labor and robots. The rentiers and corporations are pounding the world into dust to make trillions for themselves. And apologists like Friedman tell us it is our incapacity to work hard, our inability to learn the skills or summon the pluck to train ourselves in the necessary skills needed for the new world order, they tell us it is us: we are to blame for being cast aside. We are too average in a world where average is over.
We have a system in which the government extracts less from the rich than ever before, when fiscal austerity is leading to cutbacks in primary and secondary education, where college is increasingly unaffordable, and where the millions with college degrees cannot find work. A world where corporations are sitting on trillions in profits but are unwilling to hire. Nonetheless, he tells us it is all our fault.
Friedman never stops blaming the victim. He’s just a sycophant, hoping to sell more books to the oligarchs.
Source: The New York Times
The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope.
Source: project-syndicate.org
Bacon Is Good For Everything
I love a BLT with extra bacon the morning after having one too many, but new evidence shows that bacon is also great for stopping chronic nosebleeds:
Marc Abrahams, Pork, the surprise remedy for a nosebleed
A new medical study recommends a method called “nasal packing with strips of cured pork” as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.
Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, at Detroit Medical Centre in Michigan, treated a girl who had a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolongued bleeding. Publishing in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, they pack the essential details into two sentences:
“Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae … To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia.”
They acknowledge a long tradition of using pork to treat general epistaxis, ie nosebleed. The technique fell into disuse, they speculate, because “packing with salt pork was fraught with bacterial and parasitic complications. As newer synthetic hemostatic agents and surgical techniques evolved, the use of packing with salt pork diminished.”
Source: Guardian
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
- Theodore Parker
Often misattributed to Martin Luther King, who often quoted this.
Kevin Benfield, The Alarming Outlook for Urban Water Scarcity via ThinkProgress
Here are a few facts and projections extracted from a very good summary of the issues by Jay Kimball on his blog 8020 Vision: By 2020, California will face a shortfall of fresh water as great as the amount that all of its cities and towns together are consuming today. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in conditions of absolute water scarcity, and 65 percent of the world’s population will be water stressed. In the US, 21 percent of agricultural irrigation is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water supplies ability to recharge. There are 66 golf courses in Palm Springs. On average, they each consume over a million gallons of water per day. The Ogalala aquifer, which stretches across 8 states and accounts for 40 percent of water used in Texas, will decline in volume by a staggering 52 percent between 2010 and 2060. Texans are probably pumping the Ogallala at about six times the rate of recharge.
Source: thinkprogress.org
There as a study in which it comes out that thirty of the largest companies in the United States are now spending more on lobbying than they pay in federal taxes. …Who really pays for that? And the answer is America’s middle class — they’re the ones who are left to pick up all the pieces, to pay the taxes to keep the country running. And, more to the point, they’re the ones who are paying for the fact that there’s not enough money left to invest in our kids’ future.
Source: inothernews
Erratic inquiries of Stowe Boyd, who means well, despite everything.
