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When recent Flagler College graduate Mae Marino got her first 9 to 5 job after graduation she felt like she needed something more. So the AmeriCorps volunteer joined Branches South Miami, an after school enrichment program from South Florida Urban Ministries not for profit association. She now enjoys the kind of job satisfaction she knew was out there.
“It’s been such a blessing to be here,” said Marino. “I may not be earning what I was with a typical 9 to 5 but this is a different type of job, it is so rewarding and the support is beyond belief.”
South Miami United Methodist Church has been home to Branches for over five years “empowering people to move from poverty to prosperity.” In addition to after school tutoring, the summer program is now in full swing. Summer Shade Day Camp includes a physical fitness schedule, arts and crafts, organized sports, and field trips in addition to the one-on-one homework mentor help.
Branches began in Florida City by founder Kim Torres after Hurricane Andrew as a place for kids to go after school. Florida City is the largest site to date, and there is a North Miami Beach program as well. United Methodist Church and The Children’s Fund provide financial support to the programs that also rely on outreach efforts and volunteers like AmeriCorps staff to serve the kids.
“What sets us apart are the holistic services we offer,” said Director of Development for South Florida Urban Ministries Isabelle Pike. “Although we are faith based, anyone can participate. We also provide help for parents in the form of hunger relief, free tax preparation, and GED and ESOL courses. We help families with financial education and assist them in signing up for public benefit programs.”
Participating students must be receiving free or reduced lunches through the county to qualify, however Branches also does work with individual circumstances on a case by case basis wherever possible. There are 50 youth in the South Miami Branches program with two full time staff support, two AmeriCorps staff, and five volunteers.
Site Coordinator and new South Miami resident Laurie Kahn said most of the kids come from troubled homes. “A lot of the kids in our area come from single parent households. Some of the parents are incarcerated so these children are fending for themselves with some extended family support.”
Keeping the students engaged in learning during the summer and off the streets to prevent drug abuse or other trouble is also part of the mission. “We are all mentors to the youth,” said Kahn. “My inspiration to be here is to make Branches a standard in the community for people to know we can be trusted and stand by our word. We are a home away from home for kids. We offer love, acceptance, understanding and hopefully some good wisdom they can use as well.”
To find out more about Branches South Miami call 305-442-8306, extension 1002, email email@example.com or visit sflum.org.
Short URL: http://www.communitynewspapers.com/?p=44401
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50 years, hell, 10 years from now American’s who didn’t support gay rights will be as embarrassed and shamed as those who didn’t support civil rights in the 60s. The difference- thanks to social media we now have those people’s names! http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/how-could-you-boycott-a-cookie
The Back Story
January of 2011, yes well over a year ago, coming back from Las Vegas NAB at 1am I needed gas. A cop was pulling out of the gas station trying to take a left, I slowed down to let him out. (Being nice doesn’t pay… wait for it…)
After I pumped my gas I took a left out of the gas station just as the cop had done 7 minutes before. Suddenly, lights and a siren.
He busted me for taking a left on a no left turn.
“But.. You.. And.. Left.. And I.. Let you in.. And…”
“Whatever, here is your ticket. Have a nice day!”
A year later I suddenly remembered that ticket and went to the Pasadena Courthouse to pay. “You owe $900.” What?!!
Apparently they had scheduled a court date, never told me, I missed it and thus the extra fine.
I told them I would pay the original fine right then and there. “Nope, your court date is now June 6, 2012” (a year and 1/2 after the original ticket)
So now what you wanted:
TIPS FOR WHEN YOU GET A TICKET:
- Don’t Be Early Seems like you’d want to be early. Not so much. I had an 8:15am appearance, I got there at 7:45. The court doors didn’t open until 8:15 we all filed in- no line, no order. Nothing. From 8:30am- 9:15am they did 3 roll calls. By 9:30am the roll call was closed and no one else was allowed in. So the lesson, get there by 9:00/9:15 you’ll be fine.
- Don’t Dress Nice I wore a suit. I was the only one. Most people had on jeans and a T-Shirt. Surely the judge would kick these people out, teach them a lesson about manners and respect? Nope. In fact, those who were dressed poorly seemed to be able to talk down their fines more. One girl had on running shorts and a t-shirt- she talked her no insurance, no headlight, no registration fine down to $25 and out she went. (And no, the judge was not male)
- Plead “Not Guilty“ This means you’ll have to come back another day- but over and over again cases were dismissed because the police officer did not show up.
So what did I do? I plead “Guilty!” Why? Well, interesting story…
After waiting 3 hours (See: Don’t Be Early) I was all set to take my case to the next level and explain (If the officer actually showed up) how he took the same left, how the car in front of me did a left, how it was 1am in a place I have never been, I never saw the signs.. etc..
Suddenly a well dressed blues player looking 80 year old man stepped up proceeded by a cop who looked familiar. (But I am AWFUL at remembering faces. If I haven’t met you at least 10 times chances are I won’t remember your face.) The cop began explaining the location… Hey this sounds familiar.. He explained it was a gas station… And the defendant made a left and… HEY WAIT- THIS IS THE SAME COP PULLING THE SAME CRAP WITH THIS OLD GUY!!
The defendant explained how he didn’t see the sign, and that it was early morning and no one was on the road…
The judge didn’t care. GUILTY!
I have seen my future, it didn’t look good.
I had to plead guilty, as even if I came back with a great argument, this cop has done this same scam many many times and wins. it wasn’t worth it to spend another morning in court and risk the chance of not being able to go to traffic school and take this ticket off my record.
The same I wanted to pay 6 months ago but they wouldn’t let me. $248 + $64 for traffic school.
Why they wouldn’t let me pay when I offered instead of making me waste a morning in court and the tax payers money? Beats me.
And you wonder why our court systems are a mess and California has no money.
Too bad- you can’t. Well, you can- just not on the IPO. Turns out some individual investors could actually buy thru Etrade but needed at least $250k in holdings in their account and at least 1 million in personal worth.
So are you screwed? Well, no. You can still buy tomorrow once it goes public. Is it worth it? YES! Wait.. No! Wait.. Yes…
It all depends what you are looking for and which financial blog you choose to read. All I can do is give you a little but of my history with high flying IPOs and then you can decide for yourself.
My Yahoo day of IPO
In 1996 I got in on day 1 of Yahoo. After it went IPO for I believe $17? (Sorry too lazy too look it up) I got it for $32 that day. 6 months later it was at $19 a share. It hovered in the 20s and 30s for another year or so til it started to hit the $50’s in July of 1997. But July of 1998 it was $160 and by Jan 2000 it was over $400. If I had waited 6 months I could have gotten it for 1/2 price then on the day- but once you have that big of a percentage gain does it really matter?
Which leads is to, do I buy day of or wait? Wisdom says wait 6 months or so til all the excitement dies down. But I doubt I’ll wait. I see this as a very high flying stock despite what the “Experts” think.
Numbers or Trends?
I tend to be a trends guy. When everyone was selling their Apple stock back in 2002 and leaving the company for dead I was buying. I liked their new cute colorful imacs and thought people would buy them.
When people said Google’s and Netflix’s valuations were too high- I was still buying as their stock prices were getting cheaper due to the “experts” telling us the books showed those companies weren’t worth anything.
Well, the customers thought differently. (And yes, I told everyone to sell Netflix before the great CEO meltdown at $300) That was more about the trend of Hulu and Amazon taking them on- can they beat Netflix? No, but if Wall Street thinks someone can- then the stock will go down til stronger heads prevail.
So if you like a product, if you see your friends using it- go with that.
Ok, I was on a tangent- back to Facebook. I plan to buy. Will it go down? Probably? ($27 pops in my head) In 2 years will $90 on Facebook stock seem like a great deal? Yes. Will it seem like a deal in 3 months? Probably not, but why risk it for a few hundred dollars.
Like the big Tech craze bubble in 99 there are other stocks to buy that will float up with this Facebook stock.
Ones I like right now that will be much cheaper:
YELP - $21.27
But much like Efax stock during the big boom- they can come down quick and hard- so buy and expect to sell in less than a year. Especially Groupon- I don’t trust they’ll ever make money- but the stock will be pushed up simply as a alt. “Social Media” stock.
And remember- I am not an expert. Just some nerd who has been trending stocks and marketing since I was around 5 (I believe I told everyone to buy Conoco back then)
Good luck, we’re all counting on you!
So you made a web series. Now what? The choices don’t seem like many- “YouTube and then watch it go viral?!” but in fact entertainment is changing. Web series aren’t just for the web anymore. In 1999 when I started to put up web content with “The Oz Witch Project” ( YouTube http://www.youtube.com/mrotman ) the only choice was a postage size QuickTime file that no one could watch- but now your content can and really MUST be able to live on a 52” TV in your living room.
Since our content for Streamin’ Garage was long form when no one was doing long form, we focused on TV box top like Roku.
Here is a great article I was interviewed for from Streaming Media:
Opening day, to be cliche, is a time of rebirth- winter makes way to spring- or if you live in LA, freezing winter temperatures of 65 give way to much warmer temps of 70.
Baseball is all about history- not only looking forward but looking back. It is also a game of superstitions. Wear the wrong t-shirt on the wrong day and you can doom your team to 86 years of futility.
Being a Red Sox fan I am as guilty as anyone of having my special opening day routine which involves 2 things. Buying a new Red Sox hat each year. And watching the game with my cat Milo. Last year I doomed the Red Sox by buying a bad hat. And for that I apologize to Red Sox nation. The hat felt right at the time, but from game 1 it was obvious it wasn’t going to work.
That being said, I would do anything for it to be 2011 again and to be buying that same hat. Even though game 1 was a precursor to a very odd up and down season ending in a horrible down, I was able to watch the game with my cat Milo.
For 15 years Milo would watch Red Sox games with me, lovingly sitting on my lap or lying on my stomach until I would disturb his peace by jumping up and screaming at a Red Sox home run or jumping up and screaming during a dumb managerial move. He’d wait til I was done, give me a sneer and all 22 lbs of him would jump back on my stomach.
Milo sadly passed away in June of 2011. The last thing we did together was watch a Red Sox Yankees game on the TV the day before he passed away.
Milo was my best friend, he saw me thru many lonely days…er months… fine… YEARS of being alone and single in LA and thru many crappy baseball seasons. When the summer gave way to fall and fall gave way to a winter, Milo was still there lying on top of me, keeping me warm til spring came around again til I jumped up off the couch to cheer on a Red Sox home run.
So while I celebrate the arrival of spring and another season of Red Sox baseball- it isn’t quite the same this year.
Milo opening day 2011
It’s been awhile since I posted! Check out our new show from my live streaming studio, Streamin’ Garage called, “Stupid For Game of Thrones.” We do a fan round table call in each week that will include writers from the HBO show! Hosted by Bobjenz and Sarah Penna!
Back in the mid 80s when none of you were born, Coca-Cola decided to change their formula and call it “New Coke” Why? No one is really sure. It ended up being a compete disaster and opened the door for Pepsi to gain market share.Take any marketing 101 class and the first chapter is all about New Coke.
Flash forward a few decades, Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix, who apparently has never taken a marketing class has just announced that they are essentially splitting up their company. The DVD by mail will now be known as Qwikster. Thus 14 million Netflix subscribers go away like that.
This comes after 2 days of Netflix stock being brutally beaten after the number of subscribers was down by 1 million after a price increase.
The answer to lower subscribers- concentrate on the future of streaming and cut the DVD business loose. This strategy makes some sense as DVD’s numbers will continue to go down- as we have discussed on Stupid For Movies for 2 years now. But long term- it’s an odd fix. You now take all of those DVD subscribers- who at some point would become Netflix subscribers with one click of a button and you essentially lose them.
As anyone who uses the internet knows- you do things that are easy. Itunes works as it’s simple- sign up once- and then click to buy and it all integrates with other Apple products. Frendster lost to Myspace as Myspace left you logged in while Friendster made you log in every time. Dumb little things like that matter on the web.
Netflix and Qwikster will have 2 separate billing systems. They will not integrate into each other thus when someone wants to go to just streaming- the consumer would have to set up an entirely new account in Netflix. But then why not simply go to Amazon? Or Blockbuster even.
Did I also mention they don’t integrate. All your ratings you set up on your Netflix account? All the recommendations? Poof. Gone.
Netflix has opened a door that was never open before. They owned the movie rental business based on their little red envelope with the words “Netflix” on it. IN the past few years, many have tried to beat Netflix but all have failed. Blockbuster decalred bankruptcy, Walmart tried streaming, even Amazon hasn’t made much headway. Netflix had a brand recognition that companies dream of. When you wanted to rent- you simply joined Netflix. And then this.
At least give this a fighting chance and call it “New Netflix”
- Disclaimer: Mike Rotman has owned Netflix stock since 2002 when it was $5. He was too dumb to sell it at $300.
I have started a Kickstarter campaign for Streamin’ Garage.
For those who don’t know what I do- a very quick history.
I produced, wrote, directed TV comedy for 17 years. Great shows like Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Then reality TV came. I couldn’t stand making people look like fools. So I left, started my own live streaming network, sort of a playground for creative.
Since January 2010 when I opened the doors to Streamin’ Garage we have done over 150 hours of programming. We started off with 12 viewers on our first show Stupid For Movies and now have over 4.1 million live views. 30,000 subscribers on Roku and now a featured network on itunes!
But, we did it all for free. No one got a dime- and I invested all my money into making this. And now I eat ramen noodles 2 times a day (I cna’t afford to eat it 3 times a day)
So we now look to you, the fans to continue this next evolution of TV. Live. Intractive. With the fans calling the shots.
Check it out on our Kickstarter page and come join us for LIVE Karaoke tonight!
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To BID or not to BID, that is the question to answer in South Side
The coming years are going to present a special challenge for South Side
in terms of government funding in the neighborhood.
The next census will most likely bring good news and bad news to the neighborhood: the good news is that the median income has increased over the past ten years; the bad news is that the median income has increased over the past ten years and the neighborhood will no longer be eligible for some of the funding it has benefited from in the past.
URA funding for the Mainstreets Program in South Side after more than 20 years is coming to an end. Now in "Achiever" status in the program, the business community will have to look elsewhere for funding that has provided façade improvements, street cleaning, renovations and so much more over the years.
The neighborhood as a whole, both commercial and residential, must now consider alternative ways to keep things going.
An alternative now being discussed in South Side again is the establishment of a Neighborhood Improvement District or NID. The newly revised South Side Neighborhood Plan also recommends exploring the implementation of a NID in the community.
Creating a NID is a years-long process involving notification of property owners, community meetings, public hearings, a vote by property owners and city council approval.
If created, a NID would be its own organization, not under the jurisdiction of the city, or other South Side organizations such as South Side's Planning Forum, the Local Development Company, the Chamber of Commerce or the Community Council. The NID would have its own board of directors made up of property owners, could hire its own staff and decide how to spend its money.
The NID generates its funding through an assessment that could be based on assessed value, square footage or even linear footage of a property. Non-profit organizations owning property in the NID are exempt from paying the assessment, but can voluntarily decide to participate.
The borderlines of the NID will be decided upon early. While the state allows NIDs for as few as two adjoining properties, a wide-spread plan encompassing all or most of South Side would be more practical and provide the most benefits to the most residents and businesses.
Although they aren't limited to, typically NIDs focus on safe and clean initiatives and promoting the area. Depending on what level it is funded, the NID could provide clean up crews for the business district and the neighborhood; through the city, it could provide funding to hire additional police in the community or hire a building inspector for the South Side alone.
A higher level of funding could provide improvements to the streetscape, offer sidewalk grants to homeowners or any number of programs depending on what those in the NID decide – And it's their money to decide, not city council, not the SSLDC, not the chamber of Commerce.
There are those residents that would say "let the commercial district pay for it, they're the ones that benefit the most," but they would be wrong. Truly the business district has benefited from the resurgence of South Side, but so have the residents. Property values have climbed over the years, visi-
tors come for the bars (yes, the bars) and restaurants, the quirky little shops and the entertainment and come back to be residents and raise their kids and dogs.
Indeed the residents have benefited from a strong Carson Street and Carson Street needs a strong residential community to remain vibrant. Both would be wise to consider a Neighborhood Improvement District if it is proposed in the near future.
Are you in favor or opposed to a NID in South Side? Please go to www.sopghreporter.com and register your vote in our poll.
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As anyone who’s been reading my posts on gay marriage knows by now, I’ve been critical of the “movement” for taking away much-needed resources and energy from far more important queer issues. I’ll discuss that issue in greater detail in a longer post, but for now here are links to two pieces that provide the kind of numbers and details many of us have suspected from the start. Note that this is not framed as a journalistic exposé, but as the affirmation of a hypothesis I’ve been mulling over for a while.
Here’s a letter from Ryan Conrad to the Portland Phoenix, titled “Dump Gay Marriage and Regroup.” Some of you might remember Conrad from the photograph which accompanied my article in No More Potlucks: he’s the one in the wedding dress. Conrad is also a queer radical activist, most notably with the Naughty North, and he recently organised the “Future of the Past” exhibition and panel discussion at the Maine College of Art. Full disclosure: he’s a friend and colleague of mine, and I was among those who gave him feedback on this letter.
The gay-marriage campaign has been sucking up resources like a massive sponge, corralling us to give up our last dollar and free time, leaving little sustenance for other queer groups doing critical work in our communities.
Conrad points out that the “Maine Speak Out Project and the Charlie Howard Memorial Library close their doors in Portland while the few remaining LGBT youth advocacy groups across the state scrounge just to keep their doors open.” Meanwhile, the “marriage equality” folks are still going strong, collecting millions for their cause.
Historian Amy Sueyoshi, writing for the National Sexuality Resource Center, is equally blunt:
The marriage movement’s single-minded determination for “equality for all” has forgotten that many more queers suffer at the hands of more urgent inequalities. These inequalities may seem “special interest” or not relevant for a “larger” community, but this could be nothing further from the truth.
It includes a brief account of the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women and Transgender Community (APIQWTC) being refused support by a national gay rights organisation that will only work with groups on “marriage equality.”
Both Conrad and Sueyoshi are especially concerned about funding for queer youth projects, queer archives, and HIV/AIDS organisations being diverted towards gay marriage to the extent that such work is either suspended or completely disbanded. No doubt, some will say: “If you want support or money, find your own.” But anyone who has been anywhere near the non-profit industrial complex or the world of social services knows that getting support for any project means that you have to constantly reassure potential supporters/donors that the “community” really does want/need your work. And getting support for a queer project that doesn’t primarily advance gay marriage or gay coupledom is increasingly difficult these days, given that the major “players” are the ones with access to the corridors of power, and who dictate the gay and lesbian agenda to politicians and the media.
I encourage you to read these pieces for more details. And please let me know if you hear of similar instances of the gay marriage movement sucking away resources from vital queer activism.
During my own activism and reporting, I’ve come across other such instances but not everyone will go on the record or name names. That’s understandable, given the precarious state of funding these days and the political and economic clout of the major gay and lesbian organisations which claim to speak on our behalf. It’s time for those of us who are not hitched to the marriage wagon to start speaking out more clearly and loudly about the economic, political, and emotional costs of investing so many resources in a movement designed only to further the interests of a few or comfort the many who are deluded enough to think that gay marriage alone will substantially alter their lives for the better.
It’s become common in some circles to insist that gay marriage is the rising tide that will lift all other boats and help all other queer causes. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we are to use any seafaring metaphors, it might be best to describe gay marriage as the Titanic, about to hit an iceberg and take everyone down with her.
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|Birth: ||Oct. 17, 1907|
|Death: ||Apr. 3, 1988|
Zarouhi Baltaian was born in Kirsehir, Turkey. Her family was threatened by but escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915. They moved to Istanbul, and in 1920 her father and brother went to America. She worked as a dressmaker along with her sister Zabel, and lived with their mother while her father worked up enough money to bring them to America. This happened in January 1921 and they moved to America. Soon after Zarouhi met Ardashes Dulgarian and they were married on December 31, 1921. They had a still-born son the next year. That child was followed by Anna, Rose, Paul, and George. Zarouhi lived to see many of her great-grandchildren. She died of heart problems in 1988.
Parsegh Baltaian (1874 - 1944)
Gulazar Rose Giridlian Baltaian (1886 - 1954)
Ardashes Dulgarian (1895 - 1951)
Anna Elmon Dulgerian Sookiasian (1923 - 1995)*
Paul Dulgerian (1928 - 1988)*
Plot: Grove Section
Created by: Paul S.
Record added: May 07, 2001
Find A Grave Memorial# 5429678
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This extraordinary footage shows a UFO over the Kremlin in 2009. Have not encountered anything to debunk this one yet.
Despite the cesspool of trickery on the internet, occasionally the unexplainable stands out.
Has this one been debunked yet?
I will note that and see if it is included in any released reports.
But frankly, I still did not see the intact Russia building in the video
try this site out for some information about these videos.. there are buildings in the 2009 video that were demolished in 2007!
Ok, I believe that you are saying that the building on the left is the Russia Hotel.
Possibly, however there are two problems, the tower has a stepped feature that the actual tower does not have. Also there is a wide bright linear feature on the building in the photo, that is much bigger and relatively brighter than that shown in the close-up photo.
There are report of a live UFO/USO at the bottom of the baltic sea. In fact this is a neolithic site that is complete with stairways and altars. The most pecular thing is that the neolithic object is alive with EMF.
All electrical equipment die in proximity to to object and regain function at some distance.
This could be a neolithic occult site. maybe the site is magnetic and the flow of salt water around the object creates the EMF. In any event worth further investigation. But any apparent magic is most likely natural.
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Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared on CNN Friday, where he was asked to defend Chicago, Illinois’ strict gun laws (some of the strictest in the nation) in light of the city’s 500th homicide this year. Though he was asked several times, Rev. Jackson either couldn’t or wouldn’t defend the tight gun control laws, instead making a variety of accusations and strange comparisons.
The Associated Press reports that Chicago’s murder count hit 500 last Friday, a first for the city since 2008. Comparatively, 2011 saw 435 Chicago homicides. More than 2,400 shootings have occurred, and gang-related arrests are about 7,000 higher than in 2011. A total 87.5 percent of 2012′s homicides were gun-related.
Though this seems like a cut-and-dried example of the need for stricter gun control, Chicago already observes some of the strictest laws in the US. Regardless, guns continue to flow into the city and gang violence has steadily increased, despite being down overall compared to the early 90s.
On CNN, Rev. Jesse Jackson was asked to comment on gun-related homicides in Chicago, and whether or not stricter gun laws nationwide would ameliorate or worsen the problem of criminal violence in the city. Alternatively, do the strict gun laws of Chicago prove that violence still occurs regardless of gun bans?
Jackson defended Chicago, pointing out that there doesn’t exist a “gun culture” like the one apparently present in Newtown, Connecticut. “I think about Newtown, for example, they have three or four gun ranges. There are no gun ranges in Chicago,” Jackson said. “Newtown is so different than the complexity of the urban crisis.”
Jackson also said that gun crime and joblessness are linked: “40 percent unemployment does matter,” Jackson continued. “Lack of education does matter.”
Asked again about Chicago’s gun violence despite strict gun laws, Jackson replied:
“The guns are not coming from Chicago. Chicago is in a bubble as the manufacturer — we’re a target market for gun flow. And they exploit the poverty and the pain.”
Here’s video, via Mediaite. Do you agree or disagree with Rev. Jesse Jackson on the issues of gun violence and gun control? Did the CNN anchor treat him fairly?
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Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications
February 07, 2013
DARESBURY, England, Feb. 7 – The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer visited Sci-Tech Daresbury to announce a £30 million government investment into the world-leading Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) supercomputing facilities at the site.
The funding will be used to support the progress of power efficient computing technologies and firmly establish the UK as the world leader in energy efficient supercomputer software development.
Some £19 million of the investment has been allocated to STFC's Hartree Centre at Daresbury Laboratory. Hartree is the world's largest software development centre and is home to the most powerful supercomputer in the UK. The remaining £11 million has been earmarked to develop technology capable of processing the huge amounts of data collected by SKA, the world's largest radio telescope.
Economy-boosting partnerships between research and industry are just some of the benefits poised to come from investment which was announced at Sci-Tech Daresbury, a national science and innovation campus situated between Liverpool and Manchester.
