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Israeli President Warns of 'Confronatations' if Arafat Declares a State
Israel's new President Moshe Katsav warned of a "confrontation", in an interview in Munich, if Palestinian President Yasser Arafat unilaterally declares statehood on September 13th.
"If Arafat does that, Israel will not recognize this state and this could lead to a confrontation. It would be serious and would go against our national interests and those of the Palestinians," he told the Focus weekly, due out Monday.
He said Arafat committed an error during the Camp David summit, which ended in failure on July 25th, by not showing himself "ready to compromise".
"The Arabs are unfortunately still making the same mistake: they reject all our proposals," Katsav said.
"In the long term, the peace process is irreversible," he added.
Arafat is trying to drum up support for a Palestinian state, although he has indicated that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is reviewing its September 13th statehood target - (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
- Palestinians Decry US Lawmakers Threats to Cut Aid over Statehood Plan
- Israeli Arab Deputy: Arafat Critical of Clinton Bias
- Arafat Hopeful France will be among First to Recognize Palestinian State
- Palestinian Legislative Body Supports Statehood Declaration
- Arafat Meets Saudi Leaders to Mobilize Arab States on Jerusalem | <urn:uuid:f4a67c15-b60e-437f-b92a-8db9632b1fdf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.albawaba.com/news/israeli-president-warns-confronatations-if-arafat-declares-state?quicktabs_accordion=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948071 | 304 | 1.5 | 2 |
The lines between cars, computers, and mobile devices are blurring, as several new web-powered apps have made their way to Ford vehicles via the SYNC on-board vehicle control system API. Following up on our post last month about the use of the SYNC system to enable “cars as a platform,” news has emerged about the release of some new apps that give drivers (and passengers) access to web services via mobile devices.
According to a Ford press release, Stitcher (customizable Internet radio), Twitter and Pandora can be accessed and controlled on a mobile device via Ford’s latest release of the SYNC system. Drivers can use voice commands and steering wheel controls to control apps for each service:
By enabling developers to integrate the SYNC API into their apps, Ford is providing customers with the capability to access the applications they use most while in the car. Leveraging SYNC’s safer voice commands and steering wheel controls, drivers are able to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Using an open API model allows Ford to leverage the mobile device as an operating system and processor, while using SYNC to access the vehicle controls.
The YouTube video below shows the Pandora app in action:
According to BusinessWeek and LATimes.com, Mapquest can also be used to send driving directions directly to the SYNC system, which uses an internal GPS antenna to provide turn-by-turn directions to drivers.
This new set of apps is a nice preview of this latest trend for cars serving as platforms for apps that bring access to all kinds of services in the cloud. Note that Ford doesn’t seem to be the only vehicle manufacturer moving in this direction: Kia’s new UVO “Infotainment” System is an onboard vehicle control system to SYNC (though it does not yet integrate with third party apps). And just today, there’s a story in the NY Times on driving to distraction and related thread on Techmeme.
As we mentioned in our earlier post, Ford plans on creating an “app store” that will provide drivers with access to numerous apps built with an open API for SYNC. This is great news for developers, who will be able to use their API knowledge and experience to expand their application offerings to a net new platform that represents a large user base. | <urn:uuid:71cc0b1d-304c-4da5-9e5f-b29b0c4f2f6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/01/07/twitter-pandora-and-mapquest-coming-to-your-car/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942701 | 486 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Boehner Pledges Smaller, Less Costly Government
House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner pledged Wednesday that Republicans will use their new House majority to seek a "smaller, less costly, and more accountable government," and said he hoped President Barack Obama would join them.
"We hope he is willing to work with us on these priorities. But as I have said, our new majority will be the voice of the American people as they expressed it so clearly yesterday," Boehner said.
The 60-year-old Ohio Republican spoke on the morning after his party swept to power in the House, taking 60 seats away from the Democrats and leading for five more. Republicans also cut deeply into the Democrats' Senate majority, presenting Obama with a new political reality after two years of working with big Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Boehner was joined at a news conference by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who headed the GOP campaign organization that helped gain 10 governorships.
McConnell was more pointed than Boehner, saying that what Democrats in the House "learned is that choosing the president over your constituents clearly doesn't work."
He said he hoped Obama would work with Republicans "on things like spending and debt and trade agreements and clean coal technology and nuclear power. ... The question is how do we meet in the middle."
Boehner said Speaker Nancy Pelosi had tried to reach him by phone. "She left me a very nice voicemail," he said, adding he felt confident there would be a smooth transition as Republicans take over the reins of power in the House.
He also said he didn't see any difficulty incorporating new GOP House members supported by the tea party into the chamber's Republican team. Many of them campaigned on the basis of deep spending cuts or other proposals that could prove intensely controversial, including steps to privatize Social Security or eliminate entire agencies of government.
In a classic Washington minuet, the Republicans held their news conference less than two hours before Obama was scheduled to field questions from reporters at the White House, his first public appearance since the voters delivered their verdict on his first two years in office.
The new Congress convenes in January, and Boehner said Republicans would use the interim to decide precisely how to proceed with an agenda aimed at helping an economy still struggling to emerge fully from the worst recession since the 1930s.
Lawmakers return to the Capitol in two weeks for a post-election session to wrap up loose ends from the past two years, and a vote is expected on extension of tax cuts passed during the Bush administration that are due to expire on Jan 1.
Obama and fellow Democrats have said they want to extend cuts for individuals at incomes under $250,000, while Republicans want cuts kept in place for all income levels. | <urn:uuid:d60ee73d-8664-4594-88fb-cf219899957f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/39989457 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978829 | 575 | 1.648438 | 2 |
European Union naval forces say they have destroyed pirate skiffs on Somalia's coast, in their first-ever on-shore operation. Somalia's Transitional Federal Government says it welcomes the EU's efforts, but is concerned about the risk to civilians.
The naval forces targeted pirate boats lined up along the shoreline near the town of Haradhere in Somalia's Galmudug region, a major center of pirate activity.
Lieutenant Commander Jacqueline Sherriff, spokesperson for the EU Naval Force, says the operation took place around midnight Tuesday and was over within minutes.
“The operation was carried out using an EU Naval Force helicopter," she explained. "At no point did boots go on the ground, and EU forces did not go on the ground, and basically what the guys in the helicopter were able to do was focus in on these attack skiffs and fire at them and make them inoperable.”
The operation represents a change in tactics for the EU Naval Force, which was launched in 2008 to protect ships at sea around the Horn of Africa.
The EU expanded its mandate in March of this year to allow operations targeting pirate supplies along the shore.
Lieutenant Commander Sherriff says the new mandate will make it more difficult for pirates to escape.
“Before we could only operate at sea, which was quite frustrating actually, because there were the pirates on the beach and they knew we couldn't touch them if they were feet dry,” she noted.
Somali pirates have made hundreds of millions of dollars in the past five years hijacking ships and holding the vessels and their crews for ransom. But the number of successful hijackings has dropped sharply in the past several months, as ships take greater precautions, such as traveling with armed guards, and naval forces take more aggressive action against the pirates.
Sherriff says Somalia's Transitional Federal Government was aware of the new mandate allowing operations on shore, but they were not informed directly about this specific operation before it took place.
TFG spokesperson Abdurahman Omar Osman says the government welcomes the EU's military involvement, but believes more should be done to help coastal communities affected by piracy.
“While we appreciate this, we also recognize that the root cause of piracy lies inland," he noted, "where the Transitional Federal Government would prefer more resources be put into coastal communities, whether it is for employment or youth opportunities, so that will help in the long-term.”
He added that the TFG is worried about civilian casualties from such operations. There were no reported injuries from Tuesday's raid.
Article by Gabe Joselow, VOA News | <urn:uuid:3440f6dd-113f-4735-acab-a9cce17bb409> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sofmag.com/print/eu-naval-force-strikes-somali-pirate-base | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97514 | 543 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Museum to showcase contemporary Latin American art
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Long a cultural backwater, Rio de Janeiro has taken another leap toward becoming an art hot spot with this week's opening of a museum built around one of the world's premier collections of contemporary Latin American art.
Casa Daros, a 12,000-square-meter (129,000-square-foot) space in an impeccably renovated 1866 mansion, will house some of the works acquired the past 13 years by Zurich-based collector Ruth Schmidheiny. Working with German curator Hans-Michael Herzog, she combed Latin America at a time when the art world paid little attention to the region. The 1,200 pieces they bought came from 117 artists, most of them still alive and working.
It was easy pickings, Herzog told journalists at a news conference Wednesday ahead of the museum's public opening Saturday.
"In Europe, there was zero interest because people there knew nothing about Latin American art — Latin American literature, yes, but contemporary art, no," Herzog said. "We started to acquire, which was so easy because the field was so very rich."
Stored in a facility in Zurich, many of the pieces have been shown to the public in twice-yearly exhibits there, but Schmidheiny and Herzog dreamed of having a place to show off the collection in Latin America as a way to spark dialogue among artists across the diverse region.
Initially they planned to put the museum in Havana, but talks with the Cuban government failed. Given the violence that plagued Colombia in the early 2000s, the political situation in Venezuela and the lack of basic infrastructure in the Andean countries, they narrowed their list of possible host cities to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Sao Paulo and Rio in Brazil, Herzog said.
But both Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires already had bustling arts scenes, so in 2006 they settled on Rio, which was still plagued by drug gang violence and resolutely off the radar of the art world.
That's since changed, with the pacification of dozens of Rio's "favela" hillside slums, the discovery of offshore oil deposits that have flooded the city with petrodollars and Rio's role as host for the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The art world is now eager to get a toehold in this burgeoning and lucrative market, and Rio officials hope to capitalize on their moment in the spotlight to turn the laid-back beach city known mainly for its over-the-top Carnival celebrations into a world-class metropolis and Latin America's newest arts hub.
Casa Daros is but the latest of a host of new museums springing up in Rio. Earlier this month saw the inauguration of the Rio Art Museum, which is dedicated to art celebrating Rio's picture-postcard cityscapes. Two other big museums, one dedicated to science and the other to sounds and images, are scheduled to open in the coming years.
"Of course we had no idea that Rio was going to become such a hotspot when this project originated," Herzog said. "But it's, of course, fantastic for us. When it comes to museums, the more the merrier." | <urn:uuid:18c86321-9730-45e3-8972-e7c9c78b75a2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.northjersey.com/news/international/199297451_Museum_to_showcase_contemporary_Latin_American_art.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959577 | 668 | 1.789063 | 2 |
“I’m a rocker, dude, through and through. Here’s my favorite bands; AC/DC, Van Halen (not Van Hagar), Skynyrd, Def Lep.”
I’m pretty sure I should have been a rock star in another life. So it’s no surprise that one of my favorite lyrics from that era is from a Tesla song, “It’s not what ya got, it’s what ya give.” Every time I hear that song, it reminds me of how much more I have to give.
In my previous assignment with U.S. Africa Command, I had several opportunities to travel throughout East Africa and observe places subject to extreme poverty. Neighborhoods were littered with trash, kids played in the streets with deflated soccer balls, and old cars lined the streets.
I realized quickly how blessed I am to live in the United States of America. I enjoy a quality of life that so many in this world will never know. So what? Lucky me?
Well, that just didn’t sit well with me. Even though I knew I couldn’t solve world hunger, I had to figure out how to be a part of the solution. So I started a charity account with a small monthly allotment. It’s not much, and I don’t send it all to Africa. But it’s there when someone needs a little charity, and it’s an opportunity for me to get involved and try to make things a little better.
With the Combined Federal Campaign ongoing, there are so many ways to give a little of our good fortune to those in need. Just something to think about …
And giving is certainly not restricted to your hard-earned pay check. The current economy has many of us accounting for every penny, and that’s OK because we all have something worth more than money — our time. And it is precious. None of us work just a 40-hour week anymore, so the thought of giving up any more of our free time sounds like a pretty big sacrifice. Well, it is. But the return is always worth the investment.
Most of us are aware of the many volunteer opportunities available — soup kitchens, donation stations, hospitals and assisted living facilities — the list is lengthy. What about the people we work with every day? They may not need our money or charity, but we all need someone to lend an ear from time to time. Think about it the next time you are sprinting for the door at the end of the day and one of your coworkers is trying to tell you about the rough day she had. It might be the most valuable five minutes you ever give.
I would be so remiss if I didn’t also mention how important it is to give to our families. They support us during long days and long deployments, and they are essential enablers in helping us accomplish the mission every day. All they need is some love and attention at the end of the day so they know how much we appreciate their service. Even though you might be exhausted at the end of the day and feel like you have nothing left to give, a simple smile, hug, kiss or kind word will earn you more than you will ever know. Because when it’s all said and done, in the final analysis, it’s not about what you’ve got, it’s what you give. | <urn:uuid:620dfe2e-a90a-47c2-98e8-8c5555048459> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aerotechnews.com/lukeafb/2012/10/26/what-you-give-not-what-you-got-main-thing/?feedsort=related | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965846 | 721 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Brian Russell is the owner of Carrboro Creative Coworking in Carrboro, N.C. He also blogs at Yesh.com. In this interview, conducted by e-mail, Russell discusses what coworking might mean for journalism.
Q. What is coworking? How is it different from going into a coffeehouse and working on a laptop?
A. Coworking is a movement of freelance workers who are joining together to share resources like office space, Internet access, etc. This movement is in the process of going mainstream. It’s poised to really influence how corporations of all size see work. Freelancers aren’t the only ones who will work this way.
Coworking spaces usually have a very professional atmosphere in contrast to coffeehouses. But they are often focused on the type of professionals that use them. For example, Carrboro Creative Coworking has a lot of freelance software engineers. We work hard and play hard together.
Q. What kinds of people are coworking? Are writers and editors trying it?
A. All kinds of people are coworking. Many of them are involved in Web development. But we have many journalists and writers at our space.
These folks really understand the value of community. It’s a natural fit for this type of professional.
Q. Newspapers have typically operated from a central newsroom with bureaus in surrounding communities. Now, many bureaus have closed because of financial pressures. How could newspapers use coworking to cover the news?
A. Newspapers could use coworking spaces as ad hoc gathering places to meet and create news. Journalists should be in the field covering the news and regenerating the news beats of old.
Coworking spaces are also greater community hubs. With a diverse group of people working in the same place, lead generation is amplified. Plus, coworking spaces are about sharing resources and are very cost effective.
Q. In addition to coworking, you have experience in Web development and citizen journalism. In your opinion, how can newspapers better use online media?
A. Journalists must be active participants in our physical and virtual, online communities. Online media is social. No more passive observation. This means reporting should be a two-way process.
The Clue Train Manifesto explains it this way: “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
UPDATE: Carrboro Creative Coworking closed in autumn 2011. Russell now works as the chief webmaster for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. | <urn:uuid:cf85f383-bce4-4c0e-8837-0a6c135fc989> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://editdesk.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/carrboro-coworking-russell/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952717 | 559 | 1.664063 | 2 |
A quick Google search on “the importance of relaxing” yields 49,100,000 results in 0.30 seconds. Apparently, a lot of people, everywhere, think it really is important. I know what you’re thinking, “I already know this.” The thing is we all do. And yet, most of us don’t heed the wisdom. We work, do, be in action, etc. often until we’re exhausted either physically, mentally or emotionally, or all three. There is always just “one more thing” to do, one more email to answer, one more task to finish. I’m as guilty of it as the next person. Amazingly enough, if you should ever happen to get sick or injured, you find very quickly that “the world goes on without you.” The planet does not stop revolving, civilization as we know it does not end, and countries do not collapse just because we take a day off – as in, don’t go to the office, don’t turn on the computer, don’t use our phone, don’t compulsively clean or fix one more thing at home, etc. A friend sent me this little vignette recently by email: “A young lady confidently walked around the room while explaining stress management to an audience with a raised glass of water in her hand. Everyone knew she was going to ask the ultimate question, ‘Half empty or half full?’ “How heavy is this glass of water?" she inquired instead, with a smile. Answers called out ranged from 200 grams to 1 pound. She replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, I might have to go to the hospital.” “In each case it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes; and that's the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on.” There is a lot of wisdom in that little story. Much research has been done around the world studying the relationship between stress and health. There are whole institutes dedicated just to stress management. On the up side, stress is the body’s way of protecting you. When working properly, it helps you stay focused, energetic and alert; but beyond a certain point, stress stops being helpful and starts causing major damage to your health, your mood, productivity, relationships, and your quality of life, according to a study by experts Melinda Smith, M.A., Robert Segal, M.A., and Jeanne Segal, Ph.D. They say the most dangerous thing about stress is how easily it sneaks up on you. You get used to it. It becomes familiar or even seems normal. You don’t notice how much it’s affecting you, and the cost is high. So, what’s the price? Medical studies show that long-term exposure to stress can raise blood pressure and cholesterol levels, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, contribute to infertility, create hypertension, cause digestive disorders, lower the immune system which leaves you more open to infections and viruses, and speed up the aging process.
If you don't do this, the prospect isn't pretty. So, what to do? Taken from many sources, the crucial elements are: get a good night’s sleep, eat healthy (filling your body with junk food doesn’t help the situation), exercise even 15-20 minutes every day (walk!), stretch, take breaks, breathe fresh air (combine with walking!), spend time in nature, laugh, and simply breathe deeply! There are many relaxation techniques out there like yoga, meditation, music, creative arts, and rhythmic and repetitive exercise like walking, running, swimming, kayaking, cycling, etc. where your mind can flow freely. One study even says that laughter, even deliberately induced laughter, provides emotional and mental release in addition to significant physiological benefits and relaxation on all levels. As clichéd as it sounds, vacation was created to give people time off to relax from work.
Convinced yet that you deserve – even your life depends on – that break and vacation? In Costa Rica, there’s a place that can help you relax your way back to health. Pranamar Oceanfront Villas & Yoga Retreat, set right on the shoreline at Santa Teresa Beach, is a gorgeous, intimate boutique hotel with luxury two-story villas, elaborate beachfront bungalows, abundant tropical gardens, an organic healthy-cuisine restaurant and a free-form saltwater pool. Santa Teresa Beach is located on the remote lower Nicoya Peninsula of the Pacific Coast – worlds away from stress; it was voted the #1 beach in Central America for 2012 by Trip Advisor. Pranamar Villas, also winner of the 2012 Trip Advisor Traveler’s Choice Award, offers you daily in-house yoga classes, regular yoga retreats and workshops, all-inclusive yoga vacations, and surfing and yoga holidays. As well, they offer an abundance of bodywork treatments (massage, etc.) to benefit your body, mind and spirit, and keep you healthy. Check out their selection here. Just tell your boss (or yourself!) that a vacation is the answer to a better, more productive you. | <urn:uuid:ef419892-357c-48e2-9c98-98249066b6b6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pranamarvillas.com/es/blog/40-news/84-relax-its-only-a-matter-of-life-or-death.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954239 | 1,206 | 1.8125 | 2 |
TUSD spending $92K to attract Anglo kids
The Tucson Unified School District is working to attract non-minority students to three of its magnet schools.
Robison K-5 Magnet, Ochoa Magnet Elementary and Safford K-8 Magnet schools will be the focus of a television, radio and Internet marketing campaign.
The $92,000 campaign, approved 4-1 by the TUSD Governing Board on Tuesday night, will be funded by a federal grant geared toward bringing diverse groups of children together.
Board President Mark Stegeman voted no. He was concerned about spending that much on marketing, not education.
TUSD was one of 36 districts across the country to receive such a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and the only recipient in Arizona.
"The intent of the magnet schools has always been to attract a variety of students," said TUSD Superintendent John Pedicone. "But in a district where 75 percent of students are minority, the reality is there is a need to attract Caucasian kids to get some kind of balance. We must have processes that encourage students from all ends of the district to access the opportune programs available." | <urn:uuid:dcb7ae02-36e6-481b-8d46-2da8a31fa891> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.spanglishtoday.org/2011/08/tusd-spending-92k-to-attract-anglo-kids.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965584 | 242 | 1.625 | 2 |
Nintendo have pushed a new Wiimote controller for their Wii console through the FCC, though it’s unclear what functional changes the new model will bring. Listed as model RVL-036, the diagram makes it clear that this is indeed a Wiimote but the confidentiality request locks up any live photos or the user manual until November 7th 2010.
The most obvious possibility, of course, is that Nintendo have integrated their MotionPlus technology into the new controller. Currently available as a snap-on accessory, MotionPlus increases Wiimote accuracy in certain games that support the system.
Alternatively it could simply be a different design of internal hardware, with manufacturer Hon Hai Industries (aka Foxconn) streamlining the build process so as to save money on each controller produced. We’ll have to wait until later in the year to find out for sure. | <urn:uuid:f428193f-f6f5-4d4c-a135-0a67c8423de3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.slashgear.com/new-wiimote-rvl-036-clears-fcc-integrated-motionplus-2086320/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938766 | 176 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The Cordoba was Chrysler's first entry in the personal luxury market and the first Chrysler-branded automobile. Sold in North American market from 1975 to 1983, the Cordoba amused the car enthusiasts with a luxury name and a luxury feel for a very affordable price. It is a B-body car that became one of Chrysler's few indisputable hits of the '70s. In its first few years of production, demands for this car actually surpassed the number of units released. Hence, more than half of Chrysler's production that time was composed of Cordobas.
Cordoba offered many V-8 engine including the standard 318/ 2 bbl carb and the optional 360/ 2bbl carb, 400-4V single exhaust and 400ci 4bbl and dual exhaust. Providing the car's amazingly good handling is the suspension with longitudinal front torsion bars. The 1976 Cordoba is equipped with attractive and sporty three spoke wheel and conventional dashboard. Built on a 115-inch wheelbase, the 1976 Cordoba came with overall length of 215.3 inches, height of 52.6 inches and overall width of 77.1 inches.
For 1977 model year, Cordoba has been known as a sophisticated car that rode like a boat. It received a new powertrain, the 400 ci 8 cylinder engine with four barrel Quadrajet carburetor generating 175 horsepower; new transmission, a 4-speed automatic; new set of tires (15" rims with P225/70R/15 WW); and other nice touches like AM/FM radio with 4 speakers, leather seats, power windows, power seat, intermittent wipers, air conditioning and mud flaps. Cordoba's original design and substance remained for three years, despite some very minor styling and option changes.
Downsized for 1980 model year, the Cordoba shared LeBaron and Dodge Mirada's shorter wheelbase. The restyled second-generation Cordoba didn't attract the crowd the way the original Cordoba did and its sales weren't successful. As a result, the Cordoba was phased out in 1983.
You are lucky to own a Cordoba because it is considered as a pretty collectible today. The most valuable Cordobas are the ones produced in its earliest stage, especially those models featuring four-barrel carburetor and the unique Cordoba-based 300 produced in 1979. So if you own a Cordoba, particularly those that belong to the valuable class, you should maintain its tiptop shape and condition! As a part of proper care and maintenance, owners should make sure that all the dated and worn out parts are replaced with new car parts. And if you're bothered by the thought of looking for genuine Chrysler Cordoba auto-replacement parts, worry no more! Parts Train is here to provide all your auto parts needs! From electrical parts to body parts, from engine parts to car accessories, Parts Train got it covered! It is our top mission to provide you the finest Chrysler Cordoba replacement and restoration parts. | <urn:uuid:a62a040d-fb77-4024-a8aa-0e9b0130f37f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.partstrain.com/ShopByVehicle/CHRYSLER/CORDOBA | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947752 | 617 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Experimental Music with the -Subharchord- Subharmonic Sound Generator
The need for artificially created sound with possibilities for exceeding those generated by conventional instruments, for use in broadcasting and television programs, has been known for a long time. Many experimental music studios and electronic music methods are well known. A new apparatus for use in electronic studios is described which gives new possibilities for rational realizations of musical timbre.
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This paper costs $20 for non-members, $5 for AES members and is free for E-Library subscribers. | <urn:uuid:82239c8e-ee45-480c-8590-9458adad5a72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=1157 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950663 | 162 | 1.796875 | 2 |
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7 Things to Look for in a New Desktop PC
<b>If you're not a techie, buying hardware can be an arduous task. Use these tips for buying a machine that best suits your business needs. </b>
7 Things to Look for in a New Desktop PC If you're not a techie, buying hardware can be an arduous task. Use these tips for buying a machine that best suits your business needs.
Does your old clunker make wheezing noises when it boots up? Has your typing become faster than your computer? Tired of looking at the Windows hourglass for minutes at a time?
Perhaps it's time for a new desktop computer.
Computer manufacturers continue to struggle with weak business. Meanwhile, component manufacturers are making their goods smaller, faster and cheaper. The upshot: You can get a good deal on a powerful machine.
I can't recommend individual machines. They might not be on the market when you read this. Instead, let's go through the components that make up computers. Use these to help decide what you need.
Following are seven points to ponder before you buy:The Microprocessor
This is one of the most expensive parts. Microprocessors for Windows machines are made by Intel and AMD. Those for Apples are made by IBM and Motorola. So here's my first piece of advice: Don't worry so much about who makes the chip. All four are good. For Windows machines, you have a choice of the AMD Athlon XP, the Intel Pentium 4 and the Intel Celeron, an economy chip. The Pentium 4 and Athlon XP are upper end chips. The fastest Pentium 4 runs at 3.2 Gigahertz — a very fast speed indeed. It's also very expensive. The comparable AMD chip, the 3200+, is slightly less expensive.
You may need these fire-breathers if you're doing lots of video editing. Ditto if you're working with computer-aided design or playing advanced games. Otherwise, look to chips running at 2.4 GHz to 2.6 GHz (or 2400+ to 2600+, in AMD-powered machines). They're cheaper, and they perform nearly as well as the top-end chips.
Intel's Celeron is a budget chip. If you do typical office duties and surf the web, you probably wouldn't notice the difference between a top-end Celeron and a Pentium 4 running at the same speed. But you could save some money.
Apple and AMD chips run at lower speeds than those made by Intel. AMD uses the + symbol, as in 3200+, to imply that its chips are faster than comparable Intel microprocessors, despite running more slowly. Indeed, tests often show that to be the case.
Apple claims that its top-end machines are faster than those running Windows. That is a matter of controversy; there are websites devoted to debunking Apple's claims. Apple's chips run at much lower speeds, so they are difficult to compare directly. If you're interested in an Apple computer, test one at a store, then test a Windows machine. Apple computers are more expensive than comparable Windows machines.
Both Apple and AMD have new 64-bit microprocessors. They can crunch twice as much data as 32-bit chips. But there are virtually no programs that take advantage of this power now. That will change in the future, but these expensive new chips don't offer as much value today.The Operating System
Windows XP and Apple's OS X are also difficult to compare. But there's really no need. Both are stable and fast. You'll probably be satisfied with either.
Windows XP comes in two flavours: Home and Professional. Windows XP Professional has all of Home's goodies, plus some other stuff. Most of it is networking capability. Professional costs more.
But it does have some nice features. One is Remote Desktop, which allows you to access one computer from another. For instance, you could sign onto your office computer from home and check your email. It also allows you to encrypt files and folders.Random Access Memory
You will need a minimum of 256 megabytes of memory. If you can afford it, get 512 MB. I'd go to one gigabyte for demanding applications, such as video editing. Memory is relatively inexpensive, so don't skimp.Hard Drives are Big and Bigger
If you do a lot of video work, you need a big hard drive. Video files are huge. Hard drives at 200 to 250 GB are common and relatively inexpensive.
Otherwise, the gargantuan drives common today far outstrip the customer's needs. Even low-end machines today have 40 GB hard drives. You are unlikely to fill that. I recommend putting your extra money elsewhere.The Video System
The video system sends the picture to the monitor. Many inexpensive computers use the main-system RAM to run video. The video processor is built into the motherboard (the main circuit board). This works, but is less desirable.
Better computers have a separate circuit board, called a video card. This includes the video processor and memory. For video cards, 64 MB of RAM is pretty standard. That's more than enough for day-to-day computing.
However, if you are doing video work or playing advanced games, get a card with 128 MB of RAM. Truly hardcore game players can get cards with 256 MB of RAM.The Monitor
Do you need to buy a monitor? Most people get one without thinking. But monitors don't necessarily come with computers. Often, you can lower your cost by refusing the monitor. If you're satisfied with your current monitor, it should work OK with your new computer.
There are two basic types of monitor, as mentioned above: CRTs and flat-panels. CRTs are the cheaper option: I would not buy a CRT monitor that was less than 17 inches. Keep in mind that that measurement is diagonal, and includes a portion of the screen hidden behind the bezel. A 17-inch CRT will have a visible screen size of 16 inches or less.
Flat-panel monitors are far more expensive than CRTs. They come in two flavours: analogue and digital. Digital signals are produced natively by the computer; they do not need to be converted. Analogue signals are converted from digital by the video system. Some consider digital signals clearer.CDs and DVDs
All computers come with optical drives — either CD or DVD. All but the very cheapest have burners. ("Burning" is the process of making a CD or DVD.) CD-RW burners are still the most common, but DVD burners are available on more expensive machines.
DVD is wildly popular, but remains troubled by incompatible standards. You're likely to see DVD+R/RW or DVD-R/RW on a computer. They are incompatible, but most players can handle R discs made on either. R means a disc can be recorded once. RW stands for rewriteable, meaning a disc can be recorded numerous times. DVD burners can also make CDs.
I recommend that you purchase a CD-RW, at least.
One final point: I hear from so many people wondering when the best time to buy a computer is. There will always be something faster, better, hotter, cooler, bigger or smaller coming. If you need a computer, buy one now. | <urn:uuid:04a98594-f500-4695-83dd-ba2ea14a24c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peerfear.org/articles/17272 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954448 | 1,534 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Spirit Airlines’ latest problem, an unscheduled landing at Houston followed by a 10-hour delay, got big play on the Internet and raised some questions about whether the airline violated its passengers' rights. The unscheduled landing of the Los Angeles-Ft. Lauderdale flight, said a Spirit spokesperson, was due to the need to remove an unruly passenger. That’s what airlines are supposed to do. Reports add that the passengers spent an hour on the tarmac and another 10 hours in the terminal “without food.” The short answer is that the airline didn’t violate anything other than the principles of good customer service.
The delay, of itself, did not violate any obligation. Spirit’s contract of carriage, along with those of other airlines, explicitly states that the schedule and adherence to that schedule are not part of the contract.
The 10-hour ground delay did not violate the Department of Transportation’s recent passenger-protection rules. Those rules refer strictly to tarmac delays, not total delays, and Spirit’s one-hour tarmac delay fell well within the Department’s three-hour limit.
When passengers reported “no food,” presumably they meant that Spirit didn’t cover any food expenses. You can buy plenty of food at Houston's airport, but Spirit’s contract does not obligate it to pay. Although some contracts obligate an airline to provide meals and other amenities to travelers during extended delays, Spirit’s says only that it “may provide limited amenities.”
The extended delay was apparently caused by Spirit’s decision to fly in a substitute airplane. Nothing in the reports indicated why Spirit couldn’t simply reboard the original plane, but finding a substitute plane and crew to fly from Spirit’s Ft. Lauderdale base could easily take 10 hours. And unlike a majority of other domestic airlines, Spirit’s contract does not cover providing alternate transportation on another line.
Reports also claim that Spirit failed to let passengers know what was happening and instead kept posting new departure times every hour or so. Here, Spirit did violate its rather vague commitment to “make every attempt to provide our customers with accurate, up-to-date information about their travel itinerary.”
The Spirit spokesperson indicated that it would give customers on that flight a complete refund of the ticket price. Given the exclusions in Spirit’s contract, that’s about as much as they can reasonably expect. | <urn:uuid:de5f185c-3e87-4093-8961-a11f7190db0e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smartertravel.com/blogs/today-in-travel/did-spirit-10-hour-delay-violate-passengers-rights.html?id=11896324 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948232 | 518 | 1.609375 | 2 |
- over- + flood (Wiktionary)
“One of those months where things get too much and my emotions just overflood.”
“It is a negative one: I want to counteract the misunderstandings which overflood the whole field, especially by the careless mixing of mental and moral influence.”
“His great breast and head were joined by a massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it, extinguish it.”
“One hand carried her candle, the light of which fell on her pale face, with its halo of blackness -- her hair, which looked like a well of darkness, that threatened to break from its bonds and overflood the room with a second night, dark enough to blot out that which was now looking in, treeful and deep, at the uncurtained windows.”
“He would have been a stern man, but for an unusual amount of reverence that seemed to overflood the sternness, and change it into strong love.”
“I shall try not to overflood this place with insects, which I acknowledge the fact that some of you have certain repulsion towards small creatures.”
“We need to overflood their emails and phones and march down to their offices.”
“a massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it, extinguish it.”
‘overflood’ hasn't been added to any lists yet.
Looking for tweets for overflood. | <urn:uuid:f7f72aa8-31fa-46cc-8d0d-cfe2162939ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wordnik.com/words/overflood | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970113 | 354 | 1.5625 | 2 |
An innovative Australian public journalism project has partnered student reporters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with a refugee support agency and a social media startup.
The aim of the project, #ReportingRefugees, was to tackle problematic media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees in a volatile political climate in parallel with educating students to connect with a “citizens’ agenda.” The result was a student takeover of the airwaves in Australia’s national capital and a fundamental shift in attitudes.
MediaShift correspondent Julie Posetti anchored the project at the University of Canberra where she teaches journalism. This is the first in her two-part series on #ReportingRefugees.
Problem: Divisive & Xenophobic National Debate
For the past 15 years, racist and xenophobic political memes have dominated public discussion of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia, with asylum seekers who arrive by boat demonized as threatening aliens by politicians whose divisive messages are fanned and fed by inflammatory headlines and tabloid TV.
In this climate, and on the back of involvement in a substantial national research project on the reporting of multiculturalism (which led to me theorizing about the potential transformative impact of minority encounters on journalists), I decided to embark on a public journalism project with my final-year University of Canberra broadcast journalism students.
The end result was two hours of radio journalism, fueled by collaboration and social media, that gave a much-needed voice to refugees, a better understanding for the public of the complicated issues surrounding them, and important lessons for those of us working on the project.
Journalism Partnerships For Change
#ReportingRefugees was built on partnerships that I forged with 666 ABC Canberra, the ABC’s radio station in the Australian capital; Canberra Refugee Support, the city’s best-known organization for refugees and asylum seekers; OurSay, an innovative crowdsourcing startup; and the School of Music at the Australian National University, also based in Canberra.
I made my first approach to CRS, and their initial response reflected the impact of xenophobic political campaigns and media stereotyping: They were reluctant to get involved. CRS President Geoff McPherson said concerns about resourcing the project were also paramount. But I persisted, pursuing meetings and arguing the merits of interventions in journalism education and public journalism approaches in tackling problematic reporting of marginalized communities. The proposal was for CRS to facilitate contact between student journalists and asylum seeker-refugee clients and provide advice on relevant policy and community programs, with the aim of minimizing any potential harm to vulnerable interviewees and assisting in the development of culturally intelligent reporting on a complex and often poorly reported issue.
Ultimately, just a fortnight before the project kicked off, CRS agreed to participate. “The judgment of the CRS board was that the potential return on this project far outweighed the risks and (we) decided to proceed,” McPherson said, reflecting on the project at its conclusion.
Collaborating with Australia’s Public Broadcaster
By contrast, the ABC was keen to be involved from the outset. They were even prepared to hand over two hours of airtime on their main Canberra radio station to the students. They agreed to allow the students — under the joint editorial supervision of the ABC, me and my tutors — to report, produce and present a radio special devoted to #ReportingRefugees which was scheduled for broadcast on November 27 last year — three months from the start of the project.
Jordie Kilby, ABC 666 Canberra content director, explained the network’s motivation for involvement: “We hoped for an insightful look at the local community of refugees living in the Canberra region; we wanted to build on our relationships with local refugees and asylum seekers and the community groups that help and support them. We also hoped the project would give us an opportunity to look at some future journalists and their ideas and work.”
Original Student Compositions Score #ReportingRefugees
By this stage, my ANU School of Music collaborator, Jonathan Powles, had agreed to offer his students the opportunity to produce original scores to accompany my journalism students’ stories. Apart from being an interesting cross-disciplinary education collaboration and a potentially rewarding creative merger for broadcaster, teachers and students alike, the provision of original music for the planned radio program meant that the ABC would also be able to podcast the show. (Copyright laws in Australia prevent the podcasting of commercial music broadcast on radio.)
Giving Citizens a Say
Finally, I decided to approach OurSay — a Melbourne startup which partners with media organizations, universities and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to crowdsource questions designed to address the “citizens’ agenda.” They jumped at the chance to be involved, and we launched the project’s OurSay page which asked the public to identify the questions they most wanted answered by a panel of experts on asylum seeker-refugee policy during the ABC broadcast.
OurSay’s CEO, Eyal Halamish, explained the role of the platform in the project: “Especially on such a contentious issue as that of refugees and asylum seekers, where the mainstream media latch onto sensationalist, short-termist news instead of taking a broader view, a social tool such as OurSay can help set the agenda more effectively and help express what the public feels about an issue, as sourced from their own questions and comments.” It worked like this: Over the course of a month, OurSay users were asked to submit the questions they most wanted put to the panel, and the top five questions were selected by popular vote on the site.
The #ReportingRefugees Curriculum
With these #ReportingRefugees building blocks in place, I was able to finalize the structure of the project within the syllabus. This was no easy task! Trying to balance learning outcomes and university assessment policies against real-world media deadlines is always tricky. But doing so on a project seeking to break new ground through multiple public journalism partnerships, on a complex and sensitive reporting assignment, proved to be the most challenging teaching project I’ve ever been involved with. Fortunately, it also emerged as the most rewarding experience of my journalism education career.