Speaking at the site, Mr Osborne said: "Britain is in a global race and we are in a position to lead the way in science and technology. Projects like the Daresbury development are crucial to boosting the economy and putting the UK at the forefront of the big data revolution."
Professor John Womersley, Chief Executive at STFC, said: "It is really encouraging that the government recognises the critical role that the relationship between science, innovation and industry plays in supporting economic growth in the UK.
"Here at Daresbury, which sits within the thriving and successful Sci-Tech Daresbury Enterprise Zone, we have world leading research, facilities and skills working with the smallest of SMEs to the largest, most impressive industrial names, that together will drive innovation and help rebalance the UK economy."
John Downes, Group Chief Executive of Langtree, said: "This funding will help to ensure that the STFC facilities based at Sci-Tech Daresbury remain at the very forefront of research and development - supporting the vision of the site's joint venture partners to further develop the site as a centre for scientific excellence and innovation. This will in turn act as a catalyst for future growth - highlighting Sci-Tech Daresbury's importance as a key economic asset for for the North West and, indeed, the UK."
Sci-Tech Daresbury is a private-public sector joint venture between property company Langtree, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Halton Borough Council. The Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester are all active partners on the site.
Regarded as one of Europe's leading centres for innovation and business, Sci-Tech Daresbury is a national science and innovation campus and flagship Enterprise Zone site, situated between Liverpool and Manchester.
About Sci-Tech Daresbury
Sci-Tech Daresbury is a world class location for high-tech business and leading edge science based in Cheshire. It provides a unique environment for innovation and business growth, with knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking.
Home to the ground-breaking STFC Daresbury Laboratory and the Cockcroft Institute as well as over 100 high-tech companies, the site was originally established in 2006. In December 2010 a new private-public joint-venture partnership was created to spearhead the longer-term development of the Campus. Partners in the private-public joint-venture partnership are developers, Langtree, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and Halton Borough Council.
Originally named Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, the site's name was changed in July 2012 to reflect its new Enterprise Zone status, which was granted in April 2012. Enterprise Zone status allows business rates to be reinvested in the campus, potentially creating up to 15,000 skilled jobs and providing funding for new specialist office, laboratory and technical space. Enterprise Zone status will also allow the campus to leverage more than £150million in private sector investment.
Source: Sci-Tech Daresbury
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
May 10, 2013 |
Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
May 09, 2013 |
The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under fire for proposed roundups of free-roaming cats in the Florida Keys, an out-of-control burn on National Key Deer Refuge land, and participation in anti-TNR workshop.
Many U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service personnel are, I suspect, looking forward to October—or at least putting September behind them. For those involved with USFWS’s “war on cats,” this month’s been a tough one: too much of the wrong kind of attention.
Camera (en)Trap(ment) Project
September got off to a rocky start with readers (myself included) responding to news of camera traps being used in Florida’s National Key Deer Refuge “to document the number of cats stalking prey in the refuge.”
According to Key West Citizen reporter Timothy O’Hara, cats appeared on 5 percent of the “nearly 7,000 [photos] snapped so far,” whereas the endangered Lower Keys Marsh Rabbit appeared on just 3 percent. (Deer and raccoons topped the list, though specific percentages weren’t mentioned.)
Future plans include “a more in-depth study to get a better handle on the number of cats,” which, says USFWS biologist Chad Anderson, who was interviewed for the story, “will give us better insight into the predator management plan [of which I’ve been highly critical]. We want it to be as effective and efficient as possible.”
Five days later, Big Pine Key resident Jerry Dykhuisen took USFWS to task in a letter to the editor calling O’Hara’s article “our quarterly puff piece about how great it’s all going to be when feral cats are trapped and removed from Big Pine Key.” Dykhuisen, vice president of Forgotten Felines, pointed out the incredible expense associated with the proposed roundup (a “government boondoggle that is nothing more than a waste of our tax dollars and job security for U.S. Fish and Wildlife”) and the risk of skyrocketing rodent populations if eradication efforts were actually “successful,” and challenges the “‘best available science’ of which they are so proud” (which “is not really very good science at all, being decades old, using statistical methods that are highly suspect, and not even being conducted on Big Pine.”).
“Tax dollars are at a premium in this economy,” wrote Dykhuisen, “and the idea of spending more than $10,000 per cat on a project that has no chance of success is mindless government at its worst.”
The following week, a letter to the editor from Forgotten Felines volunteer Valerie Eikenberg called the camera trap project “a lame-brain experiment,” criticizing Refuge personnel for baiting the cameras with cat food. “Why spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to figure out a question that any second-grader could answer,” she asked.
Refuge Manager Anne Morkill disputes Eikenberg’s claim: “extremely small amounts of bait were used at only two camera trap sites located at unauthorized cat feeding stations, where the cats were already lured by food. The purpose was to get the animals to stop and pause for a clear photo for identification purposes.” (I received a similar explanation by e-mail from Anderson.)
Note: I’ve tried to contact O’Hara, who badly misrepresented the science in his story (for example: “Research indicates that cat predation accounts for 50 percent to 77 percent of the deaths of Lower Keys marsh rabbits and Key Largo woodrats.”), but he’s not responded to my e-mail requests.
Just two weeks later, Refuge personnel once again found themselves defending their actions, this time for a prescribed burn that grew quickly out of control, scorching about 100 acres—five times what was originally planned.
For some, at least, this was the last straw. “Morkill has to go!” read one particularly harsh comment to a Key West Citizen story about the fire.
“Not tomorrow, not next week, not at the end of the fiscal year, NOW!! She is completely over her head and needs to transfer somewhere else. From the complete mishandling of the feral cat situation [to] the out of controlled prescribed burn that threatened both residents AND sensitive wildlife… Ms. Morkill is a complete and total failure at her position. What a travesty. Go back to wherever you came from Anne, you’re a failed experiment in the Keys.”
Earlier this week, USFWS officials met with residents to explain the results of an internal investigation into the fire.
According to USFWS Fire Ecologist Vince Carver, “The review team came up with three findings: One, it was too dry to burn. Two, the [fire] crew that did it, the majority of them did not have enough experience for this type of burn. And three, after they did screw up, they did a fantastic job.”
Refuge fire management specialist Dana Cohen “repeatedly apologized to residents, saying, ‘We made a bad call’ in deciding to burn, but most appeared unmoved.” The “unhappy audience,” as Citizen reporter Adam Linhardt describes them, were short on patience, “speaking out and lambasting” USFWS officials. “One person described the burn as a ‘fiasco’ and called for Cohen’s firing.”
National Feral Cat Policy
A day after the blaze on Big Pine Key, USFWS was trying to tamp down another fire of its own making. This one, too, had gotten out of hand—but on a national scale.
In a post on its Open Spaces blog, USFWS responded to “many expressions of interest and concern regarding participation by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees at an upcoming Wildlife Society conference.” This, of course, is a reference to Informing Local Scale Feral Cat Trap-Neuter-Release Decisions, the day-long workshop being presented by Tom Will, Mike Green (both of USFWS), and Christopher Lepczyk (University of Hawaii).
As part of that conference, two Service biologists are presenting a workshop designed to help wildlife biologists and other conservationists effectively communicate the best available science on the effects on wildlife from free-ranging domestic cats. The Service has no national policy concerning trap-neuter-release programs or feral cats.
If there’s no official policy, it’s not for lack of effort.
In his 2010 presentation to the Bird Conservation Alliance, What Can Federal Agencies Do? Policy Options to Address Cat Impacts to Birds and Their Habitats, Will is pushing for a “Firm policy statement—clear, definitive, easily available—as a tool for partners.” In fact, it looks like he’s suggesting that such a policy already exists, citing, for example, a 2007 “response to inquiry” from the USFWS Charleston Field Office:
Is it still FWS policy to promote legislation banning feeding of wildlife? Yes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) stands firmly behind its recommendations promoting legislation banning the feeding of wildlife, especially nuisance species such as feral cats. Local governments are better equipped than are Federal and State agencies to regulate feral and free-ranging cats since most local governments have ordinances in place to address domestic animal issues as well as animal control services and personnel to implement those ordinances.
Is it still FWS policy opposing free ranging cats and establishment of feral cat colonies? Yes. The Service continues to oppose the establishment of feral cat colonies as well as the perpetuation and continued operation of feral cat colonies. As an agency responsible for administering the regulatory provisions of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), the Service’s position is that those practicing Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) could be subject to prosecution under those laws.
Is it still FWS policy opposing TNR programs? Yes… the Service’s New Jersey Field Office correctly states that “a municipality that carries out, authorizes, or encourages others to engage in an activity that is likely to result in take of federally protected species, such as the establishment or maintenance of a managed TNR cat colony, may be held responsible for violations of Section 9 of the ESA.”
Will goes on to cite several more passages from the letter quoted above, sent in November 2009 from the New Jersey Field Office to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Division of Fish and Wildlife “in support of the New Jersey Fish and Game Council’s Resolution on Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) and free-ranging domestic cats, passed June 19, 2007.”
The Service strongly opposes domestic or feral cats (Felis catus) being allowed to roam freely within the U.S. due to the adverse impacts of these non-native predators on federally listed threatened and endangered (T&E) species, migratory birds, and other vulnerable native wildlife. Therefore, the Service opposes TNR programs that allow return of domestic or feral cats to free-ranging conditions.
Migratory birds are Federal trust resources and are afforded protection under the MBTA, which prohibits the take of a migratory bird’s parts, nest, or eggs. Many species of migratory birds, wading birds, and songbirds nest or migrate throughout New Jersey. Migratory birds could be subject to predation from State municipality, or land manager-authorized cat colonies and free-ranging feral or pet cats. Predation on migratory birds by cats is likely to cause destruction of nests or eggs, or death or injury to migratory birds or their young, thereby resulting in a violation of the MBTA.
All of which looks a lot like a “national policy concerning trap-neuter-release programs or feral cats.” Which might explain why the American Bird Conservancy has the NJ Field Office letter posted on its website (PDF). (ABC and TWS were among the signatories to a letter sent earlier this year to Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, “urg[ing] the development of a Department-wide policy opposing Trap-Neuter-Release and the outdoor feeding of cats as a feral cat management option, coupled with a plan of action to address existing infestations affecting lands managed by the Department of the Interior.”)
To hear USFWS tell it, Will and Green don’t even speak for USFWS.
In order to protect the independence and integrity of their work and the quality of the scientific information generated, the Service does not review or edit their work based on its potential policy implications. Any findings or conclusions presented at this workshop, as well as other scientific papers and presentations by Service employees, are those of the organizers and do not necessarily represent those of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
How exactly does that work? Are taxpayers (who are, like it or not, supporting TWS’s conference: “the Service is a sponsor of the conference as a whole”) expected to believe that Informing Local Scale Feral Cat Trap-Neuter-Release Decisions wasn’t put together “on company time,” using agency resources? Like me, commenter “Mrs. McKenna” isn’t buying it:
“I find it very strange that there would be not be an edit or review of the presentations done by employees/consultants (personnel on your payroll.) Quite frankly, I know of no organization that would allow taxpayer paid employees to present at a conference of this magnitude without a screening of materials to be presented. In fact, one could deem this type of policy quite irresponsible… If there were no interest in presenting a specific viewpoint supported by U.S. Fish & Wildlife for current or upcoming policies, one can be quite certain no such presentation would be sponsored.”
Mrs. McKenna and I are, it turns out, not the only skeptics. At last check, there were 50 comments on the USFWS post (not all of them critical of the Service, of course), a record for the Open Space blog (which, since its inception in late April, has attracted just 140 comments across 97 posts—including the August 2 post about “a recent incident where the Service inadvertently issued a citation in Fredericksburg, Virginia,” which attracted 46 comments).
Although USFWS is, according to its Office of External Affairs, “committed to using sound science in its decision-making and to providing the American public with information of the highest quality possible,” recent events suggest otherwise.
Actually, past events tell a similar story.
In its Migratory Bird Mortality fact sheet (PDF), published in January 2002, USFWS offers this prediction: “Many citizens would be surprised to learn that domestic and feral cats may kill hundreds of millions of songbirds and other avian species each year.”
“A recent study in Wisconsin estimated that in that state alone, domestic rural cats kill roughly 39 million birds annually. Add the deaths caused by feral cats, or domestic cats in urban and suburban areas, and this mortality figure would be much higher.”
In this case, the Service’s “best available science” can be traced to the infamous Wisconsin Study, and—eventually—to “a single free-ranging Siamese cat” that frequented a rural residential property in New Kent County, Virginia. )
Nearly 10 later, Migratory Bird Mortality is still available from the USFWS website. So much for “using sound science in its decision-making and to providing the American public with information of the highest quality possible.”
USFWS is right about one thing, though: many citizens are surprised—just not in the way the Service imagined. The public, to whom USFWS is ostensibly accountable, is surprised at the way their tax dollars are being used to fund a witch-hunt. And, judging by the overwhelming response to the USFWS/TWS workshop (see, for example, Best Friends Animal Society’s Action Alert, blog posts from Alley Cat Rescue and BFAS co-founder Francis Battista, and the Care2 petition), the public has had enough.
With access to both information and “broadcast” technology more accessible than ever, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for USFWS to continue with business as usual. The people the Service is supposed to—well, serve—are demanding better science, more transparency, and greater accountability. People are paying attention like never before.
Think of it as “the new normal.”
1. Linhardt, A. (2011, September 29). Residents rage about rogue fire—Fed officials apologize: ‘We made a bad call’. The Key West Citizen, p. 1A,
2. n.a., Migratory Bird Mortality. 2002, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Arlington, VA. www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf
3. Coleman, J.S., Temple, S.A., and Craven, S.R., “Cats and Wildlife: A Conservation Dilemma.” 1997. http://forestandwildlifeecology.wisc.edu/wl_extension/catfly3.htm
4. Mitchell, J.C. and Beck, R.A., “Free-Ranging Domestic Cat Predation on Native Vertebrates in Rural and Urban Virginia.” Virginia Journal of Science. 1992. 43(1B): p. 197–207. www.vacadsci.org/vjsArchives/v43/43-1B/43-197.pdf
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UFO Sighting Report - Canada
June 19th(?) 2007 : Southern Ontario
Southern Ontario Canada Two White Lights (Dots) Traveling Together
Date: June 19, 2007 (Approx:) ?
Also, I read further on UFOINFO, (just found the site yesterday) and noted several postings from you from June 19, 2007. All of them are from Southern Ontario, where I live, and speak of two white spheres which were travelling in tandem together across the sky.
Last week, (perhaps the 19th?), I was sitting out on my deck watching the clear night sky when I noticed 2 white dots, about the same size as a large star would, be travelling together at a constant speed.
At the time I put it down to satellites, which I have seen numerous times before where I live. But after reading these other sightings I clued into the fact that the satellites I see are higher in the sky and blink. These 2 dots were only about 20 degrees in the sky, not far above the horizon, and they didn't blink.
They were moving quite fast in a North South direction and were East of my location what seemed to be a far distance away.
Just before I lost sight of the dots behind the trees the one in the rear had a sudden burst of speed closing the gap between the two slightly. It then resumed its previous speed matching the other one.
Not a very spectacular sighting, but may have been my first. Thanks.
Thank you to the witness for the report.
HBCC UFO Research, Box 1091 Houston, British Columbia, Canada - VOJ 1ZO
[UFOINFO thanks Brian Vike for passing this report on.]
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Getting the most from your swim stroke
Going for gold ?
If you're gearing up for that next - or fist - triathlon you may find yourself more aquatically inclined than usual. Sure, avid swimmers abound but what're competitive runners and cyclists to do with a kilometer or two of water between the start and finish lines? Swim instructor Greg Watson knows and people are starting to pay attention.
In the past year and a half, word has spread among budding triathletes about the former competitive swimmer and water polo sportsman's no-nonsense approach to getting in touch with one's inner amphibian. Certified by Canada's National Coaching Certification Program, the Ottawa-born former university club head and coach of the Ernestown Barracudas swim club teaches private and group classes at Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium and the National Athletic stadium. Why the growing interest in his services by ex-pat triathlon aspirants?
In addition to English-language classes that cater to executive-level camaraderie, Watson, 29, seems to know what makes his students tick: "A lot of these guys are doing (triathlons) for the first or second time," he says. "They haven't gotten a lot of (swim) training and have used books and videos to learn drills. But they are not sure what they should be feeling when they do those drills." Which, he adds, includes feeling constant pressure on the hands then - and only then - increasing that pressure for speed.
Many end-results-orientated triathletes, however, can shortchange their own ambitions when it comes swim training. Like training for cycling and running, Watson says that they prioritize swimming in the same way - according to distance. "When I ask them about what they've done they talk about distance," he says of typical new students, "a lot of long distances. They're not sure apart from distance what they should be focusing on" Therein lies the weakness of many triathletes when it comes time to take the plunge.
"I don't just focus on distance but getting them to think about every stroke, to be efficient," Watson says. "We do a lot of drills. But I focus on what the drill is about and how to carry that over to what they do. To be aware of their body and what they are doing." He adds that this includes getting the most out of kicks when doing catch-up drills and using the full rang of shoulder rotation when doing gallops. He's also a big fan of grasping the importance of reducing your par when comparing time and stroke counts in the "golf" drill. This, he notes, touches on another oft-held misconception athletes not trained in swimming tend to take to the water - speed over form.
"Swimming is the first part of a triathlon so you don't want to go out and use most you're energy," Watson explains. Yet, as common as such knowledge may be nouveau triathletes can leave it poolside with their towels. He draws on one of his promising students as an example: "He's got it in his head that he has to go real fast and work really hard. So I got him to swim his way one time and swim my way next. Then, we counted the strokes and the time." Using his normal swimming method, Watson says the student swam 48 seconds using 60 strokes. When he followed the instructors directions of focusing more on even, long strokes and making each one count he completed the same distance in 50 seconds but with only 42 strokes. "He might be able to do that for few hundred meters, Watson says of the student's former method but adds that in a long distance race, "he's going to die!"
For those training for their first triathlon Watson says the first and most important thing is to be prepared to cover the distance: "Make sure you can finish." Next he says is to focus on how that distance is covered: "I'd have to say really going long is important," he says of those strokes, "long and easy and focus on what you're doing under the water."
For those who have been at for a while, he suggests, "balancing their strokes out," so their strong arm doesn't do most of the work and catch the rhythm by breathing on both sides as the head turns. "It's a good thing to practice getting the maximum stretch with the weaker arm." He also cautions to pay attention to other problem areas such as kicks, catches and flexibility. "Make sure you have a good grasp of what you're supposed to do for drills. Get someone who knows - a friend - to show you. Work on getting as long and efficient strokes as possible and then speed up."
If you're interested in streamlining your stroke for competition or camaraderie e-mail Greg Watson at: email@example.com or give him a call at: 080 5481 0695.
Discuss this Article» Greg’s Replacement in Tokyo
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Equipping the Saints Series
By Larry and Audrey Eddings
ExcerptForgiveness is the major key to healing and wholeness in spirit, soul, body and relationships. It is that Word used by God to free humanity from its sinful, alienated, and estranged relationship with God. It is the Word which sets people free from bondage in which they find themselves because of an offense which has been committed against them or which they have committed against another.
Upward forgiveness opens the door to reconciliation and restoration of relationships between God and persons. Outward forgiveness accomplishes the goal of reconciliation between persons who have experienced alienation from each other. Inward forgiveness brings peace to those who harbor negative and destructive attitudes towards themselves.
Rev.: 2 March 2011
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Dr Naseer expressed these views during his interaction with TheNation Editor Salim Bokhari on Saturday. “We have established the emergency department and now we are focusing on changing public minds by launching community safety programmes and awareness campaigns,” he held.
The Rescue 1122 director general said the twin factory fire claimed more than 300 lives because of criminal negligence on the part of owners of these industrial units. “The Rescue 1122 has been expanded across Punjab and other provinces have also adopted this model,” said Dr Naseer, adding the management was also working on the launch of the emergency service at the tehsil level.
Speaking on building codes and fire safety measures, he said more than 90 per cent fire cases could be averted at an initial stage. In the West, authorities feel deeply concern even at a minor fire incident, said the Rescue 1122 director general, adding the industrial units in the country did not bother to establish a proper fire safety system.
Dr Naseer said a visible map of the building should be displayed at entry and exit points and inside the building with complete awareness among workers of the factory. Similarly, multi-storeyed buildings should have separate stairs and fire doors, whereas DCP cylinders and fire extinguishers should also be installed inside and outside the buildings.
“We have become the biggest humanitarian organisation of the world in just eight years,” he claimed. “Being pioneer of the Emergency Department, I launched this project with only 14 emergency ambulances in 2004. Now people know they have to dial 1122 in case of emergency,” he added.
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UHPA Facebook app encourages voter participation
The innovative, non-partisan campaign involves a Facebook app called “Our Hawaiian Spring” that is designed to encourage more voters, especially those 40 years and under, to be engaged in the election process in this year’s major races.
“UHPA has noted the steady decline in voter participation. We wanted to be a part of efforts to bring positive change to our islands and increase the number of voices that are part of public debate,” said UHPA Associate Executive Director Kristeen Hanselman. “Facebook is all about family and friends talking to one another, probably the most important motivator that encourages voting.”
Anyone with a Facebook account can participate by downloading the Facebook app developed by Honolulu Civil Beat. Participants are also encouraged to forward it to friends, family, colleagues and students.
Our Hawaiian Spring
The app was named “Our Hawaiian Spring” after Arab Spring, the revolution that occurred in the Middle East two years ago.
It is designed as a game and includes resources and links to inform voters about important topics. Voters have one vote per race, but they can change their vote at any time if they learn something through the campaign that changes their mind. Facebook users will be able to see running totals, which are updated in real time to see who’s leading in the different races.
Voters earn points for various tasks beginning with registering for the app. More points can be accumulated for voting, sharing the site via Facebook or Twitter and other elements aimed at encouraging a robust voter turnout. As the game is further developed, users will be able to pull a widget from the site to access customized data.
Read more about how the app works in Honolulu Civil Beat.
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<urn:uuid:1fa68353-b679-4ceb-a1f0-4e0dbaecf762>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.hawaii.edu/news/2012/10/05/uhpa-facebook-app-encourages-voter-participation/
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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
| 0.951186
| 362
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FPC55050 - Calculation: additional deduction - multi-period productions
Where the production of a film covers more than one period of account Film Tax Relief (FTR) operates on a cumulative basis. This means that:
- In the first period of account the level of the film production company’s (FPC’s) enhanceable expenditure is determined by the amount of core expenditure incurred within that period.
- In subsequent periods of account, including the final period, the level of the enhanceable expenditure is calculated by reference to total expenditure incurred by the FPC to date, taking account of FTR received in earlier periods.
Example: production continues for several periods
An FPC makes a film with total core expenditure of £100m, of which 75% is incurred on film-making in the UK, and 25% incurred on film-making outside the UK. The film is produced over three years.
The FPC is eligible for FTR and, because the core expenditure exceeds £20m, the rate of enhancement is 80% (FPC55030).
Over the three accounting periods, the profile of core expenditure is:
|UK (£m)||Non UK (£m)||Total Cumulative (£m)|
In the first period of account, because all the core expenditure is UK core expenditure, FTR is calculated on the basis of 80% of the total core expenditure, or £28m (= 80% x £35m). The additional deduction is £22.4m (£28m x the rate of enhancement, 80%).
At the end of the second period of account, the total core expenditure to date is £80m, of which £70m is UK core expenditure. Because UK core expenditure is greater than 80% of total core expenditure (80% x £80m = £64m), FTR is provided on the basis of 80% of the total core expenditure incurred to date. The additional deduction is £51.2m (£64m x the rate of enhancement, 80%).
However, £22.4m of FTR has been claimed in the previous accounting period, leaving £28.8m (= £51.2 less £22.4m) to be claimed in the second period.
At the end of the third period of account, total core expenditure is £100m, of which £75m is UK core expenditure. Because UK core expenditure is less than 80% of the total core expenditure, the film production company is eligible to FTR on the full £75m. The additional deduction is therefore £60m (= £75m x 80%).
Because an additional deduction of £51.2m has been claimed to date, this leaves £8.8m (= £60m less £51.2) to be claimed in the third accounting period.
The cumulative effect at the end of the three periods of account is that FTR is provided on the 75% of core expenditure that was also UK expenditure.
|Period 1||Period 2||Period 3|
|UK Core Expenditure (cumulative)||£35m||£70m||£75m|
|Non-UK Core Expenditure (cumulative)||£nil||£10m||£25m|
|Total Core Expenditure (cumulative)||£35m||£80m||£100m|
|UK core expenditure as percentage of total||100%||87.5%||75%|
|Enhanceable expenditure to end of period (lesser of UK core expenditure or 80% of total)||£28m (80% of total )||£64m(80% of total)||£75m(UK core)|
|Additional deduction to end of period (80% of enhanceable expenditure)||£22.4m||£51.2m||£60m|
|Less additional deduction claimed for earlier period(s)||-||(£22.4m)||(£51.2m)|
|Additional deduction due for the period||£22.4m||£28.8m||£8.8m|
|
<urn:uuid:8253bab6-7f93-4823-a63d-8f315a32bae8>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/fpcmanual/FPC55050.htm
|
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Originally Posted by Denwishy
Is feeding raw really that much better than a kibble? He is on wellness fish and potato right now. He seems to be ok but not great. He was on Eukanuba before and when he started getting allegies, i changed to Wellness.
I always thought that you are not supposed to feed then bones, especially chicken/ turkey bones which when broken, are very sharp and can tear their their intestines and tummies? It is safe? Is there a difference between raw and cooked bones?
Feeding raw vs. feeding kibble is a contentious issue- some feel one is better than the other but the only proof is in the pudding. You have to try it and see if it is better for your dog. I know that many allergic dogs do much better on high end kibble, and even better sometimes when switched to raw.
You can feed soft uncooked bones to dogs but weight bearing bones (leg bones of beef, bison for example) can be more dangerous. For larger dogs, they have no problems eating a chicken leg. For a chi, I'd be looking at starting smaller (backbone maybe?) You should never feed cooked bones as they are drier and can splinter.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.pets.ca/forum/showpost.php?p=256110&postcount=90
|
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|
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In June 2007, the iPhone instantly obsoleted all previous smartphones (the BlackBerry and Palm families), finally approaching the promise that carriers and device makers had been making about the mobile future for a decade: Real Web access. A touch UI -- that rotates. Accelerometer and location detection. E-mail and instant messaging. Photos and music. A year later came the App Store and the tens of thousands of apps -- from games to time-wasters to serious business tools -- that also made the iPhone into a computing device.
Since then, there's been an ever-increasing number of competitors, but nothing fundamentally game-changing. Apple continues to refine the iPhone and iPod Touch, adding capabilities such as a compass, Exchange e-mail support, and video capture -- but the last round of devices didn't pioneer anything significant. Both Palm and Google delivered their own iPhone-inspired OSes (WebOS and Android, respectively), but did nothing significant beyond adding (very welcome) support for multiple simultaneous apps to what the iPhone had already brought to the table.
[ Stay up on tech news and reviews from your smartphone at infoworldmobile.com. | Get the best iPhone apps for pros with our business iPhone apps finder. | See which smartphone is right for you with our mobile "deathmatch" calculator. ]
But there's been not much else.
RIM's BlackBerry OS has graduated from being DOS-like to Windows 2.0-like, while the iPhone, Android, and WebOS are in Windows 95-equivalent territory. Microsoft's Windows Mobile has been moribund, with no significant innovations in years and stuck in the mobile equivalent of Windows 3.0 territory. Nokia's Symbian OS has been even more static in a Windows 2.0-like world like the BlackBerry, and now the company says it will phase out Symbian in favor of a Linux-derived OS called Maemo -- but only over the next several years. It's an aging tortoise choosing to race in the mud.
Is there no more innovation to be had in mobile? Has mobile matched the PC in becoming a stable platform where innovation happens slowly and mainly around the edges? After all, what does a PC in 2009 do that a PC in 2000 couldn't do -- even if not as fast -- beyond using different ports?
Refinements: lots more would be welcome
Sure, there's plenty more to be done in terms of refinements. Faster processors, better battery life, and better 3G networks -- especially from AT&T -- are all needed, but these always need improvement. Enterprise-class security should be standard in all of these platforms, as should over-the-air management using standard management tools. (Making these capabilities standard would also enable mobile banking, not just satisfy security-conscious IT people.) Many could use sharper, larger screens, as well as better physical or virtual keyboards.
All should support more wireless capabilities, such as use with Bluetooth keyboards and file syncing and support for wireless-enabled projectors and printers. Voice commands should be integrated across the device's OS and the carrier's phone capabilities; right now, the voice control for dialing can't deal with the smartphone's other apps, making it very hard to use these devices hands-free while driving.
|
<urn:uuid:c5d3eb08-6a64-45d9-9ed9-3b3c2727f673>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/has-mobile-innovation-come-end-439?source=IFWNLE_nlt_mobilehdwr_2009-12-02
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.943178
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Since this has come up in the news again, I'd like to present evidence in favor of allowing the choice to circumcise or not.
First, I don't think anyone these days would advocate a blanket policy of "all male children should be circumcised", and I am certainly not. Overall I agree with the official position of the American Academy of Pediatrics:
Existing scientific evidence demonstrates potential medical benefits of newborn male circumcision; however, these data are not sufficient to recommend routine neonatal circumcision. In the case of circumcision, in which there are potential benefits and risks, yet the procedure is not essential to the child's current well-being, parents should determine what is in the best interest of the child
I do not think the evidence is compelling in either direction, but I believe there are "enough" mild medical benefits to circumcision that I support it for my child, at least. But I would certainly not fault any other parents for deciding otherwise. It is hardly a life threatening or even important decision in the big scheme of things. At best it is minor, on the scale of the deciding to keep your appendix or pierce your ears.
The Wikipedia page Medical Analysis of Circumcision has tons of great citations. Specifically the ones I found compelling in my decisionmaking are:
Ewings and Bowie performed a case-control study of 159 cases of prostate cancer, and found a reduced rate among circumcised men (odds ratio 0.62). The authors noted: "...some statistically significant associations were found, although these can only be viewed as hypothesis generating in this context."
A 1988 New Zealand study of penile problems by Fergusson et al., in a birth cohort of more than 500 children from birth to 8 years of age found that by 8 years, circumcised children had a rate of 11.1 problems per 100 children, and uncircumcised children had a rate of 18.8 per 100. The majority of these problems were for penile inflammation including balanitis, meatitis, and inflammation of the prepuce.
Three studies that have found that boys with foreskins tend to have higher rates of various infections and inflammations of the penis than those who are circumcised:
- Fakjian, N; S Hunter, GW Cole and J Miller (August 1990). "An argument for circumcision. Prevention of balanitis in the adult". Arch Dermatol 126 (8): 1046–7.
- Herzog, LW; SR Alvarez (March 1986). "The frequency of foreskin problems in uncircumcised children". Am J Dis Child 140 (3): 254-6.
- O’Farrel, Nigel; Maria Quigley and Paul Fox (August 2005). "Association between the intact foreskin and inferior standards of male genital hygiene behaviour: a cross-sectional study". International Journal of STD & AIDS 16 (8): 556-588.
Singh-Grewal (2005) performed a meta-analysis of 12 studies (one randomised controlled trial, four cohort studies, and seven case–control studies) looking at the effect of circumcision on the risk of urinary tract infection (UTI) in boys. Circumcision was associated with a reduced risk of UTI (OR = 0.13; 95% CI, 0.08 to 0.20; p<0.001).
According to the American Medical Association, "There is little doubt that the uncircumcised infant is at higher risk for urinary tract infection (UTI)."
Researchers from the Imperial College School of Medicine, Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, London, England reported the results of their study of 357 patients referred for genital skin disease. Most cases of inflammatory dermatoses were diagnosed in uncircumcised men, suggesting that circumcision protects against inflammatory dermatoses.
On Wednesday, March 28, 2007, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS issued joint recommendations concerning male circumcision and HIV/AIDS. These recommendations are:
Male circumcision should now be recognized as an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention. Promoting male circumcision should be recognized as an additional, important strategy for the prevention of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men.
So for me, I want my child to have the best chance of not having these problems associated with foreskins, even if the incidences are quite rare.
Also, having this procedure completed at day 2 of your life when you won't remember it, and as a part of all the other crazy-ass things that happen when you're born (and obviously performed with anasthetic in any case) is preferable to the risk, however small, that you might need a medical circumcision later at an age where you will remember the procedure and the recovery.
|
<urn:uuid:55c3dec7-5661-4840-82c1-1fdaa9d010c1>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/1443/should-we-circumcise-our-son/1445
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.952296
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The United States is the world's largest Gin market. London Dry Gin accounts for the bulk of domestic Gin production, with most of it being produced in column stills. American Dry gins (often termed "soft" gins) tend to be lower proof (80° or 40% ABV) and less flavorful than their English counterparts ("hard" gins). This rule applies even to brands such as Gordon's and Gilbey's, which originated in England. America's best-selling Gin, Seagram's Extra Dry, is a rare cask-aged Dry Gin. Three months of aging in charred oak barrels gives the Gin a pale straw color and a smooth palate.
|
<urn:uuid:345c170b-1c30-495f-8772-b3bad64c746d>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.caskstore.com/spirits/gin/american?p=5
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.93493
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...is my thing, as I might have previously mentioned.
Have excavated on one urban site in Egypt (not telling which) and have come to understand the importance of cities in Ancient Egypt. My concentration lies on the New Kingdom and its so-called capital cities and urban centres.
I feel the necessity to look into the development of the so-called Egyptian capital cities from the time of their foundation to their decrease in importance throughout the New Kingdom, and, where applicable, before and after.
My focus will be the cities of Piramesses and Amarna, due to the amount of recent work undertaken there and discoveries especially in the realm of industrial archaeology - extensive workshops of mass-producing character have been discovered within the last 20 years. These range from pottery over metal and glass production to the making of faience and lesser goods.
In my opinion the evaluation of workshops and other industrial evidence is a valid starting point for the discussion of New Kingdom capital cities, their development and status and their roles and functionality within the country.
From here, one can also establish national networks and international trade routes of goods coming from these capitals, linking the ancient world at the time of the New Kingdom.
I shall be adding to this in time to come.
|
<urn:uuid:1b58707a-618c-4417-b8d7-c017bc6f1f07>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://bitingwires.blogspot.com/2008/04/egyptian-archaeology.html
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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| 0.944823
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Kat and Mark Barlow are living every parent’s worst nightmare.
They are being forced to watch their bubbly two-and-a-half year old son Noah “slowly fade away”, as Kat puts it. Noah was born premature at 29 weeks on May 15, 2010. He weighed just 1090 grams, fitting in the palm of his father’s hand.
He stayed in hospital for a further 51 days after his birth before his parents took him home to Bacchus Marsh in regional Victoria.
Noah had gastrointestinal issues from the day he was born, but doctors put that down to his premature birth.
Kat knew there was more to it. When his parents tried to start feeding him solid food, he would vomit and become violently ill before passing out.
The worried parents were told on a number of occasions that Noah had gastro, but after a cycle of this reoccurring again and again, Kat demanded answers.
The long list of conditions he has been diagnosed with include Food Protein-Induced Enterocolitis Syndrome, a gastrointestinal and immune response to particular food proteins, fructose malabsorption, multiple protein intolerance and Sensory Processing Disorder. This combination of illnesses means that Noah is unable to eat and is fed a formula via a tube every three hours.
Just prior to Noah’s second birthday, the sprightly toddler began to have multiple seizures and walking became a struggle. Sadly, it was later revealed he has extensive brain damage to the part of his brain that controls vital functions including breathing, blood pressure, heart function, swallowing, appetite, body temperature and digestion. He also had a transient ischemic attack (a mini stroke) recently.
Noah’s health issues have baffled dozens of doctors. The hardest part for Kat is not knowing how long she has with the little boy who lights up a room with his cheeky grin, love of rainbows and trucks and a maturity that makes his mother believe he is an “old soul.”
He also loves animals and reading books, with many conversations revolving around lions, tigers and kangaroos. Kat said her son constantly made her laugh. “The other morning I went into his room to wake him up and he asked if we were going to have a busy day. When I told him we were, he said ‘I think I need a coffee’.”
Leave a message of support for Noah and his family on Connect Pink, where regional women come together.
Kat and Mark are determined to enjoy every precious minute with their son, whose zest for life is infectious.
They regularly visit the Melbourne Zoo and hope to visit Australia Zoo at some point. Kat said that she had been overwhelmed by the support of people touched by Noah’s story.
Originally from Bolton in the UK, Kat said the level of support the family had received was just one more reason why she loves the country she now calls home. “Australians rock,” she said. “They really are amazing. It is truly overwhelming how much support we have received.”
Kat said Noah loved to visit the park every day. On good days he will be up and down the slide, with help from his parents, while on days when he is not feeling his best he is happy to sit in the sandpit. The medical bills have been a huge strain on the family, with Noah regularly seeing about 14 different specialists.
Kat said she was left speechless when the Bacchus Marsh community hosted a community fund-raiser that netted at total of $13,500 for the family.
If you would like to help the family, you can make a donation to Noah’s paypal account firstname.lastname@example.org
If you would like to follow his progress visit http://www.facebook.com/noahbarlow2010
Check out this video of Kat and Noah when they appeared on Sunrise.
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<urn:uuid:ffa0f485-29ee-4950-a3f5-370cd667634e>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.stawelltimes.com.au/story/385517/my-beautiful-son-is-slowly-fading-away/?cs=24
|
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|
en
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Flood Coverage and Preparedness
The threat of flooding impacts many homeowners who live in low-laying areas especially near running rivers that can breach or in hurricane zones near the gulf and the Atlantic. You should always hope for the best but prepare for the worst when it comes to anticipating a flood and there are few things you can do before, during, and after a flood to minimize damage.
Keep in mind that many homeowner insurance policies don’t cover floods and that there is a 30-day waiting period before the insurance kicks in after you’ve started the policy.
For more information about preparing for floods and how to select the right insurance coverage check out Floodsmart.gov.
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<urn:uuid:ffcf75f8-671f-4ac4-89ab-46ddb460359a>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://charlesandhudson.com/flood-coverage-and-preparedness/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
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Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
They say good help is hard to find—and family after family illustrate that beautifully when caregiving needs arise.
If you are the primary caregiver, don’t assume that it has to be all you, all the time. But also don’t assume you are going to get help unless you ask. Very specifically.
Why? It depends. Sometimes your family sees you as the strong person and forget you need a rest. Sometimes they see it as your “job,” letting themselves off the hook. Sometimes they don't want to “impose”—and sometimes they are just oblivious. But this is particularly true if you never look like you need help, or demure when someone offers. Once they have offered for awhile, they forget. So right from the start, try to divide up chores, or build in respite for yourself.
Ask yourself what you really want. If it’s hands-on help:
o Be sure that when someone asks, “What can I do?” you have a concrete suggestion. Keep a checklist on the refrigerator (or better yet, online) where everyone can see it.
o Assign family members the roles they do well—or at least the roles they will do (it’s not a help if it never happens). Offload the groceries, the lawn care, the laundry., the book-keeping.
o If they live far away (or feel they are too busy) ask for a monetary contribution. A few hours of respite care from a home health agency or senior care facility can go a long way towards maintaining your sanity.
It could be, however, that you have all that under control, and really you just want a little appreciation. Then say so. But in a nice way, and before you start to boil over. A good start is a weekly phone call where your job is to vent and theirs is to tell you what a great job you’re doing.
A final note: Don’t waste time and energy worrying about the people who aren’t being useful. You need all your energy for yourself.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles
In many—if not most—caregiving situations there is a team involved. Siblings, spouses, close friends, the third cousin whose neighbor had exactly the same thing. With luck, this is great. Two heads are better than one; many hands make light work, etc., etc., etc. Often it is less ideal, with a lot of conflicting opinions, but very little action. If you are the one shouldering the bulk of the responsibility, this can really add to your stress. What to do?
First: Consider the source: Not just who is doing the criticizing, but why. Is it out of guilt because they can’t or won’t do what you are doing? A desire for self-aggrandizement? A deeply ingrained power-play mechanism (is this someone who always needs to be calling the shots)? Understanding the motivations behind the comments can help put them in perspective.
Second: Consider the content: What is particularly troubling? Once you are able to step away from the emotional component, you can figure out the best strategy for dealing with it.
· Is there a constant litany of things you should be doing, with no actual offer to help? Then play dumb, and act like the latest suggestion was an offer to step in. “Take her to the beauty parlor? Great idea. What time can you pick Mom up Tuesday?”
· Does your older brother make you feel like you’re five and a half? Take a minute to think about everything that you are doing right. Really. Make a list. Run through it. Then smile and keep moving.
· Is it simply that the criticism is so relentless? Copy teenagers everywhere and just tune it out.
· Do you have a sneaking sense that there may be a grain of truth in the criticism? Even the girl who cried wolf was right eventually, so don’t automatically dismiss everything the nosey parker says.
The bottom line: Step back as far as possible and try to gauge realistically how much truth there is in what they are saying. And then act accordingly.
|
<urn:uuid:9dd66b02-d430-47a0-b8a3-e7b899e0267e>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://blog.caringwise.com/1/category/care%20team/1.html
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
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Select () or exclude () categories to narrow your recipe search.
As you select categories, the number of matching recipes will update.
Find exactly what you're looking for with the web's most powerful recipe filtering tool.
1 hrs 30 mins
I have not made this, but it's hard to find safe canning recipes using pumpkin, so I thought I'd post it. The USDA does not recommend canning pumpkin puree, even in a pressure canner, but currently says pressure canning of cubed pumpkin is safe. This treatment is something completely different. It's from Canning for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff, published in 2010. She says, "...they're preserved in a very heavy syrup and are cooked in the syrup until translucent and completely saturated with sugar...they're essentially candied. Don't rush the long simmer in the syrup." The recipe is verbatim, so any questions about it should be addressed to the author or her publisher. She suggests serving this preserve alongside ..."rich buttered biscuits or cakes, or as a "spoon sweet", a small but elegant treat at the end of a meal, similar to those served in the Middle East." The preparation and cooking times are my estimates.
Units: US | Metric
Serving Size: 1 (3166 g)
Servings Per Recipe: 1
The following items or measurements are not included:
|
<urn:uuid:8a584968-712d-4150-9386-09c8813256e8>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.food.com/recipe/pumpkin-chips-471012
|
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|
en
| 0.951568
| 287
| 1.710938
| 2
|
'Flowers of War's' Zhang Yimou on China's future — and Tom Hanks
"The Flowers of War" director Zhang Yimou says China's rapidly growing film market will necessitate bringing more foreign films into the country and, he hopes, more actors from the United States. Could Tom Hanks be one of them?
In an interview on the set of "The Flowers of War" — which stars Christian Bale as a heroic figure during the 1937 Japanese occupation of Nanjing — Zhang told The Times' David Pierson that China's film market will soon be the world's second-largest. Because Chinese filmmakers cannot meet the increasing demand, Zhang expects the country's quota system — which officially limits the number of foreign-made films to about 20 per year — to be softened.
"I think the quota will be relaxed and the number will be increased, definitely," Zhang said while on location in Lishui County, southeast of Nanjing, in June. "Because the audience and the number of cinemas are increasing, the market is increasing rapidly, so we need lots of good films. I personally believe that the Chinese cannot make that many good films within such a short period of time."
In addition, after his experience working with the Welsh-born Bale, Zhang hopes that more Western actors come to China. "Many of them are my idols," Zhang said. "I really like their work."
Apparently among them: Tom Hanks, to whom Zhang said he told the "Flowers of War" story. "But unfortunately his schedule didn’t fit," Zhang said.
For more of Zhang's interview about "The Flowers of War" — which opened Dec. 23 and is China's entry in the foreign-language Oscar race — read the transcript below. Or watch the video above, with Zhang speaking in Mandarin (and with English interpretation provided by Nicole Liu of The Times' Beijing bureau).
Are you optimistic that one day Chinese films will rival Hollywood films on the international market?
Truthfully, I think that day is still very far off. We often hear that the Chinese market will quickly approach the size of the U.S. market and become the second-largest market. It is concluded from calculating the number of new screens and cinemas per year. But it will still take a long time for a Chinese film to create international influence.
Having the film ["The Flowers of War"] 40% in English — was it clever marketing too?
No, it’s based on the story, because the story needs it. Sometimes I myself was so curious after watching the edited film clips. I often asked the editor, "Did I shoot this film? It looks like a foreign film!"
Do you expect that any time in the near future the foreign film quota will change?
I think the quota will be relaxed and the number will be increased, definitely. Because the audience and the number of cinemas are increasing, the market is increasing rapidly, so we need lots of good films.
I personally believe that the Chinese cannot make that many good films within such a short period of time. The market is definitely growing faster than movie quality is and faster than a good director is able to grow. So we need to have foreign films to satisfy the demand, to enhance exchange with others and to learn from them too. So I think it will be relaxed.
What are the Hollywood stars you would like to work with?
Many! I met Tom Hanks for this film. I like him very much, and I told him about this story. But unfortunately his schedule didn’t fit.
There are many very good actors in the U.S. It was beyond my expectations that Christian, such a young actor, had done such an outstanding performance.
We often say America has so many excellent actors, but there are not so many excellent Chinese actors. So there is still a very big gap between us. Christian also makes us realize that excellent Hollywood actors are not limited to just being good-looking; their professionalism and great acting abilities are worth learning from.
What would you tell other A-list Hollywood actors, accomplished ones who have won Academy Awards, as to why they should work in China?
First of all, I think they are all great actors. I really hope one day I can work with them. Many of them are my idols; I really like their work.
I wish they would pay attention to what is happening on Chinese soil; the Chinese film market will become the second-largest soon. So we welcome them to come here to work and to bring their films, to let younger Chinese audiences appreciate their acting.
— Scott Sandell
Video: Zhang Yimou on the set of "The Flowers of War." Credit: Benjamin Haas
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http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2011/12/flowers-of-wars-zhang-yimou-chinese-movies.html
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EARTHQUAKE!!: If you're old enough to remember the March 10, 1933, Long Beach Earthquake, allow us to apologize for the small type size in our column. Here, let's try it this way: IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THE MARCH 10, 1933, LONG BEACH EARTHQUAKE, GIVE US A CALL! NOW, GIVE THE PAPER TO YOUR GRANDKIDS!
We have been writing about the Long Beach Earthquake since its 50th anniversary in, we're guessing, 1983. At that time, Long Beach was crawling with survivors of that quake, and we're pretty sure we heard from all of them. We have several hundred pre-email letters from people with startlingly vivid memories of the quake. We eventually had to tell people to stop, unless something really cool happened to them; not just "I thought a car had crashed into the house." Everybody thinks a car crashed into their house when an earthquake hits.
Now, though, we're all 30 years older, and if you're a survivor of the `33 quake and you were 10 years old when you managed this survival, then (sweet Lord let our math skills hold up under all this) you are 90 now.
So we're coming to you with hat in hand looking for your recollections, even if they only involve your thinking that a car had hit the house.
We know a lot of you are getting cocky and thinking, "No sharing of recollections yet; I'm waiting for the 100th anniversary." And that's fine. God admires your hubris. But we're not sure we'll be writing about earthquake survivors 20 years hence.
We know you're out there, and we're giving you a rather early head start on sharing your memories with us. All you have to do is download the latest version of Office Word, type up your memories of the `33 quake in 12-point Verdana Bold font using Associated Press style, NOT Chicago Manual of Style. Usage of the Oxford comma will result in automatic disqualification.
OR: You can write your memories down on a piece of paper and send it through the mail, or use the emailer, or just give us a call and leave your name and number and we'll call you back. Whatever's easiest for you.
Our phone number and email address are at the end of this column in tiny type.
OC FAIR BANDS: After last year's season-long slate of tribute bands, the Orange County Fair is bringing the real deals back to its Pacific Amphitheater stage this summer.
The first blast of acts announced for the Toyota Summer Concert Series at the July 12-Aug. 11 fair are pretty impressive.
Fair bookers release the season's bands just a few at a time. The initial barrage has the B-52s and X teaming up for the July 18 show; Weezer will play July 26; and ZZ Top will roughhouse fairgoers on Aug. 1. All showtimes are 8 p.m.
Tickets for these first three announced concerts go on sale Saturday at Ticketmaster outlets, online at ticketmaster.com or by phone at 800-745-3000.
You can also purchase them at the fair's box office, accessible from Gate 4 off Arlington Drive near Fairview Road. It's open Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Tickets for the B-52s/X and Weezer start at $29.50; ZZ Top tickets start at $38.25. Tickets include fair admission.