#ReportingRefugees became the foundation of the Advanced Broadcast Journalism unit (a class of 50 students) I convene at UC. I gave lectures on public journalism (featuring the work of professor Jay Rosen and others) and reporting trauma in the social media age. I also devoted a lecture to a live Skype interview with the ABC’s South East Asia correspondent, Zoe Daniel, whose beat includes the massive refugee camps and asylum seeker communities of that region.
The major assessment required students to work in reporting duos networked via loosely themed production units, on original, long-form audio or audio/video stories about refugees-asylum seekers (or policies and programs pertaining to them) which would compete for selection in the final radio program. Additionally, they had to produce images and text to accompany their stories for online publication. They were encouraged to speak with, not just about, refugees-asylum seekers and to explore personal stories and angles that the media had largely overlooked. Some reporting duos were assigned to refugee-asylum seeker families and community services facilitated by CRS, while others independently identified stories and sources.
Assessing Audience Engagement and Reflective Practice
Additionally, the students were required to maintain Twitter feeds (with a focus on community building around content, crowdsourcing and content distribution) as part of an “audience engagement” assessment. They also needed to participate in Facebook groups dedicated to editorial management. The final assessment involved publication of an academically grounded reflective practice blog which required the students to critically analyze the project, their involvement in it and their experiences of it, with reference to scholarly readings.
So, what did the students think of the project at the start? Many have admitted they were daunted by the theme and the workload when they first heard about it. One, Ewan Gilbert, conceded he was initially a tad perplexed: “I went into the assignment thinking it was all a bit over the top.” But Gilbert, now a cadet journalist with the ABC, clearly understood the project’s purpose in retrospect: “I think one of the biggest barriers people face when it comes to understanding refugee issues, is that most Australians have probably never met one,” he blogged. “Putting a face to an issue was so important to helping my understanding of the problems. You learn to treat the issue with humanity. You learn to see refugees as people and quite often extremely vulnerable people at that. If the whole refugee debate didn’t have any relevancy to me before, it certainly does now.”
Another student, Grace Keyworth, who was already working in the Canberra Press Gallery as a videographer when the project began, wrote that #ReportingRefugees was an important and timely intervention.
“I have been present at countless press conferences this year where the discussion of asylum seekers and refugees was completely dehumanized. There was a lot of talk of numbers, figures and ‘processing’ them like they’re a piece of meat, but hardly any of names, occupations or their reasons for leaving their countries,” she lamented. “It shows that as a society, we haven’t progressed beyond the racial discrimination towards immigrants that has plagued our country since federation.”
Opening Up Journalism — Critical Reflection via Social Media
The students were encouraged to openly reflect, through their social media activity, on their pre-conceived ideas about the refugee-asylum seeker issue and broadcast reporting conventions as they worked on their stories. They had to navigate very complex issues — such as balancing the need to avoid re-traumatizing refugee interviewees who’d survived torture against the need for editorial transparency and independence. Many encountered significant journalistic obstacles — from paternalism within some organizations which led (inappropriately) to one service provider refusing its refugee clients permission to speak, to nervous interviewees backing out of stories close to deadline. But in every case, these experiences delivered important learning outcomes — about the need for sensitivity and informed consent in reporting on refugees-asylum seekers, and about the need for journalistic perseverance and resilience when confronted with problems that threaten to derail stories in which many hours work have been invested.
There were logistical hurdles to mount, too. The collaborative editorial management of the project with the ABC meant that assessment deadlines had to be interwoven with ABC production deadlines. And multiple classroom visits by the busy ABC content director needed to be scheduled across four tutorials, which were timetabled for only three hours each per week.
Once the students had filed their rough-cut stories for assessment, the difficult process of selecting the content for broadcast and web upload commenced. I shortlisted stories from each tutorial with my tutors (Phil Cullen and Ginger Gorman, both of whom are experienced ABC broadcasters) but the ABC’s Jordie Kilby was responsible for selecting the final line-up of 10 stories. Meanwhile, we auditioned potential student presenters, and student executive producers attached to each tutorial began wrangling students to deliver final cut radio and web stories.
Putting #ReportingRefugees on Air
Ultimately, the students broadcast two hours of moving, human radio with a focus on personalized stories, situational reports on community programs such as a psychological service which treats traumatized child refugees, explanatory journalism that unpacked highly complex and sensitive themes, and an intelligent panel discussion, featuring the former Commonwealth Ombudsman and the UNHCR’s representative in Australia, that addressed the questions crowdsourced via OurSay in a way that allowed misconceptions to be powerfully countered.
As the program aired, students, listeners and ABC staff participated in a lively Twitter discussion triggered by the stories, aggregated by the #ReportingRefugees hashtag.
Additionally, the ABC website continues to host a bundle of additional student reports produced for the project, along with a podcast of the radio special (Hour 1 & Hour 2).
I’ll focus in more detail on the impact of the project on those involved, its reception by audiences, and the implications for journalism education in part two of this #ReportingRefugees series, but this quote from international student Linn Loken, sums up the value of the project and makes my own very substantial investment in time, energy and effort in its execution seem worthwhile:
“Knowing a few refugees now, this is not just a word to me anymore. When I hear the word REFUGEE mentioned, I think about the people I talked to during this project and I can see their faces.”
Julie Posetti is an award-winning journalist and journalism academic who lectures in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra, Australia. She’s been a national political correspondent, a regional news editor, a TV documentary reporter and presenter on radio and television with the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC. Her academic research centers on journalism and social media, on talk radio, public broadcasting, political reporting and broadcast coverage of Muslims post-9/11. She’s currently writing her PhD dissertion on ‘The Twitterisation of Journalism’ at the University of Wollongong. She blogs at Twitter. | <urn:uuid:f61e7599-bef1-454c-a451-f76bfbc6b76d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/how-social-media-collaboration-fueled-reports-on-australias-refugees019 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965146 | 2,728 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Valuing our human infrastructure
For years, politicians have talked about the under-funded public infrastructure like highways, water lines, sewer systems and basic transportation.
There is another infrastructure that is being under-funded in this city and state in particular: our “human infrastructure.”
In educational terms, we are regressing.
When I was growing up, my school district supplied the basics for a well-rounded education. I took what I learned and then expanded my knowledge at my local county-funded library, and went on to graduate with honors at Angelo State University.
Today’s children receive a poorer quality education because Texas no longer properly funds public schools K-12, and our public libraries are being starved of resources. A university education that cost me $4 a credit hour has now increased 10 times or more since I went to school.
While libraries are being destroyed by budget cuts, the need for a strong library is greater than ever. The population that our schools serve face greater challenges since so many come from homes where English is not the first language in the home.
Despite this challenge for children and adults, ESL class funding has been slashed. Dallas Independent School District has a 50 percent dropout rate, and GED class funding has been slashed.
The state of Texas has eliminated funding for the online databases for K-12 and DISD has reduced the number of school librarians.
Each of these reductions by other government agencies has increased the demand by citizens of Dallas and other Texas cities to use public libraries; however, the city of Dallas has reduced our library spending by approximately 40 percent over the last three budget years.
We would be lucky were our library merely “decimated,” i.e. reduced by a tenth. We now spend less money per capita on libraries than Fort Worth, Austin, Houston or San Antonio. Despite this lack of funding, demand at Dallas Public Libraries has increased.
In the 2006 bond program, the voters approved approximately $60 million in funding for eight new or replacement libraries; unfortunately, those buildings are now short staffed and short of materials.
Each branch except for Hampton Illinois has only a branch manager for 2 ½ days a week since the branch managers cover two branches. The branch manager for North Oak Cliff also is responsible for West Dallas. By dividing their time, they barely have time to manage their branch, let alone get to know their neighborhoods.
Many branches no longer have children’s librarians even though it is critical to encourage children to love reading if they hope to succeed in life. Texas prisons are filled with men who read at a fourth grade level.
Our city is filled with unemployed men and women who lack the necessary job skills to compete in our global economy. If we do not invest in our children, our future as a community is doomed to failure.
It does not matter how much money we give in tax breaks if our citizens cannot read the English language. Companies may locate here but employ suburbanites who have better funded schools and libraries.
The choice is clear: Either we as a city invest in our library system, our cultural institutions where children and adults learn, or we are known as a city with beautiful monuments and a high unemployment rate.
If you want to change this situation, I would encourage you to contact your City Council member and the mayor of Dallas. The proposed budget can still be changed. If you would like to help improve the Dallas Public Library System, you can join the Friends of the Dallas Public Library or your local branch Friends Group. If your branch does not have a Friends group, I can help you start a group.
Stan Aten, president, Hampton Illinois/Oak Lawn Library Friends
Republicans won’t help economy
Why did the president of Dallas chapter of Log Cabin Republicans give no evidence in his commentary (“Why I will vote Republican in 2012,” Dallas Voice, Sept. 2) as to why the GOP will help your pocketbook?
He couldn’t. They won’t. They never have.
Take stocks, the way many generate retirement, as well as current income:
DJIA up 223 percent during Clinton’s eight years, down 25 percent during the George W. Bush eight-year reign of error, and up only 46 percent during his daddy’s four-year term.
Jobs? More than 11 percent increase annualized during the Clinton presidency, under 1 percent when George W. Bush was in the White House.
How do I know the above information? I googled it.
Don’t be misled by Republicans who talk about being better on pocketbook issues. You only have to check with Google to know the Democrats have consistently done better.
Dave Gershner, Dallas
Is Schlein nuts?
In re: “Why I will vote Republican in 2012,” Dallas Voice, Sept. 2, by Rob Schlein.
Is this guy nuts? Bring back “don’t ask, don’t tell?” A federal defense of straight only marriage amendment? America got it wrong in 2008?
Hundreds of millions of Americans think not.
Can we not be trusted to vote intelligently? How about we all do away with votes and have a permanent Republican government and bring back President Bush to save us from the recession he caused.
What kind of gay man would dare show his face and tell us to vote for the most homophobic party in politics? He must be very stupid, or on the GOP payroll.
Nathaniel Ash, via the Internet
Rob Schlein’s article about why he will vote Republican (“Why I will vote Republican in 2012,” Dallas Voice, Sept. 2) reminds me of the argument that many slaves were better off in bondage than they were after they were freed.
No level of economic privilege can compensate for the loss of basic civil rights. I will not live as a second-class citizen and hide in the closet, even if it buys me a nicer car and gets me a higher paying job.
Even if I accepted Mr. Schlein’s premise that voting Republican would lead to higher economic opportunities for the average person — which I don’t — the price is still too high. That’s why I will vote Democrat, no matter who is running. And I hope you will too.
Mark Swaim, Dallas
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition September 9, 2011. | <urn:uuid:2fb2d809-1728-42ba-ab90-a1b4f2ee1501> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dallasvoice.com/tag/university-education | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962951 | 1,334 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Occupancies and revenues at hotels may be taking a hit from the recession, but that doesn't meanof mega hotels — those structures topping out at 1,000 rooms or more — has ground to a halt. In fact, there are 10 such hotels currently under construction or recently completed in the U.S., according to statistics provided by Lodging Econometrics, the Portsmouth, N.H.-based research firm.
The top 10 hotels under construction account for a whopping 14,215 rooms. Four of the Top 10 hotels are rising in Orlando, Fla., while two are under construction in Texas.
Is the rush to build these mega hotels foolhardy? Not at all, say those in the industry. There is a need for big hotels with a large amount of meeting space, according to James E. Burba, vice president and worldwide director of advisory services at Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (WATG), the Honolulu-based architectural, planning andfirm. “Generally speaking, there is a lack of choice for large conferences and large meetings nowadays, and these hotels are being built to serve that market,” he explained.
Such large-scale projects should not be surprising, say those in the industry, emphasizing that the hospitality sector remains cyclical. Hotel analysts note that mega hotel projects take years to plan, obtain financing and complete construction. Most of the properties now under construction were conceived in the 1997-1998 time period when money was available for such huge projects, said Robert Mandelbaum, director of research information services in the Atlanta office of The Hospitality Research Group, a division of San Francisco-based PKF Consulting.
At that point in time, the hotel industry was at its peak and the convention-style hotel segment was one of the best performing sectors. “The conventional wisdom was that it was the strongest segment and that it would continue to be in the future. Unfortunately, the risk and danger of forecasting is that you are speculating on future events,” Mandelbaum said. “There is a time gap between starting and completing construction of a large hotel and that leaves that much more room for error. I think some people now may be upset to open up a hotel in a year of recession, but that will change.”
Despite the current recession, Mandelbaum noted that these projects may in fact prove to be a smart move over the long haul. “Indications are that the demand is there and there will be a lack ofin the sector later in the decade,” Mandelbaum said. “The large hotel projects that open now or within the next couple of years may struggle a bit in the beginning, but from 2004 to 2009 or 2010 they will do very well because no new convention-style hotels are scheduled.”
Dave Kloeppel, CFO of Nashville, Tenn.-based Gaylord Entertainment Co., which is building two 1,000-plus room hotels, also is bullish on the outlook for the latest crop of mega resorts. “Despite the economic downturn, we continue to see strong demand for our convention hotels,” Kloeppel said. “Our core customers continue to have a need for the type of hotel product we offer — first-class hotel accommodations with a convention center attached.”
Although developers are forging ahead with construction, the timetable for at least one of the major hotels, the first phase of Walt Disney Co.'s Pop Century Resort, has been revised due to the economy. The opening of the first phase, originally set for spring 2002, has been temporarily delayed until business conditions improve, according to Disney executives. However, construction on the first phase will be completed and the opening will be rescheduled based on market demand.
Today's mega hotels under construction are certainly attention grabbing not only for their bold timing but also for their startling design. No longer sedate structures designed to attract staid conventioneers, today's grandiose hotels feature some of the most meticulous and whimsical designs ever seen. Disney's Pop Century Hotel, for instance, will offer pools shaped like a bowling pin, a flower, a computer, a crossword puzzle, a soda bottle and a highway sign.
Pop Century Hotel is a 5,760-room, two-phase project in Orlando, Fla., that will feature larger-than-life icons of pop culture. The resort will be a veritable time capsule of the 20th century, showcasing everything from yo-yos, tinker toys and computer games to beatniks and bobby soxers.
Outside, the 1,500-room Gaylord Opryland Texas resort and convention center is combining the grand architectural elements of a Texas mansion with the rustic feel of a working ranch.
Described as a destination where guests can experience the “full heritage” of the Lone Star State, the project will include a lush climate-controlled environment under glass that will showcase four acres of Texas vistas and landscapes. The state's rich history will be highlighted with a replica of the Governor's Mansion that will function as a five-room bed and breakfast.
In the state of Connecticut, The Mohegan Tribe will be the owner of the 34-story, 1,200-room Mohegan Sun Resort, which will offer 100,000 sq. ft. of convention space. The hotel, which is scheduled to open in April 2002, will be the second tallest structure in the state.
These are just a few of the 1,000-plus room hotels under construction or recently completed in the U.S. Below are some of the highlights of the top 10 hotel projects.
Disney's Pop Century, Orlando, 2,880 rooms
Filled with memorabilia and artifacts that allow guests to experience the eras of the last 100 years, Disney's Pop Century Resort will be a lodge-style development that will be built in two phases. The first phase is the 2,880-room “Legendary Years” of the 1900s to 1940s. The second phase, not yet under construction, is the 2,880-room “Classic Years” of the 1950s to 1990s. There will be themed pools in each phase.
When the entire resort is completed — and no definite date has been given — Disney's Pop Century Resort will add 5,760 guestrooms to the Walt Disney World resort.
Borgata Hotel & Casino, Atlantic City, N.J., 2,010 rooms
Boyd Gaming Corp. and MGM Mirage, both based in Las Vegas, are gambling that another large hotel is needed in Atlantic City, N.J., often called Las Vegas East.
Work is progressing on The Borgata, a $1 billion entertainment resort at the seaside resort's Renaissance Pointe. The 43-story project is on schedule and on budget for a mid-summer 2003 opening, officials said.
William S. Boyd, chairman and CEO of Boyd Gaming, which is developing The Borgata through a joint venture with MGM Mirage, said the company began conceptual work and development of the project in late 1998. “We are very excited about opening Atlantic City's first new casino resort in more than a decade,” he said. “I am pleased to see the entire project is moving ahead, on schedule and on budget.”
The Borgata will feature 2,010 hotel rooms, a 120,000 sq. ft. casino, 10 retail shops, 11 restaurants and a variety of entertainment venues.
Gaylord Opryland Texas, Grapevine, Texas, 1,500 rooms
You could call it a Taste of Texas. The Gaylord Opryland Texas, scheduled to open in summer 2004, will be a 1,500-room hotel and convention center featuring a nine-story oil derrick in homage to the history of the oil industry. Located in Grapevine, eight minutes from Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Gaylord Opryland Texas will feature four acres of Texas vistas and landscapes under a glass dome, as well as 400,000 sq. ft. of meeting, convention and exhibition space.
Gaylord Entertainment, the developer of the project, boasts the hotel's multi-sensory experience “will reflect Texas' proud heritage” and incorporate the hospitality and entertainment traditions that are the signature of Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, Tenn., the original Opryland hotel.
Gaylord Palms hotel & convention center, Kissimmee, Fla., 1,406 rooms
Not content with one mega hotel project, Gaylord Entertainment is constructing another in the Sunshine State. Outside Orlando in Kissimmee, Gaylord Entertainment is building the 2.2 million sq. ft. Gaylord Palms, includes design elements of the Florida Everglades, St. Augustine, South Beach and Key West, as well as other distinctive features of the Sunshine State. The project is one of the few with a very exact opening date and time: February 2 at 2:02 p.m.
The $385 million project will feature 1,406 guestrooms, including 106 suites and nine presidential suites. The resort also will include four acres of gardens under domed glass, along with several restaurants, lounges, shops, a spa and fitness center, two swimming pools, a wedding gazebo and entertainment venues. The hotel, on the southern end of International Drive about one mile from the main gate of the Walt Disney World Resort, will include a 178,000 sq. ft. exhibition hall, plus three ballrooms and meeting rooms.
Hilton Americas, Houston, Texas, 1,200 rooms
After decades of planning, the city of Houston has begun construction on the 1,200-room Hilton Americas adjacent to the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is being expanded. A pet project of Houston Mayor Lee P. Brown, the $285 million hotel and the $165 million convention center expansion are expected to be completed in the fall of 2003.
Houston-based Hines is the developer of the project and Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Hilton Hotels Corp. will be the operator. “The city's ability to finance the project at lower rates and still use the expertise of a private developer and operator has been key to the success of this project,” Brown said.
The mayor noted that the city has lacked enough hotel rooms near the convention center, and the combination of more hotel rooms and more exhibit space “will enable Houston to attract the larger and more lucrative conventions that have been bypassing our city in recent years.”
Bonds for the project will be repaid through revenues from the city's hotel occupancy tax, parking revenues and property tax rebates. The hotel and adjacent garage remain mortgage free.
Mohegan Sun Resort, Uncasville, Conn., 1,200 rooms
The eagerly awaited hotel at the Mohegan Sun Resort is the final phase of Project Sunburst, an undertaking that includes the recently opened Casino of the Sky featuring 82 table games, 2,564 slot machines, the Shops at Mohegan Sun, the 10,000-seat Mohegan Sun Arena and a 300-seat cabaret.
The nature-inspired design of Mohegan Sun is a collaborative effort by several of the world's most renowned architectural and design firms. New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates designed Mohegan Sun's dramatic exterior and hotel tower with inspiration and cultural direction from the Mohegan Tribe.
Situated in southeastern Connecticut on 240 acres along the Thames River, the hotel — scheduled for completion in April — will boast a spa, salon, full-service fitness center and more than 100,000 sq. ft. of high-tech and highly flexible meeting and function space, as well as the Northeast's largest ballroom.
Mohegan Sun, owned by The Mohegan Tribe, is being billed as one of the largest, most distinctive and spectacular gaming and entertainment destinations in the U.S.
Tuscany Suites, Las Vegas, 1,019 rooms
The 1,000-room Tuscany hotel-casino, which opened late last year, features an Italian theme aimed at “middle-class and upper-middle-class” convention visitors and leisure travelers. The hotel also boasts over-sized guestrooms and two-bedroom suites with television Internet access.
A project of CMH Real Estate Development, Tuscany Suites is located in Las Vegas on Flamingo Road, east of Koval Lane and west of Paradise Road, and features a 60,000 sq. ft. casino with 1,000 slot machines.
The first phase of the development, a 716-suite hotel with 10,000 sq. ft. of meeting space, is expected to be followed by additional hotel rooms and a casino. The project's cost is not being disclosed.
A variety of dining will be offered, including Palazzo Ristorante, the Piazza Lounge and the Cabana Bar & Grill, located next to a lagoon-style pool.
Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa, Hollywood, Fla., 1,000 rooms
In Hollywood, Fla. — between Fort Lauderdale and Miami — the new 1,000-room Westin Diplomat Resort & Spa promises to bring back the days of glamorous soirees and celebrity performances in lounges. White Plains, N.Y.-based Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. is developing the 39-story resort tower, which will be adjacent to an Italian-villa style country club, and will include a golf course, a European spa and a pristine beach.
Amenities at the Westin Diplomat, scheduled to open later this month, will include the Celebrity Room Lounge, which will be reminiscent of the original Diplomat Hotel that opened in 1958. The five-story, glass-enclosed lobby will feature an elaborate fountain along its entire length and views of an “infinity-edged” pool with a clear bottom to view the 240-foot lagoon pool below.
An enclosed pedestrian skywalk will connect the resort to a 217,000 sq. ft., state-of-the-art convention center with meeting rooms, ballrooms and a 50,000 sq. ft. Great Hall with exhibition space. The complex also will include the Diplomat Landing with 52,000 sq. ft. of retail space.
Royal Pacific Hotel, Orlando, 1,000 rooms
Royal Pacific Hotel, a project by New York-based Loews Hotels Corp., is the third on-site resort to be constructed at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando. It is scheduled to open in July. Guests will be able to step outside their rooms and head to Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure and the Universal CityWalk Orlando entertainment complex.
The 1,000-room resort will recreate the environment of the South Pacific, complete with waterfalls and lagoons. Amenities will include several restaurants, retail shops, a business center, fitness centers, meeting space and a 28,000 sq. ft. ballroom.
JW Marriott Hotel, 1,000 rooms
Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott International Inc. and Annapolis, Md.-based Thayer Hotel Investors are constructing the Grande Lakes Resort in Orlando, Florida, a property that will include a 1,000-room JW Marriott Hotel and a 584-room Ritz-Carlton hotel. The resort, which Marriott will manage under a long-term agreement, also will offer an 18-hole golf course designed by Greg Norman and a 40,000 sq. ft. luxury spa.
The $547 million Grande Lakes Resort, expected to open in the third quarter of 2003, is located on a 450-acre site. Thayer is leading a group of investors who are making a $65 million equity investment in the project. In addition to selling the underlying land to the Thayer venture for $31 million, Marriott also will provide development services during the two-year construction period.
Over the next few years, the U.S. hospitality industry is expected to experience a boom in mega hotel construction, noted Burba of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo, who stressed that the current economic outlook for the hospitality industry shouldn't affect the long-term aspirations of these ambitious hotel projects.
“Today's economic challenges won't have a direct impact on these projects,” Burba said. “It might impact some bookings, but the marketplace goes through periodic ups and downs. Just because we quickly went into a down cycle shouldn't change the fundamental reasons why these hotels are being built.
Mike Sheridan is a Houston-based writer. | <urn:uuid:c550adc8-c7db-4f26-bed6-a0945275be9a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nreionline.com/mag/real_estate_building_downturn | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939312 | 3,421 | 1.5 | 2 |
Painting of George Washington: $20 million. Two-headed calf: $2,000. Iconic industrial statue: $1.5 million. New Haven church records covering 138 years: $2,550. Documents of a disgraced governor: $500,000.
Those are just a sampling of the hundreds of expensive and interesting — or just freakin' weird — artifacts owned by or on loan to the state of Connecticut.
Some of those items, such as the $20 million Gilbert Stuart portrait of our first president, are insured through Lloyds of London. Others, like the Dusky Lorikeet, a stuffed bird, valued a bargain-basement $10 that's on display at the Old State House, don't require quite so much coverage.
The Washington painting "is probably the most valuable" item among all the artwork and artifacts on display at state buildings, according to Dean Nelson, administrator of the Museum of Connecticut History at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford.
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Stuart was commissioned by the state of Connecticut to paint Washington's portrait, and Nelson says the museum even has the correspondence between state officials and the artist. Stuart was paid a whopping $600 for the portrait in 1801, according to the records. Nelson says the estimate of the painting's current worth is based on recent sales of similar pieces.
Insuring all these heavy-duty artworks and historically significant artifacts doesn't come cheap.
Daria Cirish, the state's director of insurance and risk management, says the state has a special policy through Lloyds of London to cover the estimated $53.1 million worth of documents, paintings, rare books and maps and assorted other treasures in the State Library and the Museum of Connecticut History. The price of the annual insurance premium comes to a sweet $142,350.46, says Cirish.
The state's various insurance policies cover not only state property but also items from private or quasi-private organizations that are on loan to the state.
The two-headed calf and that Lorikeet (a swanky-looking parrot native to New Guinea) aren't technically owned by the state. Those bad boys, together with a whole bunch of other wacky and wild artifacts in the Old State House's "Museum of Curiosities," belong to the Old State House Association.
The association is a private group, created in the early 1990s when the Old State House was restored and taken over by the General Assembly. The board of the association was later merged with that of the Connecticut Historical Society, which now controls and cares for all that crazy and interesting stuff.
You may be wondering how and why all those peculiar artifacts end up on display in a state building. The answer is the Rev. Joseph Steward, a dude who started out by painting portraits of Connecticut politicians and business types in the late 1700s and early 1800s. (Some of those paintings are worth big bucks, including one of "General Greene and Major Shewbrick" with an estimated value of $75,000.)
Old State House spokesman Bill Bevacqua explains that Steward later decided to ask Connecticut sailors and world travelers and just plain folks to bring back oddities from their journeys, and then created a little museum to show off their donations.
Like the two-headed calf. And the "fetal pig with two heads." And the warthog, diamond putter, narwhale tusk, giraffe rib, "mummified hand," petrified mollusk, triceratops horn, three-horned goat skull, rufous-bellied niltava (an Asian bird), and "buffalo bones."
None of those somewhat peculiar contributions are worth all that much. But the restored "Hartford Fire Department Steam Pumper No. 1" certainly is. One insurance estimate put the value of that 1912 beauty at $150,000.
"It's one of only a handful of pieces of that kind of equipment from that era," says Richard Malley, head of research and collections at the Connecticut Historical Society. "There are just so few of them around."
The pumper, which was used by Hartford firemen right up to the 1930s, is actually owned by the historical society and is on loan to the Old State House.
Another prize piece the society has loaned to the state for display is an English-made iron helmet from the 1630s that was worn in Connecticut during the 1630s.
Then there's Mark Twain's very own bicycle, a high-wheeler that was donated to the society back in the 1920s by "a man who had worked for Twain for many, many years," Malley says.
It's the kind of machine made famous by Twain's essay about learning to ride a bike called "Taming the Bicycle." That's the one that ends: "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." | <urn:uuid:985631d8-6773-4e3b-bd01-504add460e6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mcall.com/topic/nm-ht34ncantiquities-20120814,0,4411582.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967766 | 1,039 | 1.71875 | 2 |
- (Photo: Desiring God via The Christian Post)
The role of single women in the mission field was debated this past weekend as Pastor John Piper sought to provide a biblical response to the somewhat contentious issue.
Piper, one of the most influential theologians in the country, acknowledged that the number of women in the mission field is huge and that they fill all kinds of missionary roles. All of those roles would be appropriate, he said, as long as they do not involve her in the role of an elder.
"What the Bible calls for is men to lead the church and lead the home. Men should be the elders (authoritative teachers) in the church and men should be the heads in their home," he started out saying at the Desiring God national conference in Minneapolis on Saturday.
"I don't think it would be appropriate for a woman to be an elder on a mission field," he contended.
"I don't think it's inappropriate for her to fill all kinds of missionary roles that don't involve her in the role of an elder. I don't think that would exclude evangelism, sharing her faith and hundreds of other kinds of support roles."
Piper, pastor for Preaching and Vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church, was on stage with four other speakers who were described as complementarians – those who see men and women as equal in dignity and worth but believe men and women have differing yet complementary roles.
Most of the speakers chose not to address the question "Would you describe for us the place of single women in global missions?" which left Piper to outline his thoughts on the appropriate role for women.
"Historically, the women who have, as singles especially, entered the mission force have been complementarians. They would have happily affirmed that when a church is formed here a man in this culture should take over, not a woman," the Minneapolis pastor said.
"I'm sure if a woman goes as a witness to her Lord, say as a nurse or teacher of English or just as an itinerant evangelist type, she's going to have these borderline, ambiguous experiences where 'I wonder if what I'm doing right now is an elder-like experience sharing the Gospel in this village with men and women,'" he continued.
"I think at those moments, we should cut that a lot of slack and seek to say demeanor and disposition and theological orientation at that moment will make a big difference in whether she crosses the line into doing something that the Bible would find disobedient."
Michael Oh, president and founder of Christ Bible Seminary in Nagoya, Japan, responded with somewhat of a pushback.
He noted that the best and most effective missionary he knows in Nagoya, is a female who is single. He also pointed out that the largest church in that same city was until recently led by a 94-year-old female pastor.
"We can complain about what you may see as something that's biblically wrong in terms of the role of women in missions but if you believe so strongly in that, you go ... you fill that pulpit, you stand up, you act on that conviction and you go," Oh said passionately.
"I think there are men and pastors and seminary-trained guys who need to step it up before you complain about a woman doing something else."
The Desiring God conference, held Sept. 23-25, focused on world evangelization under the theme "Finish the Mission: For the Joy of All Peoples; Bringing the Gospel to the Unreached and Unengaged."
Piper, who led the event, said the conference was a long time in coming as he felt a burden for the more than 6,000 people groups that remain without access to the Gospel.
Encouraging those who feel called to cross-cultural missions, Piper reminded them to focus on magnifying the greatness of God and on the saving power of Jesus Christ.
"Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. This is what the world needs to hear," he said in a follow-up video message Monday. "We have the best news in all the world." | <urn:uuid:72197e71-d541-421f-93d6-27bba9b0c985> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.christianpost.com/news/preachers-debate-role-of-single-women-in-global-missions-56651/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979221 | 845 | 1.65625 | 2 |
HEALING VOICES, a new documentary, needs our support
Posted Oct 05 2012 12:00am
It's very exciting to see a growing number of documentary films on mental health recovery, focusing on the current problems of the mental health care system, and the alternatives to the status quo. The latest such film is HEALING VOICES. But, making the film a reality takes money. Most of us are hard pressed these days to donate, but we can do so for as little as $1.00. Dollars add up.
HEALING VOICES is a feature-length documentary film examining mainstream mental healthcare and psychiatry in the United States.
See the trailer on the Kickstarter site and consider a donation to the cause.
Launched: Sep 6, 2012
WHAT IS THIS FILM ABOUT ?
Through the lens of individuals at various stages of their mental health story, HEALING VOICES will investigate topics including the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses, the role of trauma, pharmacology, alternatives to the Western one-size-fits-all medical model, and the power of storytelling in recovery.
WHO IS STEERING THE SHIP ?
The film is directed by PJ Moynihan of Digital Eyes Film, a US-based independent production company whose work in the field of mental health and recovery alternatives represents the growing body of evidence around progressive ways we as a society can support people experiencing mental health issues.
WHAT WAS THE GENESIS OF THIS PROJECT ?
Moynihan partnered with co-Producer and psychiatric survivor Oryx Cohen to create a short film for a mental health advocacy group that Cohen helped found, to be featured on Forbes.com. Accompanied by a written pitch featuring the personal account of Cohen's friend and fellow activist Will Hall, it became one of the most highly viewed stories on the entire Forbes site for several days running. This impassioned response suggested a critical need to raise the level of dialogue around mental health issues, and gave rise to the concept for a feature-length documentary. | <urn:uuid:48e9438b-b121-4d6c-afe9-b7e7d43d2afa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wellsphere.com/mental-health-article/healing-voices-a-new-documentary-needs-our-support/1754798 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941249 | 418 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Spotify’s mobile app has been available on Symbian/S60 phones (including most Nokia smartphones and some Sony Ericssons and Samsungs – see a full list of supported phones here) for a few weeks now, and I’ve had a chance to try it on my N78, and also compare the Nokia app to the iPhone version.
Spotify Mobile allows users to stream a huge catalogue of music over WiFi or 3G and, crucially, to store 3,333 tracks in offline playlists. The Spotify Mobile app is free to download, but you’ll need a Spotify Premium account to use it, which costs £9.99 a month.
Downloading and installing is a breeze. Just access m.spotify.com on your mobile browser, and you’ll automatically get the appropriate version. Once installed, just enter your Spotify username and password and the playlists from your desktop version of Spotify appear.
Various Symbian phones look to have different onscreen layouts – neccessary, of course, as the various phones have different sized screens. Read more…
Hal Graham, the first man to officially fly a rocketbelt, has died. The following is an edited extract from The Rocketbelt Caper:
Harold ‘Hal’ Graham was a 27-year-old science graduate from Buffalo who had been working for the Bell Aircraft Company as a test engineer for just over a year when he was selected to be the first man to pilot the rocketbelt – the iconic flying jetpack created by engineer Wendell Moore.
It would be Graham’s first taste of flying. He was not a registered pilot, and the only machine he had previous experience of driving was a car. He was, however, a rocketbelt fan, having grown up with Buck Rogers comics and Commando Cody serials. When Bell began to ask around for a volunteer to fly the rocketbelt he had no hesitation in applying for the job.
Graham’s first tethered flight took place in March 1961. These flights took place in a large aircraft hangar. The rocketbelt was suspended from the ceiling, and small amounts of thrust were used to generate moderate lift. 36 tethered flights later, it was time for the safety ropes to come off. Read more…
Newcastle Brown Ale will not longer be brewed on Tyneside, Scottish & Newcastle has announced, making you wonder what appreciation anyone at the brewing conglomerate has of its world famous brand. Brewing will be shifted to Tadcaster, but the drink will still be labelled ‘Newcastle’ and sold by the boatload around the world. What a sham.
In fact, the last true bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale was brewed in April 2005, after which S&N’s Tyne brewery was closed and demolished, and production was moved across the River Tyne to Gateshead, at the Federation Brewery. The ‘Fed’ will now close, with the loss of 63 jobs.
Given that Scottish & Newcastle has previously closed its Edinburgh brewery, you could be forgiven for suggesting that it should now just call itself ‘&’. Read more…
Taken: DVD Review
Liam Neeson is a former Government “preventer”, which basically means he can do karate and shoot some guns. But he has given that up to be closer to his estranged daughter, who is meant to be 17 but inexplicably acts like she’s 12, skipping around in pigtails, yelling “Daddy!” and cuddling ponies. Then she does what all 17-year-old girls dream of – she heads off with an equally gormless friend to Europe to follow hip young rock cobblers U2 on tour.
Unluckily, within minutes of arriving in an apparently lawless backwater known as Paris, France, the two girls are kidnapped by a people trafficking gang, chained to a mucky bed and shot full of heroin. Luckily, Liam knows a man who can work computers, and soon he has the name of the gang boss, and a private flight to Paris. Read more… | <urn:uuid:51442066-85ec-424a-aa18-6abd99efd2b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stuffbypaulbrown.com/2009/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970327 | 848 | 1.664063 | 2 |
(NBC NEWS) -- President Obama's nominee to head the CIA is defending the use of unmanned drones to kill terror suspects.
He goes before a Senate panel today, just as the administration decided to release a classified memo justifying their use.
Lawmakers say they've been asking for that memo for two years and think it's no coincidence they're getting it now - right before questioning the President's top counterterrorism advisor.
In written answers to the Senate Committee he'll face today, John Brennan says drone strikes on terror suspects are rare, but legal.
On the eve of his confirmation hearing to head the CIA, the White House released to lawmakers a classified memo justifying their use. "We have a high confidence that they're being done for the right reasons in the right way," said White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney.
"What qualifies as an imminent threat that would warrant taking a life without any kind of proceeding, or any kind of review, by anybody else?" said Prof. Stephen Saltzburg, GW University Law School.
At least 11 states are trying to limit the use of drones.
40 federal agencies use them to patrol the border, for search and rescue, and to monitor hostage situations like the kidnapping last week in Alabama. "It can be used to save lives." Gretchen West, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
But the question is whether it should it be used to kill Americans suspected of working with Al Qaeda overseas. "If you've joined the enemy overseas, you've joined the enemy, and we're going to fight the enemy overseas," said Rep. Mike Rogers, (R) Michigan.
Even some Democrats like Senator Ron Wyden say the memo doesn't adequately explain when the government has the legal right to kill an American.
Brennan will also face questions today on his role in controversial interrogations used by the Bush Administration. Brennan says he had concerns and objected. | <urn:uuid:e43e6f8c-2f74-45d6-8071-a014fe6ca6a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wlbz2.com/news/national/article/230503/45/Drone-strikes-legal | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96007 | 390 | 1.773438 | 2 |
7 Steps to a Snooze-Free Meditation
The temptation to doze off when you’re meditating can be overwhelming at times. Need some help? These smart tips from a seasoned practitioner will keep you focused and alert.
By Rolf Sovik
You can manage the urge to sleep with the practice of breath awareness.