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http://www.contracostatimes.com/california/ci_22666692/tim-grobaty-do-you-remember-1933-long-beach
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Make sure your Court Orders include a detailed list of visitation dates and times. "Reasonable" visitation Orders and verbal agreements cannot be enforced by this office. What is reasonable in one parent's eyes may not be reasonable in the other parent's eyes. Keep good records, including a written diary or calendar of all contacts made concerning visitation. This can be used for civil contempt actions, and will also assist the District Attorney's Child Abduction Unit.Keep an updated file of your child and the other parent. Include birth certificates, recent photos, fingerprints and any other information that would aid in identifying your child in case of an abduction.The custody orders should state that the child may not be removed from the city, county, country (or whatever area is appropriate) without the written consent of the other parent, or of the court.Teach your child to use the telephone. Without frightening your child or alienating your child from the other parent, tell your child to call home immediately if something unusual is happening. Make sure that your child understands that you will always love them and want to share your life with them.Furnish a copy of your custody and visitation orders and particularly any restraining orders, to the school, day care center and babysitter.If an abduction is threatened, notify the police department and/or the Child Abduction Unit.
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http://www.countyofnapa.org/Pages/DepartmentContent.aspx?id=4294968318
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What is it that congressional lawmakers don't get on the economy?
The economy is in the tank, but it is OK for members of Congress to take a raise. It must be Washington economics.
Members of Congress just got a 3 percent or $5,000 raise in January and the majority accepted it.
Now the No. 2 Democrat in the House said Washington lawmakers are going to have to give up their automatic raise in 2010. It would be "inappropriate," said Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer, for Congress to accept its 2010 raise when the economy is in bad shape and people are losing their jobs.
Well, Mr. Hoyer, what about the 2009 raise last month?
We think is not only inappropriate but almost immoral for Congress to have accepted a 3 percent pay increase last month, which raised members' salaries to $174,000.
The congressional pay raise in January added an additional $2.5 million to the budget.
Minnesota Congressman Tim Walz has returned his pay increase every year since he was elected in 2006. Now that is true leadership -- Walz is walking the talk.
We call on Congress to not attempt to fool Americans by rejecting the 2010 increase; when they just accepted the 2009 increase in the midst of a failing economy, crashing markets and a banking slowdown.
The House should repeal their 2009 salary increase and do it now.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.wctrib.com/content/editorial-congress-should-return-09-pay-raise
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www.safeboatingcouncil.org NSBCdirect@safeboatingcouncil.org Other Contact Information
P.O. Box 509
Bristow, VA 20136
703-361-4294 (Voice) 703-361-5294 (FAX) Description
The National Safe Boating Council, Inc. (NSBC) was organized in September 1958 under the name National Safe Boating Committee. The NSBC presently has a membership of over 330 U.S. and Canadian organizations, all with an interest in boating safety and education. The NSBC membership is diverse, with approximately 65% of the membership being nonprofit organizations and 35% being for-profit organizations.
The NSBC is the foremost coalition for the advancement and promotion of
safer boating through education. The National Safe Boating Council
accomplishes this mission by conducting a series of on-going National Campaigns to promote
safe boating, providing opportunities to work directly with national and international leaders in boating education, improving the professional development of boating safety
educators, distributing safe boating information, developing and recognizing outstanding boating safety programs, and supporting research initiatives that strengthen boating education and safety awareness.
The NSBC produces materials for National Safe Boating Week, which includes a press kit, booklets, flyers, posters, and sticker. They also produce the "Boating Safety Sidekicks" a very popular series of kid's activity booklets. Proceedings from the International Boating and Water Safety Summit are also available.
Thursday, Dec 16, 2010
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.healthfinder.gov/FindServices/Organizations/Organization/HR1423/national-safe-boating-council
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Olympic Racewalker Valeriy Borchin Collapses Near Finish [Video]
Valeriy Borchin of Russia, the 2008 Beijing Olympics gold medalist and 2011 world champion, was in the home stretch of the London Olympics 20K racewalk today when he passed out from exhaustion.
Borchin’s collapse at the 19K mark of the event was captured on the videos below. Chen Ding of China wound up winning the gold in the London 20K racewalk. Erick Barrondo, earning Guatemala’s first Olympic medal in any sport, won the silver.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Borchin, who obviously was unable to finish, was put on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to the hospital.
According to Deadspin, racewalking–which looks herky-jerky to the uninitiated–requires a tremendous amount of endurance and skill and is not a “walk in the park” by any means:
Racewalking… [is] s a real-deal, throw-down, God-honest Olympic sport. The athletes just as elite and devoted as in any other event…
It’s different from running because there are two limitations. You must keep at least one foot on the ground at all times. And your front, supporting leg must stay completely straight from the moment it touches the ground until your center of gravity passes over it. Failure to do so is called a “lifting infraction.” You do not want a lifting infraction….Only one American has ever won an Olympic racewalking medal: Larry Young scored bronzes in 1968 and 1972.
Deadspin adds that “Racewalking traces its roots back to a 19th century pastime called ‘Pedestrianism,’which was described as ‘competitive long distance walking events.’” Racewalking made its debut at the 1904 Olympics as part of the decathalon. In 1908, it became a standalone Olympic event. There are both 20K and 50K racewalks at the Olympics.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.inquisitr.com/293130/olympic-racewalker-valeriy-borchin-collapses-near-finish-video/
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Olive: an urban dive, is a locally sourced, Mediterranean-American restaurant located in the old Wympee Diner (built in 1938) on the corner of Third and Wayne in downtown Dayton. Local supplies are used as often as possible, and everything is made from scratch… they don’t even own a can opener or a microwave! Approximately 20% of profits are donated back to the community, and 85%-90% of all waste and compostable-only containers is recycled–right down to the forks and cup lids! Olive staff takes great pride in being an environmentally sound restaurant; they help deliver all veggie scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells (averaging 60-90 pounds a week) to the composting bins at Garden Station. Olive is continually pushing the envelope on local sourcing and environmentally sound procedures and is proud have been awarded both the Green and Blue (water conservation) Badges from Montgomery County’s Green Business Certification program! It took 8 months for Kimberly Collett (Olive’s owner and operator), with the help of friends and family, to gut and rebuild the inside of this Dayton landmark. The tables were hand built from raw poplar, the ceiling from plywood, the counter from a tree Kimberly’s grandfather cut down 60 years ago, the bar lights from beer bottles, and even the patio! This Dayton Original, a little urban dive (which still has it’s wympee signage and exterior intact!) is a vibrant spot to dine!
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That's good news for those customers, but AT&T's critics say it should stop withholding the feature from the last group still being excluded: those with grandfathered unlimited data plans.
FaceTime is Apple's proprietary video calling feature that launched in 2010 with the iPhone 4. Initially, the feature could only make video calls over Wi-Fi, but Apple added cellular call functionality last September with the launch of iOS 6, the latest version of its mobile operating system.
» The latest on traffic, delays and road construction delivered to your mobile phone. Click to sign up to receive text alerts!
Both Verizon and Sprint, the two other major U.S. carriers of the iPhone, allowed cellular FaceTime calls for all their Apple users from the start.
AT&T, however, made the feature exclusive to iPhone owners on their Mobile Share data plan. The company later revised its policy and said iPhone 5 users with tiered data plans could also make cellular FaceTime calls.
That still left out other iPhone users, such as those with iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, who have the tiered data plans as well as those with unlimited plans. This week, AT&T revised its policy again and said all iPhone users with the tiered data plan would be able to make the FaceTime calls.
But the policy change still left out those with the unlimited plan.
Free Press, an organization that's been criticizing AT&T's decision to block some users from the feature, said AT&T must make cellular FaceTime available to all its iPhone users. If it doesn't, the public interest group Free Press said it would file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission -- although the organization has been making that threat for months now.
"AT&T's announcement is another step in the right direction," Free Press said in a statement. "Yet as we've made clear all along, the company has no right to block the application in the first place. Until AT&T makes FaceTime available to all of its customers, it is still in violation of the law and the broader principles of Net neutrality."
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.mcall.com/topic/la-fi-tn-att-facetime-unlimited-tiered-data-20130117,0,1265854.story
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From June 21 to 24, the Miller Center for Public Affairs hosted the Presidential Sites and Libraries Conference, which, according to the Center "brought together those who work to preserve the lives of U.S. presidents and included speeches by Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential biographers. The conference was sponsored by the American Association for State and Local History, James Madison's Montpelier, the Miller Center of Public Affairs, Monticello, the National Park Service, the National Archives and Records Administration, President Lincoln's Cottage, and the White House Historical Association. The available webcasts are include talks by Joseph Ellis, Jon Meacham, and Michael Beschloss. In addition, C-SPAN taped several sessions for broadcast; check the C-SPAN web site for scheduling details. Archived webcasts of select sessions are available here.
Image credit: Lincoln at his cottage
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.legalhistoryblog.blogspot.jp/2010/07/presidential-history-at-miller-center.html
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I have usb keychain with size of 7.5GB and I need to copy file on it with size 7.4GB. But I can't because superblocks consume 0.5GB of space.
You don't need a file system to write data to a device. You can simply use
You can directly use
In my experiments this always reads the entire block device, not just the data in the tar archive. If you know that your device has 8 GiB but you only saved, say 3 GiB, you can use
Try to compress the data as much as possible. This might take a long time, but maybe everything fits on a drive with an ordinary filesystem. I would advice to use
Since you don't really need an ext4 file system but are really asking about a file system that will bring the overhead down below about 1.3% of the device capacity (100 MB out of 7.5 GB), I'd look at various low-overhead options. The two most obvious that meet your criteria of being able to handle a single 7.4 GB file is either ext2 with a low inode count and sparse superblocks, or a low-overhead FAT32 file system.
EDIT: It looks like I was wrong about FAT32's maximum file size, but I'm leaving it here in case someone comes across this and can live with the limitation that a single file cannot be larger than 2^32 - 1 (4 GiB - 1) bytes.
For a low-overhead ext2 file system, try something along the lines of
For a low-overhead FAT32 file system, try something like
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<urn:uuid:35075a5c-351e-4adb-ab47-33f2c069503d>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/50114/how-to-create-low-overhead-file-system?answertab=active
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Cathy Rigby biography
Cathy Rigby is an American gymnast and actress born on December 12, 1952 in Los Alamitos, California. At age 15, she was the first American woman to win a medal in the World Gymnastics competition and she participated in the Summer Olympics in 1968 and 1972. Overall, Rigby won 12 international medals of which eight were gold. After retiring from the Olympics, she pursued acting and performed in theatrical and television shows. She earned a Tony Best Actress nomination for Peter Pan (1991). In more recent years she’s worked as a motivational speaker for both collegiate and corporate audiences.
Gymnast, actress and motivational speaker Cathy Rigby was born on December 12, 1952, in Los Alamitos, California. The world first met Cathy Rigby as the 15-year-old girl who became the first American woman to win a medal in the World Gymnastics competition. Performing at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City and the 1972 Games in Munich, she captured the hearts of millions and popularized the sport of gymnastics in the United States.
Rigby fell in love with gymnastics at an early age. Inspired by the balance beam and set of uneven bars her father built for her in the backyard, she devoted her childhood to gymnastics under the guidance of her coach, Bud Marquette. Rigby has earned 12 international medals, eight of them gold, and was named one of America's Most Influential Women in Sports by ABC-TV's Wide World of Sports.
Transition into Theatre and Television
After the 1972 Olympic Games, Rigby retired from gymnastics and embarked on a new career in entertainment. Studying acting and singing for nearly 10 years, she made her musical debut in 1981 as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Described as a "genuine theatrical talent" by Variety, she has performed in the national tour of Annie Get Your Gun and productions of Meet Me in St. Louis, South Pacific, Paint Your Wagon, They're Playing Our Song and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Rigby's dramatic television movie credits include The Perfect Body, Hard to Read, The Great Wallendas and Triathlon. In addition to her theatre and television performances, Rigby headlined in Las Vegas where she was awarded the George M. Cohan Award for Best Specialty Act.
In 1994, Cathy and her husband, Tom McCoy, created the McCoy Rigby Series at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts in La Mirada, California. As executive producers, they produced theatrical productions and mounted national tours, including the tour of Peter Pan, which received a 1991 Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Musical.
Rigby assumed the starring role in the 35th anniversary production of Peter Pan in 1991, earning a Tony nomination for Best Actress. Both the show and the cast have allowed Rigby to relive the spirit of her youth and participate in events she once had to forfeit in favor of gymnastics. Backstage there were Easter-egg hunts and water-pistol fights, as well as a '50s-style prom that the cast threw especially for Rigby. She reprised her role in the A&E television production of Peter Pan in 2000), as well as in the theater in 2008 and 2009.
Not only is Rigby an actress and athlete, but she is also a popular motivational speaker for both collegiate and corporate audiences, touring the country discussing the importance of conscientious nutrition and the benefits of "balancing wellness." The recipient of the 1992 Mother of the Year Award, Rigby is the mother of four children: Bucky, Ryan, Theresa and Kaitlin.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.biography.com/print/profile/cathy-rigby-9542353
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Zack King, community manager at independent marketing agency RPM, argues that negative reviews are an opportunity that businesses must embrace, for if they don’t, they may lose control completely
The vast and continuous expansion of social media platforms has given consumers abundant opportunity to voice their opinion; both good and bad. This freedom of speech has made the public so powerful, it has shifted the entire relationship between brand and consumer and for this very reason, businesses are weary of embracing social media. Negative feedback can be seen to damage business; couple this with a consumers’ free reign to express themselves, and brands feel out of control over preventing the complaint going public. But brands aren’t so out of control as they might think. Instead of brushing negative reviews under the carpet, brands should proactively and transparently address complaints via social media, turning these negatives into a serious positive.
The first thing brands need to remember is that there is always truth in complaints and, as such, negative feedback can actually be used to shape and improve a business model. Through using social media to deal with the problem quickly and as openly as possible, the brand demonstrates good customer service and, more importantly, confirms their customers matter to them. A willingness to address complaints shows that a business has pride and faith in its products and services, and cares about their customers’ experiences, not just their custom. This honesty and humility is instinctively picked up on by those looking to engage through social platforms and are paramount to creating a positive emotional connection. In turn, this drives customer loyalty and lays the foundations for achieving one of social media marketing’s ultimate goals – acquiring advocates and ambassadors.
A report commissioned by Conversocial, The Consequences of Ignoring your Customers, found that a massive 88 per cent of customers said that, should they have a complaint ignored on a social media site, they would be less likely to do business with that company again. And of course it’s not just the relationship with the complaining customer that’s affected; the complaint is now public and the response must be public too. Dealing with the complaint privately may appease the individual concerned, but this strategy will still damage the brand’s image. As the author of the report, Liel Liebovitz, says, “If you take an issue offline there is no resolution for your wider audience to take reassurance from it, no matter how good your level of individual service … Your public image remains one of a careless company who leaves queries neglected.”
For a consumer to champion a brand, they first connect with its products or services before considering what the brand itself means to them. If you look at basic human psychology, people rarely trust others who go out of their way to keep their defence up and hide weakness. This also stands with the relationship between brand and consumer too. Old channels may have created a disconnect that masked much of this distrust, but social media, by definition, amplifies it. People are starting to talk to brands in the same way they talk to other people and if brands don’t become the type of person to make friends, then the business will fail.
Creating a more human-like connection with consumers also has its benefits. Demonstrating transparency and honesty is crucial in a globalised world where ethical and environmental concerns have leapt up the agenda for the average customer. Not many of us would hang out with a friend who employs a child to do their housekeeping; customers do not want to hang out with a brand that thinks it’s okay either. And if brands are seen to be hiding behind something, then perhaps they have something to hide. Simply by reacting to negative feedback, brands provide closure for the complainant; ultimately all consumers want is to be heard and when they are, they are more likely to remain loyal. In fact, a study from Maritz found that 83 per cent of complainants that received a response either liked or loved the fact that the company responded.
Perhaps an even more fundamentally important factor to a business is that, simply, they should want to know what customers are saying. Problems with products, services, communication, or indeed any aspect of the business can be highlighted and addressed and negative feedback should be used to steer improvements, and so improve sales. Who better to guide this feedback loop than the customers themselves? Even if they’re wrong, their perceptions are not. Think of it as free market research.
By now, larger businesses and brands are generally au fait with social media and comfortable with their lowered guard on these platforms. However for smaller outfits perhaps lacking in socially-savvy staff, this can be a difficult step to take, and ,for some, may even require a full-blown paradigm shift. They should be brave – it will be worth it.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.netmagazine.com/opinions/power-negative-reviews
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|
en
| 0.963407
| 978
| 1.625
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How are fiction books such as novels sorted on the shelves at Japanese bookshops? Kana order seems to play a small part but not the whole part. (I'm not asking about nonfiction books since those are ...
I know there's あいうえお, but what about at the consonant level? Also, are there any common mnemonics used by Japanese children to remember these?
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http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/alphabetical-order
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Every now and then a story will pop up about an iconic film that was previously branded with a scarlet rating. Ridley Scott's Alien is the new focus of fascination, and Geek Tyrant recently explained why. As the website points out, Scott's film is full of visceral, stomach-churning moments, some of them quite jarring — like the chest-bursting scene that poor John Hurt suffered through — but that isn't the reason Alien was rated X by the British Board of Film Classification.
Instead, the organization was concerned that children and teens would get confused about sex and reproduction if they watched Hurt's character, Kane, examining a pulsing egg — which would later lead to his face-hugging demise. They called it a "perverse view of the reproductive function." The censor continued:
"I don't want to flash ideas like this to teenagers who might not have come to terms with the normal sexual functions. The early teens are a troublesome time with physical changes making terrific demands on emotional stability. I don't myself want to pass for this age group a film which might be disturbing in a non-specific way to a significant proportion of them."
While it's easy to groan at the board's conclusion, the comments also speak to the power of H.R. Giger's creature design. In 2004, gender and film scholar Ximena Gallardo C. wrote a book with C. Jason Smith called Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley. She spoke about the link between Giger's design for Scott's film, birth and sexuality. She described it as:
" ...A nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping, metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata."
Sexiest death ever? Alien is currently rated R here in the states. In the U.K., it's rated 18, which is pretty much the equivalent of the X rating from back then.
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One of the things that Audi cleverly did was to integrate Google Earth into its navigation system. While other OEMs are chasing their own versions of navigation interfaces (generally variants on existing themes, although Chrysler using Garmin straight-up was an excellent idea), Audi went to a trusted source. (Think only of the rare Apple debacle when it decided that its Map app was superior. . . .)
Audi navi system with Google Street View
Just as there were fast followers when it came to aping Audi’s use of LEDs, there are now clever companies that are working with Google for their navigation systems. Hyundai and Kia have both separately announced that they’re going to be using Google Maps application programming interfaces (APIs) in their telematics systems, Blue Link for Hyundai and UVO eServices for Kia.
Barry Ratzlaff, director of Customer Connect at Hyundai Motor America, said, “The integration of Google Maps APIs makes Blue Link even more effective. We look forward to continuing work with Google to bring innovative solutions to Hyundai owners.”
Henry Bzeih, head of the connected car program and chief technology strategist of Kia Motors America, said, “The newest iteration of the UVO platform is a breakthrough as one of the industry’s first mobile pure app-based telematics systems, and now with the Google solutions and APIs, we take the platform to yet another level of enhancement for the Kia customer. Due to the popularity and ease-of-use of Google Maps, owners can remain confident in the technology and information being delivered to them.”
Coming soon: Google-based navi for Kia
Here’s the thing: People have long talked about the foolishness of the proverbial “trying to reinvent the wheel” when it comes to developing new products. Yet for some reason, when it comes to telematics, OEMs are spending a seemingly inordinate amount of time trying to reinvent interfaces and applications, despite the fact that even the people who are working on those projects probably have an iPhone or a Samsung product in their pocket.
When asked about that, I often hear about how those iOS and Android interfaces weren’t designed for auto.
Which reminds me of the people who went on a great length talking about why it was necessary to hardwire cell phones into cars because those mobile devices just weren’t appropriate for cars. . . .
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The region currently is home to about 62,000 foreign-born residents, the fewest of any major metro area, and local business leaders say they need a lot more.
"A steady influx of working-age immigrants in their 20s and 30s would gradually enlarge the region's working-age population," a crucial factor in wooing more companies and offsetting a potential crisis as baby boomers begin retiring and the region's population continues to stagnate, said Peter A. Morrison, a demographer with think tank Rand Corp.
While Pittsburgh does have the organizations and infrastructure to help new arrivals thrive in the area, there seems to be a lack of institutional push to get immigrants here in the first place. The Jewish Family and Children's Service is attempting to fill this void, seeking out immigrant populations in "gateway" cities.
Pittsburgh could become a secondary migration destination, like Reading, PA is for Dominicans from the gateway city of New York. But the region needs to pave the way for this relocation of people. I think the Burgh Diaspora could be of some assistance. Pittsburgh expatriates living in gateway cities and possessing contacts with various immigrant communities are well positioned to sell the upside of living in their hometown.
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Francis you stated in the first post: <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>In the U.S., established arts institutions (major symphony orchestras, opera companies, ballet companies) have tended to arise as the result of efforts by an individual or a group of individuals. By contrast, in Canada, arts organizations have been heavily subsidized by government entities.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but in Canada arts organizations do come about as the result of individuals or a group of people. It sounds like what's being said is that the Government has kept arts organizations together, which is not the case. An application for a society has to be brought forth by a group of people (this is particular to British Columbia but is similar to the other provinces), no less than five, and I believe, but don't quote me--three of whom must be at arms length from one another (that's in legal terms all of you smarty pants out there!
), in order to incorporate an organization as Not For Profit (which is similar to the Non-Profit label you have in the U.S.). These companies are expected to survive from one to two years on their own before they qualify for any kind of funding and politics being what they are, it's often longer. From what I've heard, larger companies, I'm thinking specifically of the big ballet companies, were established before government arts funding existed.<P>Also, arts organizations in Canada are expected to show where they have made an effort to fundraise in their applications for government grants. Companies cannot depend on 100% government funding. If they did they would run the risk of getting no money at all or a substantially smaller amount than they have applied for. As an emerging artist in Canada, I think I speak for a lot of us who can barely envision project funding let alone an operations budget through government grants. For Canadian arts ogranizations there is definitely a need to have high profile board members for political clout within the government granting system and now they must also have influence within the private sector, as you require in the U.S.<P>It's true that traditionally private individuals or enterprises in Canada have given much less to the arts than in the U.S. <BR>Fundraisers are seen as a necessity, for example The Dance Foundation which was created to raise the necessary monies to build and operate the Vancouver Dance Centre. <P>I'm interested to know why you think "Anglophiles drip contempt at the U.S. style of fundraising"? And why Anglophiles, particularly, as opposed to Francophones? I don't know many artists, English or French, who would turn their noses up at money, no matter how it was raised. <P>As for educating your Board, this has given me an idea. I think I will make a short video or CD Rom of dance clips for my board. Quite frankly, I don't think I would give them Dance Magazine or even Dance International which is kind of Canada's "dance magazine". I don't think print is very stimulating for people who don't actively go to see dance. Since I'm not 'high profile' this has been the hardest part for me in organizing a board for an entity that has barely begun to exist; convincing people that 'dance really is interesting' and that they really do want to schedule more meetings into their lives...<BR><p>[This message has been edited by Marie (edited January 21, 2001).]
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http://www.ballet-dance.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=85984
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en
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NEW YORK -- Analysts have greater distress when they imagine a patient committing suicide than they do when patients actually take their own lives, researchers say.
The median distress score was significantly greater among analysts who merely imagined the situation, compared with those who'd indeed been through it (P≤0.001), Jane G. Tillman, PhD, of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass., and colleagues reported at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting here.
"It says something about our ability to imagine our anxiety," she said. "We may tend to overemphasize it."
While no data on patient suicide have previously been reported, surveys have estimated that psychiatrists react dramatically to such an experience.
The investigators also wanted to determine whether there were differences in the prevalence of patient suicide by clinician specialty or degree.
To that end, they surveyed clinicians who attended the Consortium for Psychoanalytic Research meeting, using demographic data and a 16-item distress scale.
The researchers collected a total of 73 usable questionnaires representing a 74% response rate. Over 60% of participants indicated their primary practice was in psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
They found that 67% of responders had treated a patient who either attempted or completed suicide -- and those incidents tended to occur earlier in their career.