1. Sit comfortably erect. Use a chair or a wall to support your spine if helpful.
2. Close your eyes and begin to follow the movements of your breathing. Stay with the breath for a few minutes, until your focus is steady.
3. Without losing your breath awareness, relax your body just as if you were settling it into bed.
4. Continue to follow your breath, maintaining your breath awareness as if it is virtually the only thing of importance in the universe.
5. Relax your mental effort. Maintain a steady hold on your breath, yet relax your body and mind.
6. Now begin to silently recite the mantra so-hum. Let that sound flow with each breath—so on the inhalation and hum on the exhalation. Sense that these sounds are gently blowing away layers of ashes that cover the embers of consciousness in you.
7. Continue for as long as you like. The urge to sleep may come and go, but do not let it dislodge your relaxed breath awareness. Gradually, as you become more rested, your sleepiness will diminish or even disappear. Over a number of sessions you can lengthen the time you sit.
Want more? Read Rolf’s feature, “Keeping the Zzzs’s Out of Meditation,” here.
Rolf Sovik, PsyD, is co-author of Yoga: Mastering the Basics and is the president of the Himalayan Institute. | <urn:uuid:02e9ff23-4b91-4863-b4e0-bab2200dfee9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/yoga-international-magazine/meditation-articles/7-steps-to-a-snooze-free-meditation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937906 | 373 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Friday, June 06, 2008
On Becoming A Woman
Blinky the Tree Frog found a fascinating 1950's book full of advice on how to become a woman. The writer, one Harold Shryock, M.A, M.D, obviously had lots of first-hand experience on the trials and tribulations of womanhood. Fascinating that becoming a woman seemed to require a handbook, because everything the book suggests is pretty much assumed to be automatic by today's conservatives and anti-feminists, whether of the religious type or the evolutionary psychology type.
Anyway, you really should read the excerpts Blinky has so kindly provided us. They start here, continue here and here.
There you will learn that "becoming a woman" means becoming an obedient helpmate for a man, one who is good at housekeeping and who keeps the gate in sex so that he doesn't have to restrain himself at all. A woman also knows that her goal in life is to become his housewife, but she should still get some quickly-acquired job qualification so that she can work before the marriage and perhaps later if needed. Of course such qualifications never bring much of a salary...
It's a fascinating trip into the sexual politics of the past, you might say. On the other hand, almost everything in those excerpts is advocated in this country somewhere, right this very moment. Abstinence is the responsibility of girls, for example. Women gentle and home-directed while men are strong and outer-directed? I was just told this by a liberal guy.
And then there is this wonderful excerpt on sex and why it should be women who provide blow jobs for men and not the other way round, really:
Apply that concept to the porn market and the whole idea of what constitutes sex these days. It holds up astonishingly well.
Link thanks to upyernoz. | <urn:uuid:a7a0aca6-940d-405f-a22c-0a4c717ed213> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2008/06/on-becoming-woman.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972745 | 385 | 1.671875 | 2 |
(CNSNews.com) – The number of American workers collecting federal disability insurance benefits hit yet another record high in October, according to the Social Security Administration.
This month 8,803,335 disabled workers are collecting benefits, up from the previous record of 8,786,049 set in September.
In February 2009, the first full month after President Barack Obama took office, there were 7,469,240 workers collecting federal disability insurance. Thus, so far in Obama’s term, the number of workers collecting disability has increased by 1,334,095. That works out to a net increase of about 29,646 per month (1,334,095 divided by 45 months), or an average increase of about 975 per day (1,334,095 divided by 1,369 days).
During George Bush’s eight years as president, the number of workers collecting federal disability insurance increased by 2,375,258, rising from 5,067,119 in February 2001 to 7,442,377 in January 2009. That equaled an average net increase of about 24,742 per month and 813 per day. In Bush’s second term alone, the number of workers on disability increased by 1,198,575, equaling an average monthly increase of about 24,970 and an average daily increase of about 820. | <urn:uuid:50ad7c68-c722-4995-90c2-7da8067a2fd1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prepperpodcast.com/8803335-record-disability-975-day-obama/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946918 | 282 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Wheeler: ITAR typically no barrier to releasing government open source code
Export control regulations shouldn't necessarily be an obstacle to the release of unclassified government open source code, said David Wheeler, a research staff member of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He spoke Oct. 15 during the Mil-OSS WG4 conference in Arlington, Va.
"If software is intended to be released to the public, you can ask the U.S. government department or agency to approve its public release," he said.
As a result, programmers wanting to release code back into open source communities need not necessarily get bogged down by applying for a license under the State Department-run International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
"If you determine that it's okay to release to the public, there is no more ITAR control," he added.
However, the review process to determine whether the code is releasable to the public isn't well defined, Wheeler acknowledged. "The law doesn't actually say. It just dumps the problem off onto the--the phrase they use is 'cognizant government official.'"
However, even that imprecise language still creates parameters, Wheeler said, since the official making the public release decision must be "cognizant" of the code--meaning that the decision of whether to release shouldn't be in the hands of officials too high within government hierarchy.
Reviewers can also look to the military control technologies list for export controls categories--and typically, the software that people release to the public as open source "is pretty obviously not a category."
When it comes to government utilization of open source, an objection brought up that the Antideficiency Act prohibits it is inaccurate, Wheeler also said.
The act, which first became law in 1884, prohibits the government from accepting "voluntary services," which on its face could seem to exclude open source code. But, the law distinguishes between "voluntary" services and "gratis" services and bans only the former. The law's prohibition on voluntary services comes from a 19th century practice whereby individuals would volunteer their services to the federal government, and then present a bill for them. But, if the government gains agreement ahead of time that a service won't be invoiced--i.e., is gratis--the Antideficiency Act exclusion no longer applies, Wheeler said.
As for what constitutes agreement ahead of time that code is gratis, Wheeler said it's a reasonable supposition that if people normally download code from a source and don't get charged for it, "it would be bizarre to think that the government couldn't do the same thing." Wheeler, who hastened to add he isn't an attorney, noted that misinterpretation, rather disagreement over what constitutes agreement ahead of time, is the typical Antideficiency Act-related obstacle.
Voluntary "has this weird technical meaning, dating from the 1800s," he added.
- download Wheeler's presentation from the Mil-OSS WG4 conference--filled with many useful references (.pdf)
DISA strategic plan calls for expanding Forge.mil capabilities
Baker: VistA refactoring will be done in the open
Forge.mil investigates integration with GitHub
SASC Accumulo language pro-open source, say proponents | <urn:uuid:bbe9f2d2-1ecc-4647-a39b-dc638ef7d5b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/wheeler-itar-typically-no-barrier-releasing-government-open-source-code/2012-10-17 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954607 | 675 | 1.507813 | 2 |
We’ll start with a quick introduction to the technology, practice, and applications of synthetic biology. Next, we’ll detail the BioFAB, the world-wide cooperative effort at a first production facility for making BioBrick parts. Then, a new legal framework supporting open source DNA parts. Finally, a discussion of opportunities in the law as synthetic biology goes forward.
Drew Endy is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He previously helped set up the Department of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as President of the BioBricks Foundation, a not-for-profit organization promoting open access to biological technologies, and has cofounded two biotechnology companies. Esquire magazine recently named Drew one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Drew gained his doctorate in biochemical engineering from Dartmouth College and carried out postdoctoral research at University of Texas and University of Wisconsin.
Jason M. Schultz is the Acting Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic and a clinical instructor at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Before joining Boalt Hall as a faculty member in the Samuelson Clinic, he was a Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading digital rights groups in the world. Prior to EFF, he practiced intellectual property law at the firm of Fish & Richardson, P.C. and served as a clerk to the Honorable D. Lowell Jensen of the Northern District of California. While a student at Boalt Hall, he managed the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and interned for the Honorable Ronald M. Whyte of the Northern District of California.
Jennifer Lynch is the Clinic Fellow and a supervising attorney at the Samuelson Law, Technology, & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law. At the Clinic, Jennifer represents clients and supervises students in a wide range of intellectual property and privacy matters. Prior to her work with the Clinic, Jennifer clerked for the Honorable A. Howard Matz in the United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles and was an associate practicing litigation at Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco. | <urn:uuid:2570a800-6584-45bf-a29c-03ecfb081711> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/public/schedule/detail/5597 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936591 | 449 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Dave Organ wrote:
how serious are you about teaching?
Do you show up for class and say "OK, gang, what do you want to learn today? OK, let's try that."
Do you spend hours a few days before class studying material, writing and revising lesson plans, and rehearse a class until it shines?
I am not the schools instructor, but am almost always paired up with a lower ranked student. I start by going through the basic techniques, and usually find something that needs work. It could be off balancing, timing etc. If I find the student is solid in the basics, I would ask them what they want to go over. They could pick a technique, and I would give them fine points to work on, and show them variations for different scenarios, or I would show them how certain techniques are linked just in case one would fail to work.
In the Tomiki Aikido that I learn, each of the basic techniques are made up of different parts that can be interchanged, making the basic 17 techniques turn into an endless amount of material to cover.
I never come to class with a lesson plan, I just adapt to the person I'm training. | <urn:uuid:3ca428fa-ea43-480e-a416-875b6087e314> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/showpost.php?p=102306&postcount=34 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973057 | 247 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Not Stopping for Pedestrians in Superior Crosswalks? It Could Cost You!
Did you know it’s a LAW that you as a driver are required to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk? Or, do you know this, but choose not to stop anyway? The Superior Police Department has been receiving numerous complaints of motorists failing to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks–and is warning residents that failure to stop could be costly.To increase awareness, Deputy Chief Matt Markon of the Superior Police Department has issued this statement:
The Superior Police Department has been making an effort to increase enforcement of vehicles not stopping for pedestrians. We’ve received a lot of complaints and we’re stepping up enforcement to address those violations. We’ve assigned officers to watch corners where there are a lot of pedestrians and issue citations to drivers who do not stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. We’ve even used our own officers to be the pedestrians in this enforcement effort. Drivers are required to stop for pedestrians who are in the crosswalk. The fine for not stopping for someone at an uncontrolled intersection (one with no traffic signals) is $326.50 and 4 demerit points. Drivers should be aware that Superior PD officers are on the lookout for these violations and they will issue citations.
To ensure a clean driving record and more money in your pocket, always look for pedestrians when approaching a crosswalk! It’s safer for those people trying to cross the street, and it’s not worth the fine! | <urn:uuid:e53fc43e-8f53-4a18-aa8b-5e785e698c2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mix108.com/not-stopping-for-pedestrians-in-superior-crosswalks-it-could-cost-you/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958944 | 315 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Do your upcoming travel plans include your dog? If so, do you know which vehicle safety product is right for your four-legged travel companion? Prevent accidents caused by unrestrained pets with the right vehicle safety product.
Which of the following categories best describes your pet?
TOY BREEDS or small dogs weighing less than 20 pounds
Toy breeds and small dogs pose a special concern because of their diminutive size. Vehicle interiors offer ample room for unrestrained toy breeds to get into all sorts of potential mischief, including access to gas and brake pedals. How often have you seen small dogs peering from dashboards or rear windows? While it may seem cute, this type of free access is extremely dangerous for both driver and pet.
Solution: Safety seats
Solvit Pet Booster Seats are perfectly designed for small dogs. Pet safety, comfort, and style go hand in hand with these easy-to-install safety seats. Install safety seats by strapping securely to your car seat, and your precious canine cargo has First Class seating for car trips, near or far.
MEDIUM to large size dogs
Most dogs fall under this category, but pet vehicle safety is often overlooked for these dogs. Just like human passengers, your canine companion should be properly restrained during travel to ensure a safe and comfortable trip.
Solution: Harness-style safety restraints
Harness-style pet restraints are versatile devices that attach easily to your car safety belt for secure installation. But don't be fooled by appearance. These harnesses may look restrictive, but they allow your pet to sit, stand or lay in comfort. For example, the
Safety Harness is available in a fleece-lined deluxe model for soft, padded comfort. The
Pet Vehicle Seat Restraint is designed for vehicle safety and doubles as a conventional harness for hassle-free transition for dogs on the go.
RESTLESS or nervous dogs
Not all pets make good travel companions. Fearful or anxious dogs may exhibit more pronounced behavior when the car is in motion. Restless behavior such as pacing or comfort-seeking behavior in a moving vehicle creates extremely dangerous conditions. A sudden stop or a sharp turn can result in a serious accident.
There's no need to exclude nervous pets from your traveling plans.
Crates and cages are perfect for nervous or anxious travelers. As den animals, dogs have a natural affinity to enclosures that provide a sense of security. A properly sized crate offers the den-like security your dog desires in times of stress. The
Pet Den Crates are excellent for traveling allowing for plenty of ventilation and comfort. For additional traveling peace-of-mind, give your pet our
Ultra-Calm® Biscuits before you head out. | <urn:uuid:ab98e24a-58cf-4d6e-a158-6f69110ac655> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.drsfostersmith.com/pic/article.cfm?c=6016&articleid=1894&d=155&category=204 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937536 | 557 | 1.578125 | 2 |
The chance to compare experiences in caring for HIV/AIDS patients brought four nurses from Nigeria to Baltimore for a recent two-week visit sponsored by the Global Health Office in the School of Nursing.
The nurses are program officers at the Institute of Human Virology, Nigeria (IHVN), where they oversee key areas of HIV care and support under the leadership of Emilia Iwu, RN, MS, senior nursing advisor for IHVN and a School of Nursing assistant professor. The goal of the Baltimore visit was to help the nurses develop strategies to carry out what is feasible in Nigeria despite differences between clinical settings in the U.S. and those in sub-Saharan Africa.
The program was part of a collaboration among IHVN, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the School's Institute of Human Virology (IHV), and the University of Maryland School of Nursing. A group of Nigerian nurses also visited the School of Nursing last November, and the School sent six students to Nigeria in the summer.
A shortage of human resources is a "critical roadblock" in delivering HIV/AIDS care in Nigeria, says Jeffrey Johnson, PhD, professor at the School of Nursing and director of the Global Health Office, which seeks to build nursing capacity through its international exchange program. "We hope to strengthen the role of nurses and the respect they are given," Johnson says.
The four Nigerian nurses who visited Baltimore from Feb. 22 to March 8 noted low U.S. ratios of patients to caregivers compared with the ratios in places such as the Nigerian capital of Abuja, where one nurse may be expected to care for as many as 20 babies.
They also talked about differences between the role of nurses in their nation and in the U.S. "The [U.S.] nurse practitioner sees patients, assesses them, and diagnoses them," said Asabe Gomwalk, RN/RM, DIP NURSING EDUC, Bsc. "Only physicians do this in Nigeria."
Janet D. Allan, PhD, RN, FAAN, School of Nursing dean, spoke with the Nigerian nurses, as did William Blattner, MD, professor in the School of Medicine and director of the IHV's Epidemiology and Prevention Division. Experts on subjects such as palliative care also met with the nurses.
The Nigerians also observed infectious disease and pediatric care at the University of Maryland Medical Center, conferred with nurses at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and visited a Johns Hopkins University clinic.
At the VA's outpatient infectious disease clinic, they met with Karen Cervino, RN, MS, ACRN, to discuss ways to help HIV/AIDS patients adhere to their medications.
Halima Ibrahim, RN/RM/PHN/CHO, said that HIV/AIDS patients in Baltimore, some of whom keep a diary on their experience, generally "take much more responsibility for their own health" than do Nigerian patients.
Edwina Mang, RM/RN, RN (Pead.), ADHSSM, BSc NAdmin, concluded that Baltimore residents get less help at home. "In the area of family engagement, we're actually doing better in that regard," she said.
While sitting in on a support session for patients, offered by the IHV's JACQUES Initiative, Emily Umaru, RN/RM, PHN, Bsc Social Work and Administration, observed the positive group dynamics created when people with HIV/AIDS accept their status and mix with others. "Coming together gives them hope," she said. | <urn:uuid:0b1ec5d9-08c2-4c83-b26f-3a3178242ac5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.umaryland.edu/news/index.html?ViewStatus=FullArticle&articleDetail=9179 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965526 | 732 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Scanlon, on 30 March 2012 - 05:15 AM, said:
What is the meaning In the jade falcon banner (The Jade Falcon clutching the katana with what looks to me like a letter D). It's probably not a D though just wondering what that is/means.
after a brief investigation i have determined its a rank of some kind, I think..
The falcon cluching a katana is part of a tale of or clans first kahn i will sum it up as best as i can
Elizabeth Hazen was the first person to train a jade falcon a genetic enginerd preditor made to hunt a flying snake in the kerensky cluster she named it turkana.
Shortly after turkanas death elizabeth and general dehaviler were sent with infantry to subdue a rebellion on the planet eden during the combat her mech went down and she ejected and was hit in the head. When she came too dehavilers mech went down to inferno rounds and as he ejected he was struck by one and burned to death. The shock of a close friend dying in such a way so soon after the death of her beloved falcon broke Elizabeth and she fled into the jungle.
There as she was feeling sorry for herself turkana appered to her and scolded her once strong mistress for what she had become and commanede her to go back and fight. Elizabeth responded with the fact she had no weapons to which the falcon replied "have you not learned that a warrior needs no other weapon but herself mechs and swords are extensions of the weapon you already are" elizabeth heartend returned to the battle with just her hands determend to end the rebellion as she came upon the enemy a screach filled the air and turkana dropped dehavilers katana to her mistress
While this is not the whole tail that appers in the jade falcon book it is the core with a few bits cut | <urn:uuid:23ace394-1d73-49b9-8e0f-9323e5e0faec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/1624-clan-jade-falcon-hq-ironhold/page__st__180__p__186044 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97841 | 409 | 1.671875 | 2 |
By Janice Lloyd, USA TODAY
In what might be a counterintuitive take on crowded emergency rooms, patients say the time spent waiting is not their top concern, according to a customer satisfaction survey last year of 1.4 million patients.
Though decreasing the length of the visit would improve overall customer satisfaction, the report says, patients' top priorities are how well they were kept informed about delays, how well the staff cared about them as people and how well their pain was controlled. It also mattered if the waiting room was comfortable.
The study was done by Press Ganey, a consultant for more than 10,000 health care facilities (more than 40% of the USA's hospitals). For the fifth straight year, customer satisfaction showed a slight increase, to 83.7% from 83.1% in 2007.
The bad news in the report: The average time spent for each visit to an emergency room is 4 hours and 3 minutes, a two-minute decline from 2007. Lengthy stays also were highlighted in April by the Government Accountability Office, which found some waits for emergent patients — those who should see a doctor in one to 14 minutes — were more than twice as long as they should be.
The strain on emergency departments grew from 1996 to 2006 as 32% more patients sought care while the number of centers dropped from 4,019 to 3,833. Yet the increase in the number of patients seeking care shows the value Americans put on being treated in emergency rooms, says Nicholas Jouriles, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.
"What I take away from the Press Ganey report is that people have to wait longer than they should, but they love the ER and want it to be an option in their health care," Jouriles says.
Customer satisfaction declines the longer a patient waits: It's 89.2% for waits of less than an hour, 81.4% for three to four hours, and 75.1% for six or more hours.
The report calls for addressing crowding in general and decreasing "boarding" in the emergency rooms and getting patients to the appropriate floor faster. (Boarders are patients waiting in the ER for admission to the hospital.) The GAO made the same recommendation, citing "competition between hospital admissions from the emergency department and scheduled admissions — for example, for elective surgeries, which may be more profitable." Spreading out elective surgeries would help get boarders admitted during peak hours.
"It is a difficult change, but the concept is a good one," says Jim Scheulen, chief administrative officer of
Jouriles says boarders are the biggest problems facing ERs, not seekers of non-urgent care, who account for only 12% of ER patients. "Even though boarding occurs in the emergency department, it is really a systemwide problem. If we can solve the problem of boarding, we'll fix the whole health care system."
READERS: If you've ever been to the emergency room, what was your experience like? Do you agree that waiting isn't a top concern?
Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more. | <urn:uuid:ee0bb853-a121-4d99-a09a-3f89daa10270> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-06-22-emergency-rooms_N.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97 | 677 | 1.773438 | 2 |
CIA corners the market on surplus weapons
By Bruce Edwards
STAFF WRITER | February 07,2013
Century International Arms didn’t start out buying and selling surplus weapons that governments were happy to unload for a price.
The company that morphed into North America’s largest surplus firearms dealer started off innocently enough selling used office equipment. In 1961, William Sucher was selling used office equipment in Montreal when, as the story goes, one of his customers traded him a few military rifles for office equipment.
The deal was so profitable that Sucher, with the help of his brother-in-law Manny Weigensberg, never looked back and turned their sights on rounding up surplus weapons from around the world. Sucher and Weigensberg passed away some time ago.
According to the Secretary of State’s office, the company is now owned by four members of the Sucher family.
The company operates a manufacturing and distribution facility in the Arrowhead Industrial Park in Georgia with its corporate headquarters in Delray Beach, Fla.
In addition to surplus weapons, Century also sells new firearms, knives, swords, ammunition, scopes and accessories.
The company is licensed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as a manufacturer and importer of firearms and destructive devices.
Tim Smith, executive director of the Franklin County Industrial Development Corp., said the company keeps to itself.
“We do not have much contact with them,” Smith said. “We’ve tried but not with a lot of luck.”
Smith said at one time Century was located in a former railroad building in St. Albans. He said the company consolidated its operations several years ago to a 100,000-square-foot building in a private industrial park in Georgia.
Since the school shootings in Connecticut, the focus of gun control advocates has been to ban the sale of military-style semiautomatic weapons and large capacity magazines.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering legislation to curb gun violence, including restrictions on military style semiautomatic weapons and large magazines or clips. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., is the the committe’s chairman.
Leahy, Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt.,and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., were asked whether they were troubled, especially in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, that the largest distributor of semiautomatic weapons in the country is doing business in Vermont.
They issued a joint statement saying that the company has a right to conduct business as long as it’s in compliance with the law.
“They are engaged in a lawful business just as others are that are involved in firearms commerce, employing many Vermonters,” the emailed statement read. “Like all federal firearms licensees, they are subject to oversight by several federal agencies, including the State Department and ATF, and that is appropriate. Congress currently is considering possible changes to address gun violence, and we welcome this debate. And if Congress approves new steps to address gun violence, we are confident that Vermont businesses would comply with them.”
Company officials declined to be interviewed for this story but Brady Toensing, a lawyer who represents the company, provided emailed answers to several questions submitted by the Rutland Herald.
Toensing’s response was that the company supports proposals that can prevent future tragedies but not restrictions on the sale of firearms.
“Common sense dictates the focus should be on tackling the problem of the nation’s woefully inadequate mental health system and creating a legal structure and reporting system that would keep firearms out of the hands of mentally unstable people,” said Toensing, a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm of diGenova & Toensing.
“But an effective solution like this appears to be too difficult of a challenge in the current atmosphere in Washington,” he added. “Instead, the focus has been on draconian and ineffective proposals that will deprive law-abiding citizens of their constitutional rights without solving the problem or diminishing the likelihood of future tragedies.”
Century International Arms has kept a low profile over the years but its name surfaces in the news from time to time. During the 1980s, Century’s guns were traced to the Contras in Nicaragua. In 1998, Century was involved in a dispute with a Russian arms supplier over the purchase of carbines and revolvers.
Century refused payment accusing the Russian company of selling substandard weapons. However, according to news reports, The International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Zurich awarded the Russian company $2.5 million.
In 2008, Century acquired surplus World War II weapons that the U.S. government had donated to Guatemala, with the provision that Guatemala could not transfer or sell the firearms without the OK of the U.S. Government, according to a 2011 story in The Palm Beach Post. The Post, citing cables obtained from WikiLeaks, reported that Century acquired the surplus arms from Guatemala without U.S. approval with the help of an Israeli middleman.
More recently, Century’s semiautomatic version of the WASR-10, a Romanian version of the legendary AK-47, have been smuggled into Mexico through straw buyers, ending up in the hands of drug gangs, The Center for Public Integrity reported in 2011.
But Toensing defended the company’s record saying it complies with all federal, state and local laws and does not sell firearms to Mexico.
“Century ships firearms to licensed firearms dealers in the United States and expects those firearms will be sold in compliance with the law,” he said. “U.S. law strictly forbids the selling or transfer of firearms to anyone in Mexico without an approval from the U.S. Department of State and the Government of Mexico. Century also expects that individuals who break these laws will be found, prosecuted and punished.”
The company declined to release any sales figures or the percentage of semiautomatic weapons sales.
(According to the federal figures, 38,048 Romanian rifles were imported into the U.S. in 2011 by all firearms dealers. Brazil was the largest supplier of rifles to the U.S. with imports totalling 381,097)
Toensing pointed out that the company is a significant economic contributor to the economy of Franklin County, employing nearly 200 people, plus supporting jobs doing business with its Vermont vendors.
“In all, Century contributes more than 11 million dollars a year to the economy of Vermont in wages and benefits,” he said. “Additionally, Century has paid almost $10 million in the last two years in excise taxes that are used by the federal government to restore, conserve, and manage wildlife habitat. | <urn:uuid:7bd7904b-b683-4d9d-be63-5ca6a8fce255> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20130207/BUSINESS03/702079903/0/PARTNERS | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959814 | 1,413 | 1.664063 | 2 |
A new report ranks Logan International Airport as the ninth most dangerous airports in the country.
The ranking from Travel and Leisure magazine is based on the number of runway incidents – 63 between 2006 and 2010, according to the magazine, which examined the 35 busiest airports in the U.S.
FOX Undercover did its own investigation of Federal Aviation Administration data several years ago, when Logan led the country in close calls on the runway.
In that investigation, air traffic controller Kevin Winn recalled telling colleague Jim Sawyer about a close call in 2005.
“I kind of nudged Jimmy, he was standing right beside me, I said, ‘Hey Jimmy, that guy's not stopping,’” Winn said.
It was a potential disaster only seconds away, since a JetBlue aircraft packed with passengers had already been cleared for takeoff on the runway that a FedEx plane was crossing.
“The aircraft that was departing would have taken the heavy jet that was crossing right in mid-section, going right over him,” said Sawyer.
In another 2005 incident, an Aer Lingus Airbus was cleared for takeoff on one runway but five seconds later, a US Airways jet was cleared for a takeoff on an intersecting runway.
Less than 200 feet separated the planes when they took off, something that appeared to catch the air traffic controller by surprise, according to radio recordings obtained by FOX Undercover.
“Probably no need to say so for US Air 1170 but just for the record, there was a near miss there on take off,” the US Airways pilot said.
“Ah, okay,” the air traffic controller replied.
“I concur,” the other pilot said.
The FAA is dismissing the new airport rankings, saying in a statement that, “Over the past decade the aviation community has successfully worked together to reduce the number of serious runway incursions by more than 90 percent. In 2010, three serious runway incidents involved commercial aircraft during millions of commercial operations. The FAA believes the total number of incidents is too small compared to the number of operations to provide any useful comparison of airport safety.”
Topping the magazine’s list of most dangerous airports was Chicago’s O’Hare airport, followed by Cleveland’s and Los Angeles’ airports. | <urn:uuid:d4a70f9f-7302-46d6-86d9-45834f67e266> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/17770315/logan-ranked-9th-most-dangerous-airport-in-the-country | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9683 | 480 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Sculpture was the target of "Kony" graffiti on a night of protests.
Minneapolis' iconic "Spoonbridge and Cherry" sculpture survived a weekend graffiti attack and is sparkling again.
The word "Kony," referring to a Ugandan guerrilla/war criminal, was spray-painted on the popular sculpture, a centerpiece of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, early Saturday.
By midday Monday the graffiti was removed but the incident is still being investigated.
Walker Art Center, which trains 24-hour surveillance cameras on the Sculpture Garden, observed people entering the garden about 1:30 a.m. Saturday. Security staff members notified Minneapolis police, who arrived within 10 minutes.
"The police met a couple of people leaving" the garden, said Walker spokesperson Ryan French. However, the Walker didn't realize that the sculpture had been vandalized until dawn on Saturday.
Last weekend a grass-roots "Kony 2012 Cover the Night" campaign encouraged an international display of posters, stickers and murals calling attention to Joseph Kony, leader of a Ugandan guerrilla group accused of abducting children and forcing them to become sex slaves and child soldiers. He has been indicted for war crimes but remains at large. A film about his activities, "Invisible Children," became a YouTube sensation this spring.
The vandalism shocked Kony protester Gawolo Kpissay, a Liberian-born Minneapolis artist who helped distribute anti-Kony fliers along Lake Street and in Uptown Friday night.
"I think that it's super-disrespectful to deface someone's art," said Kpissay, who has participated in Walker programs. When he learned of the vandalism, he went to the Walker to apologize Sunday even though his group had nothing to do with it, he said.
Elsewhere, turnout for the "Cover the Night" campaign was minimal and the effort "flopped in trying to turn that [Internet sensation] into real-world actions," Britain's Guardian reported.
The Walker did not receive any Kony-related protest information, French said. "It could just be someone who was riding along with the activities elsewhere in the city. We're leaving it up to the police to discover."
Sgt. Bill Palmer, Minneapolis police spokesman, had no comment Monday.
French said the Walker is evaluating its security options. "We think we have a good system with the Minneapolis Park Police and the Minneapolis Police Department, but we're certainly looking into whether there are other things we could do to make things safer.
"I'm shocked that people would deface such a beloved object," he added. "Fortunately, we have a great crew and are really happy that it's cleaning up so well." | <urn:uuid:64320f51-e82e-44ba-a39f-b060c3b3e632> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/stageandarts/148614945.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969215 | 561 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Amazing Insight Alpha
Brand: Creative Crafthouse
Types: Magic Items, Dave Janelle
Dimensions: 4 in x 1.1 in x 0.13 in / 10.2 cm x 2.8 cm x 0.3 cm
Have someone select any letter of the alphabet; A-Z. By having him simply sort through the 7 wood cards and selecting only those cards that contain the chosen number (turning them upside down so that you have no clues), then you will quickly be able to tell him the chosen letter.
This is an idea I got from Maurice Kraitchik's 1942 book on titled Mathematical Recreations. I have made a couple other related window cards, Amazing Insight 16, and Amazing Insight 99. They can be great fun and are quite astounding in how they work. I recommend you take the time to watch the short video where you will get a good idea.
On this set there are 7 letter cards and a header card. They are each 4" x 1.3" made from 1/8" thick alder. They are precision made in their Florida shop and the text is all deeply laser engraved. | <urn:uuid:6f0bb5bc-51e8-4460-a987-26fde8e24970> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.puzzlemaster.ca/browse/inventors/6593-amazing-insight-alpha | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94488 | 235 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Learning from Chobi Mela
Dhaka, Bangladesh and we return to Chobi Mela, the biannual international photography festival now in its seventh edition. Dhaka’s noise and pollution slams into us as we emerge from the airport. It is an overwhelming chaos. It takes over three hours to get out of the airport and into our humble hotel.
Then we quickly enter the Chobi Mela world, a world of photographic poetics and a deep conviction that this is the visual age and these are the visions.
The photograph has become a universal language of storytelling. It has not been diminished in the digital age it has been elevated. It has left the confines of commercial publications and Kodak moments to be the communication tool of choice for millions of people around the world. As with the written word it is rapidly becoming both a tool for common expression and a tool for powerful ideas. In a seminar on the future of picture editing, host and founder Shahidul Alam, stated: “I am not in love with photography, I am in love with what photography can do”. At Chobi Mela you realize that the photograph can do a lot.
We live in an age within which visual literacy may very well transcend literacy of the word. There is no need to translate a photograph. Photographs contain both an inherent narrative and the ability to interpret. This makes the medium a medium of dialog, unlike film and television with their tightly controlled narrative forms. I watch a documentary and there is no room for me. I study a series of photographs and my head spins with questions and thinking. We have seen images from African, Chinese, Nepalese and Bangladeshi photographers, each telling a story that opens the photographic dialog. Shahidul Alam fuels the dialog constantly with questions, provocations and a quietly incessant voice that encourages us to do the same. As the festival continues into day three the city erupts into riots over a war crimes trial. It brings home the need for dialog in a visceral and important way.
In the televisual age we were glued to the screen, in the digital age we are sharing photographic stories. Listening to Patrick Witty, the brilliant photo editor of Time magazine, you can sense the tension between mass commercial publication and stories freed from the constraints of commercial media. His coverage of Syria is extraordinary yet it sits within the context of social media and the multiple other stories that emanate from Syria currently. This is the new reality: plurality of narrative. The competition between mass commercial media and the swarm of social media could be destructive or brilliant and probably both. What is very clear at Chobi Mela VII is that the business of photography may be in transition and photographers may be economically vulnerable but the art of photography is entering its most powerful phase. A picture is worth far more than a thousand words and as the digital age reveals the complexity of the world we can no longer hide behind television’s simplification. No matter who we are and what work we do we need to understand other people, places and ideas deeper and more profoundly than ever before. The photographers at Chobi Mela are fully signed up for that work. | <urn:uuid:e2545bf4-f74a-4c05-8d1f-da06d011b5e2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.studioriley.com/learning-from-chobi-mela/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955889 | 647 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Sarah Morin - Youth Experience Manager aka Kid Wrangler
Claire Ellis and Marin Bray are 3rd year youth volunteers at Conner Prairie. I often schedule these close friends to work at the same post – their enthusiasm and creativity multiples exponentially when together. Collectively, they have donated 1000 hours to Conner Prairie.
We invite our more mature and capable youth, like Marin and Claire, to portray characters along the Underground Railroad during our Follow the North Star
(FNS)program. They help or hinder guests who take on the role of escaping slaves. The program is intense and brings up an ugly side of American history. This is exactly why we choose to involve our kids. Many of our youth learn to think more deeply about prejudice, racism, and human exploitation. Some became advocates within their own schools for human rights. It also makes a powerful impression on our young guests, who see someone their own age risking his/her life for freedom or to help a stranger.
Marin and Claire - in their own words:
At Conner Prairie, FNS is a very serious subject; however it happens to be our favorite program. There are two posts that we love to work, Halsey and Merrick. The Merricks are an Indiana family that’s barely scraping along. No thanks to the slaves that have stolen all their jobs. Despite everything, they agree to help the slaves. Later you encounter the Halseys, a Quaker family willing to help “friends”. They feed you and offer you advice; alas they can’t keep you either and send you on your way.
Claire Ellis: I feel I relate most to Halsey. I’ve always been willing to help a person in need, and if a group of runaway slaves showed up at my doorstep, I would help them. I feel I relate to Halsey because when the slaves first enter, we all are in a state of shock. Then we decide to strap on our big kid boots and get the job done. We risk everything by escorting the fugitives across the street. But at the end of the day, I would do it all over again.
Marin Bray: When asked to write about my favorite post, I thought to myself, “Dang, should I be a good girl and write Halsey because it’s the ‘right answer’?” I think the characters at the Merrick post are easier for me to relate to. Don't take it the wrong way, of course I would help! But as someone who had no way of helping them I would rather send them on to someone more helpful.
FNS has given each of us a new perspective on slavery. Being part of the program has made us appreciate what we have today. We feel lucky to be apart of the program, especially with our best friend.
Sometimes learning happens quietly. You see or read something and then months or maybe even years later, you have another experience that calls up that bit of information. This is why learning in museums is so hard to measure- you may not know you learned something until much later when you figure out that, in fact, you did.
However, one of the things I love most about Follow the North Star
is that you can often see its impact on students from the second they finish the program. Their faces and conversations clearly show that they have just experienced something important. They’ve gotten a tiny taste of the struggles faced by real people who were held as slaves and had the strength and courage to try to escape.
I like to sit in on the students’ debriefing sessions where they have the opportunity to discuss the program with a Conner Prairie staff member. Usually the first question we ask the students is, if they could sum up their experience in FNS in one word, what would it be? Words like “scary,” “exciting,” and “humbling,” are common responses. They often say that the way they were treated as they played the part of escaping slaves made them feel mad, upset, or even worthless. They are shaken out of their comfort zones and cast in a role where they have to step into perhaps the most shameful aspect of our country’s history. The reality of it is often quite a surprise for them.
Follow the North Star is undoubtedly one of my favorite programs that we do here at Conner Prairie, and I am so proud to manage it for school groups. It has the power to create empathy and understanding better than any program I have ever seen, and its impact is immediately apparent. | <urn:uuid:9b10e145-d877-436d-865b-62fb2c408021> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://connerprairie.org/Connect/Staff/Blog/April-2012.aspx?tagid=121 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972238 | 957 | 1.625 | 2 |
Wed November 14, 2012
Most Afghans Now Optimistic, Survey Signals; How Real Is That Result?
Originally published on Wed November 14, 2012 8:36 pm
According to a new survey by the Asia Foundation, 52 percent of the 6,300 Afghans it surveyed in June feel the country is heading in the right direction. It's the first time in eight years of conducting this survey that the foundation found a majority of Afghans held a positive view.
At a press event in Kabul, representatives of the nonprofit organization said they surveyed Afghans across the country. Topics ranged from security to corruption to women's rights, and included nearly 90 different questions. Some were open ended, others were multiple choice.
Of the 52 percent saying the country is heading the right direction, 41 percent of them said it was because of good security. Conversely, of the 31 percent saying the country is heading in the wrong direction, 39 percent said it was because of bad security. Security was the biggest determinant for both positive and negative views.
Other numbers that jumped out were the approval ratings for the Afghan Army, National Police, and the central government. Still, strong majorities said Afghan forces need continued foreign support.
Eighty six percent said the Afghan National Police are honest and fair and help improve security. When talking to Afghans, it's rare to hear such positive comments about the police. And in private, NATO personnel often express serious reservations about the ANP.
The Afghan National Army received even higher marks, though it is fairly typical to hear more positive than negative comments about the Afghan army.