Participants reported an average of 16 years of post-graduate psychotherapy, while attempted or competed suicides occurred when they had accumulated an average of 5.7 years of experience.
The researchers also found that patient suicide was significantly less prevalent among PhDs than among MDs or master's-level clinicians. The latter groups reported significantly more patient suicides, but the researchers add that the findings do not support a widespread assumption that MDs have far more patients complete suicides than other clinicians.
Finally, they found that clinicians who imagined a patient suicide reported significantly greater distress than those who actually had a patient attempt or complete suicide.
Tillman said this could form the basis of a "projective dynamic" in clinicians that can adversely influence their response to colleagues whose patient commits suicide.
Primary source: American Psychoanalytic Association
Tillman JG, et al "Psychotherapists' experience of patient suicide: Actual and imagined" APsaA 2010.
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Felt Christmas Cookies
Today in my Craft Gossip newsletter I found a great site by Kristen – Make the best of everything! Love, love, love her great ideas and crafts. Of course you know that I am absolutely barmy about ANYTHING to do with cut-out cookies so Kristen’s craft that appealed to me most is her Felt Christmas Cookies project and I just have to share it with you!
Kristen cuts her felt items free-hand and hand sews them. But you could easily use large cookie cutters to make a pattern and machine stich them.
She does not give a tutorial but these would be easy to do.
- Make patterns from newspaper with large cookie cutters.
- Make a “sandwich” with two pieces of felt and several layers of quilt batting.
- Pin the pattern to the “sandwich”.
- Cut out.
- Open the “sandwich” and trim the quilt batting about one inch around the edges. Replace it in the “sandwich”.
- Hand or machine stich around the edges.
- Glue or stich on felt decorations.
One of the commenters suggests “make our own set of cookies that Santa just may hide instead of eat.” This is a wonderful idea and you could make a new cookie (per child) to add to the set each year. Embroider the date and child’s names on the back of the cookie.
Take the time to look at her other felt play sets – her pizzeria one is amazing!
Thanks so much for stopping by. As always I’d love to hear from you. Please take the time to visit Kristen’s site and let her know how much you like her craft projects.
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A yearning for authentic.
Read a very interesting article in the Australian Financial Review, written by Edward Docx, a journalist and author.
It seems that Post Modernism, the dominant idea of our age, is over, as evidenced by the fact that the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is hosting a retrospective exhibition called: ‘Postmodernism- Style and Subversion 1970-1990’.
Just to re-cap, Post Modernism was a reaction to Modernism. Whilst Picasso and Cezanne were modernists who created one off pieces that eschewed design and mastery of technique, the Postmodernists, as exemplified by someone like Andy Warhol, were more into collage, chance and repetition- hence Andy had a ‘factory’ to produce multiple screen prints of his work. In literature, Modernists relished depth and metaphysics, whilst a Postmodernist such as Martin Amis would be more inclined to deal in ‘surface and irony.’
Artist Damien Hirst represents a highpoint of postmodernism. For the Love of God, a diamond encrusted skull, 2007.
But the wheel has turned again. In a world where the internet is omnipresent, there seems to be a “universal yearning for some kind of offline authenticity.”Continue Reading
The anti-social media experiment.
Social Media is fast becoming one of our most dependent communication tools. The emergence of smartphones is allowing us to be constantly connected to our friends, families, celebrities, political figures and the guy around the corner that owns the milk bar.
It is also allowing brands, large and small, to engage with their customers, enabling them to be able to get insights that was once impossible. Being able to check-in to places, "like" brands, engage in open dialogues, is allowing marketers to understand consumers better than ever.
However, being constantly connected may be great for engagement, but is it making us more anti-social in the real world?
A few weeks ago, my friends and I encountered an issue that has been brewing for some time. Every time we go to a restaurant it ends up being like this:
The moment we sit down, it's phones out, check-in, update status, comment, likes, upload photos, the list goes on. Banning phones from the table didn't work, as the urge to visit facebook was too strong.
So we decided to on a challenge, an group experiment. The 7-day Social Media Ban.
The rules were simple. No social media for 7 days. If you made it through the week then you get 'kudos'.Continue Reading
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BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Some think the country's biggest railroads will become victims of the natural gas industry's success, as power plants replace coal as their fuel of choice, but they're still chugging along.
Coal has historically made up just over 20% of the biggest railroads' volume and as much as a third of their revenue. The reasoning is that railroads will get sidetracked by utilities' shift to the much cheaper natural gas, which is now selling for roughly half what it was a year ago.
That train, indeed, has left the station, as last week the Energy Information Administration reported that coal consumption by power generators fell 19% in the fourth quarter from the previous three months and 9.4% from a year earlier.
Certainly part of the decline is due to an unusually mild winter that contributed to a buildup of inventories of unburned coal to unprecedented levels, but utilities are relying on gas wherever they can and either building gas fired plants, converting their coal-burning ones to it, or at least thinking about it, which doesn't bode well for coal haulers. In one example of the impact on rail volumes, CSX (CSX) just reported that coal, which typically accounts for 20% of the shipping volume, fell 14% in the first quarter after slipping 8.1% in the fourth quarter. Given those headwinds, industry earnings should be off the rails, but surprisingly, that's not happening. "North American Class 1 railroads reported a healthy 28.5% growth in earnings per share in (the first quarter) compared to the same period last year," said BMO Capital Markets in a May 1 report. "All the railroads exceeded consensus estimates by a healthy margin largely due to greater-than-expected productivity gains, robust pricing and less-than-feared decline in coal revenues." That's why CSX was able to report that its overall volume edged up 0.6% in the first quarter from the year-earlier period. And the outlook is relatively robust for the major industry players. A review of Standard & Poor's collection of the latest analysts' ratings finds more "buy" ratings than any other recommendations and the sole "sell" was on Canadian National (CNI), which comes, ironically, as that company works to improve one of its rail lines so it can haul oil and gas from the Canadian oil shale fields. So what's going on here? It turns out that rail volumes are benefiting from increased demand for auto transport as car sales are booming and intermodal traffic is healthy, thanks to the improving economy as there are significant savings for shipping by rail over truck, given high diesel prices. Another factor is the rise in coal for export as the rest of the world's demand for high-grade coal is unabated, which is helping mitigate the expected big slump in coal volume. Railroads should also benefit later this year from big shipments of agricultural products, as plantings of corn and wheat are high this spring, while S&P says growth will also come as the general economy recovers, "given (railroads') role in transporting many of the basic materials required in manufacturing and construction." Railroads are also operating lean and mean after the recession forced a renewed focus on cost controls. S&P said that should result in better operatin margins during a period of rising volumes. Also worth mentioning is that Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) has a dog in this fight in its Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. It's a leading West Coast railroad, and coal made up 24% of its shipping volume in 2011 and 27% of revenue. Not one to get caught flat-footed, the Oracle of Omaha is fighting to get approval for BSNF to build a huge new rail yard facility in Long Beach, Calif., the busiest intermodal facility in the country. Its ability to efficiently handle more containerized ship-to-rail freight traffic would help replace revenue lost from shipping coal. Others in the industry have to be thinking about their alternatives for making up lost coal volumes as well, including long-term contract renegotiations with the utilities. Here are summaries of North America's largest publicly traded railroad companies arranged in inverse order of their number of analysts' "buy" ratings:
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http://www.thestreet.com/story/11520336/1/railroad-stocks-hurt-by-coal-to-make-a-comeback.html
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In a December 9 Los Angeles Times column, "Zoos without elephants would be a loss for the children of L.A.,” Hector Tobar protests the possibility that Billy, a 23-year-old Malaysian elephant held captive at the Los Angeles Zoo for nearly two decades, might go to a sanctuary and the zoo's exhibit might be closed forever. Three writers compassionately rebut his column.
Born Free USA united with API was founded, in part, on a mission to keep elephants out of zoos.
Zoos without elephants: a lesson in compassion
Lori Marino, Gay Bradshaw, and Randy Malamud
Los Angeles Times Opinion
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UFO Disrupts Air Traffic at China's Jiangbei Int. Airport
CHONGQING, China—Once again, an Unidentified Flying Object, i.e., a UFO is responsible for air traffic being diverted and or delayed at an International Airport in China.
UFO was spotted over the runway at Chongqing Municipality's Jiangbei International Airport led to flights being disrupted yesterday.
Airport traffic was restricted for around an hour from about 12:30pm before the object left the area and the alert was lifted, according to Chongqing media reports.
Passengers on several flights were delayed when their aircraft were diverted to other airports after the mysterious object was spotted.read it all
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en
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Hawaii offers so much more then people expect.
Home to one of the world’s most active volcanoes and the world’s tallest sea mountain. Birthplace of surfing and the hula! Formerly the seat of a royal kingdom.
There are primarily six major islands to visit in Hawaii: Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, Maui, and Hawaii’s Big island. You’ll find each island has its own distinct personality and offers its own adventures, activities, and sightseeing opportunities.
Honolulu is located on the Island of Oahu, where the timeless, natural radiance of the Islands meets the modern luxuries of today. Hike down a lush mountainside, just minutes away from a soaring cityscape. Feast at a luau under the stars one night, dine at a five-star restaurant another. Sunbathe all day on the North Shore then dance all night in Waikiki. There’s no shortage of things to do on Oahu. And the shopping is great!
And for the Golfers! Over 30 public and private courses are located on Oahu. Including such renowned courses as Ko’olau and Luana Hills Country Club. Luana Hills is perhaps the most beautiful golf course on Oahu. Located in the back of beautiful Maunawili Valley on the windward side of the island. It was the first course in Hawai'i designed by Perry Dye and his famous brother, Pete - one of the most accomplished golf architects in America. The Dye brothers made sure to incorporate many of their trademark design features, including a variety of forced carries off the tee, bunkers bordered by railroad ties, par-3's over water to island greens, and fairways that fall off steeply into bunkers and ravines. Luana Hills is set in awesome natural surroundings beneath the deep green folds of the Ko'olau Mountains. The front nine plays across the lower slopes of Mount Olomana, while the back nine winds its way through a tropical rainforest with dramatic changes in elevation. Local residents refer to it as "Jurassic Park" because there are few signs of civilization, only the surrounding forest and the mountain peaks overhead.
Just near by is The Kahala Hotel & Resort, one of the many amazing properties marketed by Leading Hotels of the World. The Kahala Hotel and Resort is located on a secluded beach but just ten minutes from the world class shopping and entertainment of Waikiki. This legendary hideaway resort in Honolulu's plush Kahala district is a favourite with presidents, international royalty and celebrities alike.
This luxury resort offers an extensive range of facilities to suit every need including: Spa facilities, fitness centre, Beach activities, Bikes, Kayaking, Surfing, Tennis and more. For the Junior member of the family the “Keiki Club” is a perfect place for them to have fun and learn about the Hawaiian culture. Full activities are arranged for kids between 5 and 12.
AMAQ members have a special offer available through World Travel Professionals. As a destination or a stopover on route to the US Hawaii offers you the best of everything. While our Australian Dollar is almost one for one, it’s the perfect time to escape.
~ Aloha ~
For more information on any of the areas featured in this blog, contact World Travel Professionals to speak with one of our consultants. We encourage and welcome all user comments and aim to use our blog to interact with our interested readers!
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Gaza crisis: Israel intensifies aerial attack
16 November 2012
Israel's aerial bombardment of Gaza has intensified after it authorised the call-up of 30,000 army reservists, amid reports of a possible ground offensive.
Israel said it fired at 130 to 150 separate targets in Gaza overnight.
The developments came after Palestinian militants fired rockets from Gaza 70km (45 miles) north towards Tel Aviv.
Fighting has intensified since Israel killed Ahmed Jabari, the military leader of the Islamist group that controls the territory, on Wednesday.
At least 18 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, including children, and three Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire into southern Israel.
Egyptian PM Hisham Qandil is to travel to Gaza later in a show of support.
Explosions continued in Gaza throughout Thursday night as Israel intensified its air bombardment. The BBC's Paul Danahar in Gaza City reported huge blasts as dawn broke on Friday.
Palestinian militants have continued to fire rockets at Israeli cities: by Thursday night, Hamas said it had fired more than 350 rockets from Gaza, of which Israel said 130 had been intercepted by its Iron Dome missile defence system.
Overnight, Israel said a further 11 rockets or mortars were fired into its territory from Gaza.
In Tel Aviv on Thursday, residents took cover after air raid sirens alerted them to a missile threat for the first time since Iraq targeted the city with Scud missiles during the Gulf War in 1991. One missile landed in an uninhabited area while another is thought to have landed in the sea.
The armed wing of Islamic Jihad said it had fired an Iranian-built, Fajr-5 rocket - which has an estimated range of 75km.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said targeting Tel Aviv would "exact a price that the other side will have to pay".
Early on Friday, Israel's army said leaflets had been dropped over several locations in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, warning residents "to stay away from Hamas, and other terror organizations".
"Before action, the IDF disperses warning leaflets calling all civilians to evacuate the area. This happened [on Thursday]," the army tweeted.
There were reports of buses of Israeli troops - and trucks loaded with tanks and armoured personnel carriers - heading towards the coastal enclave.
Israeli television stations said the build-up suggested an incursion was planned, but military officials said no decision had been made.
The Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, condemned what he called Israel's "ferocious assault" against the territory.
"We here in Gaza will remain steadfast and unshaken," he said in a televised statement. "We are all confident in our intrepid resistance fighters who are now deployed on the front."
Many of the Palestinians killed in Gaza during the last two days by the Israeli aerial and naval bombardment were members of militant groups, but civilians - including at least four children - were also among the dead. They included 11-month-old Omar, the son of Jihad Misharawi, a BBC Arabic picture editor.
The three Israeli civilians who died - two women and a man - were killed on the top floor of a block of flats in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi that suffered a direct hit by a rocket.
Egypt's new Islamist President Mohammed Mursi called the Israeli bombardment "unacceptable aggression" and said it would affect stability in the region.
The BBC understands that Cairo is actively trying to mediate between Israel and Hamas over the fighting.
The United States, Israel's key ally, has urged Egypt, Turkey and European powers who have contact with Hamas to urge it to stop rocket attacks from Gaza, saying the onus was on Hamas to stop the violence.
Arab League foreign ministers are set to discuss the violence later on Friday.
Israel's aerial and naval bombardment of the Gaza Strip is its most intense assault on the Palestinian territory since it launched a full-scale invasion four years ago.
Nasrallah Urges Arabs to Supply Gaza with Arms, Use Oil to Press U.S., EU
Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday called on the Arab countries to supply battered Gaza with weapons and use the factor of oil to pressure the U.S. and Europe into ending their support for Israel.
“The aggression started with the assassination of a major jihadist leader and several people were martyred or wounded amid a strong defiance by the resistance,” said Nasrallah in a televised address marking the first day of the Shiite Ashoura religious ceremonies.
“We extend our condolences to Hamas Movement on the death of commander (Ahmed) Jaabari and we offer our condolences to the Palestinian people. We strongly condemn the aggression and all the freedom advocates in the world must stand by Gaza, the resistance and the jihadist fighters,” Nasrallah stressed.
He said that the “main bet” is on “the will of the people in Gaza and the will of the resistance.”
“The reason for confidence is that there is a resistance movement in Gaza that has a level of wisdom, courage and steadfastness that makes it qualified for engaging in a confrontation at this high, dangerous and decisive level,” Hizbullah's leader added.
He noted that the firing on Wednesday and Thursday of Iranian-made Fajr 5 rockets at the Tel Aviv area “highlights the wisdom and courage of the current resistance in Gaza.”
Two more Gazans died as Israel pressed on with a major bombing campaign across Gaza on Thursday, raising the death toll to 15, and Palestinian fighters fired more than 250 rockets over the border, with two of them hitting the Tel Aviv area.
A rocket hit the sea just south of Tel Aviv, an Agence France Presse correspondent at the scene said, the farthest that a rocket from Gaza had ever landed inside Israel.
The attack sparked panic in Tel Aviv, with television images showing people lying on the ground outside the defense ministry, their hands over their heads as sirens wailed.
Earlier on Thursday, a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip struck Rishon LeTzion, some 15 kilometers (nine miles) southeast of Tel Aviv, the Israeli army said, but there were no injuries or damage.
“It is an episode of the episodes of the bloody, historic and decisive confrontations that will decide the fate of Palestine and the holy sites. It is one of the stages that require everyone to shoulder their responsibilities,” said Nasrallah.
“We have noticed that this enemy does not need an excuse to wage war and aggression. If the enemy's government has a political interest in war it will wage it, like it did during the 1996 Grapes of Wrath Operation when (then Israeli prime minister Shimon) Peres waged a war on Lebanon ahead of the Israeli elections,” Nasrallah noted.
“The Israelis do not need a Palestinian action in order to make a reaction and I remind the Lebanese, the Arabs and the governments in the region of this,” he want on to say.
Lashing out at the U.S., France and Britain, Nasrallah said “the blood of Gaza's children has exposed the reality of the American, French and British stances on the region.”
“This proves that they're not concerned with values or human rights, but rather with their own interests,” added Nasrallah.
He called on the Arab and Muslim countries to “cooperate in order to enable the jihadist (Gaza) Strip to achieve victory and foil the Israeli plans.”
“Western countries can definitely pressure Israel. We always hear remarks about the 'weapon of oil' and Arabs know that there are certain countries in Europe that would collapse if the price of oil rises and the same can be said about the U.S.,” said Nasrallah.
“Slash production or raise the prices,” Hizbullah's leader suggested, addressing the oil-producing Arab countries.
Commenting on remarks voiced by some Arab leaders that “what's happening in Gaza is aimed at diverting attention from what's happening in Syria,” Nasrallah said “these remarks are laughable because the Israeli objectives are clear.”
“The right thing to say is that Israel benefited very well from what's happening in Syria in order to wage a war on Gaza,” Hizbullah's leader noted.
Hariri Questions Timing of Israeli Assault on Gaza: It Aims to Shift Attention Away from Syria Revolt
Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri slammed on Thursday the Israeli assault against the Gaza Strip, saying that it demonstrates the “hostile policy of Israel against the Palestinians and Arab people in general.”
He said in a statement: “The occurrence of the attack simultaneously with the ongoing Syrian revolution poses questions over its timing and is a sign of the clear intentions to thwart the revolt as much as possible.”
“The assault demonstrates Israel's insistence to cut any possibility to reactivate the peace process,” he added.
“It is seeking to maintain its control over all occupied territories and prevent all efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state,” continued the former premier.
“We renew our solidarity with our brothers in Gaza and call on Arab countries and all influential international ones to mobilize immediately to halt the Israeli assault and prevent its expansion,” stressed Hariri.
Israel launched a bruising air, naval and artillery offensive on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the most intense assault on the Palestinian territory in four years.
The operation was launched with the assassination of Hamas' top military commander, followed by an onslaught of airstrikes and shelling by tanks and naval gunboats.
Jordan police disperse fresh fuel hike protests
November 15, 2012
AMMAN: Jordanian police forcibly dispersed fresh protests against big fuel price rises on Thursday and said its officers had come under fire, a day after riots left one person dead and 71 wounded.
Demonstrators took to the streets in several parts of the capital as well as provincial cities, but they numbered only in the hundreds after supporters of the main opposition Muslim Brotherhood, which had said it would take part, did not show up, AFP correspondents said.
Washington acknowledged that Jordanians faced a "difficult economic situation" and said protesters had a right to demonstrate "as long as they do so peacefully."
But it said it backed planned reforms set out by Jordan's King Abdullah II against criticism from the Brotherhood that they do not go far enough in establishing a constitutional monarchy in which the prime minister is elected rather than appointed by the king.
In Amman, police twice fired tear gas to disperse protesters chanting slogans against the regime, deemed illegal under Jordanian law.
Some 300 had gathered near Gamal Abdel Nasser Circle, east of the city centre, chanting "Down with the regime," and "(King) Abdullah, where is the people's money? You keep on increasing fuel (prices)."
Police used loudspeakers to demand that the demonstrators leave "because you are breaking the law," before launching several volleys of tear gas canisters and making a number of arrests.
Police again fired tear gas when the protesters attempted to regroup nearby.
In the city centre, police prevented a demonstration outside the Central Bank, but around 500 people held a sit-in near the landmark Roman amphitheatre.
In the southern city of Tafileh, police said protesters had shot and wounded four officers.
"Around 150 protesters held a demonstration today, and some of them suddenly fired directly at police, wounding four of them," a statement said.
In the northern city of Irbid, where a "gunman" was killed early Thursday during what authorities said was an attack on a police station, police used tear gas to disperse protesters who had blocked a main road.
Police chief Hussein Majali told a news conference that 158 people had been arrested in the past two days.
"Security forces will hit with an iron fist anyone who tries to affect the country's security. Peaceful demonstrations will be dealt with in a civilised manner," Majali told reporters.
He said police had recorded around 100 incidents of rioting, vandalism and theft across Jordan in 48 hours and that 71 people, including 54 policemen, had been wounded.
Twelve officers were injured early on Thursday when a group of "gunmen" attacked their police station in the northern city of Irbid, state-run Petra news agency reported, adding: "A gunman died in a shootout."
Majali said police "acted in self-defence" when they killed Qais Omari, 23, but Jordanian media quoted his father as saying that his son "was not carrying a weapon and did not attack police."
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur has said the fuel price increases are necessary to help reduce a projected budget deficit of 3.5 billion dinars (around $5 billion dollars/3.9 billion euros) this year.
But the Brotherhood's Hammam Said urged King Abdullah to intervene to reverse the price increases. "Jordanians cannot handle more burdens," he said.
Said added that a January 23 general election, which the Islamists have said they will boycott, "should be postponed as the current atmosphere is not conducive."
US State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner said Jordan remained an "important strategic partner.
"We support King Abdullah II's road map for reform and the aspirations of the Jordanian people to foster a more inclusive political process that will promote security, stability as well as economic development," he said.
Egypt PM to visit Gaza in support of Hamas against Israel
November 16, 2012 ⋅
Egypt’s prime minister prepared to visit the Gaza Strip on Friday in an unprecedented display of solidarity with Hamas militants embroiled in a new escalation of conflict with Israel that risks spiraling into all-out war.
Two rockets from Gaza crashed near Tel Aviv in the first such attack on Israel’s commercial capital for 20 years. One fell into the Mediterranean Sea and the other in an uninhabited part of one of the Tel Aviv suburbs south of the city.
Two days of Israeli air strikes have killed 19 Palestinians, including seven militants and 12 civilians, among them six children and a pregnant woman. A Hamas rocket killed three Israelis in the town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday morning.
The latest upsurge in a long-running conflict came on Wednesday when Israel killed Hamas’s military mastermind, Ahmed Al-Jaabari, in a precision air strike on his car. Israel then began shelling the coastal enclave from land, air and sea.
Israel says its offensive responded to increasing missile salvoes from Gaza. Its bombing has not yet reached the saturation level seen before it last invaded Gaza in 2008, but Israeli officials have said a ground assault remains possible.
The Gaza conflagration has stoked the flames of a Middle East ablaze with two years of Arab popular revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread further afield.
Israeli warplanes bombed targets in and around Gaza City, rattling tall buildings. In a hint of escalation, the spokesman for Israel’s military said it had received the green light to call in up to 30,000 reserve troops.
Egypt’s new Islamist President, Mohamed Mursi, viewed by Hamas as a protector, led a chorus of denunciation of the Israeli strikes by allies of the Palestinians.
Mursi’s prime minister, Hisham Kandil, is to visit Gaza on Friday with other Egyptian officials in a show of support for the enclave, an Egyptian cabinet official said. Israel promised that the delegation would come to no harm.
An Egyptian government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials accompanying Kandil would explore the possibility of brokering a ceasefire.
Mursi faces domestic pressure to act tough. But Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military aid and looks to Washington for help with its ailing economy, constraining Mursi despite his need to show Egyptians that his policies differ from those of his U.S.-backed predecessor Hosni Mubarak.
TEL AVIV TARGETED
Air raid sirens sent residents running for shelter in Tel Aviv, a Mediterranean city that has not been hit by a rocket since the 1991 Gulf War when it was targeted by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The Tel Aviv metropolitan area is home to more than 3 million people, more than 40 percent of Israel’s population.
“This escalation will exact a price that the other side will have to pay,” Barak said in a television broadcast shortly after the strike.
But an Israeli cabinet statement on Wednesday spoke only of “improving” national security – acknowledgement that the Jewish state has no illusions about crushing the militants once and for all.
Speaking at the same time in Gaza, Hamas leader Haniyeh urged Egypt to do more to help the Palestinians.
“We call upon the brothers in Egypt to take the measures that will deter this enemy,” the Hamas prime minister said.
The resurgent conflict will be the biggest test yet of Mursi’s commitment to Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which the West views as the bedrock of Middle East peace.
Cairo recalled its ambassador from Israel on Wednesday. Israel’s ambassador left Cairo on what was called a routine home visit; Israel said its embassy would remain open.
The Muslim Brotherhood, which brought Mursi to power in an election after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, has called for a “Day of Rage” in Arab capitals on Friday. The Brotherhood is seen as the spiritual mentors of Hamas.
The Israeli army said 300 targets were hit in Gaza, including more than 130 militant rocket launchers. It said more than 270 rockets had struck Israel since the start of the operation, with its Iron Dome interceptor system shooting down more than 130 rockets bound for residential areas.
Expecting days or more of fighting and almost inevitable civilian casualties, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in Gaza advising residents to stay away from Hamas and other militants.
The United States has asked countries that have contact with Hamas to urge the Islamist movement to stop its recent rocket attacks from Gaza, a White House adviser said.
“We’ve … urged those that have a degree of influence with Hamas, such as Turkey, and Egypt and some of our European partners, to use that influence to urge Hamas to de-escalate,” Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, said in a conference call with reporters.
French President Francois Hollande began talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other world leaders in an attempt to avert an escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Jean-Francois Ayrault said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron spoke to Netanyahu too, saying Hamas bore the principal responsibility for the crisis.
Israel’s sworn enemy Iran, which supports and arms Hamas, condemned the Israeli offensive as “organized terrorism”.
Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militia Hezbollah, which has its own rockets aimed at the Jewish state, denounced strikes on Gaza as “criminal aggression”, but held its fire.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned Israel’s action.
Iraq bombings kill 17 on eve of Muharram and Ashura
14 November 2012
At least 17 people have been killed and dozens wounded in bombings across Iraq, on the eve of the Islamic new year and the holy month of Muharram.
Six car bombs and roadside devices exploded in the capital, Baghdad, and four other cities, the AFP news agency cited officials as saying.
In the deadliest attack, at least three bombs went off simultaneously in Kirkuk, killing at least five people.
Muharram is an important part of the Shia Muslim religious calendar.
During its first 10 days, millions will commemorate the martyrdom in 680AD (61 in the Islamic calendar) of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala. The mourning culminates in the festival of Ashura.
Shia religious events have in the past frequently been targeted by extremist Sunni Islamist militant groups, including al-Qaeda in Iraq.
No group has said it was behind Wednesday's bombings, most of which occurred in the ethnically-mixed, oil-rich northern province of Kirkuk.
Police said the attacks in Kirkuk city started with a car bomb explosion near the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by the president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Massoud Barzani.
As security forces and bystanders gathered at the scene, there was a second blast, leaving at least five people dead and 34 wounded.
"My child was killed! His friends were killed!" Shukriyah Rauf screamed after the blast, according to AFP. "There is no security here, our homes were destroyed!"
A separate attack in Kirkuk wounded seven street cleaners.
"The car bomb targeted our friends - they are not police, soldiers or politicians," said Jassim al-Obeidi. "They just wanted to make a little money."
Another car bomb targeted an army patrol in the nearby, predominantly Sunni town of Hawija, killing at least four people.
In the town of Hilla, south of Baghdad, a vehicle packed with explosives blew up near a girls' secondary school and a crowded poultry market, leaving at least six people dead and dozens wounded, among them reportedly schoolchildren.
A blast was also reported in the town of Bald Ruz, in the central province of Diyala.
In the capital, Baghdad, one person was killed and at least six were wounded in a series of blasts.
One of the explosions went off near the Palestine and Ishtar Sheraton hotels, two of the city's biggest, shattering nearby windows. Another blast was reported in the central Firdous Square.
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Highlights of Papa Murphy’s Item 19 Financial Performance Representations (2011 FDD) – Part 2
- The following analysis is based on 27 company stores owned and operating during the entire period of Papa Murphy’s fiscal year ended January 3, 2011. The average annual Net Sales for these 27 stores for that period was $436,098. Of the 27 stores, 12 met or exceeded this average.
- Each of the 27 company stores used a uniform accounting system, and the data pertaining to the company stores was prepared on a basis consistent with generally accepted accounting principles during the applicable period.
- The sales, discounts, and expenses of the 27 company stores were divided into three categories. Company stores with annual Net Sales in excess of $474,005 were placed in the High category; company stores with annual Net Sales ranging between $393,976 and $468,930 were placed in the Middle category; and company stores with annual Net Sales below $326,390 were placed in the Low category.
- Of the 27 company stores owned and operated for the entire period of the company’s fiscal year ended January 3, 2011, 26 were included in the April 2010 Franchise Disclosure Document and 1 store was open all weeks after being temporarily closed in 2009.
- Papa Murphy’s fiscal year is based on 12 periods, rather than a full calendar year. The company’s fiscal year ends on the Monday closest to December 31. Therefore, the 2010 fiscal year ended on January 3, 2011.
Section II – Sales and Store Level Operating Costs for Company Stores (expense percentages are of sales, net of discounts for fiscal year 2010)
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PORTLAND, Maine — The president of University of Maine was in Portland on Wednesday morning to promote the university’s new strategic plan and remind the business community of its role in growing Maine’s economy.
Paul Ferguson, who formally became UMaine’s 19th president last April, spoke at the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Eggs & Issues breakfast. He took the opportunity to tell the audience about the university’s Blue Sky Project, which Ferguson unveiled in July 2012.
The Blue Sky Project is “the singular focus of the University of Maine family,” he said, and will help guide the university in “how to clearly see the challenges we face in Maine, the country, the world, and how we take active approach to solve them,” he said.
Building stronger relationships between UMaine and the rest of the higher educational institutions in the state is an important goal, Ferguson said. Making it easier for students to transfer from community colleges to the public universities is a priority, he said.
“We want to build that pipeline, we want to talk about it, we want to create the ways to make it right,” Ferguson said. “We have to get away from Maine education looking at higher education as competitors. Remember if it’s all one closed box, then we’re going to chew each other up trying to figure out what’s going on. Let’s open our eyes up, let’s look at ways to partner and figure out how to get a student from high school to wherever they need to go, even if it’s ultimately a doctorate. We have it all in Maine; we just have to work closer together.”
As for economic development, Ferguson said UMaine has a $783.4 million annual economic impact in the state, and that every $1 the state invests in UMaine generates $8 of economic activity in the state.
Ferguson also touted some of the university’s recent successes, such as its Advanced Structures and Composites Center, which recently received a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop offshore wind turbine technology. That grant could lead to even more government funds in the future.
“Our Advanced Structures and Composites Center is in line to receive a grant of $95 million to develop R&D and technology that is going to transform the technology in offshore wind development, and it has the potential to transform the economy of Maine,” he said.
He highlighted a 2010 report from the Education Trust that named the University of Maine “the highest overall performer” among the country’s public universities.
The need for Ferguson and the university to communicate its message effectively was made clear at the polls last November, when voters approved all bonds but the one that would have provided $11.3 million for facility upgrades at the University of Maine System, community colleges and Maine Maritime Academy.
Ferguson closed his presentation by reiterating UMaine’s role in the state, and by sharing his vision for the future.
“This institution and Maine are inextricably linked for the future. And I’m here to share with you — and not to defend the status quo and things of the past — that we have such a bright future together with this great gem that you — the state of Maine — have built, and [which] I have the wonderful pleasure and privilege to lead at this moment in time,” he said. “We want to come together and look to that blue-sky future, to think creatively, to think out of the box. And don’t forget we have this great resource, and now our challenge is to do it wisely and with dispatch.”
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LOS ANGELES WEST BRANCH
I didn't expect to send you another circular this spring; but it appears that I have written another book!
So many persons have been asking me for something on the...
June 1, 1895
Prof. C. E. Markham,
Dimond, Alameda Co. Cal.
My dear Friend Markham:-
I write to ask you for a service—not for myself as an individual, but only for myself as a witness for a divine order of things than that in which we live. I find...
This postcard is dominated by the river on the lower half of the postcard, adjacent to a busy waterfront scene, with town and sky in the background. The top of the post card is browned and worn slightly. Written message in blank space at bottom...
Commissioners; Report; Federal government; Financing; Indians; Clinton, Dewitt, 1769-1828; New York (State); Erie Canal; Pamphlet
Pages four and five of a thirteen page pamphlet issued in 1816 addressed to "the honourable, the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress, the representation of commissioners of the State of New-York, in of the said...
Fulton, Robert, 1765-1815; Morris, Gouverneur, 1752-1816; Hudson River; Correspondence; Revenue; New York (State); Erie Canal;
Page twelve of the pamphlet consisting of a letter written by Robert Fulton to Gouverneur Morris dated February 22d, 1814 with the response by Morris dated March 3, 1814. Fulton and Morris, both supporters of the canal, exchanged letters on the...
Erie Canal; New York (State); Enlargement; Canal Bill; Loco Foco; Pamphlet
Page 16 of a sixteen page pamphlet on the Enlargement of the Erie Canal. In 1851, controversy arose regarding the enlargement of the canal. This shows excerpts from various New York newspapers voicing protest against the project to enlarge the Erie...
Feb’y 23rd, 1912.
In response to many requests for publication we have now on the press Comrade William A. Prosser’s Open Letter and Challenge to Mr. Raymond Robins in answer to his attack on Socialism, as published in the...
“FOR THE GOOD OF THE ORDER”
Chicago, April 5, 1912.
Dear Comrade of the Christian Socialist Fellowship:
Rev. Wm. A. Ward, with great courage and loyalty, took up the work of the Fellowship as General Secretary when the treasury was empty,...
May 26th, 1917.
West New Brighton, L.I.
Was much disappointed to miss you at Mrs. Stockwell’s when I ran over at breakfast time Thursday morning, as I had a bee in my bonnet which I wished to put in your...
92 Waters Avenue,
West New Brighton, N.Y.
November 13, 1911.
My dear Carr:
I sent you a check this morning to help spread the Episcopal Special. I had no power to make it less. Your Episcopal number is a strong voice from the blood-stained top of...
February 19, 1916.
Mr. Edwin Markham,
92 Waters Avenue,
West New Brighton,
Staten Island, New York.
My dear Markham:-
I have been working hard trying to get the Christian Socialist Fellowship movement going and have had two or three talks with Dr....
July 25, 1902
My Dear Mr. Markham:
Thank you very much for your kind response to my letter. I am quite certain that “The Muse of Labor” will prove to be in every way suited to our needs. Thank you also for your good words concerning “The...
February 13, 1907
My dear Mrs. Markham:
The letter which you so kindly enclose opens up too many questions to be considered in a letter.
(I) It is not “an accepted theory” that the more competition the better, except of course, by the...
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Why not use this blog entry? Not that you would use it, perhaps that's presumptuous of me even to assume it, but no one wants to hear about word studies from the pulpit. On the other hand, what will people say when they hear Acts 4:8-12 proclaimed this Sunday? According to the NAB, Peter asks if he and John are being “examined today about a good deed done to a cripple, namely, by what means he was saved” (Acts 4:9). Screech. Screech. Those are the online sounds of my intellectual brakes grinding to a halt. The ancients are notoriously not politically correct; they are direct and to the point. They say what they want to who they want using the language they want. From a modern perspective, feelings are not spared. Keep that in mind, foolish Galatians, and woe to you Pharisees, whitewashed tombs, and do not think I have forgotten about you Sadducees, who know neither the power of God nor the Scriptures. I could find examples outside of the New Testament, in Judaism or amongst Greco-Roman authors, put I hope the point has been made, obtuse, demanding and silly readers! But, “a cripple”? That is the best translation for this phrase in Acts 4:9 according to the NAB? I do not want to hear this language on Sunday when I hear the first reading proclaimed. There are a number of “cripples” in my congregation. I remember fondly also my brother-in-law, a “cripple” who died in 2008 at 37 after a lifelong fight against the physical ravages of Spina Bifida.
The man who is healed by Peter and John (3:1-10) is described as being chÇlos, “lame” or “crippled,” from birth (“from the womb of his mother” in the evocative Greek). His joy at being healed is pronounced; he literally jumps for joy at his healing and his physical freedom (3:8). He has a right to be happy. But he is also the same man he was prior to his physical healing, as loved by God as he was before he could walk. God’s power has been made manifest, for his benefit, but also for the spiritual benefit of those who observed his healing and who observe him now. He was never “a cripple,” though being crippled was a part of his reality, just as none of us ought to be defined by our physical being alone. The Greek in 4:9 actually uses a straightforward and general adjective to describe him: asthen?s: sick, ill, feeble, weak, powerless. Combined with anthr
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After a shipment of kitchen cabinets has arrived and everything's been checked to make sure it matches your order, the next step is a critical one: Have the installer mark all the cabinet locations on the walls, along with marking the studs where the cabinets will be attached.
Measurements come first. The installer should find the "high spot" on the floor where the kitchen cabinets will be installed. Most floors in older homes aren't level, and cabinet installation must work with the reality of a home's condition. Similarly, walls often aren't plumb or square, even in relatively new construction, so the installer must check them before any cabinets can be installed. Doors to wall cabinets should be removed before installation.
The base kitchen cabinets set the standard for the rest of the installation. Before installation, they should be lined up and connected to one another. They should first be clamped together for perfect alignment and then connected through the sides by screws. This method is far more precise than attaching components to the wall separately, one after another.
Once the base kitchen cabinets are lined up and connected, your contractor will be able to tell what kind of "shimming" may be needed on the walls and the floor. A shim is a narrow wedge of wood that works much like a matchbook placed under the leg of a wobbly table in a restaurant. If your floors or walls are at all "wavy," as is the case in many older homes, shimming will be necessary.
Most frameless cabinets are screwed directly to a wall. If hanging rails are to be used, however, they should be cut and screwed to the studs, usually about 2 1/2 inches below the soffit. This space will allow the cabinet to be lifted above the rail before being lowered onto it. Molding is then used to cover the gap between the top of the cabinet and the bottom of the soffit.
Wall kitchen cabinets should be installed starting in a corner and working outward. In a U-shaped kitchen, the two corner cabinets should be installed first. As each cabinet is hung, it should be fastened to the preceding one so they're perfectly aligned. When all the wall cabinets have been installed, they should be checked to make sure they're level, plumb and square.
Most base cabinets require leveling legs, which should be attached to their bottom corners. In standard installations, the installer makes a mark 34 inches above the high point of the floor along the walls where the base cabinet will be placed. This assumes that the height of your countertop is going to be the standard 36 inches.
Toe-kick moldings are an aesthetic feature that screens the leg levelers from view and provides a floating look to the base cabinets. Some can be snapped into place. Finally, doors and drawer fronts are attached, using adjustable hardware to align them and make the opening between the doors even from top to bottom.
Face-frame kitchen cabinet installation doesn't differ greatly from that of frameless kitchen cabinets except that face-frame cabinets usually are screwed to the wall through a mounting strip. Because they have more inner construction, face-frame cabinets don't rack as easily as frameless cabinets. Since the door can be adjusted on the frame, face-frame cabinets also offer some flexibility in door placement, provided that the doors haven't been predrilled.
Reprinted with permission from the National Kitchen & Bath Association
Get all the info you need on mission-style kitchen cabinets, so you can create a warm, welcoming and comfy kitchen design.
Get the info you need on kitchen cabinet materials, and explore your options for pre-fabricated or custom kitchen cabinets.
Explore your options for kitchen cabinet colors and finishes, and get ready to create a kitchen with supreme style.
Kitchens by Professionals(at Pro Galleries)
Kitchens by People Like You (at Rate My Remodel)
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By Henry Sekanjako
KAMPALA - The Kabaka of Buganda Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II has called for the promotion of technical education to enable the youth be self-reliant.
“In today’s competitive world, we need to plan for our communities by identifying and encouraging the youth to study market oriented courses, business and technical studies for self-employed,” Kabaka said.
He counseled that Uganda would make significant development by migrating from the traditional courses to vocational courses which he says will help people get integrated into the job market easily.
Kabaka Mutebi made the remarks on Friday at Buganda Royal Institute of Business and Technical Education in Mengo, Kampala at the Institute’s 7th graduation ceremony.
A total of 799 students were awarded certificates and diplomas in different disciplines in catering, cosmetology, computer science, journalism among other courses.
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Acclaimed author Cynthia Lord received the Newbery Honor for her debut novel Rules, which School Library Journal. called “a lovely, warm read.” In Touch Blue, Lord pens a moving tale about the meaning of home. Tess is heartbroken when she learns the state of Maine is about to shut down her small island’s schoolhouse, forcing her family to move to the mainland. But Tess’ parents have a plan. Increasing the school’s attendance by having families take in foster children just might change the state’s mind. Tess is sure the plan will work, but she makes a wish on some blue seaglass just in case.
©2010 Cynthia Lord (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
“[Readers] will feel an enormous amount of hope as they read Tess and Aaron’s story. It delivers the message that everything happens for a reason, and that sometimes all you need to do is believe.” (School Library Journal)
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I have three things to say about this.
Harmony Public Schools appears to have cracked the code.
The charter school system, with 38 campuses across Texas and more than 23,000 students, regularly produces students who excel at math, science and engineering. And they do it on a shoestring.
Harmony’s five schools in Austin spent $7,923 per student in 2010-11 on operating expenses, almost $1,600 less than the Austin school district and about $800 less than the statewide average.
Harmony’s schools have also consistently beat the rest of the state on standardized test scores even while educating about the same proportion of students considered at risk of dropping out.
Few other charter schools operate as efficiently and effectively as Harmony. But the ability of some charter schools to seemingly do more with less could become a key issue in the mammoth school finance lawsuit that is set for trial in October.
A 2011 study done for the Texas Education Agency found that charter schools spent 15 percent less on operations than did comparable schools in traditional districts. Most of that difference came from hiring less experienced teachers and paying them less.
Lindsay Gustafson of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association said paying teachers less and stripping them of job protections would drive good teachers out of the classroom. Teacher turnover was twice as high in charter schools as in traditional public schools, according to the 2011 TEA study.
“We’re interested in quality, not just what’s cheap,” Gustafson said.
Soner Tarim, Harmony’s chief executive officer, said his schools are methodical about getting the most out of every employee, giving each person multiple jobs to ensure a leaner administrative operation.
One key to Harmony’s low-budget education is hiring teachers — some of whom come from Turkey — with little experience and paying them far less. The pay difference was about $11,000 less than the state average of $48,600 in 2010, though Tarim said teachers have since received a pay raise. Although charter school teachers are not required to be certified by the state, more than 70 percent of Harmony’s teachers are certified.
Harmony’s hiring practices and its ties to Turkey have generated controversy, including an investigation by a committee in the Texas House. House General Investigating Committee Chairman Chuck Hopson, R-Jacksonville, said the investigation has been concluded and its findings turned over to other agencies looking into charter schools.
Tarim said Harmony’s teachers are willing to work for less because of the innovative, safe and supportive environment that produces results. Other savings come from the schools’ minimal spending on athletics, transportation, guidance counseling and social work.
Harmony also must dedicate relatively little to serving students with disabilities and those learning English. Only 6 percent of its program budget went to educating students with disabilities last year compared to 21 percent for the Austin school district. Austin also committed about 17 percent of its dollars to bilingual students while Harmony spent just 1.6 percent.
1. The thought of being able to pay for his tax cuts by slashing teacher salaries is just ambrosia for Dan Patrick, isn’t it? If you listen carefully, you can actually hear him salivate.
2. On a more serious note, while the story doesn’t get into how or why Harmony is successful getting students to perform well, if the secret to their success at doing it efficiently is being able to convince teachers capable of achieving that performance to do so for 25% less than the industry average salary, I don’t know how well that model can be replicated. I can’t think of too many industries where getting above average results for below average pay is a successful long-term strategy. In an era of stagnant wages and a declining middle class, it’s indecent to be talking about it as a way to keep property taxes at artificially low rates.
3. It may be that there isn’t much of anything that can be learned from Harmony’s experience and applied to the public schools. Sometimes it’s just the right combination of people that makes a place special, and you just can’t make it happen the same way anywhere else. By all means, we should study them and the other high-performing charters and try to learn from their experiences, but what works for them may not work for any other school. There’s never just one right way to do something.
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Feb 18 2013 ·
0 comments ·
Social Media ·
Most of us know that social media gives brands the critical opportunity (and necessity) of listening to consumers.
Consumers often take the lead from the brands whether it’s identifying an emerging style or simply figuring out what to have for dinner.
Brands often take the lead from consumers by identifying influencers and leaders within their target demographic and employing their newfound knowledge to improve their products and services.
Jan 26 2012 ·
2 comments ·
Mandi Frishman, Social Media ·
When I was in high school I participated in a focus group about deodorant. I sat in a room with a bunch of girls that I had never met and was asked to share my memories of deodorant and give feedback on the smells that I enjoyed. The most memorable part of the experience was a girl who shared that she began using deodorant after her mother told her that she smelled like, “A meatpacking plant.” Her delivery was excellent – completely straight faced with no hint of emotion. It was the highlight of the focus group, although I’m pretty confident that the company who paid for that focus group did not enjoy it as much as I did.
Now this was “back in the day” (within the past 10 years) but not so far back that I don’t remember how much I was paid. For less than two hours of my time I made $60 and they gave me cookies. There were probably 5-7 girls in the room with me, each of whom were given $60. We were not the only focus group and I can only hope that they got something more than “girls will use deodorant when shamed by their mothers” out of it. But why all of this talk about how much we were paid? ROI, my friends.
Let’s fast forward to the glorious present, where teens tweet, brands want you to like them, and public content is indexed for your searching pleasure. How could that company get better information today? How could they expand their focus group while refining their data, and without paying for every bit of feedback? Two words: social media.
Your focus group is out there, tweeting, posting, and blogging about their deepest darkest desires, offhand thoughts, likes, and dislikes. They’re talking about your industry, your brand, your products, and even your employees. The social media listening tools that are available are incredibly powerful and allow brands to monitor whatever keywords they desire. For the first time, you have an opportunity to get unfiltered feedback, offered up in real time and without prompting.
If you’re reading this with a questioning mind, and I hope you are, you’re probably thinking: “What happens if that deodorant brand wanted to know what got young women between the ages of 13 and 18 to wear deodorant for the first time? Is it possible to move from monitoring to engaging in order to ask specific questions of specific audiences?” (I love it when you ask questions.)
Let’s respond to your questions by asking three questions:
- Does this brand have a Facebook Page?
- Does this brand have the ability to purchase Facebook Ads targeting females between the ages of 13 and 18?
- Does this brand have the ability to build a campaign soliciting stories through a branded landing page?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, the brand can take their focus group from 5-7 girls uncomfortably answering questions for money, to thousands of girls answering questions for fun. People will contribute to your market research without expecting payment if you position the ask properly. Less cost, more quality – and high quantities of – information. ROI, my friends.
It’s time to unfocus your focus group.
When she’s not working as a marketing manager for Make Me Social, Mandi Frishman enjoys perusing the internet for mentions of her dog, Emma. During her time studying at The University of Florida, Mandi became convinced in the power of learning through play. She has since committed herself to playing (and learning) all day, every day.
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Mousehole (pronounced "mous'le") is a fishing village two miles south of Penzance. Buy a local a pint of 'Tinners' in the Ship Inn on the harbour, and he'll tell you about the dire problems of the Cornish fishing industry and the injustices of EC legislation. These people, who work so hard when they have the chance - you could lose a small coin in the cracks in their hands - are watching their livelihood slowly ebb away.
Not so in the mid 1960s when Bill and Maggie Fisher set up Celtic Pottery there. Maggie was a Canadian with a keen business sense. The south coast of Cornwall has strong links with Canada; if you passed through Newlyn at the end of the twentieth century you would see more maple leaf flags than Union Jacks or Kernow crosses.