When asked to name the biggest problem at the national level, 28 percent of those surveyed said insecurity, 27 percent said unemployment, and 25 percent said corruption. And, 79 percent of respondents said corruption was a major in Afghanistan as a whole (56 percent said corruption was a major problem in their daily lives).
So, given those numbers (and the constant complaints one hears in Afghanistan about the failures of the government to deliver services), how is it that 75 percent of those surveyed gave the central government a favorable rating?
Perhaps part of the answer lies in this statistic: 64 percent of respondents said it is inappropriate to criticize the government in public.
When pushed on this point, Fazel Rabi Haqbeen with the Asia Foundation, said he didn't think there was excessive bias in the numbers.
"However, we are looking into the social desirability aspect of the survey," he said.
He admitted that culturally, Afghans are likely to express either favorable opinions or opinions they think the questioner wants to hear.
Journalists encounter this constantly when talking to Afghans — people who might sit with family and criticize the government, the security forces, or NATO forces for that matter, might turn around and tell a journalist they are happy to have foreign forces in the country and they think they're doing a great job.
Haqbeen said that since this survey has been conducted for eight years, people are aware of it, and don't feel the need to tailor their answers for the interviewers. Also, eight years establishes a track record — and, again, this is the first such survey to show more than half saying Afghanistan is headed in the right direction.
But the Afghan staff in NPR's Kabul office expressed skepticism about much of the data, especially the positive responses about the Afghan government and the police in particular. They said it simply doesn't fit with what they see and hear.
They also questioned the finding that 55 percent of men surveyed said it was acceptable for women to work outside the home. They felt that was too high.
Some of the numbers that did seem more realistic were that 48 percent fear for their safety or the safety of their family, 63 percent expressed no sympathy at all for armed groups, and 70 percent said employment at the local level is very bad or quite bad.
A more interesting details from the demographic breakdown of the interview subjects: 58 percent never attended school, 34 percent were farmers, and 87 percent were from households with a monthly income below $300. Lastly, 38 percent said if given the opportunity they would leave Afghanistan, and 60 percent said they would not.
The presenters of the data said that they will be conducting analysis in the coming months to interpret the results and present findings and conclusions to the government and policy makers. | <urn:uuid:617ce541-f1f4-42e3-815d-43484c384a65> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wkyufm.org/post/most-afghans-now-optimistic-survey-signals-how-real-result | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978412 | 882 | 1.804688 | 2 |
It is amazing what you can do with a simple clock mechanism and a lot of imagination. With just these two ingredients you can obtain a lot of wonderful products, especially if your name is George Nelson and you still are one of the greatest names in modern design. He was at the peak of his career back in the 1950s and 60s, but his works are admired and treasured more than ever. This is the Nelson Sunflower Clock, a very simple, yet very beautiful and graceful objects you can admire in someone’s home. It is, indeed, pretty similar in shape and appearance to a sunflower and it was created in 1958 by George Nelson.
This clock is still manufactured by Vitra in Poland and I think it is very modern. You can take it and make it your best home accessory and you will see it fits any home, bringing a bit of great design in it. The clock is made of plywood, each “petal” being made of two bent narrow stripes of plywood. The sunflower clock has a black clock mechanism in the center and, even if there are no numbers on it, you can still tell the time thanks to the small and discreet little white dots that are placed at the joining spots. The item can be purchased now for $1,185. | <urn:uuid:eec3869e-e79c-49a3-9d85-36cb170737fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.homedit.com/category/appliances/page/4/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982446 | 266 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Your vote on this answer has already been received
Prof. Shantha Sinha is an anti-child labour activist of international reputation. She is the founder of Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya Foundation, popularly known as MV Foundation (which is named in memory of her grandfather Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiah), and is a Professor in the Department of Political science in Hyderabad Central University. Currently, she heads the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights; The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) was set up in March 2007 under the Commission for Protection of Child Rights Act, 2005, an Act of Parliament (December 2005). Professor Sinha is its first chairperson. | <urn:uuid:b5aa935b-0b6f-4412-b3a4-0d49d5c3f5a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://qna.rediff.com/questions-and-answers/is-the-armys-protest-against-the-6th-pay-commission-justifie/22865941/answers/13116914 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966794 | 146 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Last weekend I had the chance to train in DaitoRyu Aikijujutsu. DaitoRyu is a branch of the jujutsu family and was developed by Takeda Sokaku. One of the most famous students of Sokaku was Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido.
During our training the instructor presented us with various self defense situations, and from time to time would ask us to show him how we would react. During each event I did my best to apply solid techniques as quickly as possible.
Eventually the instructor said to me, “That’s good, but you’re making a lot of assumptions aren’t you? You’re thinking he’s going to stand that still, be that loose, and let you do these techniques without a rough struggle? You gotta hit him hard. bang! Loosen him up, then apply your technique.”
At first I was a little embarrassed because an aikijujutsu instructor had to remind me, a karate guy, to do some hitting. But then I realized that he wasn’t providing advice from a stylistic perspective, but from real-life experience, having dealt with conflict most of his life through law enforcement in the Bronx.
The Value of Striking
The art side of martial arts can be a bit ensnaring. With a skilled, cooperate partner, it’s easy to come up with extremely impressive techniques. Over years of practice, we can develop an almost “magic-like” effectiveness as we learn the exact buttons to push on our fellow practitioners. Unfortunately, this cooperation also leads to bad assumptions about how violence and struggle actually takes place.
When dealing with true conflict, you can never be sure of the physical or mental state of an opponent. An assailant could have steely arms which make wrist locks useless. They could be tweeked on mind bending drugs, nullifying any pain-inducing techniques. Their nervous system could be just a bit different than you expect, making your vital point strikes inefficient.
In unpredictable situations, you want the most reliable and simple techniques possible – and in most cases those techniques are going to begin with hard striking.
Starting With Strikes
The problem with beginning your self defense with wrist locks, escapes, throws, or other maneuvers is that you haven’t done anything to disrupt the mental rhythm of your opponent. As you move, there is nothing stopping them from adjusting and moving with you. Of course, your technique might still work, but you’re relying on the inability of your opponent to cope rather than utterly stopping their ability to cope.
A hard strike to a vulnerable part of your opponent’s body will immediately shift their train of thought from attacking you to dealing with the injury you’ve inflicted. As their brain is being fed alert signals from the damaged part of the body, you can swiftly move into your jujutsu, judo, or aikido technique since the overall strength and tenacity of your opponent is temporarily nullified.
The Importance of Location
Striking just anywhere isn’t going to do it. There are some individuals who are in such great shape that you can slam them as hard as you want in the pecs, abs, arms, and thighs and they won’t be slowed down by it. Instead, strikes have to come quick and hard to vulnerable locations like the throat, eyes, ears, groin, and joints.
Even for opponent’s who are enraged or on drugs, a balance inhibiting box to the ears or blinding jab to the eyes will give you an immediate advantage.
A Practice Tip
When learning self defense, even at a beginner level, always utilize some sort of distraction. Even if you are trying to learn a specific joint lock or throw, start off with something that will freeze your opponent’s mental state. Good self defense comes from good practice, and if you drill distractions into your routine there is a much better chance they will be there when you need it.
For non-striking practitioners such as aikidoka or judoka, stick to your curriculum but try to learn from other styles that do utilize striking.
Perhaps next we can discuss the other weapons in the arsenal besides striking, and their place in the self defense cycle… | <urn:uuid:8bd99b1e-9dad-4299-a9c4-6764d7b5222c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ikigaiway.com/2009/how-to-capitalize-on-striking-sequence/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958321 | 895 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Meyer served as the British ambassador to the United States from 1997 to February 2003. In this interview, he recounts the British perspective on the diplomatic battles after 9/11 and leading up to the war in Iraq. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Dec. 20, 2007.
- Some Highlights From This Interview
- What drove Tony Blair's alliance with the U.S.?
- His belief that Blair was "seduced" by U.S. power
- Was Blair a "neocon's neocon"?
- The consequences of Blair's "hug America close" policy
- His dawning realization of Cheney's influence
- When France overplayed its hand
- Why he understands Rumsfeld's remarks about "old Europe"
Describe the phone call you made to [then-National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice on 9/11.
The phone call was, in a sense, the obvious one: "Is there anything we can do to help? Do you need any specialist help in New York City to dig into the ruins? Is there anything we can do, anything? And, by the way, who do you think did it?" And her reply was: "No, we think we've got everything we need in New York to deal with the situation. If we need anything, we'll come back to you. And thank you for your condolences."
By then, I think it was fairly obvious it was Al Qaeda. She said as much over the phone. And I think it was in the same conversation, or it may have been the next one we had very soon after, she said, "Well, one thing we need to look into is to see whether Iraq's had anything to do with this." But at the time, it was Al Qaeda up front as the likely main culprit.
What was your reaction to her mentioning Iraq?
At the time we didn't know anything. I knew that there had always been suspicions about Iraqi involvement in the earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the failed one in '93.
At that moment, I didn't really think very much about it, because [in] all this chaos, nobody really knew anything for sure. Where was the president of the United States, for example? So one didn't start to crystallize, if you like, in a seriously analytical way until the initial shock had worn off. And I suppose by the late afternoon of that day, we were already in the groove, the crisis groove, in a proper way.
What was the conversation Tony Blair had with the president soon after that?
I can't remember the exact sequence of conversations now. ... But I think very early on, when it was quite obvious that this was Al Qaeda that had done this thing, I think the initial concern in London was I suppose very sort of condescending, really; was there should be no sort of knee-jerk, cowboy, instant reaction to this without a bit of forethought about what ought to be done. And I think this was part of the initial Blair message, was to check on how Bush was going to react to this.
We had already picked up in the embassy that there was going to be no knee-jerk reaction; there was going to be no sort of wild overreaction; that this was going to take some thought, and the proper thing to do would be done after the due deliberation. That was the same message as Tony Blair got, and I think it was very reassuring for the government in London. ...
There had been a meeting in Washington of the main intelligence chiefs from London with their opposite numbers, CIA and your other agencies, so we already had some kind of data on all this. … It only became, I think, toward the end of the week that we became concerned that if indeed it was Al Qaeda, if this was Afghanistan, if this was the Taliban, that that should be the primary focus of any initial reaction and that we should not allow ourselves to be diverted by, if you like, other suspects, which would of course primarily have included Iraq. ...
Of course, by the time Tony Blair came to Washington that week, as we now know -- it's a matter of record -- again, the president had met with his main advisers at Camp David. There had been a debate about what to do next. There had been some there who had argued for going after Saddam Hussein straightaway. I believe [then-Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz was the main advocate of that. But the president had himself taken that decision over the weekend, that whatever might follow, the primary target was Al Qaeda. So by the time Blair came to Washington to have his talks with the president, he found himself pushing at an open door.
[What happened when Blair came to Washington?]
We arrived at the White House in time for supper before the speech the president was going to deliver. ... The president and the prime minister had a private word together before we went into dinner. We went into dinner, and it was made immediately clear to us that whatever might follow on Iraq, that the main preoccupation, the main priority was Afghanistan and what we should do there. Some people have alleged that Blair and Bush decided there and then, in the White House, that evening, to go after Iraq next. I have to say to you, that was never said in my hearing.
Blair was a skeptic about the targeting of Iraq at that point?
At that time, yeah. Blair has said this a number of times since then. His main concern was, if it was Al Qaeda, if Al Qaeda was being sheltered by the Taliban, if it was Afghanistan, then we had to focus like lasers there and not be distracted by something else. I think Tony Blair has always said once you're clear [about] what the primary objective is, you bend every effort toward that. And that was very much in the front of his mind, that we must challenge the Taliban, give them an ultimatum, and then -- and it was all at the same time -- develop international support for whatever course of action.
One of the things Blair said over dinner to the president, which I think he'd already suggested in a message, was that he, Tony Blair, [was] very willing to put his shoulder to the wheel to help rally international support behind the United States. And we mustn't forget -- and it's easy to do so now with the passage of time -- that at that moment, there was massive international sympathy for the United States of America, including -- people forget this also -- big pro-American demonstrations in Tehran.
What was this alliance about? What were the goals? What was in it for the British?
… Blair had this belief, rightly or wrongly, that if you didn't do this and left America out on its own at a time of great crisis like 9/11, then it would revert to the kind of isolationism which we had seen in the U.S., for example, in the 1920s and 1930s. ... So it was a natural reflex for Blair both politically, instinctively, even emotionally to assert the closest support for the United States in its hour of need.
How did Blair's philosophy of a post-9/11 Britain come into play, taking into account an understanding of what an alliance with the U.S. meant and what the goals really were?
There are many strands to this. I want to keep it sort of reasonably simple, but it is perfectly true that Blair intervened very actively internationally well before 9/11. Sierra Leone was saved from anarchy at the last minute. Blair, I think, would claim -- and I think he'd be right to claim here -- that he read Kosovo better than the Clinton administration did. ...
Now, if you've done that and you've also made a great speech in early 1999 in Chicago, which pronounces a kind of doctrine of humanitarian intervention -- you've got theory; you've got practice; and you've also got belief.
When the terrorists struck on 9/11, and Blair had been sensitized several years previously to the possible threat from Saddam Hussein, it was very easy for him intellectually to move from "We've got to deal with terrorists; we've got to deal with regimes that harbor terrorists; and the most terrifying danger to the world is rogue states with weapons of mass destruction who may allow such weapons to come into the hands of terrorists." Actually, [that] was the way that George Bush's thinking developed, and Tony Blair's thinking developed in a very, very similar way.
How do you believe Bush and the folks surrounding him viewed the relationship and the importance of that relationship?
At that time -- and I think this applies as much to the Clinton administration as to the Bush administration -- when the United States looked eastward toward the countries of the European Union, at that time, they would have identified the United Kingdom as the strongest partner/ally that they had, both economically and politically and militarily. The only other country in Europe that was capable of, as they say, projecting force with any effectiveness in the outside world besides United Kingdom was France. And at that time, the relationship with France was highly troubled, even before we got into the business of Iraq.
So there was the United Kingdom, the single most important European ally at the time. And I argue with people about this a lot, and particularly with Americans: I actually think that when serious planning was started on removing Saddam Hussein, the United States did not want to do this on its own. I mean, [then-Secretary of Defense] Don Rumsfeld and others will say, "If we have to, we'll do this on our own," but I'm morally sure that in the heart of the U.S. administration, they did not want to do this on their own if they could have avoided it. And so Britain and, to a lesser extent, Australia, Spain, [the] Italians, [were] very, very important to their anti-terrorism strategy.
After that dinner, the focus moves to the Capitol Hill speech. Describe the role that Blair played and the president's comments about Blair.
Think of it this way: The president is about to make the most important speech of his presidency. His performance since 9/11, although on an upward grade in the view of public opinion, was not considered by everybody in the United States of quite rising to the crisis. … He did quite a good speech at Washington Cathedral at the end of that week, and his performance at Ground Zero with the firefighters and the others was pretty good. But he hadn't quite seized the nation.
I remember over that first weekend people in the White House talking to me and my staff about, should he address the nation on television and radio? Should he make a speech to a joint session of Congress? Should he do something else? And in the end, they decided, it's going to be Congress. That's going to be the moment.
So here we are, the British prime minister with a small group of advisers, including the British ambassador, and we're having supper on the evening before this incredibly important speech from George W. Bush. And the president is sitting there talking calmly and dispassionately about Afghanistan, the Taliban and what we need to do. And it's we on the British side who start to get agitated for him: "Surely, Mr. President, you should be -- do you want to go through your speech?" And then we carry on talking a bit.
Now, a lot of very derogatory things are said about President George W. Bush, but I tell you this: That evening, he was clear-minded, he was articulate, and he was as cool as a cucumber, at least on the outside, to those of us watching. And finally at the end of the supper, he said, "You" -- to us, the team -- "you guys go on ahead. I'm going to take Tony upstairs, and we'll travel to Capitol Hill together." And my reaction to that was, "He's certainly cool as a cucumber." And that's a very great gesture of friendship, to say to Blair, you know, "You ride with me to the Hill." …
We got there, and the president started his speech. Almost straightaway, he paid tribute to Blair in a very public way. It was a very moving moment. It was an extremely moving moment, and it was said with very great eloquence.
I think the important point about that moment is that Blair and Bush had already got on pretty well. I mean, they were sort of feeling their way with each other still, but from that moment onward, the real legacy of 9/11 was that their relationship moved to a much higher plane at the end of that day. It became two people bound together on an enterprise on which they thought and felt very, very similarly. So the British-American relationship, Blair-Bush relationship, after that evening, was different in kind from what it had been before.
You've said Blair was seduced by the proximity and glamour of American power, and by Bush specifically. Explain what you mean.
Let me say straightaway, if you find yourself in close proximity to the presidency and the president of the United States, and you're in the White House, and the whole panoply of the American state and power are there, it is easy to be seduced. I was seduced by its proximity. I constantly had to sort of whisper into my pillow every evening, "Remember, you represent Britain."
So I felt that sometimes that the Number 10 [Downing Street] team found it exhilarating, almost intoxicating, to find themselves in a situation where, with the president of the world's only superpower, they could actually shift the pieces to change the international geopolitic, if you like. ...
So all this was an intoxicating brew, an intoxicating brew. And I think that one of its practical consequences was to let oneself be so carried away by the mission to be defined, but to be so carried away by the mission that it encouraged a tendency not to examine the hard details, particularly as to what would happen in Iraq if and when we were to remove Saddam Hussein.
What did you think of the 2002 State of the Union address?
I always used to find State of the Union speeches interesting, mainly for being in the chamber and looking around and seeing the theater of it all. I have to say the content of most of the speeches I listened to, it's not always riveting, and one's mind would drift.
And my mind was drifting during that State of the Union speech -- when suddenly a shot of lightning. There was this phrase, "axis of evil," and it really made me wake up. But it is not because I suddenly thought to myself, Jesus, is the United States about to attack three rogue states? As it were, it took me straight back to Ronald Reagan and the "evil empire," and when I'd heard the evil empire phrase. ...
I think the first report I sent back to London was to say: "Don't brush this phrase away as if it was exaggerated rhetoric. Remember the evil empire and just think of it, about what 'axis of evil' means." The conclusion I drew at the time was it wasn't surprising that these three countries [were] put in the same bracket, because if you went back to the famous piece that Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs at the beginning of 2000, she put those three countries together as categories, rightly or wrongly, as rogue states.
I remember saying to London, "It's only Iraq where there is serious military intent." So far as Iran is concerned, so far as North Korea is concerned, [it] is, in my view, my judgment, highly unlikely that anything military is going to be [done], anything anytime soon. ...
What was Tony Blair's point of view on attacking Iraq at this point?
I think the Blair point of view was this -- and it was articulated first and, in some ways, most clearly in the speech that he made in April 2002 at College Station, at the presidential archive, having spent the Friday night and the Saturday with George W. at his ranch at Crawford.
And the essence of it, the heart of it is that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are cut from the same cloth; they are part of a single problem. In other words, dealing with Saddam Hussein was integral to the war on terror.
Now, of course, this is possibly the most contentious premise of the entire Iraq invasion and occupation, that it was an integral part of the war on terror. But Tony Blair believed it implicitly, as did George W. Bush. And to this day, Tony Blair and those who were with him in government will still assert that there is a global war on terror, and that bringing Saddam Hussein down was part of the same mission as dealing with Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and [the] Taliban in Afghanistan. That was the heart of the position.
You were concerned that if we went in the direction of Iraq, that the U.S. would be concentrating only on winning the war, ignoring the postconflict situation in Iraq. Explain your concerns.
Something had already happened at the end of the previous year in the Afghanistan campaign. We had won there militarily, unexpectedly quickly. But because that happened, concerns arose immediately about, what do we do now? We couldn't get the international aid effort together as fast as we could have done. The war had been fought with warlord proxies from all over Afghanistan, while at the same time we were trying to create a new form of central governance in Kabul based on President [Hamid] Karzai. So even then we in the embassy in Washington were saying to London, the problem with Afghanistan is that the Americans have forgotten [war theorist Carl von] Clausewitz: that war is a pursuit of politics by other means. And now we needed to do the politics.
So when thinking started to develop audibly, we picked this up, that some contingency planning had begun on Iraq, which made people in Britain say that the Crawford summit was going to be the war summit, but vis-à-vis Iraq and not Afghanistan.
One of the things that we were saying from Washington was, "Yeah, this stuff is going on, but there's absolutely nothing going on about what happens if and when Saddam Hussein is brought down. And that is a black hole."
You've mentioned a Rice comment that you'd heard, that the British were seen as the ones that would clean up after America left.
This was in the Afghanistan context rather than in the Iraq context. Kabul, I don't think, had yet fallen, and I remember a meeting in the White House in which Condi was musing rather than sort of laying down the laws. She was saying, you know, "Once we win this campaign, what we would like to do is to look to our allies, Europeans, Japanese, to come in and do the civil-economic construction." …
I remember sending a message to London saying, "If this is what is going to happen, and we're going to go back and do this very, very difficult thing, entrenching a new form of governance in Afghanistan, please remember that British troops will be marching accompanied by the ghosts of those who were slaughtered in 1841."
So fast-forward to Iraq. It's not just my mind. There were the minds of many others in London. If we were going to do war -- and at the time, in my view, it was not clear that this was the inevitable outcome -- if we were going to do war, by God, we had to plan for the peace as well. And that was not evidently being done in Washington.
Or in the United Kingdom.
Well, there were people in the U.K. who were thinking about it, but in the end we were no better prepared. We were less well-prepared, actually, in many ways, than you were for the consequences of the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime. So we are equally guilty of not thinking that through. And indeed, I think now the military establishment here would admit they weren't even militarily properly prepared in Britain for going into southern Iraq; that the final decisions were taken very, very late in the day.
You've said that post-9/11, the Republican realists in America had little chance to withstand the views of the neocons. Explain what you mean.
This was a bit of, if you like, an American version of Kremlinology, really, because you look back on the history of American foreign policy since the World War II, and it was very much a mainstream, "realist" foreign policy. It tended to be pretty bipartisan as well, as it was in the U.K., that it didn't really matter to the British Foreign Office for many, many years whether it was Conservative government or a Labor government. So you had this great tradition, this great corpus of received wisdom on how you should conduct yourself abroad.
What happened when George W. became president was, individually, a number of very powerful people came into the administration who came from a different, if you like, ideological cloth; who thought that America's mission in the world should be defined in a different way and executed in a different way. So we had this thing called the Project for the New American Century, if I've got that right. But even they didn't seize the Bush administration until 9/11.
In my view, if you look at George Bush from inauguration day to 9/11, it's a very mainstream, realist foreign policy with some quite new and interesting things on how you handle Russia. It's actually an interesting foreign policy in which [then-Secretary of State] Colin Powell was pretty powerful figure.
9/11 comes; demons are released; Pandora's box opens. And that also opens something else: It opens the door to the influence of the neoconservatives and others who thought like them. Was that discomforting for the British government, for the British Foreign Office, for the realists in Britain? Very discomforting. But for Tony Blair, it almost fitted perfectly with his view of the world and his way of thinking. So some people who say Tony was the neocon's neocon, you know, they're not a million miles from the truth.
The administration's view on the Middle East was very clear: Peace in Jerusalem would be gotten through Baghdad. How was that different from the British view?
There were many strands of thinking in the United States which led to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein had to be removed. One of the strands was we'd been trying to settle Israel/Palestine for years and years and years, and we've gone about it the wrong way. The right way is to turn Iraq into a democracy, to make it a kind of showpiece for the Middle East, and that will have such a benevolent effect around the area that solving Israel and the Palestinians will be much easier. So one heard through 2002, 2003, over and over again, that the road to peace between Israel and Palestine lay through Baghdad.
Now, that ran totally counter to all received wisdom in London, and, to a degree, curious enough, against Tony Blair's vision of the Middle East, because all through 2002 and afterward, he would say to George W. Bush: "If we are going to do Saddam Hussein, there are a number of things we need to have in place to help us get there. One is, try and bring in the United Nations, and the other is to try and sort out the Middle East, Israel/Palestinians in parallel." That meant effectively dealing with the intifada, which had blown up at the end of 2001, early 2002.
And effectively, Blair got absolutely nowhere on that issue, because the U.S. administration set its face. A very senior official said to me in the State Department that the U.S. on this matter had become "more Likud than Likud." So Tony Blair, for all his special relationship with George W., did not have the countervailing force to be able to overwhelm that position.
It seems in the game that was being played, the British were not winning many hands. What was going on?
This point has been put to Blair many times, and the answer he usually gives is to say that the war on terror and the relationship with the United States was not a matter of bargaining chips; this kind of debases the nature of the relationship. Of course the answer to that was, we're not talking about bargaining chips. If you are about to embark on an incredibly ambitious and risky enterprise by taking down Saddam Hussein by military means, you need to be pretty damn certain that all the right preconditions are in place. I'm not making a party political point here. But, for example, if Margaret Thatcher had found herself in the same situation, she would have -- because this was the way in which she operated -- insisted on the most meticulous planning for the aftermath as for the military campaign itself.
Now, this didn't happen in 2002. On the U.N., up to a point, we did get what we wanted. We did get the issue worked through the U.N. In the end, it blew up on us, didn't it? Came to pieces. But you cannot deny that there were months of effort to try and do this inside a U.N. context, not just because the British wanted it or the Australians wanted it or the Spaniards and the Italians wanted, who were to go ... into Iraq with United States, but because in the end, George W. was persuaded that this was in the American interest. And you never win an argument in Washington ever unless you can persuasively convince the United States that it is in its own interest to do something. And that's not just the interest of the administration, but the interest as seen by the U.S. Congress. That is one reason why Tony Blair never prevailed in his view on what should be done between Palestine and Israel.
Some say the U.S. needed the U.K. The British had tools, resources to be persuasive. One might say that Blair wasn't persuasive, that he should have been more of a bully for his own goals.
I agree with that. I've always agreed with that. Basically, if the argument had been put in a different way, the outcome would probably have been different as well, might have been different. That is to say, if the British prime minister had said to the American president, "I agree that Saddam Hussein needs to be dealt with one way or the other, and if this comes to a military operation, we would like to be with you, but we will not be able to do this unless there is an unwinding of the violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and this is agreed [to] by the United Nations Security Council by a majority, or preferably unanimously; if we don't have those two things, I'm sorry, George, I won't be able to do this with you," I actually think that this would have had a material and significant impact on the decisions taken by the United States.
I don't want to overemphasize the influence of the United Kingdom, but I start from the premise that the U.S. did not want to do this on its own. And if we had said, "We're not going to do this unless those conditions are met," sure as hell the French and Germans even less would have done it. And I wonder whether Spain, Italy and Australia would have been there. That, I think, is the heart of the matter. ...
You've said that Tony Blair's policy was to hug Americans close. ...
There was an unforeseen consequence here, and it was this: that there was an irreconcilable contradiction inside the policy of "hug them close." Blair believed very, very strongly that if Britain were to have influence in Washington, in the White House, it had to be seen almost as an unconditional ally and partner of the United States of America in public, always to be supportive, so that in private it could be candid and influential.
Trouble is, it didn't work out like that, because if you say to the United States, or to anybody, "Whatever you choose to do, I'm with you," in a [snaps fingers] flash, your leverage is gone. You can exhort; you can seek to persuade; you can do all of that. But what you can't do is say, "Hell, I'm not going to do it if you don't do what I want you to do," because you've given that card away.
So "hug them close" -- that's not a bad way of going on. But when you got down to the hard part, it meant, effectively, we could only exhort rather than actually act.
Powell's views matched those of the British. Do you see a connection between the way the British were operating and the way Powell was operating?
Yup, to a point. But I think you can take it so far and no further. Colin Powell is an honorable man. I knew him pretty well when I was in Washington, and in the end, he put service to his country and to his president before all else. I think that is admirable. People who say, "Hell, he should have resigned if he was so much in disagreement with the president's policy," I think miss the point. I think he concluded that at the end of the day, his duty and his service was to his president and his country. And I hope that is remembered in books that will be written about this episode.
The position of Britain was different. We didn't owe, if you like, the same kind of duty -- of course we didn't; we're a sovereign nation -- to the president of the United States or to the United States. What we owed to the United States was to tell it, to you, our closest allies and friends in the world, unvarnished and clearly as we saw it. And I don't think that was done.
You state that the [April 2002] Crawford meeting is where the serious discussions on Iraq began. Some feel that at this point, Blair feels that the threat of war will win the day and that to some extent, that was what the Crawford meeting was about. Do you agree?
There's a problem for me over Crawford, because there were hours and hours and hours where the prime minister and the president were alone together. ... I think Blair and Bush thought it was almost certainly going to come to war; that in order to bring Saddam down, it was going to need military action. But this wasn't quite the same thing as taking an operational decision, "We're going to go to war." I don't think it was ever that.
I have big arguments with American friends in particular about whether war was inevitable or not from even the end of December 2001 onward. I don't believe it was. So I think the commitment that Blair made to Bush at Crawford was necessary as part of the war on terror; not because of Saddam's intrinsic defects, to put it mildly, that he had to be brought down, and it would probably need to be done by military means, but not absolutely necessarily so. And the story unwound thereafter.
You feel that the British didn't quite understand the importance of [Dick] Cheney's role. Explain.
It became clear very early on in the George W. Bush administration that Cheney was going to be an incredibly powerful vice president. He had effectively chosen himself to be vice president, having been put in charge of what you call a search committee or whatever, and he assembled very rapidly a highly talented staff who dealt with national security. So you saw very early on this very powerful figure, loads of experience from the first Iraq war, plus this very, very talented staff under Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
So we all said to each other, in London, in Washington -- the embassy to London, London to the embassy -- "This looks like being the most powerful vice president since God knows when." But for a long time, it wasn't completely clear what this meant. What did it actually mean for policy?
I think the first thing that came out of this observation was that in meetings, in principals' meetings, he was very powerful, very influential. So we knew that he was having a very, very strong impact on decisions across the board, on domestic policy as well.
The other thing we knew was that he met alone with the president at least once a week. They had their sort of famous lunches. And as we got into 2002, it became more and more apparent that he was a very strong, hawkish influence in the collective decision-taking of the White House.
I think the thing that hit us most forcefully was a speech that he gave in August of 2002 to the American Veterans of Foreign Wars, which was super-hawkish in its dismissal of the U.N. and U.N. inspections, to such an extent that I was told that it even alarmed the White House; he gave another speech a week later which [was] all a bit toned down.
It wasn't until early September 2002, when Tony Blair went to Camp David to see President Bush, and Dick Cheney was there for all the talks, that finally revealed the full extent of the man's influence on the planning for Iraq. From that moment onward, we marked him and his staff very, very closely indeed. During that period, October-November 2002, [when] the detailed negotiation was going on in New York at the U.N. on what became Resolution 1441, it was so obvious that Colin Powell, the British, others were pushing this way, and there's massive pushback coming from the vice president.
I remember going to have a conversation with Scooter Libby. It must have been at the end of October 2002, right in the middle of all this, and draft resolutions were flying backward and forward, different versions. Oh, it was impossible to keep up [with] what the hell was going on in New York.
My role was trying to influence in Washington the instructions that were being sent to New York on the negotiation. I went to see Scooter, and I said, "What do you think of" variant whatever it was of the resolution, draft resolution. And he was absolutely plain. He said: "We don't think there should be another resolution at all. How many more resolutions do you want on Iraq? We've already had 14, 15, 16 or whatever it is since 1991. Do we really need another resolution to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein is a bad man who should be removed?"
So he wasn't even into discussing. And I said to him, "What do you think of this text?" He said: "I haven't looked at this text. Why do I want to look at this text? This whole thing is a waste of time."
Actually, we all now say, "Ha! Ridiculous �berhawk," and blah, blah, blah, and "Look what happened to him." But he's not 100 percent wrong. There were double-figure resolutions out there which had condemned Saddam, and the terms of which Saddam had refused to abide by. I mean, let's make it plain: I was a supporter of removing Saddam.
[After the September 2002 private meeting with Blair and Cheney at Camp David, Bush tells British aides that Blair has "cojones."] How did that statement go over? What was the feeling at that point?
From a British point of view, that was quite a good meeting as far as it went. What does one mean by that? It was simply that Bush had committed to exhaust the U.N. process before taking any decision to go to war. You see, in July, as we all went away from our summer holidays, we didn't even know that. Would the United States be prepared to try and work the issue through the Security Council?
In August, largely through the efforts of Colin Powell, he succeeded to persuade the president himself and Condoleezza Rice that this was the way to go. And I think the president had accepted it in principle already in August. In London they didn't know that. And to be frank, in Washington, we weren't sure whether the president had taken this decision. …
Blair came to Camp David to try to nail the president down to go through the U.N., and so to announce in his speech at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly a few days later. And in that immediate objective, Blair succeeded. But again, again, the path had been cleared. The door had been opened, if you like, by an internal American process beforehand. …
Of course the corollary was, "If we exhaust the U.N. process, and it didn't work, you're going to be with me, aren't you, Tony, when we go to war?" And that's what happened in the end. ...
All through the fall and early winter of 2002, the thing that made me really anxious, obsessed me almost above all else, was that in the end, the U.K. and the U.S. would have a different view of what constituted exhausting the U.N. process. I felt that firstly because there was much greater impatience [on] the American side to get this sorted out one way or another, and the U.N. was intrinsically slow and cumbersome. There was immense frustration in Washington over the slowness that it took to get Resolution 1441 through.
This anxiety, this obsession, was fueled by a realization which came from a conversation I had with somebody in the White House, that how in God's name were we going to synchronize a U.N. process which led to the reintroduction of weapons inspectors into Iraq under Hans Blix with a contingency plan for war premised on going to war at that time in January 2003? How could it work? There would have been no way in which inspectors could get in there, do that job, produce that final report on the same timetable as the contingency military plan. …
Tony Blair has another doctrine, the Tony Blair doctrine, which is that if you are seen to be seriously preparing for war, this may prove to be the best means of avoiding war. So after the passage of 1441 at the beginning of November, for a moment you thought, maybe all this stuff is going to come together and that under this pressure, Saddam Hussein will either completely cave in or be removed or forced into exile or something like that.
There was this moment when, even in Washington, people began to breathe a sigh of relief if they were against the war, and the hawks were a bit depressed by this. But this only lasted for a flicker of time, if you like, because the price of getting a unanimous Security Council resolution was ambiguity, and the ambiguity lay in what was known as the trigger for war. It was a fundamental difference between the United States on the one hand and almost everybody else on the Security Council on what constituted a trigger for war. The Americans believed that the flouting of 1441 would in and of itself provide a casus belli. Everybody else said, "No, we need another Security Council resolution actually to provide or pull the trigger for war." …
The British, we kind of tried to smother this gulf by saying: "Well, hang on a minute. Whether or not we need a second resolution" -- and in the end we did argue for one, but at the time it was not totally clear -- "we've got to come back again and debate in the Security Council Hans Blix's reports, so there will be an opportunity to decide what we have to do next." We hoped that that would cover the gap. It didn't. …
You stated that even by Bush's standards, the 2003 State of the Union address was messianic in tone. What were you hearing?
Immediately after Saddam's declaration of his weapons holdings at the beginning of December, you felt the atmosphere in Washington change. You felt the die is now cast. Unless Saddam is murdered or forced into exile, war is coming. It's coming. The war machine is now really going to happen.
And in January 2003, the traditional State of the Union speech, if there was any doubt, any doubt that the United States was not now committed to war, it was removed by the president's speech. It gave him no wiggle room at all, absent, as I've said, Saddam's voluntary departure or of his assassination.
The tone and language were of a kind that you will almost never hear in Europe -- you might hear from Tony Blair -- but it was truly messianic. It was truly good against evil; right against wrong; [the] United States, the chosen people, the instrument of God -- something, in my view, [that] goes back not just to the founding fathers but way back before then. It's deep in the American soul, and it's what distinguishes United States from most other countries in the world. And I thought to myself, that's it. That is it. This country, without now any doubt at all, is going to go to war. And that is how I reported the speech to London.
You have to think about the background to this. … We had traveled a long way from the spontaneous expression of sympathy for the U.S. after 9/11 to where we were by late 2002, early 2003. It was a fractious relationship with France and with most of the continental European countries, except for the new members of the European Union, like Poland. …
I think the negotiation of 1441, which had personally involved Colin Powell, sometimes with the French foreign minister, [Dominique] de Villepin, that had left a lot of mutual bruises as well. …
Colin Powell was fed up because it was Martin Luther King Day, and the French were insisting on having this debate on international terrorism, I think it was, in New York. So [amid] great personal and political trouble, Powell and [British Foreign Secretary Jack] Straw found themselves at the U.N. Security Council in New York. ...
De Villepin gives a press conference, which is interpreted as a real stab in the back, particularly to the United States, particularly to Colin Powell personally, after he made all this effort to accommodate the French wish to have this debate. And de Villepin lets rip as only de Villepin can do. An old French friend of mine who used to be in the French diplomatic service used to compare de Villepin to one of these French cavalry generals who felt that if he didn't die in battle, he was shamed. That's another story.
I went into the State Department to see actually [Powell's deputy] Rich Armitage that week without fully understanding the flavor of what had happened in New York. And the air was blue. The air was blue. There was a smell of cordite in the deputy secretary of state's room. I went in; he took me in to see the secretary, and the air was even bluer there, and I suddenly realized how badly the French had played their hand on that. You could disagree with where the United States was going, and many people did, but this had been a gratuitous insult, which, at a phase that was still just diplomatic, did no good at all.
What were the consequences? I think it truly soured the relationship between the two sides of the Atlantic at a time when there was still some stuff to play for, particularly on the second resolution. That was a bad day for diplomacy.
What position did it put Powell in?
London was not, at that time, expecting to make a great deal of progress with the French, or indeed with the Germans. It was an atmospheric souring rather than a substantive development that made cooperation more difficult, I think.
Did it put Powell into the hands of hawks?
It may have reinforced that tendency. I mean, I think this is where the labels become a little bit deceptive, because I think that probably from early December onward and Saddam's statement of his weapons holdings, that in the State Department, it had become pretty clear that the time had come to start to prepare to put the United States in the best diplomatic position if in the end, finally, the president ticked off the war box. I think that was the atmosphere at the time.
In late January, early February 2003, Blair came to Washington to delay the war. Some feel that the president was merely pacifying the prime minister by that point.
On the eve of Tony Blair's visit to the White House at the end of January, there were two issues that were of great importance to the British. One was, if it was going to be war, we, the Brits, because we'd started our military preparations so late, wanted a delay if possible; I think at the time we were looking at late February instead of whenever it was, or early March.
The other thing we wanted was to get the United States onboard for pressing for a second Security Council resolution that would enable war to go ahead within a U.N. framework, if that's what it came to. I remember sending a report to London on the eve of Blair's arrival saying, "Neither of these things are in the bag [with] the United States, so you're going to have to make the case to Bush and hope to win him over." …
The one thing that I think the hawks were frantically frustrated about was the risk that more and more diplomatic delay would lead to a point where, militarily, the invasion was prejudiced, because there was all this stuff about the hot weather coming on and you had to choose this window. And apparently the Arabs, particularly the Saudis, were saying, if you're going to do this, for God's sake, get this over with as fast as possible, because this is going to be very dangerous.
So there was no enthusiasm in Washington for a second resolution. But the very people who were going to accompany the United States to Iraq if it came to war -- it wasn't just us; it was Spain; it was the Italians; and it was John Howard, who was in Australia … -- all saying, "If we can get the second resolution, it's going to help a lot with our domestic opinion."
And in the end, that did bring the United States onboard. The president, in the press conference after that meeting with Blair, the end of January, did not display -- how can one put it? -- extravagant enthusiasm for a second resolution. But he didn't say no. And in the end, the Americans put their shoulder to the wheel. The fact that your diplomacy, their diplomacy and our diplomacy proved wholly ineffectual in the end is another matter. ...
Around the same time, Rumsfeld makes a statement about discounting old Europe. How do you view this?
I can reduce dinner parties in London, and even more so in Paris, to stunned silence when I say I can understand why Don Rumsfeld said what he said. The very worst construction has been put on these remarks in Europe. The background to all of this was, as I've said, a very fractious transatlantic relationship, particularly, but not only, with France and Germany. But the new entrants to the European Union, led by Poland, were much more amenable to the American position.
So it seems fairly obvious that if you're going to talk about Europe from the American side of the Atlantic, you're going to make a distinction between the old Europeans and the new Europeans. It's bloody obvious. But people got terribly steamed up about this, and I never attached a gigantic amount of importance to it.
Then there was this thing about Rumsfeld being very dismissive of the British military contribution and effectively saying, "We don't need the Brits if we're going to do this," and people in London got terribly hurt by this. … Do you honestly think that the U.S. secretary of defense is going to get up and say, "Jesus Christ, if the British army is not there, we can't do it"? Of course he's not going to say that. He's going to say, "We can do it, whatever happens; we don't need the British there." And actually, in context, what other answer could an American defense secretary give? By that time, the United States was committed to war. So with hindsight, these incidents have acquired enormous importance. I think they're relatively insignificant.
In March 2003 Blair is up for a vote in Parliament. Bush calls saying, "Don't lose your government." What happened, from your perspective?
Of course Bush and Blair had this conversation after I'd left Washington, so I wasn't professionally privy to what was going on. But there was a lot of concern in Washington about the British parliamentary process, because the Bush administration had got the resolutions it needed through both houses of Congress, and relatively early in the fall of 2002, if I remember rightly. So they're not worried about Congress anymore.
I kept on saying to people in Washington, "Look, the prime minister's going to have to get through the House of Commons on this, and if he loses a vote in the House of Commons, the very first example of regime change that you will experience will be in London." … That was a very powerful argument for getting the Americans onboard for the second resolution at the U.N. …
In the end, he won quite handsomely in the Commons, but it wasn't clear at the time. And I think the context, the framework for that conversation between Bush and Blair was to try to come up with some sort of solution that would not put Tony Blair at terminal political risk.
And that was?
... I gather the president's offer to Blair was, "Well, don't take part in the active invasion, but help us passively, logistically, and maybe in the end with the peacekeeping afterward." ...
But whatever you think of Tony Blair -- people approve and disapprove -- he has courage. People may say it's just willful stubbornness. Well, OK, but he did have courage. He could have backed down. He didn't back down. And in the end, he won the vote.
When you look retrospectively, why was it impossible for Blair or for our administration to understand just how dire the postwar situation was?
I was not unique in telling the British government that planning for postwar, planning for post-Saddam, was a black hole. I mean, there were plenty of other people doing the same thing. … So when you talk about hammering away on this issue, there's lots of hammers hammering. And I have to say to you, I don't know what the complete answer is. Sometimes you'll hear from people who were in the government at the time the excuse that they'd had assurances from President Bush that everything was OK. But, you know, in serious government, that is not an answer. Even if it is your closest ally and your brother in arms, you do the stuff yourself. ...
I suspect that although there was a lot of planning going on, it wasn't properly pulled together. And in London, I think at the highest echelons of government, there was such a concern to keep public opinion, House of Commons opinion, Labor Party opinion, Cabinet opinion on the side for possible war, that it absorbed so much political effort and stamina, that actually there was very little left for saying to the machine, "Get cracking on a really detailed plan for what we will do in Basra and the south if that is what it comes to," and also to press upon the Americans the need to do A, B, C and D. The instructions never went out. They never went out, so that when Saddam fell, the mayhem and chaos that followed were a direct result of this.
But that may not be the whole story. And until we have a full public inquiry over here -- which we may never -- I have to say we will not know why it was. ...
Lessons learned? If you fight a war on the basis of global values, the very first thing you have to ask yourself is, whose values? Because values that are asserted as global are very often no more than your own. And that is one thing that has happened here.
The other is, always remember that war is fought for political reasons, and winning the war is therefore only a preparation for winning the peace. That we've gotten in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
And thirdly, democracy as it is practiced in the United States, in the United Kingdom, cannot be transplanted like a lung or a heart to other cultures and to other countries, [with] totally different traditions and totally different stages of development. ...
And the final one is the good old classic: Beware of what you wish for, because democracy in Palestine has given us Hamas; democracy in Iraq has given us a Shi'a-dominated government that gives very little room for the Sunni. ... And remember also, irony of ironies, one of the countries which is more democratic and has more elections is Iran, a member of the axis of evil. | <urn:uuid:deb24ecb-7b54-4420-b841-5c4fd5928287> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/interviews/meyer.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98752 | 11,077 | 1.648438 | 2 |
(By Josh Marks, cross-posted at Green Forward)
Right now the disconnect between Washington’s political-media class and the American people is astounding. Somehow in the midst of this economic catastrophe, the conversation steered away from fiscal stimulus and job creation to deficits and spending cuts. Meanwhile, millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans continue struggling to make ends meet.
Along comes Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with his new book “End This Depression Now!”. Since 2008, Krugman (and a few other courageous individuals like former Obama economic adviser Christina Romer and economist Joseph Stiglitz) has been a voice in the wilderness calling for bigger and bolder government intervention to stimulate job growth while political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic fail to meet the challenge of this economic crisis with timid half measures and awful austerity. In America, the Republican Party is ruled by anti-government hysteria and free-market fundamentalism.
Krugman is a disciple of 20th century British economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated against austerity measures and for public spending to tackle unemployment during an economic downturn. Keynes’ magnum opus was “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” and his ideas came to a successful realization during World War II when the U.S. government borrowed money and started massive wartime spending that eliminated unemployment and brought the economy roaring back.
WWII is what plowed America out of the Great Depression and shut up the deficit hawks of the time, the Hooverites who feared government intervention and put their faith in private industry to solve the Great Depression. No one wants another war, so Krugman often jokes that we need a fake alien invasion to rally the public behind more fiscal stimulus (although Krugman glaringly omits climate change and global warming as the very real threat that could be used to justify expansionary fiscal policy).
Krugman is critical of American and European leaders for failing to learn the lessons of the Great Depression. Of course Republican free market radicals like Alan Greenspan are hammered for deregulating Wall Street to the point where the bankers brought down the entire global economy. But also Ben Bernanke is singled out for not being forceful and creative enough at the Federal Reserve. And Krugman criticizes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for not being big enough and not making a large dent in unemployment. He argues this made it harder to pass a second stimulus package because Republicans would wrongly argue that public spending doesn’t work. And President Obama is criticized for at times going along with the Republican narrative that deficits and spending cuts must be dealt with now, even though there is no evidence that approach works. In fact, spending cuts can actually prolong the recession and even potentially create a second recession.
But Krugman argues that there are simple solutions to these problems, and that if the right policies are put in place, unemployment could be significantly reduced in less than two years.
The first solution is a federal aid package to states and localities so they can start hiring back teachers, firefighters and other public employees. Krugman writes that with federal aid to reverse budget cuts, state and local governments could be spending $300 billion a year that would create more than a million direct jobs and possibly up to three million jobs when indirect effects are taken into account.
Upgrading the nation’s crumbling infrastructure is another area that could create millions of jobs. There are many delayed or canceled projects that could be restarted with fiscal stimulus — roads, bridges, rail, airports, water pipes, broadband cables and more. And of course if we are capable of still thinking big, there are visionary projects like clean energy, the smart grid and high-speed rail that could transform our inefficient passenger rail system into the best in the world (the Recovery Act committed $8 billion to high-speed rail, but more federal money is needed).
Other solutions include environmental regulations boosting the renewable energy sector and incentivizing energy efficiency upgrades; Bernanke’s Fed having “Rooseveltian resolve to do whatever is necessary” by being “aggressive and experimental”; fully addressing the housing crisis with robust debt relief for homeowners, “a program of mass refinancing”; and taking a tougher stance on China and other currency manipulators.
But what about the political will? It isn’t there right now, but can it be? Krugman devotes the last chapter to this subject. And he has some timely advice for President Obama as he enters a tough reelection fight:
“The experience of Obama’s first term suggests that not talking about jobs simply because you don’t think you can pass job-creation legislation doesn’t work even as a political strategy. On the other hand, hammering on the need for job creation can be good politics, and it can put enough pressure on the other side to bring about better policy too. Or to put it more simply, there is no reason not to tell the truth about this depression.” | <urn:uuid:616a01b1-9c87-4638-b35d-94f3a05a627a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.winningprogressive.org/tag/recession | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949591 | 1,026 | 1.742188 | 2 |
UCR Athletic Director Brian Wickstrom recently announced the athletic department’s decision to push back the proposal to replace the men’s tennis team with women’s sand volleyball to 2013. The postponement of the proposal came after Wickstrom sought public opinion from the UCR community, where the fielding of a men’s tennis team for one more year will allow seniors to play out their final year, and freshmen to re-evaluate their plans. The proposal would reportedly save the athletic department nearly $150,000 annually. The department also feels that the men’s tennis team does not draw much interest from the community, but sand volleyball team would serve the interests of the student body while saving money to improve other programs. Sand volleyball is a relatively new sport in the NCAA, having debuted just last year. The success of Team USA in the past two summer Olympics has also largely contributed to the sport’s popularity.
We at the Highlander Editorial Board support Wickstrom’s proposal because it makes sense for the university and its student body economically. According the department’s figures, the savings from implementing women’s sand volleyball outweigh the current amount of funds needed to support the men’s tennis program. The men’s tennis budget stands at $174,419 for this season. The estimated cost of a sand volleyball team is around $22,277 per season. The estimate also includes travel, as the department expects the team to compete only in California. Sand volleyball players would be recycled from the indoor volleyball team, thus no additional funds for scholarships would be required.
However, there is an initial cost of constructing three new sand volleyball courts at a price tag of $74,455. Critics claim this is a risky investment if the sand volleyball team does not work out as promised. But the same argument can be made for the men’s tennis team, which has found little success since UCR became a Division I institution in 1999. In the 2012 season, the men’s tennis team won zero matches versus Big West opponents.
UCR should stop investing money in a program that’s proven unsuccessful and instead focus on developing a new sport that’s not only cheaper but has the potential to flourish. A sand volleyball team would place UCR at the cusp of its emergence as a popular new sport; the playing field is relatively level as other universities are just starting to implement it. Rather than struggling to compete in a well-established sport like tennis, UCR can develop a fresh, new program alongside other universities. This could be our school’s chance to cultivate a competitive team from the get-go.
Sand volleyball has the potential to become a premier sport at UCR. Only a handful of teams have implemented sand volleyball into their athletic curriculum so far. Currently, CSU Long Beach, Loyola Marymount, Pepperdine and USC have sand volleyball teams that played last year. CSU Long Beach drew a big crowd at its first game, drawing 200 people to the match. Currently, UC Santa Barbara is the only other school in the UC system expected to field a sand volleyball team this coming season. The possibility of UCR joining the list of schools as a pioneer in the sport is a significant advantage, as the university can attempt to establish a successful program. The university could also potentially attract significant talent, as we would be one of the few universities that offer sand volleyball in the western region. This talent would not be limited to the new sport, however; sand volleyball could bolster UCR’s ability to attract traditional volleyball players as well.
Interest in sand volleyball is at an all-time high—it was one of the most watched sports at the last summer Olympics, alongside swimming, gymnastics and track. With the 2012 London Olympics coming up, sand volleyball should be provided with an additional boost of interest, especially if Team USA wins the gold.
Student response has been understandably conflicted; many are sad to see the men’s tennis team go, but many are also interested by the addition of sand volleyball. Tennis is played actively by the UCR student body. It also has a deep history at UCR, dating back to its Division II days. Tennis, despite its popularity as a student activity, is not a sport that consistently draws fans to matches. Part of this has to do with the fact that tennis is not as big of a spectator sport as sand volleyball. When play is in session during a tennis match, any noise from the audience is frowned upon. Clapping and cheering only occur at the end of every play. With several matches happening concurrently, it can also be hard to follow. Sand volleyball is a more dynamic sport that draws in the crowd with its fast-paced action.
The fact that student athletes on the men’s tennis team will not be able to continue their sport will hurt. The incoming freshmen this fall who were expecting to play on the tennis team will hurt even more. The reality is that sooner or later, if the team is indeed canceled, student athletes will be hurt. We at the Highlander Editorial Board feel that the benefits of establishing a competitive, popular and economically feasible sport such as as sand volleyball outweigh the pains of losing men’s tennis. Whether sand volleyball will be implemented or not will lie in the hands of Brian Wickstrom, but he should base his decision on what is best for UCR and its students. | <urn:uuid:0ae75773-a8b6-4264-80f3-00efaad38674> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.highlandernews.org/3902/editorial-benefits-of-sand-volleybal-outweigh-costs-of-losing-mens-tennis/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970849 | 1,107 | 1.664063 | 2 |
St. James Infirmary has been providing free, non-judgmental medical and social services for sex workers since 1999. This week, it’ll take the next step. The clinic is putting ads up in Muni buses throughout the city this month meant to educate and inspire Muni riders throughout the city.
But the campaign, entitled “Someone you know is a sex worker,” won’t be seen on a billboard near you. The ads, which feature actual sex workers, were rejected outright by both Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor before transit ad company Titan 360 agreed to the bus campaign.
You can preview the controversial images -- as well as mingle with fabulous people who work for the health and safety of Bay Area sex workers every day -- at an exhibit and launch party on Sun/16.
Artist Rachel Schreiber -- who created the campaign with photographer Barbara DeGenevieve, and whom the Guardian reached by phone yesterday -- thinks advertisers may be hesitant to seem aligned with sex workers rights.
“The anti-trafficking community has such a monopoly on the voice of the issue that I think people are afraid to speak out in another way. People are afraid of being perceived as not supporting that position. Anti-trafficking campaigns are really well funded, often overstated and under researched. Of course we are anti-trafficking and one of our big goals is to fight violence against sex workers”
“There are a lot of people who work in the industry by choice,” she continues. “And everyone deserves access to labor rights and health care and shouldn’t be stigmatized.”
The 27 individuals -- sex workers as well as friends and family members of sex workers -- who agreed to have their portraits and quotes displayed are taking a risk. It can be dangerous for sex workers to let their identities be known to the public. But Schreiber praised the participants for taking that risk for the good of the sex workers rights movement.
“There are a lot of activists in the community who are willing to go out on a limb…one impressive feature of this community is their support for one another, their willingness to go public to make the topic less secretive and stigmatized,” she says.
Campaign slogans include “sex work is real work” and “sex workers rights are human rights.” Those are central tenets of the sex worker rights movement, which strives to gain respect and rights for everyone from legal workers like adult film performers and dancers to people who work illegally, including those who exchange sex for survival or sustenance.
Most sex workers go to great lengths to separate their sex work from the rest of their lives. Schreiber notes a case where a high school teacher in Berkeley was outed, and lost her teaching job as a result.
“We have a really intense social and cultural taboo against the notion that people trade sex for any kind of money,” says Schreiber. “It’s really deeply ingrained.” She says other, legal occupations, present similar challenges.
“Agricultural workers, they’re using their bodies and their bodies are in harm’s way. Same with construction workers,” she goes on to say. “Sex work, yes it’s a form of labor that uses the body, but just because it involves sexuality its taboo is blown out of proportion.”
“Someone you know is a sex worker” campaign launch
Sun/16 5-8 p.m., $10 suggested donation
Intersection for the Arts
925 Mission, SF
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by Gary North
Scott Crossfield, 84, died last Wednesday when his single-engine Cessna crashed in north Georgia. Crossfield was the first pilot to fly at twice the speed of sound. That was in 1953. He later got very close to Mach-3. I mention this because this is the way I want to go: doing my work. Of course, that's not in a Cessna. I want my wife to find my body, head face down on my 1983 PC AT keyboard, with a string of 7s across the screen.
One of the mental exercises that I recommend that people do is to imagine that they are at their 70th birthday party. All of their relatives have gathered. They then give a speech — no more than ten minutes — on what they think were their life's greatest successes outside of their family, and why. Half of the speech should be devoted to the what and why, and half to the how.
This exercise is important because it forces people to consider what they have done with their lives so far.
Second, it forces them to assess if they have accomplished what they really want to accomplish.
Third, it forces them to think through the choices they must make in order to bring their dreams to fruition.
Fourth, it forces them to make concrete plans.
People refuse to do this because it is too painful. It reveals to those who have never thought about their goals that they have nothing very specific in mind. With nothing specific in mind, people rarely wind up in the condition that they would have preferred to wind up, had they given it much thought.
Add to this the threat of inflation for most people's "golden years." Then add default of private pension programs, a collapse of the stock market, and soaring health care expenses.
Hardly anyone flies out like Scott Crossfield.
If you will do this exercise, you will come up with a list of unanswered questions.
Get them answered.
April 24, 2006
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com | <urn:uuid:b0a0f26c-c46a-41c7-81e1-f04fd23a6b94> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north449.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9843 | 417 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Undaunted, Quinn tried again the next year. He began negotiating another round of options contracts, with a call date on April 1. But he added a new provision. "I learned in 2003 to put your call date really late," Quinn says, so he sweetened the new round of contracts: If farmers would hold on until May before Metropolitan decided whether to exercise its options, the agency would pay an additional $20 per acre-foot premium. "We offered them more money if they kept the call going longer," Quinn says. "That's valuable to you as the buyer, because it reduces the probability of your making a mistake."
With such adjustments, Quinn slowly stacked the odds in Met's favor. At the beginning of every "water year," which starts on Oct. 1, there is a 50-50 chance that Metropolitan will have enough water to meet its demands. The potential spread at the start of the year is huge: Met may need to store as much as a million acre-feet of excess water each year, or it may need to scare up a million acre-feet to cover shortfalls. It all depends on how much precipitation falls over the course of the winter. Only as summer approaches do water managers finally have a solid idea of how much water will really be available.
In early 2005, Met signed options for 125,000 acre-feet of water. But by February, after a relatively wet winter, there was only about a 10 percent chance Met would need it. "And then when April hit" - in a repeat of what had happened in 2003 - "the (supply) curve shifted up," Quinn says. "All of a sudden we had no (water) problem."
This time, Met let the options expire without exercising them. Although the agency lost the $1.25 million it paid for the options, that was just a fraction of the nearly $16 million it would have lost had it bought the water but not ultimately needed it.
"Some people say, 'Well, you wasted money - you paid the 10 bucks (per acre-foot),' " Quinn says, shrugging. "But it's like paying health insurance: Even if you don't get sick, you don't feel like you wasted the premiums you paid."
This summer, Quinn left Metropolitan for a new job just as the biggest crisis in years hit the agency. In June, the state shut down its Delta pumps for nine days to protect endangered Delta smelt, whose populations have plummeted in recent years. Then, in September, U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger ordered the state to protect the smelt by throttling down the pumps from late December until June, when the fish spawn in the Delta. The restriction could reduce by up to a quarter the amount of water pumped out of the Delta.
Metropolitan kicked into crisis mode. The agency maintains an office on the ninth floor of The Senator Hotel, across the street from the state Capitol in Sacramento, and high-level Met managers have been on rotating deployments there throughout the fall. In October, the agency joined the list of supporters for a proposed ballot initiative that would approve a multibillion dollar project to route Sacramento River water around the Delta.
Exactly what form that project will take is, for the moment, unclear. But it could turn out to be a scaled-down version of the Peripheral Canal, which would protect Met's water supply - and, the project's supporters say, be paired with a substantial program to restore the smelt's habitat. (Despite that apparent reversal of its Boronkay-era decision not to seek new infrastructure, Met did, quite prominently, decline to support a competing measure that enjoys the spirited support of the farm lobby; it would authorize both a canal and two new dams.) Even if voters approve either of the measures - something that many capital veterans say is unlikely - it will be at least 15 years before an around-the-Delta canal is completed.
That has left Met scrambling to assess how vulnerable its water supplies will be next year. Metropolitan has significant quantities of water stashed around the state in its various storage projects. But as that water is drawn down, farm-water transfers will become critical. Deep within the agency's L.A. headquarters, its Water Surplus and Drought Management group - known in Metspeak by the pronunciation of its acronym, WSDM, as "the Wisdom group" - has been assessing whether Met needs to begin doing drought-rationing triage and lining up options contracts.
When the state shut down its Delta pumps in May, the WSDM group began calling in Met's chits. The agency immediately asked the Palo Verde farmers to fallow the maximum amount of land allowed under their contract. "We put them on notice," says Kightlinger, Met's general manager, "and we'll be going full-bore next year."
Meanwhile, in an office just past the reception area in the ninth-floor Sacramento office, Steve Hirsch has maps pinned on every available patch of wall. Hirsch is Met's program manager for water transfers and exchanges, and he has an order from WSDM to find and buy 200,000 to 250,000 acre-feet of water next year - 9 to 11 percent of Met's annual average deliveries.
Judge Wanger's ruling is forcing Hirsch into unexplored territory. In the past, when Metropolitan negotiated dry-year options with farmers, Hirsch says, "it's always been smarter to go north of Delta," in the Sacramento Valley, where water is cheaper. But Wanger's decision considerably complicates efforts to move water from the Sacramento River through the Delta and into the pumps.
Because of the pumping limits, Hirsch will have to thread his water transfers through needle's-eye windows of opportunity that may open at the pumps from next July through September. Only if next year is extremely dry will Met have any chance of getting water transfers across the Delta, through the State Water Project pumps and into the California Aqueduct.
That has left Hirsch pursuing a two-pronged strategy. In addition to buying options north of the Delta, he is making contacts with an entirely new set of irrigation districts, south of the Delta in the San Joaquin Valley. There, it's more likely that Met can actually take delivery of whatever water it buys - but the prices are higher, too.
Met is not the only agency seeking emergency water. Several San Francisco Bay Area urban water agencies will also see their supplies cut by Judge Wanger's ruling and are scouting out their own water-transfer deals. They will likely work cooperatively to find water. But at the end of September, the directors of the San Diego County Water Authority - a member of Met that has been increasingly insistent on lining up its own dedicated supplies - voted to seek a deal for 30,000 acre-feet from the Butte Water District in the Sacramento Valley.
The increased competition for water could drive prices up significantly. "If the prices get too high, we have the ability to say we'll sit out a year," Hirsch says. Metropolitan has enough water in storage that it could draw that down further to make up any shortfalls. "That's what we'll do if things get too crazy," Hirsch says, although he points out that such a tactic would result in less water in storage to cover shortfalls in future years.
In addition to the logistical challenges Met faces in the coming year, it will have to overcome some substantial lingering perceptual issues. "They've done a very good job of changing their approach and seeking cooperation," says Van Tenney, who retired from the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District last year. But, he says, to many irrigation districts, "they're still suspect, even today. A lot of people in the north wouldn't give them the time of day."
In October, Hirsch did not seem particularly overwhelmed by the complex juggling act he'll be facing this winter. Still, he allowed, "this year's tough, because we're entering into a lot of new scenarios."
As evidence continues to mount that climate change will further reduce water supplies in California and throughout much of the West, Hirsch's tough new scenarios will likely become the norm for the entire region. It may not be long before Met's quiet, two-decade-long experiment in risk management proves useful to far more than the 18 million people whose faucets the agency will try to keep full next year.
Back in L.A., in his office on the 12th floor of Metropolitan's headquarters, Kightlinger says that the state's farms are as important to the agency now as they were in Carl Boronkay's day. "In those critical years, we need everything we can get hold of," he says. Then he circles back to the abiding question, "How do we make it work so we can both survive?"
The author is a contributing editor of High Country News.
This article was made possible with support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation and the Jay Kenney Foundation. | <urn:uuid:632b6e35-1e4e-46bb-991b-082ca9e58186> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hcn.org/issues/358/17328/article_view?b_start:int=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971244 | 1,864 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The quantifiable economic impact of a professional sports team in the Chicagoland area has been debated for years and the argument will continue for decades to come. Economists will state that consumer spending on professional sports would merely be spent on other forms of entertainment; hence there is no “added value” to the economy.
Whichever side of the debate you favor, one thing is for certain: professional sports means big business for Chicago. The value of the major sports franchises to Chicagoland transcends the “civic pride” that citizens feel when their team is a winner on the field. Keeping score in professional sports goes far beyond the final outcome of a game on the playing field.
A simple but valuable effect a team can have on the economic community is drawing visitors. Stadiums and arenas throughout Chicagoland hold tens of thousands of people and host athletic contests year-round — bringing fans from all over the world to the area. Drawing people into the region fuels growth for many other economic sectors that also serve these individuals. Jobs are created in a wide range of industries to handle the influx of visitors who rely on regional services while they are in town.
Many industries look for corporate partnerships and brand-building opportunities with professional sports teams as they search for a competitive edge. Creative sports marketing and advertising vehicles help corporations to more effectively reach their consumer base. Two examples of how different industries have created business relationships with pro-sports franchises include the ‘naming rights’ deal at U.S. Cellular Field and the ‘presenting partner’ arrangement between the Chicago Bears and JP Morgan Chase. The possibilities are endless, with potential results ranging from improved name recognition, enhanced brand loyalty, creative product launches, new venture opportunities and financial growth. Intertwined within these economic and marketing opportunities is the pride of being associated with the rich Chicago tradition that is inherent with every professional sports franchise in our City.
Sports franchises will continue to be a vibrant part of the business community, helping to create numerous business opportunities within multiple economic sectors. Our sports stadiums and arenas have become architectural icons and destination points, adding beauty and new neighborhood identities, while providing wonderful experiences for residents and visitors to enjoy for years to come.
Building a winner is what every business strives for in the face of stiff competition. We are all fortunate to have incredible economic opportunities while operating in a championship city. And congratulations to the world champion Chicago White Sox. They embody the true essence of teamwork. It is in that same spirit that all businesses, both large and small, should develop a competitive edge that helps keep Chicago one of the nation’s fastest growing business centers and, of course, home to championship-caliber sports teams.
Ted Phillips President
and CEO, Chicago Bears | <urn:uuid:ed97a4a8-d105-4d06-b431-d7e6453c4c95> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.villageprofile.com/illinois/chicago/06/topic.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94614 | 559 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Posts Tagged ‘acai berry for weight loss’
Are you tired of taking in weight loss pills and get absolutely no results? Here is a natural way to lose weight without any side effects: The Acai Berry Fruit. Wondering how a fruit can help in weight loss? Don’t be, because Acai Berry is an amazing fruit having weight loss qualities. It is a faster and a natural way to lose weight. This article will provide you with every possible detail related to this magical fruit.
Acai Berry fruit is considered to be one of the healthiest fruits. It is produced on the Acai palm tree. It has a small round shape that resembles a grape fruit. This fruit contains a seed surrounded by something like pulp. Although this fruit has many benefits but the main reason for which the Acai Berry is taken is the natural weight loss. It helps in burning more calories of the body even while doing the regular physical work. The consumption of the Acai berry fruit only will not help in weight loss. The intake of the fruit may be followed by a balanced diet and a proper exercise regime.
Read the rest of this entry » | <urn:uuid:af0abb5d-ee4f-478c-88d9-98bd699ef0e4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ehealthpremier.com/tag/acai-berry-for-weight-loss/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951805 | 239 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Employers are leaving workers unaware of how to deal with stressful situations like sexism or racism in the workplace by failing to provide them with the guidance they need.
This is according to research by Canada Life Group Insurance, which found that two-thirds (64%) of employees feel they have been left without official company advice or support on how to deal with sexism in the workplace and more than half (55%) have received no guidance on dealing with racism at work.
In addition, 70% of employees said they didn't know their employer's official procedure on dealing with unwanted sexual advances from colleagues.
Canada Life Group Insurance has warned that employers that fail to communicate official procedures on dealing with problems at work risk employees going on sick leave to avoid stressful situations or, in extreme cases, taking legal action against them.
According to the survey of 1,607 employees, 10% have called in sick because of perceived bullying in the workplace and more than half (54%) have taken time off due to problems caused by their colleagues or workload.
Paul Avis, sales and marketing director at Canada Life Group Insurance, said: "It is extremely worrying that so many employees are unsure of how to deal with serious problems in the workplace.
"These issues are not only upsetting and stressful for employees, meaning that they may try to avoid them by calling in sick, but could escalate into potential legal action."
He urged employers to ensure that they communicate with their employees about how they should handle such problems to make sure they feel supported at work. | <urn:uuid:17ba0895-a097-4a68-93ac-db5b0cf55b9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/26/07/2012/58685/employees-left-in-the-dark-on-key-hr-issues.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984026 | 308 | 1.84375 | 2 |
The big difference between the New York International Auto Show and a regular old car show is that the whole point of the NYIAS is to sell journalists on new cars so that they can sell the public. Everything is designed specifically to convince attendees that this year is the year for the most glorious, powerful, efficient, speedy, green, opposite-sex-attracting cars everywhere. Because of that, advertising trends tend to emerge. Auto show memes, if you will, that every manufacturer seems to employ in order to push a brand new SUV onto Joe Six-Pack. Check out part one of my guide for the introduction to the show, but today I’m looking at the rules each car maker follows to make themselves seem hip, sexy, and with it.
If you don’t make an electric car, you suck
The biggest theme at the NY Auto Show this year seemed to be the continual optimism surrounding electric cars. Every company had one, and a small test track was set up in the “EV Pavilion,” aka an electric vehicle ghetto hidden away in the back corner of the bottom floor of the show.
Have your EV fear allayed by letting someone else drive you around at five miles an hour! Whee!
Somebody’s restarted production of DeLoreans, which, before Back to the Future, were known as a heavy steel underpowered car made by a coke dealer. Now they’re electric!
But despite some new electronic gear, they still have the same 80s interior styling. Ew.
But did I mention it’s electric! According to a release, its range is over 100 miles of “city driving.” Top speed: 125 mph!
The Chevy Volt is an image car: great for GM to advertise, but they haven’t sold well. It’s a plug-in hybrid, which means it has an extra-large battery pack so you can drive battery-only for awhile before the back-up gas engine kicks in. They sometimes catch on fire.
Toyota, which has long dominated the hybrid market, has also made a plug-in hybrid. We’ve gone from filling up a tank in five minutes and driving for hundreds of miles to letting a car charge for hours before driving tens of miles before reverting back to the gas engine we started with. Progress!
Nissan’s Leaf has done relatively well. It came out around the same time as the Volt, and won the ad war early on because it’s a real electric car. No gas back-up for this puppy! (Also, it’s only zero emission if you don’t count that the energy you use to charge it likely came from a coal power plant.)
Now Ford’s jumped in the game with the Focus. It gets 100+ MPGe, which is the EPA’s way of comparing an electric car’s mileage to a regular old gas car. The number is always insanely high, partly because the power plants that provide electricity use fossil fuels more efficiently than cars, and partly because MPGe is dumb.
This is Mitsubishi’s i-MiEV. It’s a cheap, simple, light electric car. No Americans will buy it because it has roller skate wheels, cloth seats, and it’s small.
This is Mitsu’s i-MiEV Smart Air Concept. It apparently quick charges to 80% in just 35 minutes, and was my girlfriend’s favorite car of the show. It looks like it’s going backwards, but I thought it was a pretty cool-looking city car.
It also had a number of cool touches, like this photovoltaic smile in the front. I actually dug the concept a lot, but it’s small, so it won’t succeed in the U.S.
BMW really went for the gusto with the i8 (also pictured above). I’m sure it has tons of batshit crazy specs, but when it’s got glass flanks, you know it will never be produced. But still, I applaud BMW for building a concept car that’s actually kind of crazy.
sports cars must be sexy
Sports cars are loud, impractical, and inefficient. Or so they used to be, these days they’re much better. But the reason someone buys a sports car is because they want to get laid. Ergo, sports cars are all about sexiness. Exhibit A: That hump in the hood hiding this M3’s 4.0L V8 is called a “power bulge.” Really.
This is Lamborghini’s new model, the Aventador. Lamborghini has always been the in-your-face, brutal dominatrix of the supercar world. The company also names all of its cars after famous bulls from bullfighting lore.
Look at how much rake the windshield has. It’s almost flat. The whole car exudes a BDSM vibe that makes you tingle in weird places, and that’s just sitting still. Wow.
The Bugatti Veyron has been around for a lot of years now, but because R&D costs are so high, even a $1.7 million price tag wasn’t enough to keep Bugatti (owned by Volkswagen) from losing money on every one sold. If you think that price tag is high, the maintenance costs are insane. Imagine paying $70,000 for a tire change that first require you to ship your car to France.
The Veyron has also come in a number of special editions, which are a common move by hypercar manufacturers to suck more money out of people who want the most exclusive of the exclusive. This one is a Blanc Noir. My girl said it looked like a slut. Not sure why, but I kinda get it.
This is the Jaguar XKR-S. All those letters mean it’s an extra-special sports model. I don’t care about that though, I just think that it is one hot fucking car. Not joking: I dreamt about it the other night.
This Jaguar E-Type is the spiritual predecessor to the XK-R. It’s basically one giant rolling penis. (If you remember that Family Guy in-out bit, or any other phallic car joke, they were referring to the E-Type.) It’s one of the more gorgeous cars ever, although I don’t like that the guy who owns it put modern large wheels on there.
The Dodge (now split off into SRT, like Ram) was gone for a couple years, but it’s back and more swoopy than ever. The Viper was always a brutal car, powered by an equally brutal 8.4L V10 truck engine. The new edition has been sexed up with some very feminine headlights.
This Kia GT concept was the car of the show for me. Imagine me saying that about a Kia! But look at this thing: curvy, vented, carbon fiber everywhere (the blades on the wheels were a nice touch.) It’s lovely!
It’s got a real purdy mouth and all that. But seriously. It’s a Kia!
race cars legitimatize everything
Someone once said “If you want to make a small fortune in racing, start with a large one.” It’s true: racing is absurdly expensive, but companies sponsor race cars because showing off incredible feats of speed and engineering helps sell pedestrian cars to the masses. Here’s the new racing version of the Viper. Race cars rules because they’re cars, but more so.
Lotus is a British car company that has always known for founder Colin Chapman’s uncompromising quest for lightness. (Back in the 70s, that quest turned dangerous when his Formula 1 cars traded safety for speed.) Now, with Chapman long dead, Lotuses are getting more mainstream, with more computers, comforts, and weight. But this Evora GT3 is a great attempt at showing folks Lotus still has it!
Porsche had this legendary 917 on hand. It’s a beautiful, streamlined racer from the heyday of Le Mans. Did I mention that it’s beautiful? My knees were shaking I was so excited. Hell, I was so excited I was about ready to go buy a Porsche SUV! The ploy worked!
The 917 is powered by a flat-12 engine. So rather than the pistons going up and down like in an inline or vee engine, the pistons move side to side. It helps lower a car’s center of gravity, and is a Porsche (and Subaru) hallmark.
The Mazda RX-8 doesn’t even use pistons, it’s powered by a rotary engine, which essentially utilizes spinning triangles. This was a great example of a sports racer that’s actually built to look like a regular car.
This Dodge Dart, driven by Travis Pastrana, also looks like the street version. This one’s a bit different though; it’s all-wheel drive and has 600 horsepower, while the street car is front wheel drive and has a third the power. But even if they’re nothing alike, you see videos of this bad-ass thing sliding around in dirt and think “Holy shit! I need a Dart!”