The design for which Celtic was to become famous, Folk, was one of Bill's. Heraldic designs - aggressive cockerels with claws at the ready - were the order of the day. Maggie split with Bill and moved the pottery to Newlyn, the next village along the coast towards Penzance, taking the Folk design with her. Here she met up with Ev Stevens who ran Newlyn's Gwavas Pottery. Ev (short for Everidge) joined Maggie, and his range of designs were amalgamated into Celtic to become the Medallion range. Medallion proved to be as popular as Folk, and Celtic Pottery is remembered for just these two designs.
In the late seventies Celtic became Sunset Ceramics making a different range of wares, but the sun set on Sunset within a few years. Maggie is still a very successful businesswoman. She gave up pottery and now runs trading companies in various parts of Cornwall.
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Can you say cutest triplets ever???
We bet you'll be able to now.
Especially after you check out these River Otter triplets now on exhibit at the Oakland Zoo!!!
We had thought we had seen every adorable animal there was, but these otter babies top them all!
But why only look at the pictures?
If you're in the Oakland area, you can see them for yourself!
Or if you're not in that area, then we have totally awesome pictures (below) !!!
Image via .] Oakland Zoo
Chester Zoo in the UK became the proud new owners of two adorbz Asian Small-Clawed Otter pups back in the end of January!
The two little pups,
Wallace, a boy, and Dill, a girl, have been spending time exploring their enclosure with their mama Daisy and their papa Robbie.
Just recently, it was time for their first check up!
The little otters were weighed and checked all over for general good health.
A zoo vet said:
Aww this little guy is so cute!
An eight-week-old baby sea otter was found abandoned by its mother in Alaska.
Volunteers from the Alaska SeaLife Center attempted to find the baby's mother, but they had no luck!
So they've been prepping the orphaned baby sea otter for its new home in Vancouver, Canada.
But in the meanwhile they're enjoying the time they get to spend with this adorable little thing.
Check out the adorableness for yourself by watching (above) !!!
Wow, just wow.
We thought puppies and kitties were cute.
But they got nothing on the
and it's brand new baby Otter pup!! Oregon Zoo
The newborn lil river otter named
Molalla was getting a checkup and thankfully someone thought to film it.
Just listen to her little squeaks!!
Omg, she's just so stinkin' cute we don't know what to do with ourselves.
We guess we're gonna just have to watch that video again… and again… and again… LOLz!
Check out the video (above) for a super cute baby otter just adorbzing around!
2/26/2013 6:58 PM ET |
Even though it is happening to otters, it may be a cause of concern for humans, too!
English and Welsh otters' have been observed to be having a decrease in their penis bone weight plus other negative sexual side effects!
Scientists have attributed these effects to
There's a brand new amazing dunker here in town!
And the best part is…
…It is a SEA OTTER!!
A sea otter named
Eddie who's high flying prowess can be seen at the Oregon Zoo.
Or you can see the video (above) !!!
These otters are TOO CUTE!!!
At the Vancouver Aquarium two sea otters were spotted floating around, napping, and holding hands!!!
If you haven't had your daily intake of adorableness - don't worry, we got you covered!!!
Ch-ch-check out these hand-holding otters directly (above) !!!
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Today’s letter-to-the-editor appears in the Daily Reflector of Greenville, North Carolina. It’s titled Evolution now treated as religion. We’ll give you a few excerpts, enhanced with our Curmudgeonly commentary, and some bold font for emphasis. As we usually do, we’ll omit the writer’s name and city. Okay, here we go:
When I was growing up, it was called the theory of evolution. Now it is called evolution and is presented by the media and many of the scholarly to be an accepted scientific fact.
Yes, it’s one of those sneaky terminology-switching conspiracies we’ve been gradually implementing in order to manipulate the minds of the masses, but the letter-writer is astute enough to have noticed. She continues:
The scientific method starts with a hypothesis and then finds data to back up that hypothesis. If there are other data that does [sic] not back the hypothesis, the investigator is supposed to consider the possibility that the original hypothesis is flawed or incomplete. I believe evolution is treated more like a religion than science.
We’ve seen worse definitions, but the process doesn’t begin with an hypothesis. It’s only in theology (or maybe sociology) that doctrines pop out of the air, independent of facts. To the letter-writer’s credit, however, she didn’t babble about theories morphing into laws. Let’s read on:
Where are the fossils of the incremental stages from a one-cell organism to the marvelous human body?
No credit for that one — except for originality. This is the first time we’ve seen a demand for transitional fossils going back to the amoeba. We continue:
Recently scientists are re-evaluating their theory about DNA. At first scientists thought that only 20 percent of DNA was useful. Now the percentage is up to more than 50 percent. Many think further study will increase that percentage. In addition, the DNA has at least three levels of complexity. A single cell is not simple.
The theory of DNA is being re-evaluated? We didn’t know that, and we’re not sure about those “three levels of complexity.” All we can figure out from that paragraph is that the letter-writer doesn’t like it when more is learned and textbooks change.
Get ready now, because here comes the good stuff:
One of the tenets of the evolution religion is that mankind is getting better and better. Where is the evidence of that?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! This really is an original letter. Moving along:
Here I am referring to human relationships. If you look through history across all cultures, you see examples of envy, hate, robbery, brutal killings, etc. [Skipping more of the same.] I do not think we have evolved into better beings.
She’s right. The persistence of creationism is proof that we’re not getting better, and our lack of progress disproves evolution. Egad — there’s no way out of this! Ah, we’re coming to the end:
My main point is to try to direct those who accept evolution as absolute truth to begin questioning their views. Maybe you will not be so quick to condemn those who do not agree with you.
She’s talking to you, dear reader. Don’t be so quick to condemn those who question your absolute truth.
Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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Marginal note:General law on admissibility of statements to apply
146. (1) Subject to this section, the law relating to the admissibility of statements made by persons accused of committing offences applies in respect of young persons.
Marginal note:When statements are admissible
(2) No oral or written statement made by a young person who is less than eighteen years old, to a peace officer or to any other person who is, in law, a person in authority, on the arrest or detention of the young person or in circumstances where the peace officer or other person has reasonable grounds for believing that the young person has committed an offence is admissible against the young person unless
(a) the statement was voluntary;
(b) the person to whom the statement was made has, before the statement was made, clearly explained to the young person, in language appropriate to his or her age and understanding, that
(i) the young person is under no obligation to make a statement,
(ii) any statement made by the young person may be used as evidence in proceedings against him or her,
(iii) the young person has the right to consult counsel and a parent or other person in accordance with paragraph (c), and
(iv) any statement made by the young person is required to be made in the presence of counsel and any other person consulted in accordance with paragraph (c), if any, unless the young person desires otherwise;
(c) the young person has, before the statement was made, been given a reasonable opportunity to consult
(i) with counsel, and
(ii) with a parent or, in the absence of a parent, an adult relative or, in the absence of a parent and an adult relative, any other appropriate adult chosen by the young person, as long as that person is not a co-accused, or under investigation, in respect of the same offence; and
(d) if the young person consults a person in accordance with paragraph (c), the young person has been given a reasonable opportunity to make the statement in the presence of that person.
Marginal note:Exception in certain cases for oral statements
(3) The requirements set out in paragraphs (2)(b) to (d) do not apply in respect of oral statements if they are made spontaneously by the young person to a peace officer or other person in authority before that person has had a reasonable opportunity to comply with those requirements.
Marginal note:Waiver of right to consult
(4) A young person may waive the rights under paragraph (2)(c) or (d) but any such waiver
(a) must be recorded on video tape or audio tape; or
(b) must be in writing and contain a statement signed by the young person that he or she has been informed of the right being waived.
Marginal note:Waiver of right to consult
(5) When a waiver of rights under paragraph (2)(c) or (d) is not made in accordance with subsection (4) owing to a technical irregularity, the youth justice court may determine that the waiver is valid if it is satisfied that the young person was informed of his or her rights, and voluntarily waived them.
Marginal note:Admissibility of statements
(6) When there has been a technical irregularity in complying with paragraphs (2)(b) to (d), the youth justice court may admit into evidence a statement referred to in subsection (2), if satisfied that the admission of the statement would not bring into disrepute the principle that young persons are entitled to enhanced procedural protection to ensure that they are treated fairly and their rights are protected.
Marginal note:Statements made under duress are inadmissible
(7) A youth justice court judge may rule inadmissible in any proceedings under this Act a statement made by the young person in respect of whom the proceedings are taken if the young person satisfies the judge that the statement was made under duress imposed by any person who is not, in law, a person in authority.
Marginal note:Misrepresentation of age
(8) A youth justice court judge may in any proceedings under this Act rule admissible any statement or waiver by a young person if, at the time of the making of the statement or waiver,
(a) the young person held himself or herself to be eighteen years old or older;
(b) the person to whom the statement or waiver was made conducted reasonable inquiries as to the age of the young person and had reasonable grounds for believing that the young person was eighteen years old or older; and
(c) in all other circumstances the statement or waiver would otherwise be admissible.
Marginal note:Parent, etc., not a person in authority
(9) For the purpose of this section, a person consulted under paragraph (2)(c) is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, deemed not to be a person in authority.
- Date modified:
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By Anton D. Nagy | May 20, 2011 5:42 AM
Apple‘s highly anticipated — and hopefully upcoming — cloud-based music streaming service could very well be the fastest on the market if Cupertino implements one of its patents related to partial media cloud storage for faster content streaming.
According to a patent application entitled “Local Storage of a Portion of Streamed Media Items”, a portion of the music or video file would be stored locally on your device (iPhone) with the rest of it being synced as necessary. This would allow for instant playback without the need to pre-buffer a certain amount of content to allow the playback to begin.
Back in February there was another Apple patent related to merging portions of a file between the locally saved segment and an online part. These two combined together — if, of course, Apple decides to go this way — could bring some innovation to what we currently know as cloud storage and media streaming.
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My previous post asked whether Donald Rumsfeld should resign. I'm asking the question about the wrong guy. Rummy only does what he is told. He implements the policy decisions made by the"decider" in chief. Bush needs to go (and by extension Cheney as well). We need a restructuring of the entire executive branch. We need a new vision (hell any vision) for our country.
. The article was writted by
, a Professor of History at Princeton since 1987.
. Both are must read articles. I'm reposting them in their entirety below just to have for future reference should they move the links at some future time.
Flashback: Bush in '99 -- We Warned You!
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
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How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
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THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.
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BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
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BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
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Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
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Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
Flashback: Bush in '99 -- We Warned You!
George W. Bush was head cheerleader in prep school, a hard-partying frat rat and mediocre student at Yale. After skirting the draft in 1968, he failed at business three times, got bailed out by powerful friends, made a fortune at taxpayer expense and became the popular but weak governor of Texas, an evangelical Christian who preaches morality but ducks questions about his own past. And now he might be president?
As of early July, all indicators seemed to confirm that Texas Gov. George Walker Bush had wrapped up the Republican presidential nomination -- a full eight months before votes will be cast in the first primary, in New Hampshire. After months of buildup, the oldest son of former president George Bush left his home in Austin -- in a campaign plane he'd named Great Expectations -- and set out to take his message of compassionate conservatism to America.
With a Bible in one hand and a cell phone -- on which he speaks regularly to Christian Coalition leader turned political consultant Ralph Reed -- in the other, Bush sounded more like a Southern minister than a presidential contender. In Iowa, at the announcement of his candidacy, he boasted, "Some people think it is inappropriate to draw a moral line in the sand. Not me." He preached abstinence to Christian students in South Carolina. "The twin epidemics of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease are a major problem for the future of America," he warned. "It is hard for the American dream to touch a life if you've had a baby out of wedlock." Later that week, he appeared with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, at a church-run school in Tampa.
At these first few appearances, audiences loved George W. Bush, just as Texans have for the past four years. Much of his success lies in his ability to connect with people: He is, simply put, a masterful retail politician. "George W. has finally found his place," says Georgette Mosbacher, a longtime friend of the Bush family, whose former husband, Robert, served in the Bush Cabinet. "Even though he's Harvard-Yale, he has a real folksy quality that lets him connect with people. He's a people's politician."
No one, however, predicted that George W. Bush would ever be in this position. Until his fortieth birthday, he appeared to be a feckless rich kid, the first-born son of a powerful father. "The whole key to understanding George W.," his cousin John Ellis told Time, "is his relationship with his father," a onetime Texas oilman whose twenty-plus years of political networking landed him in the Oval Office. "Bushes had to be winners," one Bush Sr. biographer wrote.
That emphasis on winning, combined with his father's reserved and emotionally distant personality -- "We don't air our psychological laundry," Jeb once told a reporter -- made George W. the person he is today. Charming, shrewd and quick-tempered, he sometimes seems driven by the fact that, for years, he saw himself as the "Bush family black sheep" -- a phrase he's used to describe himself. "Can you imagine what it's been like to be the son of the man who has built the most impressive political resume of the twentieth century?" Mosbacher says. "No wonder it took G.W. some time to find out who he is. What about the sons of powerful men who never find their way? That could have happened to him."
But questions linger about Bush. Is it enough that the only political post he's held is governor of Texas -- a state whose constitution renders its governor a virtual figurehead with no real power? Will he be hurt by the wishy-washy stands he's taken on abortion, hate-crime legislation and Kosovo? Will he be sunk by persistent rumors of illegal drug use and carousing in his past? When one examines the fullness of his life -- and for this article, Rolling Stone interviewed some 100 people who know Bush -- a more disturbing problem emerges. What Bush is saying now, with its overtones of evangelical Christianity and a moral one-upmanship, has almost nothing to do with the way he has actually lived most of his life. Is Bush being hypocritical? Or is he, as his supporters claim, a man who has recognized the error of his ways -- the one politician who can point the country in the right moral direction?
The forty-sixth governor of Texas was born on July 6th, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father, then a young World War II veteran, was rushing through Yale in just two and a half years. By 1948, after George Herbert Walker Bush had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, he and his wife, Barbara, and their young son moved to Texas, to stake their claim in the oil business. The Bushes would move around some over the next few years before settling in Midland, Texas, a dusty piece of oil patch where George W. passed much of his youth.
In 1953, while Bush was creating Zapata Petroleum with his friends John Overbey and Hugh and Bill Liedtke, Georgie's younger sister, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia; she died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York that October. During the months when Robin was sick, George and Barbara never revealed her illness to Georgie, then six and attending Sam Houston Elementary School. Following Robin's death, Georgie tried to ease his mother's grief. "One lovely breezy day, I was in our bedroom when I heard Georgie talking to a neighbor child who wanted him to come over and play," Barbara Bush later wrote in her autobiography. "Georgie said he wanted to, but he couldn't leave his mother. She needed him. That started my cure."
In 1959, after Georgie graduated to San Jacinto Junior High, Bush and his partners split up Zapata, and Bush took its offshore drilling subsidiary. Because he needed to be near the Gulf of Mexico, where Zapata's drilling took place, he relocated his family -- by then there were five kids: George, Jeb, Marvin, Neil and Dorothy -- to Houston and enrolled Georgie at the Kinkaid School, a private academy favored by Houston's wealthiest families. Two years later, George W. transferred to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the school his father and grandfather had attended. "He was not a goody-two-shoes," classmate Tom Seligson said, recalling a spring-break trip they took to Fort Lauderdale. "He partied as much as anybody. I don't ever remember him being depressed." Indeed, at Andover, where his nicknames were "Lip" and "Tweeds," Bush was known as an "unexceptional student," as another classmate would later remember, who "played a lot of sports, none of them particularly well." In his senior year, he became head cheerleader.
George W. may not have been as academically inclined as his father, but, according to Tom Craddick, a state representative from Midland who has known the Bushes for years, "George was strong and opinionated, like his mother. She's more of a forceful person than George W.'s father is. George W. says he got his mother's mouth." A prominent Republican is less kind: "Barbara Bush is an exceedingly vindictive, nasty individual with a very high opinion of herself. She's always been that way." Cocky, boisterous, flippant -- these were the traits George W. was developing as a young man. They were anathema to his formal father. To crush George W., his father merely had to say he was "disappointed." "Dad was shy," George W. said years later. "We never had 'the talk.' He never told me to wear a raincoat [condom] or anything. I never had any sense of what his ambitions were for me." But he and his father did have a real affection for each other. "I know George respected his father a lot," says John Kidde, a roommate of George W.'s at Andover. "I remember whenever he greeted his father, he always gave him a hug or grabbed him around the waist."
Despite his modest grades, George W. was accepted at Yale, his father's other alma mater. "He was not accepted because he was a legacy, either," says Henry Chauncey Jr., Bush's adviser at Yale's Davenport College. "It was a time in Yale's history when the admissions office was not being favorable to alumni children, since the school was trying to broaden its base. Some alumni got angry because they didn't think the school was accepting enough legacy students." Clearly, Yale was in transition -- and not just concerning admissions. More profound changes were taking place, many of them caused by the Vietnam War. "Yale was on the cusp of change," says Lanny Davis, the former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who was one year ahead of Bush at Yale. "By the end of my time at Yale, there was a light-year of change because of the antiwar and countercultural movements -- movements many Yale students joined."
George W. steered clear of the famous anti-war protests there. He majored in history, but he couldn't match his father's Phi Beta Kappa performance. One friend comments that he "didn't set the place on fire" but fell into "that broad middle." Actually, Bush was too busy partying to study. Later, more than one friend would compare him to Otter in Animal House. Not only did he join Delta Kappa Epsilon, but he was elected president. Naturally, he wasn't averse to drinking. "Let's just say, liquor was permitted in the fraternity house," says Donald Ensenat, one of Bush's friends at Yale, "and George W. had a good time." Lanny Davis concurs: "We were fraternity brothers, so we went to parties frequently. In all of the times I saw George partying -- and we were not known for bashful parties -- he was always just drinking and dancing and having lots of fun. I never saw him lose control."
Not surprisingly, Bush had the minor brushes with authority to be expected of a rambunctious frat boy. One Christmas, New Haven police arrested Bush for stealing a wreath from a fraternity house. On another occasion, Princeton University campus police seized Bush along with other Yale students -- "all of them well-lubricated," says one eyewitness -- when they rushed the football field and tore down the goal posts after Princeton defeated Yale in the Ivy League championship game. "George W. was detained out of the crowd with a few others," Ensenat recalls. "Who knows why they picked him. I have a vivid memory of him walking down the length of the football field with a campus policeman on each side, grabbing him by the arms."
After running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1964, George W.'s father decided to get serious about politics. He sold his share of Zapata and ran for a House seat in 1966, in a state dominated by a Democratic Party that had a president, Lyndon Johnson, in the White House. Bush won, making him one of the few Republican congressmen from Texas. Then, just weeks after his father was elected to Congress, George W. saw his name in the paper. On Sunday, January 1st, 1967, the Houston Chronicle ran a wedding announcement: "Congressman's Son to Wed Cathy Wolfman." The item identified Bush as a Yale junior and Delta Kappa Epsilon president, while Wolfman was a Rice University junior -- and a member of the Elizabeth Baldwin Literary Society -- who had previously attended Smith College. In the accompanying picture, George W. is young and handsome, his hair cropped in a neat crew cut; his bride-to-be is smiling and cheerful. That year, though, the engagement was postponed.
In the late Sixties, as the United States remained mired in the Vietnam War, any young man in his twenties was at risk of being drafted. While his grandfather had served with distinction in Europe during World War I and his father had been nothing short of a war hero in the South Pacific during World War II, George W. received academic deferments. After Yale, he needed an additional deferment to avoid military service -- and Vietnam. As it happened, when he graduated, in 1968, Bush joined the National Guard, which drastically reduced the odds that he would ever see active duty. That summer, Bush and Wolfman ended their relationship for good. "We were very young," Wolfman says. "It just kind of died."
How Bush got into the Guard when its nationwide waiting list had 100,000 names is a story that illustrates his privileged position in life. Although the likelihood of his being accepted through standard channels was remote, Bush applied to the Guard during his last semester at Yale and was immediately admitted to the 147th Fighter Group of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, near the congressional district then represented by his father. He enlisted in May and was commissioned in September. Later, Bush's commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Walter Staudt, insisted that congressman Bush did nothing to get his son into the Guard, but this is contradicted by a source close to Ben Barnes, the speaker of the House in Texas in 1968, who was elected lieutenant governor that same year. According to the source, George Bush telephoned Barnes and asked him to make a phone call to facilitate George W.'s acceptance into the Texas Air National Guard. Barnes made the call.
In 1968, Houston, the business hub of the oil industry in Texas, was growing so fast, it barely resembled the cow town it had once been. As Big Oil boomed, skyscrapers appeared as if from nowhere, while sprawling two-story brick-and-shingle apartment complexes sprung up throughout a city whose limits grew to be sixty miles wide. When Bush arrived in Houston for his Guard duty, he rented an apartment in one of those complexes -- in a fashionable new "singles" building called Chateau Dijon. Advertised as "the place to live," it was described by residents as having a wild side and a sedate side, each configured around a swimming pool. Except for training periods in Georgia, Bush spent all of his time in Houston. He flew fighter jets for the Guard, but mostly he zipped around town in his sporty Triumph and partied. At the Chateau Dijon, he chose to live on the wild side. Though he never ran into her, his future wife, Laura Welch, a second-grade teacher at John F. Kennedy Elementary School, lived there, too -- on the sedate side.
Bush would call the years he spent in Houston his "nomadic period." "He's said he did some things that are bad, but what's bad? Heroin?" says a friend who has known Bush since college. "He didn't do heroin. Grass is not a big deal anymore -- is it?" But at the time, some people close to Bush believed his indulgent lifestyle was a big deal, among them his father. Sensing that his son had lost perspective in his life, Bush arranged for George W. to volunteer at an inner-city community group called Project PULL, an organization founded by former Houston Oiler John White to keep urban teenagers off the streets. "George W. volunteered to assist in the gym and the recreation area," says Otha White, White's widow. "John knew George Bush's father very well. They wanted to build his character at the time." Ernie Ladd, a former professional football player involved with the group, recalls Bush fondly: "Kids in the black community had a lot of fear of the police. George helped bridge that gap."
In 1970, at Richard Nixon's urging, Bush Sr. left the House to run against Lloyd Bentsen for the Senate. When Bush lost, Nixon named him ambassador to the United Nations, a post he held for two years before becoming chairman of the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, George W. continued his nomadic existence -- an attempt, he later admitted, to "reconcile who I was and who my dad was, to establish my own identity in my own way." As his father realized one triumph after another, George W. suffered under what one friend calls "the overwhelming weight of being who he was": Bush's first son. Normally, Bush Sr. was understanding of George W., but one night in 1973, their relationship reached a low point. Visiting his family in Washington, where they lived while Bush chaired the RNC, George W. took his fifteen-year-old brother, Marvin, out drinking. As George W. drove home drunk, he smashed into a neighbor's trash cans, causing a loud commotion. Once the boys got inside and Bush Sr. discovered that both sons were drunk, he confronted George W., who challenged him physically. "You wanna go mano a mano right here?" George W. said to his father. It was ugly and unpleasant, the kind of confrontation with a family member Bush Sr. avoided at all costs. The scene ended peacefully, but this much was clear: George W. did not have the full respect of the man he admired most.
When his National Guard commitment ended just as the Vietnam War did in 1973, George W. was free to do whatever he wanted. Applying to graduate schools, he was rejected from the University of Texas Law School but accepted at the Harvard Business School -- a recognition, some speculated, of his father's growing success in the business and political worlds. Following his graduation from Harvard in May 1975, George W. decided to return to Midland, which had become so prosperous because of the sustained oil boom that Rolls-Royce had opened a dealership there. Midland did not have the cosmopolitan sheen of Houston; the place still had a rough, unsophisticated edge. The "in" spot to go for dinner was the Petroleum Club, a hangout for nouveau riche wildcatters, not Ivy League MBAs. "We didn't have a lot of Yale and Harvard graduates in Midland-Odessa," says Bob Barnes, a businessman who became friends with George W. "Yet he fit into the crowd. He was as down-home as you could get, which was refreshing coming from his background. Compared to his dad, he was certainly a Texan." Bush paid the rent on his garage apartment by working as a land-rights consultant.
"When George moved back to Midland," Tom Craddick said, "he bummed an office, he bummed golf clubs, bummed shoes. You were lucky if you saw him in a fresh shirt." Another friend recalled, "In the Seventies, while everyone was wearing boots and bluejeans, George was walking around town in these flimsy black Chinese slippers" -- no doubt a gift from his father, who now served as Gerald Ford's envoy to China. At the Midland Country Club, where Bush was a member, the management started to give out the George W. Bush Dress Award, a tongue-in-cheek honor presented to the club's worst-dressed golfer.