This Honda Indy car was a particularly egregious example of race cars being used to sell lesser things. If you squint in the background, the Honda products being showcased near this streamlined bullet were a dirtbike and lawnmower engines.
Toyota knows what its doing. Near its truck section, it had this NASCAR Camry. It, of course, has NOTHING in common with a real, boring-ass Camry, but being in NASCAR helps Toyota keep it real with the truck-buying segment of America.
Unlike all the other cars out there, NASCAR rides are pretty freaking basic. Not even a GPS!
On the other hand, this Lotus F1 car in the Pirelli booth is anything but lo-tech. With the amount of R&D put into these things, each car costs tens of millions of dollars. Look at how many buttons are on the steering wheel! That alone can cost $50,000 or more. This car is sponsored by a deodorant company, by the way.
The Infiniti booth had this Red Bull/Renault F1 car. Red Bull won the F1 manufacturer’s championship and driver’s championships last year, largely because this car was way better than everyone else’s. Infiniti actually doesn’t have much influence over the car. But Renault builds the engines, and Renault owns Nissan which owns Infiniti, so someone somewhere thought Infiniti should be the brand on the car.
Never make a taxi
Here’s Nissan taxi, which will be replacing the fleet of NYC cabs. A lot of people aren’t happy about it at all, for millions of reasons, including the fact that Iran builds copies of Nissan cars. (Really.)
This is the interior. Notice the USB chargers. The floor is lit and puke-proof.
This VRG MV-1 taxi was also present. Another issue with the Nissan taxi is that it really has no accommodations for folks
The MV-1 is the apparent answer, with a spacious interior. I just like that it looks like it might have been in Blade Runner.
Stay tuned for Part Three of Motherboard’s auto show guide tomorrow.
Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead. | <urn:uuid:6a02f39e-dc91-4999-b7c2-60e8e7f55fe3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-essential-memes-of-the-new-york-auto-show--2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959082 | 2,469 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Trouble setting up print server
I'm using computers in a LAN Network that are running Win2000. I want to set up one of them as my printer server but I noticed that when I want to print I have to manually search for the print server using the "my network places" icon and then connect to the printer from the client. How can I solve this?
Now for the past two weeks I noticed also that I couldn't access any of my clients if it try to connect to them from other clients - it keeps saying that this machine has no logon permission, I didn't set any permission. What could be the cause?
Assuming the printer is installed on the workstation you wish to print from, its more likely that the port configured (Properties of the printer- Port Tab) has changed or misconfigured. Check the port settings and make sure they match the located of the print server.
Also, you might want to try and right-click on the desired printer once you browse through the 'My network places' icon, and see if you get an option that will allow you to install it. Usually there is such an option.
This was first published in June 2003 | <urn:uuid:a4f6135a-f449-49ad-b0a3-e2cb6988616a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/answer/Trouble-setting-up-print-server | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966768 | 245 | 1.515625 | 2 |
April 16, 2012
NORFOLK, VA (The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star) -- Celebrity doc Harvey Karp has been called the "Baby Whisperer" for helping superstar moms like Madonna soothe fussy infants with the ballyhooed "5S" method:
Swaddling them in a blanket. Holding them on their side or stomach. Making a shushing noise. Swinging them back and forth in your arms. And letting them suck on something, like a pacifier.
Thousands of parents swear by it, and a local pediatrician at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters decided to put it to the scientific test with 240 babies facing routine immunization shots.
The journal Pediatrics released Dr. John Harrington's peer-reviewed study today, which shows that the method calms babies and reduces pain.
The babies who received the 5S treatment calmed faster than a control group of infants who received a dose of sugar solution, a known pain reliever often used in pediatric offices.
Harrington said he no longer uses the sugar solution but instead explains the 5S technique to parents.
"At first, we were thinking, 'It can't be that easy,' but it really was. Instead of telling parents, 'Here's something you can give your baby, we can say, 'Here's something you can do to help them.' "
A pacifier and a shushing noise beats giving stressed babies sugar to soothe them, a pattern no parent wants to begin with a childhood obesity epidemic raging across America.
Harrington got the idea for the study when Karp visited the area several years ago. Karp is nationally known for his best-selling "Happiest Baby on the Block" book and DVDs. The Los Angeles doctor teaches at the University of Southern California and gives workshops across the globe on how to trigger the "calming reflex" in colicky babies.
He spoke at CHKD several years ago, and Harrington asked whether there had been any scientific study of the 5S method.
There hadn't been.
"I'm an evidence-based kind of guy," Harrington said.
He was skeptical of the idea, so he set about designing a study to test it. The study was funded through the Summer Scholars Program, a research internship offered by Eastern Virginia Medical School and CHKD.
During the summer of 2010, Harrington and EVMS medical residents watched Karp's video and learned to swaddle a baby in less than 15 seconds and make the proper "shushing noise," which is supposed to mimic sounds a baby hears while in the womb.
The babies were 2 to 4 months old and received routine immunizations at well-baby visits in Norfolk. One group received a sugar solution to relieve pain. Another group received the 5S method. A third had a placebo water solution. And a fourth group had both the sugar solution and the 5S treatment.
The medical residents, who became experts at the swaddling technique, performed the 5S method on the babies. They used a scientific pain-measurement score to gauge the babies' pain at intervals up to five minutes after the shots. They also measured the length of crying.
The babies who had the 5S treatment stopped crying sooner and scored lower on the pain measurements. The children who did not receive the 5S treatment were calmer with the sugar doses than water placebos. There was no difference between the babies who received 5S alone and those who received both 5S and the sugar dose.
Dr. Ari Brown, a Texas pediatrician who was not involved in the study, said it suggests that physically soothing babies is more effective than giving them sugar.
She said she doesn't think it means Karp's method is superior to other methods that parents have been using for years, though. Brown, the author of the book "Baby 411," said she would have liked to see other options explored, such as breast-feeding after the shot.
"New parents can be taught some simple maneuvers that reliably work to soothe babies," she said in an email response. "Pediatricians all know these tricks ... we just need to teach moms and dads how to do it!"
Indeed, many of the parents who watched the EVMS residents who swaddled, shushed and swung their babies said, "Wow, can you teach me how to do that?"
One of the drawbacks, though, is that the babies outgrow the method pretty quickly, Harrington said. By the time a parent perfects it, the baby's too big to swaddle.
Until then, though, Harrington said the 5S method can "help you bond with your child and make you feel like a good parent."
(C) 2012 The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, VA. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved | <urn:uuid:c0fbcb2a-ed1c-49c9-8d69-ec2e2fd1d780> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSRNM000/333/24524/1437781.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970676 | 1,006 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Myra Dorsey Turns Tragedy into a Page Turner
At some point, we all face adversity and challenging times. But what we choose to do with the lessons we learn through them can make a world of difference. For Myra Dorsey, author of the book “Benefit of the Doubt,” she has taken her struggles and turned them into a page-turning book that helps others learn how to change their mindset in order to change their life.
“People are brought up to believe and aspire to many different things, and our lives can take many different directions,” explains Myra Dorsey. “We may get caught in traps of thinking one way when, in order to overcome challenges and live our lives to the fullest, we need to be willing to change the way we think.”
Dorsey has been sharing the lessons learned in “Benefit of the Doubt” (AuthorHouse, 2012) as she visits various book stores and churches along her tour. Her transformation comes after experiencing a physically and mentally abusive relationship that also other challenges, such as there being a hit placed on her family, and intrusive in-laws that tried to add to her demise. All this, while also being highly successful in her career. Coming to a crossroads, she chose to take the life lessons she had learned and turn them into a fictional story that would convey the same messages to her readers.
In her personal life, she left her successful position in the corporate world in order to start her own business. She also became an author, writing this book, so that she could share with others what it takes to transform and change their life.
“People may think that you can’t change, that you are just stuck wherever you are in life,” adds Dorsey. “But that’s simply not true. What I hope that people learn from this book is that they may face challenges, but that they can overcome them, and go on to thrive. I did it, and so can they!”
“Benefit of the Doubt” is a book that focuses on Kendal Sweeney, a woman who seems to have it all together. She’s highly successful in her career, yet endures unfortunate circumstances. Her strong faith helps her get through the adversity and come out on top. The book is available online at Amazon.com, BN.com, and other online stores. To learn more, visit www.benefitofthedoubtbook.com.
Tags: Myra Dorsey , Authors , Books , Self Help
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. | <urn:uuid:c50988bc-da81-4800-a39f-221b86220cc9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.groundreport.com/Lifestyle/Myra-Dorsey-Turns-Tragedy-into-a-Page-Turner/2949166 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972891 | 554 | 1.8125 | 2 |
And to this day I’m thinking, those kids, and they were all kids, you know, are of one mind or the other mind, was, if anything comes around like this, this low, they’re going to blow them out of the sky with 50-caliber machine guns.
Transcript / ShowHide
I was a late replacement for what we called the Light Aid Detachment commander. That’s the group of mechanics if you want to call it that go with the armoured corps to keep their equipment in shape. Not just the tanks but we took care of everything, all of the guns, the small arms, all the generators, all the B vehicles and the wheel vehicles, armoured cars, trucks, dump trucks. We had a dump truck. And we even took care of the cooking equipment that the cooks used.
But getting onboard the ship was rather interesting. It was the, one of the general class transport ships, which would take about 6,000 troops. And we were fortunate in that we only had about 4,000 onboard, so we weren’t crowded too much. But it was interesting, we arrived there, we were onboard the ship and as a unit, the Royal Canadian Dragoons, and, Dog Squadron, and a few other RCEME [Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers] people who were going over that belonged to other units. But all the Americans that were coming onboard were all draftees. And they were individual replacements. We were a unit replacement, we were going over to replace the Strathcona squadron [Lord Srathcona’s Horse, an armoured regiment] that was there. They were all individual replacements and it was rather interesting to see them coming up the way they called their name, last name, and they’d answer with their first name. They’d step onboard the gangplank, and up they come. Helping one of these kids with these boxes up the gangplank, was a rather young fellow, when he got to the top, they wouldn’t let him off the ship. And he went to Korea with the clothes he had on and stayed in Korea for the full year as a draftee. And anybody puts a foot onboard that ship never got off.
And the flying fish came out and they were flying right across the pass of the ship, right up onto the deck. And of course, there’d be about as, well, about 10 inches long and they were fairly big. And they looked like a fish with big mosquito wings on them and flip them back over. So some of the guys would make them into pets but it didn’t work out. But they had never ever, in A, aboard a big ship or B, seen flying fish before. So every day it was something new for not only me but many, many of the kids that were on there too.
Although the truce had been assigned, Seoul was still a mess and it was bombed out pretty bad. And we crossed the Han River on a temporary bridge and started going up the main supply route, MSR as it was called up towards a place called Uijeongbu. Some of the names still stick in your mind after a while. And the road turned to moss port gravel and it got narrower and narrower. And the dust got thicker and thicker, you know, we had to slow down to go through a one-lane village. The dust was flying up and we slowed down going through this village and this was our and their introduction into getting close to the demarcation lines, if you want to call it. But I remember this particular village. We could touch the shacks on both sides, leaning out the trucks. And on the side of the road was a little Korean kid about seven, eight years old. And he had a stick, about a four foot long stick with a soup can nailed on the end. And he was urinating into the soup can and taking the urine and spreading it on the dust in front of this little shack that was there. And the shack that was there had an open counter and hanging in the shack on racks were dried fish covered with dust. This was sort of our beginning of introduction into things that were different from Canada.
But this particular time in the middle of the scram [practice for an air raid], it didn’t come “air raid yellow”, caution, it came “air raid red.” Which meant it’s coming. The reason I’m chuckling is that it got stood down about 10 minutes later but in the meantime, “air raid warning red,” we had tanks all warmed up in the compound that I showed you a picture of. And when the air raid warning, every one of the guys manned the 50-caliber machine gun was on the top of the tank. And we had three ground-mounted machine guns. They were manned as well. Covers off. One up the spout because a 50-caliber, you have to cock twice to get the thing ready to fire. And I’m there, and to this day I’m thinking, those kids, and they were all kids, you know, are of one mind or the other mind, was, if anything comes around like this, this low, they’re going to blow them out of the sky with 50-caliber machine guns. He won’t know what hit him. See. They were ready. And the other thought that’s in their mind is, “Oh boy, if this happens, it’s World War III and we’re it in the front row.” So you can see these kids grow up so fast. And I must say, they turned out to be a real professional bunch.
We did go through Jasper [Alberta], which was the first stop that we had after we entered Canada. And it was well organized. What we did was we spoke to the train conductor, saying “We want to stop in Jasper.” “Well, we’re not scheduled to stop in Jasper.” “We want to stop in Jasper and we don’t want to be in Jasper before 10:00 am.” “I’ll see what I can do. We’re on a freight train run.” He come back, told the old man [regimental commander], “Yep, we can manage that.” He says, “We can stop for 10 minutes.” He said, “That’s all it’s going to take.” The train came to a stop, the sergeant major got off and walked over to the liquor store. And he stood outside the front of the liquor store and the people he had organized went in and picked up a case of this and a case of that and a case of this and as they were going out, the sergeant major was peeling off the bills. I was duty officer that day, I was there making sure everybody got back on the train. | <urn:uuid:87491fb1-47f1-4abb-9df4-60301e47224b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thememoryproject.com/stories/2301:frank-lucano/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988837 | 1,476 | 1.664063 | 2 |
We wore the jackets, rode the vans, carried the bags, lifted the streamers. Aside from attending the Ad Congress sessions, we were engrossed in a little guerilla marketing of our own.
The 30s Can Save the World is a homegrown Y&R Philippines movement, a way to make An Inconvenient Truth a little more convenient to face. Y&R helped Al Gore take the message to Cannes. We wanted to start with people we knew, so the ad industry became our natural target market.
The 30 second tv spot has become a symbol of everything that’s default and old in advertising. Its death has been announced quite a number of times, although I have yet to see anything resembling a funeral, so it must be shambling about as a zombie, the pitiful undead of the marketing world.
Since the 30s was now a throwaway solution, we decided to recycle it.
It’s a time format we in advertising are quite familiar with. So repurposing it seemed easy – and convenient. It takes 30 seconds to write on the other side of the paper. 30s to unplug your cellphone charger before going to sleep. 30s to turn off the tap while brushing your teeth. 30s to decide to take one car to the client’s office. An old thing becomes a new, easy thing.
We sent TarpBags (recycled from old advertising tarpaulins) to 4As agency heads; inside, the bags held an old u-matic tape converted into a timer, notepads made from printer scrap, “postercards” printed on the backside of ad posters. During Ad Congress, the vans offered free rides to delegates. While they were inside, they could watch our video (recycled from a Powerpoint presentation) and our ad (recycled from an old tv commercial that Chevron, our client, gave us permission to use).
Even if you’re not from the ad industry, you’re more than welcome to follow the movement on Twitter. Spare the earth just 30 seconds of your time. It’s not much – but if a lot of us do it, it can do all of us a world of good. | <urn:uuid:62210b17-c4d1-4bf2-9160-786beb3c378d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leigh.wordpress.com/tag/30s/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95214 | 466 | 1.5625 | 2 |
It is the middle of winter here in the North Country. For parents of toddlers, it is a time of year when you probably want to be outside with the kids enjoying the snow as much as possible. However, you may find yourself indoors most of the time because little kids can only really be outdoors for a little while before they get cold.
You may also have noticed that toddlers’ energy levels do not have any regard to the seasons or the weather. Your active toddler has just as much energy in the middle of winter as he did last summer. When outdoor play time is limited because of the cold, it is important to figure out ways for your toddler to safely enjoy some active play time indoors.
We are lucky to have a fairly long expanse of floor space where Dylan can run back and forth. This same space doubles as a “soccer field”, where we kick a beach ball back and forth or play catch with another soft ball. These things are fun, but kids like variety. Today, I went looking for some ideas for active indoor play ideas that we can add into our repertoire for some much needed variety.
One fun idea is the impromptu “dance party”. Cranking up your tot’s favorite tunes and bopping around the living room is sure to put a smile on his face, and yours too. Another idea is to make a game of tossing a ball or small stuffed animal into a variety of different containers from different places in the room. You can use plastic cups to set up a “bowling alley” and teach your toddler how to roll a ball into the “pins” to knock them over. Rolling a ball is an acquired skill, believe it or not, and you may be surprised at just how much time it takes your toddler to understand that rolling a ball is actually a “thing that people do” just as much as throwing the ball is.
If you have floors that won’t get sticky and some colored or masking tape, mark out some hopscotch – type games and give them a try. Charades, yoga, building blanket forts, and turning cardboard boxes into pretend vehicles are also fun ideas to try. When it’s cold outside, it is time to get creative and find fun, new ways to work active play into your day. What are your favorite active indoor play activities? | <urn:uuid:35b7db30-1431-402a-a041-9b99a608c381> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.families.com/ideas-for-active-indoor-play | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96863 | 493 | 1.8125 | 2 |
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You hope you'll never need it, but having a road emergency kit is great for those long trips (just in case). Full Story
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The Hartford Center for Mature Market ExcellenceSM provides practical information to help people make decisions about both driving and housing as they age. | <urn:uuid:57f4028b-c95d-47ec-9330-ad54a1b9e6cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehartford.com/vehicle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933796 | 254 | 1.625 | 2 |
MILWAUKEE, Wis. -- Health officials in Wisconsin, California and Illinois are reporting new deaths from swine flu and say all three patients had had other health problems.
The Wisconsin death was the state's first from the H1N1 virus. Milwaukee Health Commissioner Bevan Baker would not release any details Thursday except to say that the person was an adult who had a common underlying health condition that he would not specify.
A 74-year-old man from Gurnee, Ill., died Tuesday, according to the Lake County Health Department. Officials said he had significant medical conditions that increased his vulnerability.
Officials in California said 9-year-old Karen Perez of Concord had been diagnosed with swine flu and had a bacterial infection before she died May 29. | <urn:uuid:df79359f-c96d-40af-b445-5bb8da2e5492> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jems.com/print/7252 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991196 | 157 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Newt Gingrich is running yet another attack ad on Mitt Romney in South Carolina, this time simply throwing spaghetti at the wall: He's donated to Democrats, voted for a Democrat once, loves abortion, yadda yadda yadda. Also, Mitt Romney is John Kerry, in that they are both from Massachusetts, where the official language is French. Watch Mitt Romney speak French in 2002, like a fool.
But of course Newt Gingrich, while most likely doing recon for his eventual plan to take over the world, lived in France between the ages of 14 and 16 — just long enough to pick up some of the enemy language himself, according to a biography (via Foreign Policy):
In the book, author Mel Steely tells how Gingrich lived for several months in a hotel while he attended an American high school. Later he and his family went to live in a chateau in the Loire valley.
Newt "had enough French to survive" when he would go off exploring the city on his own, the author said.
According to the Gawker Almanac of American Politics (to be written), having "enough French to survive" at some point in your teens is enough to put you in league with America's worst enemies.
And to compound the problem, here's Gingrich apologizing in Spanish a few years ago after referring to it as "the language of living in the ghetto." For shame. | <urn:uuid:36890b88-1f72-48c5-82f3-ef61726c25be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gawker.com/5875865/mitt-romney-isnt-the-only-candidate-who-dabbles-in-the-wicked-french-tongue | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970096 | 287 | 1.5 | 2 |
Classes in our Community - Fields of Exploration
Theatre Under The Stars' classes offer innovative programs tailored to fit your school or organizations' needs. Our Classes in the Community programs impact over 8,000 children each year, advancing Theatre Under The Stars' mission of spreading arts education to the Greater Houston community.
Programs are designed to bring musical theatre training to your facility. Curriculum can be customized to meet specific learning objectives as determined through our consultation with you. Click on the subjects below for more information. Contact us for fee structures.
Click here for a booking information & application
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TUTS offers school groups and Girl Scout Troops the opportunity to visit TUTS for backstage tours and/or workshops specifically tailored to fit their needs. Through these field trips, students ages 7 to 18 years old, are introduced to musical theatre and gain an appreciation for the intricacies of producing a musical. For the Girl Scouts, TUTS helps girls earn their dance and theatre badges. All the students gain insight into the many careers offered, both on and off stage, by musical theatre companies.
Educator In-Service Programs
These sessions were created to share innovative teaching tools that use musical theatre to help educators meet their fine arts TEKS/STARR requirements. Through in-service, teachers receive professional training and development that results in stronger, more innovative curriculum to better engage students with the arts. Although the sessions were created to serve fine arts teachers, TUTS can customize any in-service to serve all fields of study.
You Come To TUTS - $500 (maximum 6 hours) for up to 15 teachers **$20 per additional teacher
TUTS Comes To You - $300 (maximum 3 hours) for up to 20 teachers **$15 per additional teacher
TUTS professionals visit Houston-area hospitals/treatment centers to teach patients voice, dance and acting. TUTS staff work alongside hospitals/treatment centers to create programming that enchance and enrich the patient's lives. | <urn:uuid:f430d4eb-028d-4e1a-a546-633a55e230b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tuts.com/Education/ClassesintheCommunity/Classes/tabid/77/Default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937108 | 414 | 1.75 | 2 |
Last week, Algonquin author Esmé Raji Codell was featured on the Chicago television station WCIU, where she showed off her wonderful Bookroom–PlanetEsme. Her mission? To educate and inspire future generations of book fanatics! Seriously, this woman is saving the world. Watch the video HERE. After taking the virtual tour of The Bookroom, I’m kind of wishing to be eight years old and living in Chicago. Books and cookies. What else could you ever need?
If you’re not in Chicago either, you can bake your own cookies and explore Esme’s website HERE, to read up on great new children’s books and enter contests. This is truly a labor of love for Codell, who is an award-winning author, teacher and librarian. Her book, Educating Esmé, is about her first year of teaching in an inner-city public school. She also wrote How To Get Your Child To Love Reading which is an innovative guide to inspiring lifelong readers. | <urn:uuid:02f22bb8-23ac-4675-b08a-ca42513c9a70> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.algonquinbooksblog.com/blog/news-and-publicity/mom-im-moving-to-planetesme/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950086 | 215 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Devon donates high-rise firefighting equipment to Oklahoma City
Devon Energy Corp. has donated high-rise firefighting equipment to Oklahoma City for use in case of an emergency at Devon Tower, the company's 50-story downtown skyscraper.
Devon Energy Corp. is doing what it can to make sure Oklahoma City's firefighters have the tools they need in case of a fire at the company's new downtown skyscraper.
The Oklahoma City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to accept a donation from Devon of about $11,000 worth of firefighting equipment for high-rise buildings.
Devon Tower, part of the Devon Energy Center, is the tallest building in Oklahoma by a large margin at 50 stories, and presents unique challenges for city firefighters.
The equipment will be stored almost halfway up the tower on the 23rd floor, making it easier for firefighters to respond to a blaze on the tower's top half.
“Any time we have a high-rise fire, it's so labor-intensive and involved just getting up to the fire floor and getting your folks in position,” Oklahoma City Fire Department Deputy Chief Marc Woodard said. “Once you get up there, the fire just has so much lead time on you.”
The need to be ready for a fire in a tall building was reinforced during a recent fire on the seventh floor of an eight-story apartment tower, Woodard said.
“The guys saw how labor-intensive and how exhausting it was. That really made a believer out of us,” Woodard said. | <urn:uuid:786a3d47-cc35-401b-a2c0-938c36519d2e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsok.com/devon-donates-high-rise-firefighting-equipment-to-oklahoma-city/article/3730812 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957282 | 322 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Government safety regulators are investigating complaints that throttles can stick on older-model Ford Escape and Mazda Tribute SUVs and cause them to crash.
The probe, announced Tuesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, affects 730,000 SUVs from the 2001 to 2004 model years that are powered by V-6 engines.
The safety agency said it has received 99 complaints from owners of the SUVs alleging 13 crashes, nine injuries and one death caused by the problem. The throttles on the SUVs can fail to return to idle when the driver takes his foot off the gas pedal, according to agency documents.
Sixty-eight of the complaints were about the Escape, and 31 involved the Tribute, a nearly identical vehicle made by Ford for Mazda. Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford used to own about one-third of Mazda. But Ford began cutting ties in 2008, and in 2010 lowered its ownership to 3.5 percent.
Investigators are looking into whether the sticky throttles could have been caused by repairs made as part of a 2004 recall of the same vehicles. About 590,000 of the vehicles were recalled in December of 2004 to fix an accelerator cable defect, and the documents say the repairs could have damaged the cruise control cable.
Ford spokeswoman Marcey Zwiebel said Ford is aware of the investigation but won't comment on specifics.
"We will fully cooperate, as we always do, with NHTSA," she said.
The Escape has been one of Ford's most popular vehicles since it went on sale in 2000, with more than 2.1 million sold. It was the top-selling small SUV in the country in three of the four years covered by the recall. It was outsold by the Honda CR-V in 2002.
The investigation is among the larger probes started by NHTSA in 2012. While many affect fewer than 100,000 vehicles, the agency this year began looking into door fires affecting 1.4 million Toyota Camry midsize sedans and RAV4 small SUVs. It also expanded a fuel tank fire probe in older-model Jeep Grand Cherokee SUVs to include 5.1 million vehicles.
NHTSA investigations are the first step toward a recall, but they don't always cause cars and trucks to go back to dealerships for repairs.
The investigation comes just over a week after the Center for Auto Safety, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group petitioned NHTSA to investigate the Escape and Tribute problems. The group also asked for a hearing to decide whether Ford and Mazda met obligations to notify owners and fix defects in their vehicles. NHTSA can fine automakers if it finds they didn't notify owners in a timely manner.
But NHTSA denied the group's petition, saying it believes it can gather all the information it needs without a hearing and that a hearing could distract from its investigation. NHTSA said it has been looking at Escape and Tribute problems since early in 2012, after the driver of a 2002 Escape was killed in a crash in Payson, Ariz., in January.
The Associated Press | <urn:uuid:28a979ce-9eb9-4bc6-a1a0-dfad52ae7e72> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jul/17/feds-probe-ford-escapes-for-sticky-throttles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970235 | 636 | 1.59375 | 2 |
TWO Newcastle harbour trees are suspected to have been poisoned in order to improve views for residents in the prestigious Breakwater Apartments.
The "environmental vandalism" drew a strong reaction from the Hunter Development Corporation yesterday, which said trees were continually being sabotaged on the harbourside strip.
The corporation said it would look at strategies of coastal councils before deciding how to respond.
The Newcastle Herald has reported that hundreds of trees are poisoned or chopped down each year with the intention of improving views and the issue is a growing problem for councils.
Councils have responded drastically in some cases, including blocking views with screens or shipping containers. Others have offered rewards for information, with a view to prosecution.
Numerous trees on the harbourfront, which is the responsibility of development corporation and not Newcastle City Council, have had to be replaced in recent years due to vandalism.
Newcastle City Council arborists, shown a picture of the ailing Tuckeroo trees, said it was believed they were poisoned.
Trees that die of natural causes typically shed leaves.
Corporation general manager Bob Hawes said it was "beyond belief that individuals feel they have a right to destroy public assets paid for by all taxpayers".
"It is also bewildering that the same trees planted outside the Crowne Plaza are unaffected while those at the eastern end of the promenade [in front of the Breakwater Apartments] continue to suffer attacks." | <urn:uuid:39db56ec-4c85-44e8-b7d9-36de9ced6a1b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theherald.com.au/story/116249/trees-poisoned-for-the-view/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968421 | 293 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Now that it looks like some form of health care reform will be passed this year — barring a catastrophe like Joe Lieberman — we have some idea of how the eventual act will affect mental health services. All of the plans now under consideration will mean some real improvements for mental health consumers, and there doesn’t seem much likelihood of these improvements being cut out before passage. However, it appears that individuals and employers will still have to purchase their insurance from private insurance companies, without competition from a strong public option like Medicare available for everyone. Nevertheless, the “reform” aspect of the bill would require private insurers to make some real changes in how they treat mental health issues.
- Parity for mental health and substance abuse services. As it is now, when you see a mental health provider, your insurance company will probably pay him or her less for your visit than they would pay your GP or specialist for a similar service. They might require a higher copay from you for a mental health service than a GP visit. They might limit your total annual or lifetime benefits for mental health services. For instance, I have many chronic depression clients who need year-round supportive therapy, but their annual benefits run out in August or September. Most patients have to pay me a $30 or $40 copay from their own pockets, rather than the $10 or $15 that their GP charges.
With a reform bill, private insurers would have to end these practices. That will make it much more possible for patients to receive the care they need without added expense. It will also make it possible for patients who need medication to see a specialist, and not have to rely on the family doctor to prescribe medications he’s not really expert at. Eventually, it may lead to more practitioners entering mental health, a real benefit because credentialed providers are in short supply.
- No discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. The fact that insurers currently can, and do, refuse to insure you for pre-existing conditions is one of the major factors that keeps consumers tied to their jobs. It also forces them to contort themselves anxiously through COBRA plans and sensitive negotiations with their employers to stay on their old plan. And of course the old plan currently is still free to let you go, cap your benefits, or charge you a higher rate for those pre-existing conditions.
This doesn’t hurt only mental health consumers, of course, but also those with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or any other chronic or recurring illness. The current policy thus causes a great deal of stress for many, many consumers, which hopefully will be greatly eased by the new legislation.
- No rate changes based on health status. With reform, insurers will no longer be able to raise your rates because you develop a chronic or expensive condition. All subscribers in the same age group will pay the same rate.
- Greater availability of insurance, at lower cost. Though the details haven’t been worked out yet, a major goal of all the bills is greater availability of individual insurance plans to people who can’t afford health care now. Many people with mental health disorders such as long-term depression are not able to sustain themselves in challenging or stressful jobs, resulting in poverty or underemployment. The current economic collapse and the fact that insurance rates keep rising more than twice as much as the general cost of living has put health insurance out of reach for many. Reform is meant to make insurance much more available.
- Expansion of Medicaid. Medicaid is the government-run health care plan available to the poor. It’s a program that works well, and though there are some problems they are nothing like the problems with private insurance. The bill would basically expand the definition of the poor to include more working-class, low-income families. The fact that so many households have parents working two or three part-time jobs, none of them providing private insurance, means that Medicaid expansion and the greater availability of low-cost private plans will take a tremendous worry off of working people’s backs.
These are all great steps forward, especially for everyone who sees a therapist or takes an antidepressant or other psychiatric medication—or needs to. However, the devil is always in the details.
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O'Connor, R. (2009). What Health Care Reform Means for Mental Health. Psych Central. Retrieved on May 20, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/11/03/what-health-care-reform-means-for-mental-health/ | <urn:uuid:07aa6b08-6797-4b02-8321-dade7e5728f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/11/03/what-health-care-reform-means-for-mental-health/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959057 | 983 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Little House on the Prairie is the epitome of the good-natured
family show, and while it serves up a generous helping of
sentimentality, the attention to character and story means that the
series has weathered the passing of more than twenty years with both
its dignity and its entertainment value intact. As we see in Season
6, Little House continues to be truly a family show: one that
both the adults and the children can enjoy together. And while Little
House certainly addresses "important issues" it manages
to do so in a natural, non-preachy manner: the Ingalls aren't perfect
(that's part of their charm) but they're certainly solid role models
for both younger viewers and their parents.
Season 6 is a pivotal season in the Little House saga. One of
the appealing aspects of the series has been how the characters grow
and change over time; even though it's a fundamentally episodic show,
it doesn't always have a "reset button" in every episode.
5 saw a lot of changes for Mary, who married Adam and moved away
to teach with him at the school for the blind, Season 6 has some
important moments in store for Laura.
Most notably, Season 6 sees the arrival of Almanzo Wilder (Dean
Butler), who is fated to be Laura's husband. (That's not a spoiler
even if you've never read the original Little House books, as
Laura provides a foreshadowing voiceover in a key episode in this
season). The two-part season opener, "Back to School,"
provides a nice introduction to the character of Almanzo, as well as
Laura's immediate fascination with him. As the season proceeds, we
see that Laura is moving out of girlhood into young womanhood, and is
struggling with her own feelings as well as her parents'
expectations; Pa Ingalls in particular is far from ready to give up
Modern viewers may be surprised to see romance treated so seriously
for a sixteen-year-old character, but in this case Little House
is actually being true to the historical setting (and Laura Ingalls
Wilder's own biography). Young people in the 19th century were
expected to start life as adults much earlier than they do today,
especially out on the frontier, and as we saw with Mary in an earlier
season, that often included marriage at what we'd consider a very
young age. When it comes to handling the shift from "little
girl" to "young woman" for Laura, a character we've
known and loved as a mischievous little kid, Season 6 has its work
cut out for it; I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well and
believably it's handled. By the end of the season, with "Sweet
Sixteen" and "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not," Laura has
taken on a new dimension as a character.
The stand-alone episodes offer the usual variety of stories centered
around the Ingalls family and the people of Walnut Grove, but in a
nice change of pace from earlier seasons, a number of the stories
actually affect recurring characters, rather than "neighbor of
the week whom we never see again." For instance, in "The
Family Tree" we see young Albert become a full part of the
Ingalls family. "The Return of Mr. Edwards" has a fairly
self-explanatory title, although the episode is no joyful reunion,
but is surprisingly dark. Another notable episode in Season 6 is the
tragic two-part episode "May We Make Them Proud."
While it's not an earth-shattering omission, I have to report that
Season 6 is actually missing an episode: "The Little House
Years." This three-part episode was a retrospective of the
Ingalls family's favorite memories, shared as they gather for
Thanksgiving, and originally aired on Nov. 15, 1979; it seems to have
been shown in addition to the normal slate of 21 episodes. In any
case, even though it's not exactly "original" material,
it's disappointing that it's not included on the DVD set for fans of
Little House on the Prairie: Season 6 is a 6-DVD set, with the
discs packaged in a long cardboard fold-out case which fits inside a
glossy paperboard slipcase.
Unfortunately, while the content is good, the transfer quality leaves
a lot to be desired. The image is uneven in terms of quality: primary
colors like the bright blue sky or Laura's red dress look bright and
vivid, but most of the rest of the image looks faded and has a
slightly brownish tint. The contrast is too heavy in dark scenes, and
the picture is quite soft, so there's little detail to be seen in
longer-distance shots. On top of that, the print isn't in very good
condition: there are many speckles and flecks of dirt in the image,
and several instances of shimmering distortion effects. Watchable?
Yes, but a serious disappointment even accounting for the age of the
The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is also sub-par. The overall sound is flat
and slightly muffled, and there's a distinctly tinny quality to the
sound. Whenever voices get raised – as in so many of the scenes
involving Mrs. Oleson – it's noticeably harsh-sounding.
bonus material continues to get more substantial with each season's
release. In Season 6, fans are treated to several interesting special
features. On Disc 1, we get an audio commentary from Alison Arngrim
(who played Nellie Oleson) for "Back to School: Part 2."
Even though it was recorded so long after the fact, Arngrim still has
quite a few interesting and amusing anecdotes to share about the
series and that episode. We also get three substantial and reasonably
interesting interviews: a 20-minute interview with Dean Butler
(Almanzo Wilder) on Disc 2, an 11-minute interview with Alison
Arngrim on Disc 4, and an 8-minute interview with Dabbs Greer
(Reverend Alden) on Disc 5. Lastly, Disc 6 has the inevitable trivia
though the transfer quality leaves a lot to be desired, Little
House on the Prairie: Season 6 still gets a "recommended"
rating, as it's really a great example of truly family-friendly
entertainment. Sure, it's on the sentimental side, but it's all done
in such good spirits that nobody minds a little sappiness. After all,
it's really the characters who make the series, and with Laura
getting more of the spotlight in this season, Season 6 is especially | <urn:uuid:6a778826-65db-4cbf-9df8-aeedd423b97a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/13090/little-house-on-the-prairie-the-complete-season-6/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959908 | 1,441 | 1.726563 | 2 |
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Several years ago the Bush Administration determined that there was a big black hole in the American economy. International Investors….like Bernie Madoff, Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, Jeff Skillings and literally thousands of very rich Americans had actually buried money in Credit Suisse and a variety of banks on Bahnhoff Strasse in Zurich, Switzerland. The Treasury Department went after several international banks, the country of Switzerland and then proceeded to ask for identification of all American citizens that had deposited funds of over $10,000 dollars in Swiss Banks. The Swiss fought the issue, tooth and nail and maintained that if they were to disclose these folks…..the harm to Swiss Banking would be irreparable. Finally, under tremendous pressure Switzerland relented and had to give up the account info. This haven for the rich and/or famous considered untouchable, including what some say, Nazi gold and cash left over from WWII, had to finally open the books on Americans participating in the process.
Well, as the Madoff Case grew like topsy over 17,000 American citizens were identified as prime targets of the IRS for serious tax evasion. Much as in the spirit of the Jerry Sandusky case, the Treasury Department suggested that the “humanitarian solution” would be to offer a ”General Amnesty” to all those who had participated in the ” Swiss Stealth Banking Protocols” and pay their required taxes and in addition pay a moderate fine. All but 2,500 took advantage of this program and not much more has been mentioned about the relationship between the U.S. Treasury Department, the United States Government and the country of Switzerland nor any of the many other offending banks.
As the issue of Mitt Romney now raises its head about the Bain Capital “arms length” relationship from 1999 forward and the fact that Romney now refuses to offer up more than just the last two years of his tax records – the questions start to mount: When did Romney have money in banks in the Cayman Islands? Does he still have money in the Caymen Islands? What other Caribbean Islands does Mitt Romney have banking relationships with? Does Mitt Romney have funds anywhere in Southeast Asia, China or anywhere else? What about other European Countries? Does Mitt Romney have money there as well? What about Mitt’s Bermuda Holding Company?
Living in a Global Economic Society, it is easy to understand that by a mere flick of a mouse…..billions of dollars can easily change hands across multiple international borders. Bernie Madoff taught us all about that. His $17 Billion dollars …..are still missing. His brother Peter will be doing some hard time soon, but still remains out on bail. JP Morgan – Chase and CEO Jamie Dimon are busy trying to explain how a $2 billion dollar Credit Default Swap loss has turned into a $7.5 Billion loss…..which may be turning into even more. Hey, when you start talking about the 1%, their sets of rules can be a lot different from the rest of us.
Mitt Romney, should he care to be our next President, better get a grip on the fact – that we live in a “Full Disclosure World”. Romney needs to explain his last 12 years in detail, along with all his tax records and all of his “off shore” banking activities. Was Mitt Romney afforded “Amnesty” if or when he reported his deposits in his Swiss Bank Accounts? These are simple questions that need to be answered. If everything is on the up and up….no problem – Americans will know that the Republican Candidate is forthcoming and willing to share his soul with the American people. If not, the American people can start to sweat.
Bain Capital, Cayman Islands, Swiss Bank Accounts and Amnesty? Mr. Romney probably a good time to let everyone know…. | <urn:uuid:a2678c01-64e3-466f-82fd-101f82426c64> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2012/07/bain-capital-cayman-islands-swiss-bank-accounts-and-amnesty/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966781 | 784 | 1.75 | 2 |
News - Double The Wellness
by Life Positive
He has brought from London, a special device through which he can conduct an energy diagnosis of a person, and find out about the disharmonic functioning of prana, chakra and nadis as they are the dynamic activator, channels and pathways of the vital force respectively. For homoeopathy, this vital force is considered to be the key of disease and treatment. Therefore, appropriate homoeopathic medicines can be prescribed after the device helps him understand the subtle energy condition, and the under or over functioning of different cells in the body.
Dr Ladda says, "The combination works well because both radionics and homoeopathy work towards balancing the energy level of the patient, and both are based on the idea of 'like cures like', and the totality of the symptoms to find the homoeopathic similimum. They offer better results when used along with each other, rather than independently." For instance, Dr Ladda says that he would be able to heal an arthritis patient in about eight to nine months using homoeopathy, but with radionics and homoeopathy combined, he could manage to heal the same person in four to five months. Now that sounds remarkable, doesn't it? With radionics, a healer can not only determine the primary cause of an illness, but also detect potentially serious health conditions at an early stage before they manifest in the physical plane. It also helps to find out the homoeopathic similimum with the needed potency.
Contact: Ph: 09371667444, 09822171862; firstname.lastname@example.org, www.wavehealing.co.in
|HOME | SUBSCRIBE | WALLPAPERS | ADVERTISING | POLICY | PRACTITIONERS | WRITERS | PEOPLE | ABOUT | CONTACT| | <urn:uuid:3e47c9f1-1423-477c-b9dd-2a54d57c9a78> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lifepositive.com/Mind/News/Double_The_Wellness.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933447 | 390 | 1.695313 | 2 |
|Search The Web||Stephen King Crossword Puzzle||The A to Z of Author Stephen King|
The A to Z of Stephen King
A is for... Hearts in Atlantis
King's collection, now in paperback and first published in late 1999, has five tales of childhood and college days in the 1960s, intertwined so that it reads more like a novel than a collection of novellas. King didn't go to Vietnam, high blood pressure and burst ear-drums prevented him, but that war haunts these stories as students protest, are drafted and survive or change because of it. Less to do with the war is the opening story, which some consider the best, Low Men in Yellow Coats. Here the monsters from King's Dark Tower series are invading a small town and only impoverished kid Bobby and his mum's lodger Ted Brautigan can fight them. Local bullies are turning on the kid too echoing one of King's favourite books, Lord of the Flies. King is once again at his best evoking pictures from our own childhood and formative years...
B is for... Bag of Bones
There is a huge debate going on between fans about whether the "new", less ghastly Stephen King books are as good as the classics. One camp declares not, the books are less gripping and scary than before and it is after all "horror" that they read the books for. The other camp sees the move towards more reflective and realistic situations as a sign of maturity and that "serious" literature reviewers can now take King much more seriously. I fall somewhere between the two. I certainly don't want to read formula novels where the author's heart is clearly not in them - Desperation shows signs of that. On the other hand I feel that books like Bag of Bones are too long to sustain the reader's complete interest. Essentially a story about a haunted house or rather a haunted town, the book is actually at its best when dealing with the grief of the narrator, Mike Noonan, over his recently deceased wife and the effect this has on his ability to write. It has some creepy moments but for me the villain is not strong enough and the point of view, the book is told entirely in the first person, hinders the development of secondary characters which strengthen so many of his other novels.
C is for... Carrie
The Brian de Palma film of King's first novel, Carrie, in which a child, abused by her obsessively religious mother and taunted mercilessly by her classmates, is driven to use her telekinetic powers against them, did much to establish the writer as the undisputed King of horror and to set standards in the horror cinema genre. The casting of child and mother, with Sissy Spacek as Carrie and Piper Laurie as her mother, was nothing short of genius and both fully merit their academy award nominations. Spacek is both pitiful and endearing in the opening scenes, beautifully handled by de Palma, making us pity the girl and to a certain extent share the embarrassment and disdain of her classmates. The film also contains one of movie's all-time famous moments, the heart-thumping slow-motion build up to the bucket of blood dropping on the "heroine" and the split-screen aftermath is a scene that has to be seen in the cinema to be truly appreciated. The novel was almost lost during its creation when Stephen King threw it in the trash - luckily his wife Tabitha rescued it. Although it had only modest sales as a hardback, the paperback set King up for life and while over-shadowed a little by the film and later novels, it remains a favourite amongst King's fans and has much to recommend it.
D is for... Dreamcatcher
The eagerly awaited first full novel by King since Bag Of Bones is Dreamcatcher released in late March 2001. The story tells of four childhood friends who as adults are attacked by aliens while on a hunting trip. There are echoes of both It and Tommyknockers in the new novel theme and since these are probably my two favourite King books, I'm really looking forward to it. Incidently in May 2000 while doing research for the book Stephen King took a tour with water officials of the Quabbin Reservoir, which serves the city of Boston.
E is for... Eclipse
One of the pivotal scenes in Dolores Claiborne involves an eclipse of the sun... Perhaps King's first diversion from the horror formula and also overshadowed by a strong film adaptation, Dolores Claiborne is a novel that concerns a housekeeper accused of murder for the second time in her life. In the book the story is told by the main character herself and delivers piece by piece the details of her life with an abusive and drunken husband. The film however concentrates more on Dolores' relationship with her estranged daughter whose descent into drugs and alcohol is threatening to mirror the extremes of her father's addictions... Kathy Bates gives a great performance as Dolores while both book and film paint realistic pictures of rural, island life...
F is for... Fears
Despite the fact that King is a giant of a man at 6 foot 4 and 200 pounds, and that he's been happy giving the rest of the world the heebie-jeebies all these years, King has many phobias of his own. These include death, insects, closed-in places, deformity, rats, snakes and the dark. Perhaps it's his understanding of these phobias that makes his scenes so memorable - he's scaring himself as he writes them. The scene in the mining hut in Desperation with all sorts of slithering, crawling things in complete darkness in an enclosed space must have been particularly difficult to visualise...
G is for... The Green Mile
When Stephen King released The Green Mile in 1996 as a series of six novellas, cynics may have seen it as clever sales technique, but fans were riveted by what turned out to be one of King's best stories for years. Set in the Death Row of a Southern prison during the depression the story is narrated by an old guard years after the supernatural events have passed. A huge prisoner, John Coffey, is sentenced to the prison and slowly his special gifts begin to affect the guards and prisoners around him. The story has now been published into a single volume and, of course, has been adapted to the big screen with Tom Hanks in the narrator's role. After a series of less successful films and mini-series, a big hollywood production of a King book was long overdue, and director Frank Darabont, who also directed King's screenplay The Shawshank Redemption, brings the series to life with great skill.
H is for... The Dark Half
The Dark Half has an intriguing (and illuminating, perhaps) plot. In parallel with the author in Misery, Thad Beaumont kills off his pseudonym George Stark who for years has been paying the bills by churning out trashy ultra-violent thrillers in order to write more literary novels. However a feeling of foreboding, backed up by nightmares, is haunting the writer and soon it becomes clear that while he may be finished with George Stark, his dark half isn't yet finished with him. As a novel it works out reasonably well although there is more threatened violence than real action, and much about the psychopomps (a word that unfortunately sounds more silly than frightening), gatherings of small birds, harbingers of the living dead. At the time I first read this book, I remember wondering whether King was about to give up horror altogether or whether the killing of his own pseudonym Richard Bachman (see "P"), was less of a career change and more an act of necessity...
I is for... It
Once you've read this book you will never look at clowns or balloons in quite the same way... One of King's amazing talents is his ability to recall what it was like to be a child. There are many, many passages in It where I was transported back to my own childhood, to long days mucking about playing in ponds and streams, to scary days when you just couldn't seem to escape the local bully, to bold days being the leader of games in a weedy, little gang, to dark days where family life was grim and running away seemed a good option. Coupled with this ability King also has the guts to put children in extreme and horrifying danger and yet show the strength of youth where maturity falters and crumbles... The ending doesn't satisfy everyone but like The Stand the getting there is easily the best writing of its kind... A personal favourite and one that was adapted into a especially good mini-series for TV...
J is for... January 1971
Stephen King married Tabitha Spruce in January 1971. They had met in the Fogler Library of the University of Maine where they both had worked. During the years before Carrie was born the Kings had little money but a few sales of short stories helped the family along. They have three children Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip and one grandchild, Ethan, son to Joe and his wife Leanora. They have lived mostly in Maine throughout their marriage apart from a brief stay in Boulder, Colorado and a cut short stay in the UK in 1977. Maine features in almost all of King's books and as the biographical note in many of them says it is "his home state and the place where he feels he really belongs".
Stephen King graduated with a BSC in English from the University of Maine in 1970 but although he was qualified to teach at high school level, he was unable to find a post straight away. For a time he worked in an industrial laundromat and then as a janitor before securing a job at the Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. During this period he continued to write and managed to sell a number of stories to men's magazines, many of which would be later collected in Night Shift. In early 1973 Carrie was accepted by Doubleday & Co, and when the novel's paperback rights were sold King was able to give up the day job and concentrate on writing full time. His connection with Hampden Academy didn't end however, he now provides scholarships for students through the school.
K is for... Stanley Kubrick
The idea for King's third book in print, The Shining, was born on a weekend trip with his wife away from the children. They stayed in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park but during the weekend King found the place unsettling and disturbing. He imagined the entire book in his head and wrote it very quickly afterwards. It's not just a story of a writer driven by the ghosts of the hotel to attack his wife and child but about a man who cannot face failure and who through alcohol, visits the abuse taught to him by his own father on his own child. The novel was taken up by renowned director Stanley Kubrick, whose previous films included 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove. His film is not fully faithful to the book as he preferred to suggest the hotel's influence on Jack rather than state it, and to rely on visual images than explanations. Jack Nicholson played Jack Torrance with Shelley Duvall as his wife. Both give impressive performances although Kubrick heartlessly kept Shelley Duvall in a state of distress during the later scenes by criticising her constantly and continually changing her lines and cues. Still, both book and film are classics in their own ways. A mini-series more faithful to the book was made in the 90s although it has to be said with an inferior cast.
L is for... The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
|© 2000, 2001 Compiled by Alan J Stuart| | <urn:uuid:595c87b9-2510-411f-9186-de3a75aee95f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alan.stuart/books/kingstep.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982153 | 2,397 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Wednesday, 25 April 2012 07:57
Games - Games
|← Star Trek for the Wii-U a Possibility||Microsoft to Show off Cross Platform Music →|
In today's world people want money. If they aren't making even more money than they already have then they aren't happy. In comes used game sales. Used game sales have been around since the dawn of video game time. It's a way for us poor folk to get to play the sixty dollar games that we can't always afford without resorting to piracy. However rumors are flying around saying that next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles will block used games. This has put a rift in the video game industry with some devs saying it's a fantastic idea while others just claim that it's downright bad. Another developer has joined the ranks of the Dark side...er former.
Crysis 3 developer Rasmus Hojengaard says that it would be "awesome" if next gen consoles were to block the use of used games when asked about the topic in an interview with CVG.
From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It's weird that [second-hand] is still allowed because it doesn't work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well.
In my opinion software shouldn't be blocked from being used twice at all. The price of OS' like Mac OS and Windows OS and any other software is bordering price gouging when you consider that Linux OS and other software that goes with the Linux systems is FREE. We're in a world where we've gotten too greedy and don't think about people like myself who can't afford $120 for Windows 7 because my student loan debt greatly exceeds that amount by...a lot.
Used video games have been with us for a long time as mentioned before. It helps Joe Schmoe's like me to be able to buy new games. Just recently I turned in a ton of games just so I could get a new 3DS and two 3DS games. None of which I would have been able to get had used games been blocked on current gen systems.
Also, these developers and publishers whine and moan about piracy. Once used games are gone piracy will be on the rise even more. Companies are charging $60 for a game on top of making us pay $5 for some skimpy clothing for our characters. DLC is another story and we don't have to pay for it. However it's unfair that these developers want to complain that they aren't making enough money because of used game sales when they're already trying to milk us out of every penny that we have.
I can not and will not stand by developers who think that used games are bad. You sir/madam are bad for trying to take away video games from me. Myself and others can only afford to buy so many $60 games. Last year Skyrim was the only game I payed full price for and this year Assassin's Creed III is probably the only one that I'll pay full price for. It comes to the point where you can only chose one or maybe even two. Student loans and Pell grants only get you so far. As for a job, I have one but I'm only getting two four hour shifts each week. That measly pay check every two weeks goes to rent.
If any of you developers or publishers out there who think that used games should be block and are reading this then think twice. I will not upgrade to the next generation of consoles, I'll actually probably just buy a Wii-U since that won't block used games. I will not buy your games anymore unless it is used. I will not support you period.
Gamers, this is a message to you. Instead of rallying against terrible endings in video games and what not we should take a look at the trouble that's going to make a terrible ending for all of us. Used games are not an abomination and that part of the industry should be preserved. This is the cause we should rally towards, this is something worth fighting for. Used games will never die, and if they do we should not stand for it.
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In today's world people want money. If they aren't making even more money than they already have then they aren't happy. In comes used game sales. Used game sales have been around since the dawn of...
© 2013 - Screen Rave
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- There Will Be Ads - Microsoft plans commercial breaks on XBox Live! entertainment | <urn:uuid:0bdc27a3-201e-4df0-a21c-9333bea72b6e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://screenrave.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20480:crysis-dev-blocking-used-games-would-be-awesome&catid=126:games&Itemid=272 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967658 | 1,075 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Twitter recently acknowledged the company downloads the entire address book of its mobile users, including email addresses and phone numbers, when they use the "Find Friends" app.
Did you know that iPad usage spikes at 8 p.m. and iPhone consumption peaks at 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m.?
Looking for a promising career in a lousy economy? A new study suggests you're apt to find it in apps _ the services and tools built to run on smartphones, computer tablets and Facebook's online social network.
Virginia State Parks has launched a smartphone application that will help guide visitors to a park nearest them and help them navigate trails and other attractions.
There are iPhone apps that map out the Battle of Gettysburg A climate-controlled system at the visitor center in Gettysburg is so precise it will detect the change of a few degrees And soon parking lots at the Gettysburg battlefield will also be equipped with the latest technology
A new website app may provide help with the age-old parenting battle of getting kids to do their chores and do them well.
Want to earn stuff by watching TV? A free app for that debuted Wednesday.
The next wave of smartphone technology shares where police have radar detectors set up.
The "Winter Wake-Up" app keeps you from being blindsided by snow and ice that add time to your morning commute.
There are ways to access Wikipedia's content, even though the site is blacked out.
Microsoft is facing accusations of potential racism related to its patent for a new pedestrian-friendly map application.
Move over "Angry Birds" and make way for "Angry Brides."
A new app is designed to make you go to the gym by making it hurt financially if you don't.
A quick-thinking victim of a stolen iPhone helped Montgomery County Police not only recover his smartphone, but apparently also solve a string of thefts from autos.
Dulles International Airport, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport are included in Skype's plan.
A new smartphone app called "Uber" may give D.C. cab drivers a run for their money.
RepairPal will let you know of a shop's estimate of repair work is reasonable.
Transit Near Me takes sometimes confusing and hard-to-use transit maps and combines them into a single interactive map.
Soon, agents may have smart phones with a new app called Mobile One, which plugs into their phone and allows them to scan fingerprints in the field and plug them into the national criminal database.
With the holiday season in tow, many people may be looking for new activities to entertain their guests -- and Fairfax County would like to help them. | <urn:uuid:b4aa998b-f9df-4a38-a04f-ee09191042b2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wtop.com/?hlpage=6&nid=967 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947739 | 552 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Within minutes of the Supreme Court's ruling to uphold the president's health care law on Thursday, both Congressional Republicans and the GOP's presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, vowed to repeal the law as well.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell restated that vow Friday, saying on the Laura Ingraham radio show that if Romney wins and the GOP gains a majority in the Senate, repealing Obamacare "is the first item on the agenda."
But can they?
If Romney wins the White House, his power to gut or eliminate the law is severely limited without the help of Congress. And with slim odds that the GOP will win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, congressional Republicans face a steep climb to repeal the president's signature law.
Such long odds have not deterred the law's opponents, though. After the Supreme Court ruled on the health care law, House Republicans quickly promised that they will once again act to repeal the law in its entirety July 11.
That vote is expected to pass easily, much like when the House first voted for repeal Jan. 19, 2011, approving the measure 245-189. House Republicans have already voted 30 times to disrupt, dismantle, defund and repeal provisions in the health care law. No similar attempts have passed in the Senate.
After Chief Justice John Roberts announced the decision Thursday morning, Mitt Romney rushed to the National Mall, with the Capitol Dome perched over his shoulder, to promise to repeal the law on Day One of a Romney presidency.
"What the court did not do in its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States," Romney pledged. "I will act to repeal Obamacare."
The "act" in Romney's sentence might be the key word. He cannot, as president, use an executive order to single-handedly repeal a law that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. But there are three possible ways Romney could go after the Affordable Care Act using executive power, said Michael Dorf, a constitutional law scholar at Cornell Law School.
First, Romney could direct the departments charged with administering the law to grant the states any and all waivers that were written into the law. Because there aren't many of these waivers and those that do exist don't take effect for years, this method would not disable the law quickly enough to appease the GOP and meet his Day One timeframe.
Second, he could instruct his administration not to enforce the law. This tactic is similar to Obama's decision that his administration would no longer deport undocumented immigrants, "but on steroids," Dorf said.
"It's not that he would be prioritizing one part of the act above another, he would be saying he wouldn't do any of it," Dorf said.
Obama's immigration decision "was at the edge of what a president can do," he added. "What Romney would be proposing to do would go way beyond that."
Romney's third and most "radical" option, Dorf said, would be to assert an independent duty as president to act on his own interpretation of the Constitution, despite the Supreme Court's ruling. Thomas Jefferson was the last president to use this line of reasoning in 1801 when he refused to prosecute people under the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or certain officials.
While this option would be the most effective way to quickly and fully repeal the law, Dorf said, it would be like "playing with fire."
"It is possible he could do it and get away with some of it, but it would be at the cost of sparking a Constitution crisis," Dorf said. | <urn:uuid:3fe8e6eb-4d3c-4d0c-8086-6831e6d40edd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/reality-repealing-obama-health-care-law/story?id=16679832 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972431 | 751 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Donald Moffett doesn’t call his artworks in “The Radiant Future” sculptures. They’re not paintings either. The Staten Island-based artist prefers the word “contraptions.”
“He has really taken apart the idea of what a painting is and can be,” said Michael Goodson, exhibition director of CCAD’s Canzani Center Gallery, where Moffett’s exhibition will be on view through the end of the year.
Balancing his paintings on jaunty-yet-jarring constructions — oops, contraptions — Moffett challenges how paintings are typically displayed.
“I still do hang on to the category of painting as my prime interest. I think that will be clear in the show,” Moffett said. “With the way the paintings have been developing over the last few years, with the drilling and the opening up of the structure, the wall became a real downer.”
Thus, he brought them into a three-dimensional space by hanging them on constructions made of things like wood and donkeys, a little man and a Snow White look-alike.
“We did go a little berserk with the hanging devices. We clearly got into them,” Moffett said. “However, through all of that, as elaborate as these hanging contraptions might be, they are supporting a painting just as a wall traditionally does. … But clearly they’re not neutral. They are symbolic. They come off as symbolic. They’re not random. They’re not un-thought.”
Those symbols in the hanging devices (as well as the holes in the works) are up to the viewer to decide what they mean to the paintings, which shamelessly embrace “the fat of oil paint,” Goodson said. They look more like shaggy carpet than oil paint.
“I’ve learned a lot from working with oil paint,” said Moffett, who originally intended to paint the work with acrylic but it didn’t hold the refinement of the shape quite like oil did. “You learn why oil paint lasts 500 years. It’s durable. It’s malleable. It’s sculptural even. That’s a lot of paint. That oil paint is still wet in a lot of cases.”
Goodson likened the thickness of Moffett’s paint to when the impressionists turned to impasto, in which the paint was so thick brush strokes were visible.
“It’s a celebration of paint and the history of paint in a different, smart way,” said Goodson (who, we might add, managed to get this exhibit up on time despite Moffett’s art storage space being smacked around by Hurricane Sandy).
The idea for the near-illusionary shape of the paintings was inspired by Moffett’s participation in a cake decorating class. The piping of pastries with icing made him consider how paint would hold up through a similar application.
“The Radiant Future” exhibit is paired with a compilation of works Moffett made near the start of his career. He drew the 17 sketches in “Mr. Gay in the U.S.A.” when he attended the sentencing of Ronald Gay. Gay opened fire in 2000 at a Virginia gay bar because he blamed the LGBT community for his last name being a source of amusement for his peers.
The drawings are sparse — some made of only two or three lines — but as moving as Mr. Gay’s story is tragic.
“[The drawings are] very honest in a way and that kind of also includes bad drawings,” Moffett admitted. “Some are a little embarrassing. But I stick by them and don’t go back into them because they were too honest.”
The shooting “was crushing in a lot of ways,” he said.
This is the first showing of “Mr. Gay in the U.S.A.” in which Moffett also offers a viewing of ephemera he collected while working on the project.
Opening simultaneously this Friday at the Canzani Center Gallery is a suite of paintings by Byron Kim made every Sunday since 2001 called “The Sunday Paintings” and “Simulacrum,” a collection of works by numerous artists that have ditched digital and returned to studio practice of making art from the ground up. | <urn:uuid:af233dd0-e737-4cc1-b8a0-91553f2693cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.columbusalive.com/content/stories/2012/11/15/preview-the-radiant-future-and-mr--gay-in-the-u-s-a-.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97514 | 954 | 1.664063 | 2 |
|The safety and security of passengers is of the utmost importance
Interislander travels the Cook Strait between the North and South Islands of New Zealand and is one of the most spectacular cruises in the world. The 92 km journey between Wellington and Picton is one of New Zealand’s most iconic tourist experiences.The service operates three ships, carrying passengers, their vehicles, rail and commercial freight: Arahura, Aratere, and Kaitaki. All offer the freedom and ease of exploring New Zealand by road. Taking a vehicle on an Interislander ferry is as simple as parking - just drive on and drive off. Nor do passengers with vehicles have any luggage restrictions. Offering up to 11 sailings a day, Interislander passengers also have the convenience of a wide choice of travel times.
During the Interislander journey, passengers take a stroll on the decks, enjoy a meal, a drink, or even catch the latest movie release. Or, of course, simply enjoy the breathtaking views.The safety and security of passengers, luggage and staff at the two Ferry Terminals at Wellington and Picton, is of the utmost importance, meaning a sophisticated and efficient system is paramount. Interislander had an aged analogue system, which had poor image quality and was becoming slow and ineffective.
Network Imaging Solutions (NIS)
was chosen to lead Interislander’s system overhaul. Partnering with Teltrac Communications, John Hurford from NIS designed a MOBOTIX
installation that far exceeded the expectations of this
“The salt in the atmosphere where Interislander operates was also a big issue we had heading into this project, but the self-cleaning coating on the MOBOTIX cameras made short work of this.''
important public safety system. NIS has been a security solutions provider since 2004, and differs from the traditional distribution model.
They are actively hands-on and have the IT experience to assist integrators install and set up systems to the end user level. John Hurford (NIS) said, “Upgrading to a new MOBOTIX IP system gave Interislander far more control over their security requirements and increased flexibility, while remaining cost-effective.”
He outlined some harsh environmental conditions that created challenges for any security system at the site, "We had to deal with below freezing temperatures, with Picton and Wellington Ferry Terminals situated at sea level and subject to harsh gales, rain, hail and temperature variations. A very corrosive salt laden atmosphere also makes things difficult.”
Solution NIS designed and implemented a surveillance system comprising MOBOTIX Q24M
cameras. In total over 30 cameras have been installed to date. Ian Gilbert, Security Manager at Interislander, praised the durability of the MOBOTIX cameras and their ability to overcome the harsh environmental conditions.“The production of custom stainless steel brackets as mounts meant we were able to protect cameras where appropriate from the difficult conditions at the site. Using these brackets, combined with the MOBOTIX camera’s built-in protective housing, the system is secure from the elements. | <urn:uuid:3099ef5f-99b9-439a-8dd3-20719f622c36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sourcesecurity.com/companies/micro-site/mobotix-ag/case-studies.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948947 | 649 | 1.515625 | 2 |
The University of California San Diego‘s striking new Rita Atkinson Residences may have students across the states scrambling to fill out an application. The graduate student housing building is part of an effort to meet the university’s unique goal of housing half of the student population in campus facilities, enhancing the educational experience on campus. Architect Joseph Valerio designed the project to target LEED Silver certification while attracting top students with its refined modern design.
The contemporary housing project consists of 226 two-bedroom units as well as support areas for the residents. The average unit is 725 square feet, and the building totals roughly 225,000 square feet spread over nine floors. The minimal interior finishes were purposefully selected to maintain an urban aesthetic while conserving material resources.
Sealed concrete plays a primary role throughout the project, making up the floors, ceilings, columns, and walls. Extensive glazing throughout ensures that students are able to make the most of the southern California sun while diving into their studies.
+ Valerio Dewalt Train Associates | <urn:uuid:565c4ae3-f7a6-411d-a3cc-f8739993079a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inhabitat.com/ucsd-unveils-striking-new-student-housing-building/ucsd-atkins-dorm-14/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943184 | 211 | 1.5625 | 2 |
T. Markus Funk , Jess A. Dance
The authors are with Perkins Coie, Denver. T. Markus Funk is an associate editor of Litigation and a national cochair of the ABA’s Global Anti-Corruption Task Force.
Germany has assumed a “leading position” in the investigation and prosecution of foreign bribery cases, according to a March 2011 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Working Group on Bribery. “Germany’s enforcement has increased steadily and resulted in a significant number of prosecutions and sanctions imposed in foreign bribery-
related cases against individuals,” the OECD stated. Similarly, Transparency International rates Germany as having “active enforcement” of the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention.
Indeed, in recent years, Germany has been second only to the United States in the number of foreign bribery cases being tried, and third to the United States and United Kingdom in cases charged. Accordingly, companies doing business in Germany or with German companies are well advised to make themselves familiar with Germany’s anticorruption laws. | <urn:uuid:1a2cacce-4ad5-4d94-babc-58552bdb399f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanbar.org/publications/litigation_journal/2011_12/spring/global_litigator_potential_collateral_estoppel_effect.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947772 | 235 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Sunday May 19, 2013
Burmese Boat People Flee Genocide Increasingly Compared to BosniaPolitical Perspective by Tim King Salem-News.com
Government forces are now killing Buddhists also; demand an end to the violence in Myanmar!
(SACRAMENTO, CA) - People who share my heart wrenching concern for the tragedy taking place in fledgling democracy Myanmar, need to help this cause by writing to their U.S. Senators and Members of Congress. We must compel them to participate and save the lives of human beings who are suffering miserably with no answer in sight.
U.S. officials need to contact President Thein Sein and demand that all coastal military forces that are preventing refugees from landing on their own nation's soil relinquish their positions and allow safe landing and passage.
Each day passes with U.S. media ignoring the plight of these Rohingya Muslim refugees, who have been murdered and burned and driven out by the majority Rakhine Buddhist majority.
This arrived in my email today:
Nurul Islam, A Human Rights Activist & Media coordinator, ARU
They are stateless people who lost their citizenship in Myanmar, previously known as Burma, in 1982 under the ruling military junta famous for murder and maintaining high level political prisoners like opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi who is a Buddhist and a silent one on this issue.
I am listing the stories I have written on this ethnic cleansing period in Burma that began in July. You can use our 'Myanmar' or 'Burma' tag below to take you to hundreds of stories beyond those I have personally written. Salem-News.com has become a virtual magnet for the advocates and reporters who are also following this story, most of whom are in Europe and Asia, which is why your help is needed.
Government forces opened fire on mobs of Buddhist protestors within the last 24-hours, killing several. This has to stop immediately and should have never happened.
This, following a systematic genocide of Rohingya homes and villages and unforgivable mob violence and murder. People are being tortured to death as we have reported, and this is all happening at the hands of the Myanmar government.
Oct-16-2012: U.S. Media and Press Are Guilty of Murder
Oct-15-2012: Tortured to Death in Burma - Extremely Graphic!
Jul-20-2012: Why Are Buddhists Committing Genocide Again?
Tim King has more than twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. Tim is Salem-News.com's Executive News Editor. His background includes covering the war in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, and reporting from the Iraq war in 2008. Tim is a former U.S. Marine who follows stories of Marines and Marine Veterans; he's covered British Royal Marines and in Iraq, Tim embedded with the same unit he served with in the 1980's.
Tim holds awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing from traditional mainstream news agencies like The Associated Press and Electronic Media Association; he also holds awards from the National Coalition of Motorcyclists, the Oregon Confederation of Motorcycle Clubs; and was presented with a 'Good Neighbor Award' for his reporting, by the The Red Cross.
Tim's years as a Human Rights reporter have taken on many dimensions; he has rallied for a long list of cultures and populations and continues to every day, with a strong and direct concentration on the 2009 Genocide of Tamil Hindus and Christians in Sri Lanka. As a result of his long list of reports exposing war crimes against Tamil people, Tim was invited to be the keynote speaker at the FeTNA (Federation of Tamil Sangams of North America) Conference in Baltimore, in July 2012. This is the largest annual gathering of North American Tamils; Tim addressed more than 3000 people and was presented with a traditional Sri Lanka ‘blessed garland’ and a shawl as per the tradition and custom of Tamil Nadu
In a personal capacity, Tim has written 2,026 articles as of March 2012 for Salem-News.com since the new format designed by Matt Lintz was launched in December, 2005. Serving readers with news from all over the globe, Tim's life is literally encircled by the endless news flow published by Salem-News.com, where more than 100 writers contribute stories from 23+ countries and regions.
Tim specializes in writing about political and military developments worldwide; and maintains that the label 'terrorist' is ill placed in many cases; specifically with the LTTE Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, where it was used as an excuse to slaughter people by the tens of thousands; and in Gaza, where a trapped population lives at the mercy of Israel's destructive military war crime grinder. At the center of all of this, Tim pays extremely close attention to the safety and welfare of journalists worldwide. You can write to Tim at this address: email@example.com. Visit Tim's Facebook page (facebook.com/TimKing.Reporter)
Articles for October 25, 2012 | Articles for October 26, 2012 | Articles for October 27, 2012
Hear Raymo's Songs
|Contact: firstname.lastname@example.org | Copyright © 2013 Salem-News.com | news tips & press releases: email@example.com.| | <urn:uuid:7dde210f-4ecb-4678-bc77-4fdbbbdbb183> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://salem-news.com/articles/october262012/burma-help-tk.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946294 | 1,107 | 1.570313 | 2 |
DOES v. Enfield
In the spring of 2010, officials at the Connecticut-based Enfield Public Schools decided to hold their graduation ceremonies at First Cathedral, a Christian church. The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Connecticut and Americans United for Separation of Church and State brought a lawsuit in federal court charging that the Enfield Public Schools' decision is an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion.
First Cathedral features a wide variety of Christian iconography. The stage where students would receive diploma packets is surrounded by a 25-foot-tall cross, banners reading "Jesus Christ Is Lord" and "I am GOD" and seven symbols representing Jesus. The facade of the church features five large Christian crosses and another large cross towers over its roof. The church's lobby contains a fountain in the shape of a cross surrounded by a frame in the shape of a tomb. Large-screen televisions throughout the sanctuary display the message, "This is God's House Where Jesus Christ Is Lord," while students and guests wait for the ceremony to begin.
The groups brought the legal action on behalf of two Enfield High School seniors and three of their parents. The lawsuit asserts that holding commencement at First Cathedral violates the separation of church and state and the religious liberty rights of students.
The legal team handling the case includes Luchenitser, Legal Director Ayesha N. Khan and Steven Gey Fellow Devin M. Cain of Americans United; Legal Director Sandra J. Staub and Staff Attorney David J. McGuire of the ACLU of Connecticut; and Daniel Mach, Director of the ACLU's Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Status: On May 31, a federal judge declared that the Enfield Public Schools’ plan to hold high school graduation ceremonies at a Christian church is unconstitutional, and ordered the school board to find an alternative venue. | <urn:uuid:6eff6ccc-6f04-4be4-915b-add53b47c664> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aclu.org/religion-belief/does-v-enfield | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941534 | 371 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Boycott hopes to break up boys' club
Effort to halt male bias on event panels sparks controversy. Elizabeth Gibney and Paul Jump write
A fierce debate over gender balance on conference panels has been ignited after UK academics and science writers joined those signing a pledge to refuse to speak at or to moderate events dominated by male contributors.
Writing in The Atlantic on 4 January, journalist Rebecca Rosen called for the pledge after observing that all 22 speakers originally listed for a web technology conference in London on 9 February were male. Three female speakers have since been confirmed.
More than 300 people signed the online pledge before it was taken down because of abusive comments being posted.
John O’Shea, former artist-in-residence at the University of Liverpool’s Clinical Engineering Research Unit and a regular on such panels, was among those signing up.
He told Times Higher Education that although the pledge was not a “magic wand”, it gave speakers the opportunity to use their power to challenge the situation. “I think that men working in all industries should be proactive in regards to this problem,” he said.
Critics suggested that the pledge could enforce tokenism, but science writer Ed Yong said the problem was not a shortage of female speakers but rather organisers’ efforts to find them. “Getting a gender-balanced panel isn’t a sign of filling quotas…or other such absurd accusations, it’s a sign of a functioning meritocratic process,” he said.
Dame Athene Donald, professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge, pointed out that such a pledge should “cut both ways”, with all-female panels and committees being similarly shunned.
The pledge may be having an impact. At the height of the debate, the National Union of Journalists was questioned over the all-male line-up at its forthcoming Open Access and Editorial Quality event on 6 February. Organisers say that a new speaker, Gail Cardew, director of science and education at the Royal Institution, has since been added.
Meanwhile, Research Councils UK has written to all university vice-chancellors to say that they will use their institutional visits and auditing programme to enforce improvements in university departments’ retention and promotion rates for women and ethnic minority researchers.
Rosie Beales, senior policy manager for research careers and diversity at RCUK, said the research councils were concerned about slow progress in translating policy commitments by senior managers into cultural change at departmental level.
However, she said that RCUK had decided against including in its new Statement of Expectations for Equality and Diversity, published on 17 January, a requirement for departments to obtain formal accreditation for their equality and diversity efforts, such as an Athena SWAN Charter award. Instead, research councils will compare departments’ positions on equality to the national picture and ask those below the national standard what they are doing to improve.
Ms Beales said she hoped that the research councils’ status as funders would prompt departments to take equality and diversity seriously. If departments did not, she added, RCUK would reconsider imposing a requirement for accreditation. | <urn:uuid:40a6b440-e367-4daf-a491-268245896f2f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/422408.article | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967409 | 647 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Anyone who’s ever played video games knows the feeling. Maybe you’ve got bullets whizzing past your head, maybe a clock is counting down. Either way, you’ve got a controller gripped so tightly in your hands that your knuckles have gone white from the loss of blood flow. Teetering on the edge of your couch, you lean toward your television like it’s some kind of industrial-grade magnet. Your shoulders sit tied up in knots around your neck.
Our video game experiences may be virtual, but our physical reactions to them are as real as they get.
This we know: Video games can really get the blood pumping. And sometimes it’s cathartic, this explosion of action, competition and stress. But sometimes it’s just, well, stressful. (Remember that time you pitched your controller across the room in a fit of frustration?)
But while so much of gaming is rooted in these intense emotions — the fear of death, the fight for survival, the desire to dominate — more and more these days it seems games are offering the exact opposite kind of experience.
Some games just want to help us chill out and relax. They want to help us find our happy place. They come offering us our moment of Zen.
Game Factory recently launched the first in its “Zenses” series of games – games that promise the kind of “active relaxation” that “allows the player to transcend the stresses of everyday life” in the form of nature-themed puzzles. Meanwhile, “Zen Bound” — forthcoming for the iPhone — promises a “calm and meditative” game of wrapping rope around wooden statues. And all kinds of casual games now offer “Zen mode,” modes that allow us to play without the standard stresses of a timer or the threat of losing if we don’t make the right move.
But can a game truly help us chillax?
Jenova Chen thinks so. He’s the creator of "Flower,” the game most likely to chill you out … when it’s not busy blowing your mind.
Relaxation without the cheese
“This is a video game version of a poem dealing with the contrast and the harmony between the urban and the nature,” Chen says. He calls “Flower” — a game that just launched on the PlayStation Network — “interactive therapy.”
Chen, co-founder of ThatGameCompany,also knows exactly what you’re thinking right now. “It is very lame to describe this game with words because it sounds cheesy,” he says.
Yes. Games that offer mellower pursuits tend to come off like some newage guru hawking the latest self-help fad. Just check out this “Zenses” advertisement. Aimed squarely at women, it sounds like the cheesiest tampon commercial ever invented.
But I’ve played “Flower,” and I promise: It isn’t cheesy.
Yes, as the name suggests, it is a game about flowers, and more importantly it’s a game about the dreams flowers have when they’re trapped in the gray confines of an urban apartment.
A game that you download directly to your PlayStation 3, “Flower” begins with a single petal. Riding on a breeze, you sail across grassy meadows, collecting petals from other flowers until you’ve become a swirling trail of petals with the power to affect the environment around you. Sometimes you bring light to the landscape, sometimes you bring color. But no matter what you’re doing, you soar through the air with an unparalleled feeling of grace and lightness.
OK, sure, it still sounds cheesy. But truly, “Flower” — the follow-up to ThatGameCompany’s award-winning underwater game “ Flow ” — is as artful and artfully implemented a game as I’ve ever seen. Its dazzling graphics drop you into the middle of a magical-yet-familiar place that comes alive with music as you swoop through it. And the controls are as intuitive as they come. Tilt the PS3’s motion-sensitive controller to steer your petals where you want them to go. Push any button you like to propel them forward on the breeze. It’s that simple.
Meanwhile, there is no ticking clock or ever-shrinking health bar to threaten you … and with none of these pressures you’re soon delightfully absorbed in sailing through the grass, hunting for flowers and leaving your mark on the world around you.
What’s that over yonder?
The thing is, there’s a fundamental problem with trying to mix relaxation and video gaming. That is, video games are interactive entertainment. You don’t just sit there and absorb them like you would a movie. You grab the steering wheel, you drive the action forward. But in order to keep you glued to the driver’s seat, games must find a way to motivate you.
Many games do this by hurling bullets at players, because there’s nothing that keeps us snapped at attention like the instinct to survive. But even games that claim to be relaxing seldom are — subtly pressuring us to accumulate points or beat a clock or solve puzzles that tax our brain in less-than soothing ways. (Ian Bogost, a game designer and Georgia Tech associate professor, penned this essayon just how difficult it is for games to deliver on the promise of Zen.)
And that’s what makes “Flower” such a stunning success. It sinks its hooks into us without threatening us. But how do you keep people engaged in a game when you aren’t putting their (virtual) lives at risk?
“I think there is another very big instinct for humans and that is curiosity,” Chen says. “When you are in this open field of endless waving grass and flowers, you just want to know what’s out there, what’s behind the little hill.”
He’s right. “Flower” is a game so beautifully and cunningly presented, you can’t help but want to peek behind every bucolic nook and cranny. By appealing to our adventurous spirit, it gently draws us in, leaving us focused but calm, even when it takes a turn into darker territory.
“Right now if you look at what kind of emotional experience a game can offer in the mainstream market it’s very limited to those primal feelings — excitement, thrills, competitions and surprises,” he says. “I hope by making these games that evoke different emotions we can preserve and bring back some of those gamers who used to love games but later found the games too shallow and naive and not worth playing.”
But the question remains: After years of getting juiced on adrenaline, will seasoned players take to a game about flowers (a game that seems more like grandma’s speed)? Do veteran gamers really want to chill in waving fields of green?
Chen believes that if movies can appeal to many different kinds of viewers, then why not games?
“I think there is a way to design an interactive system so that different players can play the game in a different way,” he says. “Like with a Pixar movie, the child and the adult look at different depths of the film, but they can both enjoy it. I think a good game should also be like that.”
While “Flower” may not appeal to everyone, it is capable of satisfying different players on different levels. Those addicted to the rush can careen through “Flower” at top speed, buzzing the tops of the flowers like a fighter pilot buzzing enemy rooftops. But those of us who’d like to mellow out for once in our stress-filled lives, we can sit back and absorb the visual splendor laid out before us. We can meander through the landscape at our leisure. We can stop and smell the flowers … almost.
Hello my happy place. At last I have found you.
© 2013 NBCNews.com Reprints | <urn:uuid:5b4adef8-709b-4ff3-ab9d-26b867c5837f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29148421/ns/technology_and_science-games/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94394 | 1,738 | 1.679688 | 2 |
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Odds of winning the $600 million? 1 in 175.2 million |
Poll: Plan on buying a ticket?
Mr. Viola,I've read the following interview with Tom DeWeese and in a couple places he makes quite a stretch- like where he tries to tie sustainable development with nature getting preference over people.http://www.acslpa.org/html/sustainabl...
But in any case, so what is the alternative to sustainable development? Wait until there is gridlock on the streets, no water comes out of the tap, we have to let our septic sit in our yards and then wait for the free market to come to our rescue?
And how about those property rights? Should I be allowed to store all the water that comes on my property even if it means people downstream won't have any?
Or should people be allowed to build as many houses as they can on their property even if it means it will overcrowd existing schools and other services?
Do my property rights allow me to open a halfway house for drug addicted pedophines next door to where you and your children or grandchildren live, or within walking distance to a school?
Now as far as nature being placed as equal to people. It sounds bad on the surface but when you think about it, we make our living from nature and working eco-systems. No working eco-systems, no resources, no jobs. Besides, do the generations alive now have the right to catch every last fish or shoot every last mammal, cut down every last tree, use every last resource or pollute every last drop of water leaving future generations without any means to make their living or have a chance at longevity in the name of "rights"?
And so on....
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Pruitt Meter ticking on St. Lucie County's property appraiser.
Indian River County
St. Lucie County | <urn:uuid:cb7a1d78-e679-43d0-b024-ea667890da83> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tcpalm.com/comments/reply/?target=61:468475&comment=1029924 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930161 | 452 | 1.71875 | 2 |
A Treasure Box from New Zealand Today we got a parcel of treasures all the way from New Zealand, sent to us by our blogging buddies in Mrs. Hayes class. The parcel contained some pumice from a real volcano and kina and paua shells. They also sent us some seeds and paua earings. It was sort of like Christmas.
The children had a wonderful time examining the exotic things in the box. Why is the pumice so light? How did the shell get so blue inside? Thank you blogging buddies! Watch our blogs for more about our New Zealand surprises tomorrow. | <urn:uuid:80e77332-4813-439e-9ec8-4f5ba9a8b3c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blog_id=109645 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948578 | 123 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Doing big stuff in the cloud
Data crunching in scalable environments
Live webcast At 11am today we're broadcasting live with a show that takes a different angle on cloud.
Over the last few months our broadcasts have focussed on the use of cloud for delivering internally facing services such as email and collaboration. We've also looked at how cloud can be used to achieve reach. Now we're switching our attention to the real grunt and capacity of the cloud for large-scale data-centric apps. Whether you use terms like high volume analytics, big data or some other trendy phrase, what we are referring to here are applications that consume lots of compute power to act on extremely large datasets.
To help with this, we are lucky enough to have Peter Elleby (CTO) from Hydra, an innovative new company that provides and supports large clients with a service that allows them to analyse huge volumes of Web and social media data, along with complex internal product and service information, to optimise the way in which they interact with customers.
The application itself is fascinating enough, but of particular interest to Reg readers will be some of the practical lessons learned - e.g. about the difference between traditional and cloud based database environments, the practicalities of integrating a large scale cloud app with on-premise systems, and the kind of things that are important to consider when thinking about using the cloud for the ‘big stuff’.
Lucy Sherriff is your host for the hour. She will be joined by Dale Vile from Freeform Dynamics and Michael Newbury from Microsoft. You can join Lucy and the gang right here for free. | <urn:uuid:268c35fe-a96f-4aea-be82-4200264a0a0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/cloud_data/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946413 | 336 | 1.515625 | 2 |
FBI's Outgoing Cyber Cop Says Americans Don't See Size Of Threat
Originally published on Fri March 30, 2012 1:17 pm
The FBI's top cyber cop retires today after nearly a quarter century in federal law enforcement.
Shawn Henry started looking into computer issues in the run up to Y2K (the arrival of the year 2000). He says that experience left him hungry to learn more about the way electronics were changing the way we live — and the way criminals operate.The movement of so much sensitive information online poses an "existential threat," according to Henry.
"I think about the threat to our critical infrastructure and the ability for somebody to reach out from around the globe and to critically impact some of our most important capabilities as a nation," Henry says. "To touch the electric power grid, to touch the water or the sewer or the transportation system, and how dangerous that is for us and how relatively easy I think it can be."
Henry says he worries not just about intrusions by people working on behalf of foreign governments, but also the influence of organized crime groups and loose networks such as Anonymous and Lulz Sec who may not even know each others' identities.
"The average American doesn't realize how significant this threat is. I think when we tell people that there's a bomb that's going to go off, that resonates with people ... because they can see the carnage; they've seen it on TV or on the movies and they know what that means," he says. "But when you talk about somebody coming into your network, exfiltrating all your data, stealing your personally identifiable information, the data's still there, which means for most people, you can still see it, [so] it's not real to them."
In recent months, high level Obama administration officials have tried to sound a cyber alarm. FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress the threat would soon surpass terrorism as the bureau's top priority. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta worried aloud about a cyber attack that "could be the equivalent of Pearl Harbor." And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said new technologies were outpacing the government's ability to keep up.
Henry says the FBI has worked to hire people with technology expertise and to place those trained agents inside 63 different countries, forming partnerships with law enforcement in Eastern Europe and working side by side to bring hackers to justice.
His introduction to federal government came as a file clerk in 1983, but his first post as an FBI agent was in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s. A couple decades later, Henry came "full circle" and was appointed to lead the FBI's Washington field office, one of the bureau's largest.
Henry says the current response to the cyber threat is "not sustainable." It leaves too many secrets exposed, he says, and people and companies need to do more to protect themselves from cyber thieves. As he told a conference, "computer security has become an endless game of defense, which is both costly and unsurvivable in the long term."
He says he will keep working on cybersecurity issues when he leaves the FBI for an unspecified job in the private sector in the Washington area. | <urn:uuid:301d7381-7884-49d7-a720-a1cabd05414f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wvasfm.org/post/fbis-outgoing-cyber-cop-says-americans-dont-see-size-threat | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972691 | 647 | 1.726563 | 2 |
So, it's back to school time again, is it? Once more unto the breach, dear friends.
Once again, clothes must be bought, school supplies organized, permission slips filled out and, in the case of parents of younger kids, day cares must be checked to make sure they're not secretly run by cults.
And on top of all that, we have to feed these youngsters! Yep, that's right. Failure to feed your children can result in low grades, lack of energy and a persistent whining sound coming from them.
As tempting as it might be to just buy Snack Packs by the case and augment them with granola bars, Fruit Roll-Ups and any other brightly packaged convenience food, why not take a bold step and actually look at some nutritious, healthy after-school snacks you can make at home?
Heck, you might even get the kids involved in one of the five following recipes ...
This is an easy one that even the youngest kid will want to get in on making.
The great part is that it's insanely versatile. As long as you have graham crackers and some sort of spread, the fruit combinations are limitless.
Let the kids be part of the process from start to finish! Have them help select fruits, even dried or frozen ones although fresh is best, and play around with different spreads. While they can be pricey, almond, cashew or soy butters can help steer around peanut allergy issues.
These are great make-ahead snacks for lunch boxes, too. Stick to dried fruit for those, though, since the juice in fresh fruit can turn the graham crackers soggy.
Fruit s'mores are great, but sometimes your kids are in the mood for something a bit more nutty ...
Oatmeal Peanut Butter Bars
This one is a total classic. The bars combine everything that's best about after-school snacks: They taste good, they're fairly healthy, the kids can help make them and they keep a long time.
Here again, the ingredients are ripe for modification. This is a great time to teach your kids about contrasting flavors, if they've got any culinary interest at all.
Throw some super-tart dried cranberries in instead of the raisins. Use chopped toasted pecans or almonds instead of the sunflower seeds. Dip the entire bar in chocolate ... no, wait. Forget that last one.
The point is that this is another great snack. Just ignore that pot of melted chocolate over there. Put it right out of your mind ... at least until our next back-to-school snack ...
You didn't forget about the chocolate, did you?
Admit it. Since the last page, you've been sitting there with a glazed expression just dreaming about watching the bubbles slowly form on the top of that liquid goodness, dipping random items into it and eating them until you slip into a diabetic fugue. | <urn:uuid:d33cf125-afac-4d83-880c-d8105b05ee81> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kxly.com/house-and-home/education/back-to-school/5-delicious-back-to-school-homemade-snacks/-/13079344/416254/-/item/0/-/yv5elb/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951767 | 606 | 1.71875 | 2 |
There are many different factors that motivate employees and individuals. These include monetary, power, achievement, opportunity for advancement, the ability to contribute, etc. Another major factor: RECOGNITION.
Everyone likes to be recognized for their efforts in making a company successful. Employees who feel good about their abilities and their contributions to a company or team are more likely to be happy, content and motivated. When they’re recognized for their efforts, they’ll also continue in their desire to excel. Awards are a cost-effective way for employers to increase employee morale and help the company attract top talent and generate brand awareness. Some of the most common corporate award categories are:
- Sales Excellence
- Best Customer Service
- Best Product
- Best Executive
Corporate awards are great for morale, and presentations generate news and public content that can help build a company’s brand awareness.
If you have people or projects that deserve an award, recognize them! You might be surprised by how happy and proud they’ll be to work for a company that cares! | <urn:uuid:67611b75-25ef-4c89-a4ba-5acbf275a3da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.austintrophies.com/index.php/corporate/clocks/promotional-clocks.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955562 | 219 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Green Valley State Park to Close During Special Deer Hunt
CRESTON - Green Valley State Park will be closed to the general public Nov. 17-18, for the ninth annual special park deer hunt.
The hunt will allow 25 hunters to harvest up to 50 antlerless deer using only muzzleloaders. Hunters have already registered and will receive two antlerless tags each redeemable only during the special hunt at the designated areas and specified dates.
Additional DNR staff will be on hand to patrol the park boundaries. Green Valley will re-open to the public on Nov. 19.
“The hunt helps keep the deer population in the park under control,” said Alan Carr, park ranger for Green Valley State Park. “Hunters must attend a special safety meeting before the hunt where we explain the reason for the hunt, discuss the rules and show them the park boundaries. We hope to harvest as close to 50 female deer as we can and do it in a safe and efficient manner.”
Carr said the hunt has been a great deer management tool for state parks.
“People want to see deer when they come to park, but we need to maintain a balance in the deer herd,” Carr said. “Research shows that if you stop these hunts completely, the deer population tends to go back up rather quickly so the hunt will probably remain an annual event. The depredation biologist sets number of deer targeted for removal each year that is based on the population survey.”
The average harvest for the two day hunt has been just over 40 deer each year. | <urn:uuid:04259aaf-ab0a-44c9-ae5e-d9c9a69ba7dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iowadnr.gov/insidednr/socialmediapressroom/newsreleases/vw/1/itemid/1079 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931838 | 329 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Oh, to be a fly on the wall behind the closed doors of Gov. Sam Brownback’s office during the final week of a contentious legislative session.
What the governor says in private — let alone what he thinks about the session — probably will remain a gubernatorial mystery.
But aside from his public comments, there is an electronic trail in the form of emails and text messages the governor sent and received during the legislature's final week. Whether the public will get a peek at that trail, however, is unclear, following an unresolved Kansas Open Records Act request filed by the Journal-World several months ago.
In June, the Journal-World filed a request with the governor’s office for all emails and text messages sent from and received by Brownback’s state email account and state-issued cell phone between May 14 and May 20, the week of the state legislative wrap-up session.
That request was originally denied, as a spokeswoman for Brownback said the governor had neither a state email account nor state cell phone.
“The governor does have a personal phone. However, he relies on staff for official communications,” said Sherriene Jones-Sontag, a Brownback spokeswoman.
The Journal-World then amended the request to include emails or text messages sent from any Brownback-owned accounts that the governor “uses to conduct state business.”
In August, the Governor’s office filed a formal request for a Kansas Attorney General’s opinion on the issue based on the “unique nature of the request and the lack of legal guidance from the courts or other authorities.”
The Attorney General’s Office, by statute, is tasked with monitoring compliance of the Kansas Open Record’s Act, and issues opinions on murky legal questions regarding the law.
According to the Kansas Open Records Act, “Public records are defined as any recorded information, regardless of form or characteristics, which is made, maintained or kept by or is in the possession of any public agency.” The act is not restricted to written communication, and includes records such as video or audio recordings.
During the past two months, Attorney General’s Office has not responded to numerous emails and voicemails from the Journal-World seeking updates on the request.
Numerous other states have dealt with similar requests for gubernatorial emails and texts during the past several years and, in general, openness of the records usually wins, said Gene Policinski, executive director of the Freedom Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan First Amendment advocacy organization.
For instance, in 2008, numerous media organizations requested the emails of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had just been tabbed as Sen. John McCain’s Republican presidential running mate. After a two-year delay, and following an initial cost estimate by Palin’s office of $15 million for the records, the emails were released in 2010 at a cost of less than $1,000. They were eventually posted in an electronic archive.
It comes down to the distinction between personal communication and communication being conducted in the public interest, regardless of which account the communication comes from, Policinski said.
“When public officials conduct official state business, they should be open for the public,” Policinski said.
The previous two Kansas governors, Kathleen Sebelius and Mark Parkinson, both had state-issued email accounts, said Douglas County Commissioner Mike Gaughan, who was on staff for each.
But some public officials, at the advice of political consultants, have eschewed official public accounts in preparation for the possibility that such information could be requested by the media, Policinski said.
“It’s a practice that runs counter to the spirit of open records laws,” he said.
That’s not to say that opening all communications from state officials serves a public interest, and Policinski said some personal communication — with family members, for instance — falls under a “zone of privacy” and should be exempt from public view. | <urn:uuid:a95950ce-aa9a-4c0b-9f0f-2d806daeffda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2012/dec/02/hunt-governors-texts-and-emails/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959988 | 839 | 1.53125 | 2 |
I don't know about others, but for us, we need just a simple definition and help in pronunciation. Until we know more grammar, detailed definitions aren't of much use.
I would think there are lots of beginners who would like to be able to purchase a $9.98 paperback with a pronunciation guide for every word in the NT.
Maybe not though
No one else seems to be looking for one. | <urn:uuid:d536342e-aba6-4c27-b87d-15c4a78bdce1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1212&p=11495 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97907 | 85 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Discover is Virginia Western Community College's orientation for new students and their supporters. At Discover, you will register early for fall classes; become familiar with campus resources; meet faculty, staff, and other incoming students; and much more!
Keep in mind that the Discover program is popular since it allows students the opportunity to register early for Fall 2013 classes, get familiar with campus, and have questions answered before classes begin. The Discover program is filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Please reserve your Discover seat early to ensure that you have this opportunity!
Registration for Discover 2013 begins May 15
Before attending Discover, you must:
Please note: Students who will be enrolled in high school or home school for the 2013-2014 school year should NOT attend Discover; it is for new curricular students only. If you have questions about dual enrollment, please contact your high school guidance counselor.
We use VW Alert to immediately contact you during a major crisis or emergency. | <urn:uuid:b976fb9d-f5c9-4b65-bf15-89bcd644ca59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://virginiawestern.edu/discover/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944367 | 197 | 1.515625 | 2 |
There are plenty of free things you can pluck from the web as well as from libraries, parks, banks, and other businesses. Here’s a look at more than a half dozen valuable freebies:
- Free checking. Last week we wrote an article about how, at many banks, free checking was soon to become fee checking. But plenty of banks still offer free checking accounts. SunTrust, for example, offers a free plan with no minimum balance required. And you get free online and ATM service too. Wachovia and U.S. Bank still have their own version of free accounts. Chase even offers $100 for opening such an account. Indeed, a host of banks and savings and loans offer free checking. So far. When you’re looking for lower fees, including free checking, always to look smaller local banks and credit unions.
- Free credit reports. You can go to AnnualCreditReport.com for a free look at your credit history once a year. If the Financial Regulatory Reform bill passes, you might also one day get a look at your credit score. Read about other changes ahead here.
- Free cash. If you can’t find an ATM near you for a free cash withdrawal, no worries: Plenty of stores will give you cash back with no fee when you use your ATM card to make even a small purchase. You can buy a candy bar or a Diet Coke and get back up to $100 in cash from Wal-Mart. Target will give you back $40 if you use your ATM card for a purchase. Grocery stores also offer cash back. And then there are iPhone and other apps that will help you locate ATMs: Here’s one.
- Free information calls. Bing 411 (1-800-BING-411 or 1-800-CALL-411) allows you to find local shops and restaurants, as well as get driving directions, traffic reports, sports scores, stock quotes, and weather reports. 1-800-FREE411 allows you to get any number, business or residential, in exchange for listening to a brief ad.
- Free scholarship search. Plenty of websites offer free searches for scholarships, such as Fastweb. There’s even a company called Free Scholarship Searches that offers links to 40 websites that offer free scholarship searches. And check out our story, 6 Tips to Pay Less for a College Degree
- Free baggage. Sure, nearly all airlines are charging to check baggage but at least one doesn’t: Southwest. And remember carrying on bags is still free, except for on Spirit Airlines.
- Free entertainment. Your local library and parks offer lots of free fun, from books to movies to concerts. Join their e-mail list to see what’s up. And of course, there’s the Internet, offering free games as well as magazine and newspaper articles. Just go to the website of your favorite periodical.
- Free Water. While technically not free, tap water is about as close as you can get. If you’re concerned about water quality, buy a filter. But don’t ever pay for water at a convenience store.
- Free TV. Thanks to sites like Hulu, you can now watch many popular television shows online for free. If your favorite shows are free on the web, why pay for cable or satellite? Check out You Don’t Have to Pay for Cable TV for more.
- Free telephone calls. Services like Skype and AIM let you communicate with other users for free. Always calling a loved one long distance? If you both get copies of something like Skype, you can talk all you want without paying a dime. And with a service like Google Voice, you can get all of your cell phone calls free, too.
That’s a few quick ideas, but we know there are dozens more. Share your favorite and help make this list even better. | <urn:uuid:3c41cbf7-48d1-4cb5-9451-69a099a368e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-people-pay-for-that-they-could-be-getting-for-free-2012-7?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937069 | 809 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Written by Greg Scandlen - Heartland.org
As virtually everybody in America now knows, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin posted the following on her FaceBook page:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Naturally, she was roundly reviled for these comments. One person quoted by the New York Times replied, "One problem: None of the bills emerging from various committees includes the kind of 'death panel' that Ms. Palin says would be rationing care."
I guess that's that, eh? Mrs. Palin should go back to shooting elk and stop irritating the New York Times.
Well, not so fast.
It's true the bills don't explicitly identify a "death panel," but there is plenty that would lead to exactly that outcome. Some of it is already law, in fact.
First, Congress already enacted, as part of the stimulus package, $20 billion for Health Information Technology, or HIT. This is designed to get every doctor and every patient wired up to a national database of health information. Every disease, diagnosis, prescription, and treatment will be submitted to this national database and made accessible to researchers, payers, and law enforcement. This is not speculation; it's the law.
Next, the stimulus package also appropriated money to create a "comparative effectiveness research" program. Its proponents claim this will only be "research" to determine what treatments work best for large populations, using the health information database to make their determinations.
This is based on Britain's "NICE" (National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness) program. NICE determines the dollar value of a "quality adjusted life year" (QALY) and allows payment for drugs and treatments that are lower than that number and disallows those that cost more. NICE has already disallowed cancer drugs and treatments such as hip replacements for elderly people and stopped allowing injections of steroids for people with severe back pain.
Of course, just doing research doesn't sound threatening. Research is good, isn't it? We all love research.
This is where the current bills come in. To hold down the costs of Obama's health care program, the administration has come up with a whole menu of activities-chronic disease management, pay-for-performance, wellness incentives, and so on.
I know, I know, the eyes glaze over at this kind of bureaucratic gobbledygook. Who really knows what any of it means? That's why Sarah Palin is so dangerous. Her controversial statement cut through all the fog and made people sit up and take notice.
In fact, these are the kind of programs that take benign "comparative effectiveness research" and put some teeth into it. Suddenly it isn't just research. Suddenly we are using that research to decide how much to pay doctors. That is the whole purpose of pay-for-performance (or P4P among policy wonks.)
Physicians will be paid more if they follow the guidelines established by the yet-to-be-named research group. (My suggestion for a name is Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission of the United States, or CERCUS.) The HIT will be able to alert the CERCUS as soon as any doctor tries to violate the P4P guidelines. Uh-oh! A warning will pop up on the doctor's computer: YOU ARE TRYING TO VIOLATE THE GUIDELINES! EXPLAIN YOUSELF!!
Your doctor may be able to fill out all the paperwork to get an exception, and appeal any denial, but it will be an uphill slog. More likely, the doctor will go with the flow and accept the higher level of payment for being obedient.
That's where Mrs. Palin comes in. She would like her son Trig to live. She will need to appeal the decision to . . . whom? Very likely a panel much like what she describes.
Only it won't be called a Death Panel. It may be called the LIFETIME Panel: "Listening to Irritating Families Explain Their Insistence on a Medical Examination."
Greg Scandlen is director of Consumers for Health Care Choices at The Heartland Institute. | <urn:uuid:6bce0664-75a6-4005-9f35-6b0073db4494> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rightsidenews.com/2009081727823/us/politics/palin-was-not-wrong-on-death-panel/print.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949056 | 918 | 1.578125 | 2 |
For the general public, Dennis Hopper was identified to the end with the '60s counterculture, thanks to his career-making role as a hippie biker in Easy Rider. So when he died this past weekend, you're forgiven if you were surprised to read that he spent the last few decades of his life as a Republican. Unlike many famous figures who moved from one end of the spectrum to the other, Hopper never underwent a big public conversion. The man who once "was probably as Left as you could get without being a Communist" voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, but he didn't make a stink about it at the time; the closest he came to giving his past persona a public burial came when he disavowed the drug abuse that just about wrecked his career in the 1970s. When no less a leftist than Abbie Hoffman criticized celebrity ex-dopers for issuing atonements that "look like cartoon confessions extracted under threat," the old radical nonetheless singled out Hopper's renunciation as one of a few "sincere" repudiations "by people I know and admire." This was in 1987, seven years after the actor started quietly casting his ballots for the GOP.
Not many people could vote for Reagan while maintaining the admiration of Abbie Hoffman, but Hopper's cultural impact was much larger than his private political sympathies. In virtually all his roles, including the roles he played in the gossip columns, Hopper exuded an individualism too explosive to be reduced to mere ideology, be it left, right, or libertarian. It was the individualism of a talented actor eager to play eccentric characters and the individualism of a self-destructive rascal who alienated his colleagues, the individualism of the counterculture's cosmic cowboys and the individualism of a Kansas Republican. It was the individualism of someone willing not just to stare into the abyss but to fall into it, climb out, then merrily dive back in.
Born in Dodge City, Hopper started acting onscreen in the mid-1950s, playing small parts in cowboy movies and JD flicks. He was blackballed after battling director Henry Hathaway on the set of 1958's From Hell to Texas, so he fell into TV work and low-budget films. Even after he started getting roles in respectable movies again, he continued to do lowbrow pictures for people like Roger Corman, the B-movie producer whose young actors and directors would become some of the most prominent names of the New Hollywood of the late '60s and the '70s. Hopper himself would help usher in that New Hollywood by directing, co-writing, and co-starring in Easy Rider, a 1969 release that at first seemed to be just another biker picture but eventually revealed itself as something more.
A central theme of the western is the tension between the sometimes lonely freedom of the road and the sometimes suffocating security of the rooted community. Easy Rider took place in a modern western landscape, not in the days of the frontier, but it grappled with the same idea. J.F.X. Gillis has argued that the film is, despite its reputation, a deeply conservative movie with parallels to Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale." In their stops along the road, Gillis argues, the protagonists "were given choices, opportunities to find meaning in their lives beyond that gas tank filled with money, beyond the pleasure of the brothel or the bottle, beyond the aimless wandering, meaning offered through spiritual commitment. Could there be a more conservative theme? The rancher and his family, the commune: first they were given a model of a meaningful life, then they were given an invitation to build that life. Invited to stay and join a family and find God, they refused."
"If this narrative had been Medieval, could there be any doubt at all of the theme or the moral teaching intended?" Gillis asks. "Sinners wander the countryside on a secular quest, encountering God's message but failing to acknowledge Him. They seek worldly pleasure at the expense of spiritual fulfillment, finding treasure and discussing it under a tree, only finally to die a horrid death by the wayside." That might not match the popular understanding of the movie's message, but it isn't far from at least one of the filmmakers' views. "My heroes are not right, they're wrong," Hopper's co-writer and co-star Peter Fonda said. "Liberty's become a whore, and we're all taking the easy ride."
Easy Rider was a hit and Hopper suddenly had Hollywood clout, which he burned through rapidly. He fell into disfavor again, and then he had another comeback. Along the way he had several memorable roles: as the amoral Tom Ripley in The American Friend, a crazed photographer in Apocalypse Now, a deranged '60s burnout in River's Edge, an alcoholic seeking redemption in Hoosiers, a cold-blooded hit man in Red Rock West, a post-apocalyptic dictator in Land of the Dead. But only one Hopper part would become as iconic as his character in Easy Rider: Frank Booth, the violent, impulsive, scenery-chewing sociopath at the center of Blue Velvet—a film written and directed by another unexpected Reaganite, David Lynch. If Easy Rider is the story of some footloose travelers who can't bring themselves to settle down, Blue Velvet is about a boy returning to a rooted community only to find that it too contains demons.
In 1984, it was possible for Gene Siskel to contrast Easy Rider (which, he informed us, "trashed establishment America") with the anti-Communist thriller Red Dawn (which was "nothing less than a military manifesto for our nation's youth"), concluding that "After more than two decades of pervasive liberalism, the Hollywood film industry is suddenly producing popular pictures that can only be called conservative." As it happens, Red Dawn director John Milius is a self-described "Zen anarchist" and a product of the same New Hollywood that gave us Easy Rider, but it's easy to miss those sorts of nuances when you're looking through the distorting prism of the Culture War. In retrospect, the New Hollywood was too big to be contained by either the counterculture or the left; it included John Milius as well as Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood as well as Jack Nicholson, Hopper the budding Republican as well as Hopper the hippie. In the best movies of the period, the animating idea wasn't some clichéd battle between the hipsters and the squares. It was the concept that powered those westerns of an earlier era: the tension between the home and the road, and the happiness and horrors to be found in both.
In that tug of war, Hopper embodied the most extreme sorts of rootlessness, playing a series of unconstrained ids and the wrecked shells they left behind. Sometimes, as in Hoosiers, the Hopper character managed to climb back into the community; other times, as in Apocalypse Now, he stayed out on the edge. His great gift was to make those excesses exciting and perversely attractive, even when his characters were at their darkest and most damaged.
Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press). | <urn:uuid:41e915c7-7561-4ddf-bdba-552530e953b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/01/the-id-and-the-odyssey | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976471 | 1,512 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Meet fifth-grader Josh—an irrepressible motormouth, always in trouble. His ordinary troubles grow wildly out of control when he brings a mutant frog he has found to school, and it seems everyone is on his case—parents, teacher, classmates, even the lunch ladies! When the frog is confi scated by the principal, Josh organizes the school to do what he knows is right. Heartwarming and hilarious, this novel by a major new talent will have kids cheering.
A Classroom Guide to In Memory of Gorfman T. Frog by Gail Donovan
About the Author
Gail Donovan lives in Portland, Maine.
Janet Pedersen has illustrated many books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. | <urn:uuid:f178f3f2-9d5f-4092-b730-1a2a81724963> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mrsnelsons.com/book/9780525420859 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953162 | 152 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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The RX From "SiCKO:" More Choice
The pundits are working overtime trying to defuse the message from "SiCKO," Michael Moore's new film. They are trying to convince the public that the United States could not possibly do what every other rich country (and even some not so rich countries) have managed to do: guarantee their people decent health care.
The centerpiece of the pundits' whine is that universal health care could not work here. They claim the systems which work in other countries require a larger roll for government in health care than Americans want. While this claim is contradicted by poll after poll on the topic, we don't have to argue with the pundits, rather pointless task in any case.
We can just give people a choice and let them vote with their feet. Suppose the government were to establish a Medicare-type program and open it up to all individuals and employers in the country. Those who already have insurance can switch to the government-run plan. Similarly, employers can switch to it as well. Individuals who do not already have insurance would have the option of buying in to the expanded Medicare plan as would employers who do not currently provide insurance for their workers. We can also have a system of expanded subsidies for health care for low and moderate income households, which will make health care insurance more affordable for those families.
This is more or less what both John Edwards and Barack Obama have proposed in their presidential campaigns. To get to universal coverage, there are important issues like mandating that individuals have health care insurance, and also questions about the revenue source for subsidies, but the key point is to establish a national Medicare-type insurance system that can get costs under control and eliminate the enormous waste in the private insurance system.
Medicare's administrative expenses are a small fraction of the administrative expenses of private insurers. Medicare uses just 2 percent of the money that flows through the system to cover administrative costs. By contrast, private insurers spend between 10 to 20 percent of their premiums to cover administrative costs. They use this money for marketing, high CEO salaries and dividends to shareholders; all expenses that Medicare does not have.
This is the reason Medicare always wipes the floor when it competes against private insurers on a level playing field. That is exactly what happened in the late 90s when the "Medicare Plus Choice" program was restructured to remove most of the subsidy for the private insurers that participated in the program. The vast majority of the HMO's that had entered the Medicare system went running for shelter, whining that they could not make a profit if they were only compensated as much per patient as the traditional Medicare program.
This is why when the Republican Congress wanted to expand the role of private insurers in Medicare with the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act: They put in a system of subsidies that the Medicare Payment Advisory Board estimates at 12 percent per beneficiary. The insurers again claim they could not possibly make a profit if they got the same per patient fees as the traditional Medicare program.
This experience is important. We cannot afford universal health care if we don't bring the costs of the US system more in line with the rest of the world. We currently pay more than twice as much per person, with no obvious benefit in terms of outcome. The key to creating a more efficient system is to have a government-run system comparable to the traditional Medicare system.
But, we don't have to pontificate about American values and the role of government - leave the silly pseudo-philosophical debates out of it. This is a straight dollars-and-cents question that can be determined by the market. Give people a choice and let them decide whether they want to be insured through the government-run system or want to stick with private health care providers.
The pundits have managed to flip reality on its head. It is the health insurance industry and their partners-in-crime, the pharmaceutical industry, that are scared of the market and competition.
If we just allow a government-run plan to compete on a level playing field with private insurers, we can soon get a system of universal health care. The question for the insurance-industry-loving pundits is: "What's wrong with giving people a choice?"
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect. | <urn:uuid:5243e515-b48c-477d-9d3c-02ff239bb3a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/03/2254 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960967 | 1,040 | 1.53125 | 2 |
HCC International Student Chamber of Commerce
The HCC International Student Chamber of Commerce was developed in 2009 through the HCC Chancellor’s Innovation Grant program. The purpose of the organization is to support the entrepreneurial efforts of HCC students, (and staff, and faculty) through ongoing programming related to starting and developing entrepreneurial enterprises and to foster business through global interface. Originally, the program was envisioned as a catalyst for the creation of small businesses and a springboard for the creation of jobs so that HCC students could, in essence, design and develop their own jobs regardless of current job market conditions.
The scope of the organization has increased to include other components. A student organization has been developed which would allow for some business activities to be developed and supported by student officers and members. An entrepreneurship center is being developed which will eventually lead to students having resource options for seed money funding for entrepreneurial enterprises.
Key Components of the International Student Chamber of Commerce
Entrepreneurship Center (in development)
Why Focus on Entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is what drives the U.S. economy. A large majority of jobs are created by entrepreneurs who start a company or a venture and grow the operation until they are able to supply themselves with ongoing employment, and other people as well. Supporting and developing entrepreneurship through education and support helps to provide for constant growth in the economy and shapes the future for prosperity. Individuals who start businesses, and grow them successfully, do not have to worry about staying employed. Entrepreneurs create their own employment and, in many cases, their own wealth. Entrepreneurship requires a higher standard of professionalism and requires individuals to have greater self- discipline, imagination, innovation, global perspective, and energy than other occupations. Developing these characteristics in students is a primary objective for HCC.
- Create your own future.
- Create your own lifetime employment.
- Meet your financial goals.
- Enjoy maximum freedom.
- Foster your innovative nature.
- Develop a great professional network.
- Do what you enjoy.
- Earn a good living.
- One network meeting per month
- One general meeting per month
- One conference per long semester
- One trade mission per year
- Ongoing special events
- Ongoing resource development
Linda Koffel, Dean of Instruction
Earl Smith, Division Chair
Warner Henson, Professor of Business
Velva Tyson, Professor of Business Technology | <urn:uuid:7c2baadf-d9b2-4fa0-8e07-64be8ef8c6c6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hccbizconnect.org/chamber/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939485 | 497 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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