During the spring of 1977, George W. Bush, thirty years old, took stock of his life. Besides earning two Ivy League degrees with so-so academic performances, George W. had achieved little. Now he wanted to add some legitimacy to his life. So he decided to run for the House of Representatives from Midland. But there was a problem: He had no profession, no family, no home -- none of the traditional trappings every candidate has. He had to change that.
By fall, he had. In June, at a barbecue in Midland, Joe O'Neill, a childhood friend, reintroduced him to Laura Welch, "a very pretty woman" (as George W. would describe her) with whom he'd grown up in Midland in the Fifties and who had lived in the same Houston apartment complex in the late Sixties and early Seventies. After earning a bachelor's in education at Southern Methodist University and a master's in library science at the University of Texas, Laura, the only daughter of a prosperous Midland home builder, now worked in Austin as a librarian. George W. and Laura couldn't have been more different; that's why she told O'Neill, when he had tried to fix them up once before, that she "wasn't interested" because Bush was "real political." This time, however, she agreed, and they started dating right away. "I guess," Laura said, "it was because we were the only two people from that era in Midland who were still single." Barbara Bush put it more romantically: "George W. fell madly in love with her."
Bush also got busy on the job front. On June 24th, 1977, using $17,000 from his education trust fund, Bush incorporated Arbusto Energy (arbusto is Spanish for bush). Next, he bought a house and announced he would run for Congress. By November, he concluded what Laura described as their "whirlwind romance" by marrying her. Now he had everything he needed for a political career: a business, a home, a wife.
Throughout 1978, Bush campaigned, often with the help of his family. His manager was his younger brother Neil. In the primary, Bush took conservative positions on touchstone issues -- he believed the Equal Rights Amendment was "unnecessary"; he opposed the use of federal funds for abortions; he said he had "done nothing to promote homosexuality in our society" -- and he reminded Republicans that they should run him in November because he had "proven [he] can raise money." He also demonstrated that he was remarkably adept at retail politics, though his youth worked against him. "When he goes canvassing door-to-door," a New York Times reporter noted, "his boyish appearance suggests less a go-getter businessman than a nice young fellow next door, offering to help bring the grocery bags in." Despite the fact that his opponent in the Republican primary was endorsed by national GOP heavyweights like Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Bush won his party's nomination, by a razor-thin margin. In November, Democrat Kent Hance beat him by calling him an East Coast carpetbagger.
After that failed run for Congress, Bush decided to make a serious foray into the oil business. In March 1979, he drilled his first well and thereby turned Arbusto, which up till then had existed only on paper, into a real company. "The first well I ever drilled in which I had a participatory interest was dry," he said. "And I'll never forget the feeling. Kind of, 'Oops. This is not quite as easy as we all thought it was going to be.' " That was the beginning of a string of dry wells. "I lucked out," Tom Craddick says. "I didn't get into any of George's wells." Indeed, Bush was so unlucky, friends like Craddick joked that Arbusto should have been called El Busto. "It's hard to believe George couldn't hit one well," says a Bush observer. "After all, the Oil Patch was so rich with oil -- and Midland was in the middle of the Oil Patch -- you could smell oil on the wind."
Because federal tax laws made oil companies good tax shelters, Bush had no trouble getting investors for Arbusto. Of course, he was helped by the fact that as 1979 passed, it became clear that his father was going to run for president. That year, George W. raised $565,000, based on a lackluster drilling record. He sold five percent of Arbusto for $50,000 to James R. Bath -- a friend from the Guard who, after going into business in Houston, ended up with numerous dealings that involved the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, an institution that would soon become caught up in a worldwide criminal investigation so serious that by 1991 BCCI was the very symbol of corporate corruption. Not only did James Bath have BCCI connections, but one of his clients, Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, the banker for the Saudi Arabian royal family, would even be indicted in the scandal. For his part, Bush would later contend that he "had never heard of BCCI" at the time.
Most of Arbusto's investors were friends and associates of George W.'s father, whose attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 ended with Ronald Reagan putting him on the ticket as his vice president. One Bush friend was Philip Uzielli -- a New York businessman and friend of Bush Sr. political ally James Baker III -- who invested an undisclosed sum in Arbusto, betting on spec wells Bush was drilling in New Mexico that, not surprisingly, came up dry. In late 1981, Bush was planning to offer a public drilling partnership, something many independent oil companies were doing, but Arbusto had less than $50,000 in cash, with debts that included nearly $300,000 in bank loans and $120,000 owed to creditors. So in January 1982, Uzielli arranged for Bush to get an influx of cash when his Executive Resources bought 400 shares of Arbusto stock for $1 million in exchange for ten percent ownership of the company and a seat on its board. It has never been made clear why the sales prices of two minority positions in Arbusto -- $50,000 for five percent to Bath, $1 million for ten percent to Executive Resources -- could have varied so drastically.
In May 1982, Bush changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration Oil Co., a marketing move clearly intended to play off the name of his father, now vice president. Despite the new name, the public offering failed. According to Securities and Exchange Commission documents, Bush intended to raise $6 million but brought in just $1.3 million. To make matters worse, the wells he drilled either were dry or produced little oil, and investors lost seventy-five percent of their money. During one quarter, Bush Exploration operated sixteen wells that produced less than 50,000 barrels of oil, ranking it 993rd among oil companies in Texas. Bush's continued failure was offset by the fact that he was now a new father. In November 1981, Laura had given birth to twin girls, who were named for their grandmothers, Jenna and Barbara.
In 1984, Uzielli tried to keep Bush Exploration solvent by buying another 400 shares of stock, this time for $150,000 (it's hard to understand the logic of how the sales price was established.) Bush Exploration needed to merge with a profitable company, so Bush found Spectrum 7, a Cincinnati-based oil company owned by William DeWitt Jr. and Mercer Reynolds III, two GOP contributors who, in 1988, would be major donors to his father's presidential campaign. DeWitt and Reynolds named Bush CEO of Spectrum 7 Exploration, a subsidiary of Spectrum 7, with a $75,000 salary. At Bush's urging, Spectrum sank $1 million into stripper wells in Texas in 1985, just when oil prices started to drop. Indeed, Spectrum's financial performance proved to be as dismal as that of Bush's previous two companies. Finally, in January 1986, the world oil market collapsed. In a six-month period, Spectrum lost $400,000. The company's plight had become so bad that Bush and his partners were considering bankruptcy. "I never saw him depressed over the failures," says a Bush confidant. "What he became was angry."
If it hadn't been for his father's friends, in fact, Bush would have been out of business by then. In July of that year, George W. reached a turning point when he and Laura traveled with friends to Colorado Springs to celebrate his fortieth birthday. The group was staying at the Broadmoor Hotel, and on the night of his birthday, over dinner, George W., who "was not a quiet drunk," according to one friend, had too much to drink and became obnoxious. "It was a party," said Joe O'Neill. "We were all sort of loud, and George gets louder than most. You know, we were that loud table in the corner of the restaurant. And I think in my heart that it dawned on him, or Laura said to him, that he could end up doing something to embarrass his father, and that just did it."
George W. went cold turkey the next morning. "I just quit," he said. "I had had enough. And it's the best thing I've ever done in terms of seeking a more meaningful life." Naturally, Laura was elated. "I think he had been thinking for probably a couple of years before that that he was drinking too much and it was interfering with his life," Laura said. Over time, Bush replaced his drinking with a near-addiction to jogging and a new devotion to Laura's Methodist religion -- a faith much more evangelical than the Episcopal Church he'd grown up in.
In late 1986, again in need of a financial savior, Bush merged Spectrum with Harken Oil and Gas, a company headed by Alan Quasha, whose family was a major supporter of the Republican Party. Bush received 212,152 shares of Harken stock, valued at $530,130; he was not given a management position, but he was made a director and a consultant, the latter position paying him $120,000 a year. Now Bush's ability to raise money got a kickstart. In 1987, Jackson Stephens, an Arkansas investment banker and a major Bush Sr. fund-raiser, sold about five percent of Harken to Union Bank of Switzerland for $25 million. Harken officials -- including Bush, who attended a meeting in Little Rock at which this sale was discussed -- would later deny they knew that Union Bank's partner in a Geneva bank was BCCI. According to congressional hearings that were eventually held, Union Bank was even helping BCCI avoid money-laundering laws in Panama by flying cash out of that country in jets. In time, Swiss banking rules forced Union to divest its Harken stock, so Stephens sold Union's shares to Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi Arabian investor with his own BCCI connections -- he was a co-investor in various deals with BCCI frontman Ghaith Pharaon and used Khalid bin Mahfouz, a principal BCCI shareholder, to handle his investments. As for whether it was odd for a Texas businessman to have BCCI connections, "it's not that unusual," says Peter Truell, the author of False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire, since there was frequent overlap between "big Saudi oil money and big Texas oil money."
In mid-1987, Bush moved to Washington to work for his father's presidential campaign. By this time, George's brother Jeb, seven years his junior, was already the secretary of commerce in Florida. Now, Bush Sr., not entirely happy with the way George W. had lived his life, was giving him a chance to prove himself. "Mrs. Bush didn't trust Lee Atwater [Bush's brilliant but erratic campaign manager] as much as the president did, so they brought in G.W. to watch Lee," says Ed Rollins, who worked as White House political director from 1981 until 1986. "Of course, Lee needed watching. He needed adult supervision, and G.W. provided that supervision. It was awkward for G.W. being first son, but in the end people came to respect his judgment and political instincts." Republican adviser Roger Stone says that "G.W. didn't have a title, but he was listened to because he was the candidate's son. He was a hothead with a very short fuse who was always looking for a fight, but ultimately G.W. and Atwater got along well."
Following the election, which ended in Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis, George W. stayed on in Washington "long enough," Stone says, "to make sure the people who were for Bush got rewarded and the people who were against him got fucked." Another Bush intimate says, "They did this by rewarding their supporters through patronage and freezing out people who didn't support Bush. The Bushes have long memories, and they keep lists."
Finally, George W. got something out of the campaign he might not have expected. "He earned his spurs in that campaign," Rollins says. "His father certainly had greater respect for him afterward. My sense is, he grew in stature and became one of the intimates to his father. He was now more than just a son."
In December 1988, Bush returned to Texas, settling in Dallas, and encouraged by the role he had played in the campaign, set his sights on trying politics again himself by running for the Texas governorship. Bush needed one significant business achievement, so, with the help of Bill DeWitt (whose family had owned the Cincinnati Reds), he started to assemble an investor group to buy the Texas Rangers, the baseball team located in Arlington.
Since baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth insisted that the new owners be from Texas, Bush's group decided he'd be a managing partner, to increase public awareness that a Texan was buying the Rangers -- even though Bush could afford to invest only $606,000, which gave him a mere 1.8 percent of the team. Ueberroth thought that Bush's investor group needed more Texans, so he approached Richard Rainwater, a man who had become wealthy as the financial adviser to the Bass family of Fort Worth. Suspicious of Bush's lousy business reputation, Rainwater agreed to invest only if the club made his friend Edward "Rusty" Rose a managing partner along with Bush. When this was agreed to, the Bush-DeWitt-Rainwater group bought the Rangers, on April 21st, 1989, for $86 million. When Barbara nixed George W.'s plans to run for governor in 1990 because she thought it would be unseemly for the son of a president to run for such a conspicuous public office, Bush became a Rangers managing partner, for which he was paid $200,000 a year.
At once, the new owners told the city of Arlington they wanted a new stadium or they would move the team to another Texas city. Under this threat, Arlington officials devised a plan. They would give the owners not only a new stadium but a facility that included parks, restaurants, shopping malls, an amphitheater, a learning center and a Little League baseball field. The cost of what became known as the Ballpark at Arlington was $191 million, out of which the owners would contribute $30 million, which would be raised through a loan and a "seat option bond" (a one-time fee that box-seat season-ticket holders would pay to keep their tickets). The other $161 million would be raised by implementing a half-cent sales tax in Arlington.
As if this deal wasn't good enough, the owners could buy the Ballpark at Arlington from the city for $60 million by applying their $5 million annual rent to the purchase price. In twelve years, then, the Rangers organization could own the stadium and never have to produce any upfront money. (In the end, to avoid paying property taxes, the owners deferred outright purchase of the stadium, though the option remains open.) George W. had found himself a deal that was unquestionably good for him and his partners, if not the taxpayers of Arlington. "You might call this politics as usual," says Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, a leading expert on public financing in the sports industry. "You might call this politics as usual with an exclamation point. But it doesn't appear that anything expressly illegal happened."
In April 1989, Yousuf Shirawi, the oil minister for the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain, called Michael Ameen, a Houston oil consultant who worked as a consultant to the State Department, to ask him to recommend a company for an offshore drilling project in Bahrain. Perhaps because he was friends with Abdullah Bakhsh, the Saudi investor and major Harken shareholder, Ameen picked Harken -- a company that had never drilled a single well offshore, much less overseas. Even so, Bahraini officials were so impressed that the president's son sat on Harken's board that they gave the contract to Harken in January 1990, even after Harken officials admitted they didn't have enough money to finance the project. "[George W.] was the son of a big muckety-muck," says BCCI expert Peter Truell. "They were using the son to cozy up to the dad." With a contract in hand, Harken got the capital from Bass Enterprises Production, a company whose assets were managed by Richard Rainwater, Bush's Rangers partner.
On June 22nd, 1990, when Harken's stock price was unusually strong because of the Bahraini deal, Bush sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock at $4 a share, for $848,560. On August 2nd, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Harken's stock dropped to $3 a share. On June 30th, Harken had released a quarterly report disclosing a $23.2 million loss for the second quarter, which Bush had known about before he sold his stock, since he was on Harken's audit committee. On news of the loss, Harken's stock dropped to $2.38 a share. Finally, Bush waited until March 1991 -- eight months later -- to file the required insider-trader forms with the SEC. When he was subsequently accused of insider trading, Bush justified his lateness by saying that the proper paperwork had been filed on time but lost by the SEC. An SEC investigation found Bush guilty of no wrongdoing, but skeptics note that the SEC's chairman had been nominated by Bush's father in August 1989 and that the SEC's general counsel had actually represented George W. in the Texas Rangers negotiations. As it happened, the Bahraini project turned out to be a bust, since every well Harken drilled came up dry. "Can you believe it?" says a Texas political insider. "G.W. goes to the Middle East and he can't even hit oil there! Midas he is not."
While the Harken deal developed in 1991, George W. moved to Washington again, to work as an adviser in his father's re-election campaign. He came out throwing punches. "G.W. played a key role in the ousting of John Sununu," Ed Rollins says. "John was too high-profile to be Bush's chief of staff. He saw himself almost as a deputy president. The reality was, John had to go -- and G.W. knew it. Others in the Bush administration did not want to take on Sununu, even though they shared G.W.'s view. So G.W. became the messenger who told his father this had to happen. I'm sure G.W. volunteered to fire Sununu himself. There's a hard-ass side to G.W. that he enjoys." Because of the Sununu firing, George W. was often asked to do the more unpleasant duties his father wanted to avoid. "That's how he got the nicknames the Hatchetman and the Enforcer," says a Bush White House insider. "George W. was the one who carried out the trash." As a result, when the Bush campaign needed a tough-guy spokesman, George W. was trotted out. It was he, for example, who met with reporters to deny charges that his father had had an affair with longtime Bush staffer Jennifer Fitzgerald, a rumor that had become so widespread that the Washington Post once described Fitzgerald as a government worker "who has served president-elect Bush in a variety of positions," to the great hilarity of the Beltway crowd. The line George W. gave to reporters that day would become infamous: "The answer to the Big A question," he said, "is N-O."
Like other Bush advisers, George W. thought his father was waging a losing campaign in 1992. "Bush Sr. didn't believe the country would throw out the commander of the Gulf War for this cracker governor from Arkansas," Ed Rollins says. "He actually told people that. I'm sure G.W. told his father he was in trouble, but, right up to the closing days of the campaign, the only person in America who didn't know Bush was going down in flames was George Bush." Roger Stone adds, "He simply didn't think voters would turn down a war hero for a draft dodger." They did, of course, and in November 1992, Clinton defeated Bush. Despite the loss, some good came out of the experience for George W. If Bush had been unhappy with periods of George W.'s life in the past, he had grown to respect his son in ways he never did before. Indeed, had he listened to George W.'s warnings, the election might have turned out differently. Beyond this, "The '92 defeat, as hard as it was on George and Jebby," Laura Bush said, "in a lot of ways was the first time in their lives they were liberated from the shadow of their dad." As evidence of this, when George W. moved back to Dallas to resume his job with the Rangers, he started to make plans for something else: a run for governor against Ann Richards in 1994.
The first person Bush called was Karl Rove. A college dropout who had attended five different schools before he finally gave up, a Denver native who moved to his wife's home state of Texas in 1977, Rove was a ruthless political operator in the tradition of his close friend Lee Atwater. During the Eighties and early Nineties, Rove handled so many successful Republican campaigns, one Democrat quips, "Texas didn't become a Republican state, it became a Rove state, and Rove can run Texas as well as anybody." Rove does this through sheer force of will. "He reminds me of [loyal Nixon aide] Charles Colson," says Tom Pauken, a former Texas Republican Party chairman who worked in the Nixon White House. "Colson would run over his own grandmother to help Nixon. With Rove, you're either on the team or you're on the enemy list. It's very Nixonian. He's a control freak who runs roughshod over anyone in his way."
Rove signed with Bush, who relished the idea of running against Richards, the crusty grandmother turned politician who had hit the big time when, in her keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1988, she dismissed George W.'s father by sneering, "Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth!" Rove put together a winning strategy: Bush would campaign on four issues -- reform of the education, welfare, tort and juvenile-justice systems -- and nothing else. From the start, Bush stuck with these four issues, or at least he did after Rove made it clear to him that he'd lose if he didn't. "Bush almost lost to Richards early on because he was out there saying this incredible shit," says one political observer. "Rove's people woodshedded him. They took him out to Bush's weekend place in Athens for three days. Man, when he came back, he was the most disciplined candidate you'd ever seen. He talked about his four little issues and that was it." The only time he did go off-message was to highlight a personal achievement he felt qualified him to be governor, such as what he claimed was his success as a businessman. He was "an unabashed capitalist," he said at one campaign stop.
Soon, Bush's private life become an issue. In early May 1994, a Houston Chronicle reporter asked Bush whether he'd ever used illegal drugs. "Maybe I did, maybe I didn't," Bush said. "What's the difference?" The day after the Chronicle story broke, Bush held a news conference in Lubbock. "What I did as a kid? I don't think it's relevant," he said. "I just don't . . . don't think it matters. I think what matters is my view on prisons, welfare reform and education."
In the coming weeks, the Ballpark at Arlington opened, and Bush pointed to the stadium as his greatest achievement. In September, Richards challenged Bush's record as a businessman when Caterair, an airline catering company on whose board Bush had sat for five years, announced it was near bankruptcy. "I'm proud of my business record," Bush said. "And what I hope that Ann Richards does is focus on issues that matter to Texans and lay off of personalities." Instead, Richards aired a television commercial charging that the various businesses Bush had been involved in, either as director or owner, had lost $371.6 million. Richards continued her attack in October in the campaign's one debate, but the exchange that created the biggest dispute that night was Bush's answer to the moderator's question about his National Guard duty. "Putting an F-102 jet in afterburner in a single-seat, single-engine aircraft was a thrill, but it also wasn't trying to avoid duty," Bush said. "Had that engine failed, I could have been killed. So I was at risk." In the days after the debate, veterans groups angrily criticized Bush for comparing the risk he faced flying jets on practice runs over Texas to the risk American soldiers faced in live combat in Vietnam.
In late October, Richards suggested that Bush was guilty of insider trading when he sold his Harken stock -- a criminal act. Now Bush's camp had to fight back in a way that would end the controversy about his business dealings for good. So, only days before the election, Rove fired his big gun: Barbara Bush. "It makes me pretty darn mad," the former first lady said in a speech picked up widely by the press, "to see these ads that just plain aren't true. . . . [George has] been a good, successful, decent, honest businessman. Why doesn't Ann Richards talk about the issues? That's what George is doing. She should be so lucky as to have a son like George."
Texas voters agreed. On November 8th, Bush won with fifty-four percent of the vote. At the time, Richards still had a nearly sixty percent approval rating. On the night of Bush's stunning victory, Jeb lost his gubernatorial race in Florida, so the Old Man, as George W. had taken to calling his father, was tempered when he called from his home in Houston to congratulate George W. in his hotel room in Austin. Even so, George W. knew what he had done. "You've made me proud," Bush reportedly said that night to his son.
"This is what happened," Roger Stone says. "George W. used to be more like his mother, but over time he became more like his father. He matured."
What few outside the state understand about Texas politics is that the governor has little statutory power. "Texas has a restrictive constitution," says Earl Black, political-science professor at Rice University, in Houston, "that has historically made the governor of Texas a weak executive position. The lieutenant governor has the real power, since he presides over the Senate and appoints the legislative committees. The only real strength the governor has is power of the bully pulpit."
In the days following his victory, Bush made a concerted effort to become friends with Pete Laney, the speaker of the House, and Bob Bullock, the lieutenant governor -- both Democrats. (Bullock died this June.) "Mr. Bush, we can make you a good governor," Laney said at the trio's very first meeting, "if you let us." Bush did. In the 1995 session, he also met informally with almost every representative and senator by showing up unannounced at their offices -- something Richards never did during her term as governor. "The ultimate defining moment for me was when he was first elected governor," says Georgette Mosbacher, "and he was able to bring together his enemies. He did it quickly and quietly. I had never seen that done in Texas politics. It was at that point that I knew he was a winner."
While Bush politicked, he let Laney and Bullock push through previously proposed reform bills on education, crime, welfare and tort -- Bush's "four little issues." Rove had picked those issues, as it turned out, because he knew bills on each were already in the legislature's pipeline. Now Bush could take credit for the bills, even though he had nothing to do with creating them. "Bullock was really the governor during Bush's first term," says Tom Pauken, the former Texas Republican Party chair. Columnist Molly Ivins agrees: Most of the time, "W. was bright enough to do what Bullock told him to do for four years, but as a result we have no evidence W. really knows how to govern."
In June 1995, Bush made one of his most controversial moves as governor. The Patient Protection Act, which was approved by the Texas legislature, would have instituted major HMO reforms by requiring companies to be more open about their benefits, allowing customers dropped from a plan to appeal and instituting reviews by the Texas Department of Insurance. Bush vetoed it. He argued that the act "imposes too much government regulation and unfairly impacts some health-care providers." The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association released a statement applauding Bush's veto. In the coming years, Bush would receive some $1 million in campaign contributions from insurance companies for his re-election bid.
In 1997, Bush again broke free of Laney and Bullock, proposing a plan to overhaul Texas' tax system by cutting local property taxes by $2.8 billion; new business and sales taxes would offset the reduction, so public schools would continue to be fully funded. Laney killed the plan in committee, and the eventual property-tax-reform bill the House passed didn't resemble Bush's. Once that bill left the House, Senate Republicans, who feared it was merely a guise to invent new taxes, voted it down. Instead, the legislature passed a one-time referendum that saved Texas homeowners $1 billion over two years. "We had a major problem with George the Second's tax bill, which had more than seventy new taxes," Pauken says. "He even wanted to tax haircuts. I led the fight to defeat it, and then we got a billion-dollar property-tax cut. Bush fought against the billion-dollar cut, but eventually he took credit for it." Says Senfronia Thompson, a Democratic state representative from Houston, "The governor has been able to benefit greatly from the hard work of the Texas legislature."
When Bush ran for re-election against Gary Mauro in 1998, Laney and Bullock were back on his side. Bullock even endorsed him, despite the fact that he was godfather to one of Mauro's daughters. Other Democrats, among them Lyndon Johnson press secretary George Christian, supported Bush, too. "LBJ would've had a problem with that," Christian admits. "Mrs. Johnson sure did. Liz Carpenter [Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary] jumped all over me." Carpenter says, "G.W. is extremely likable. The Bushes all have good manners and great civility. But they don't have a lot of vision. Anyway, I'm a Bible-thumping, foot-washing, full-immersion Democrat who can never bring myself to vote for a Republican."
With even some major Democrats supporting Bush, Rove had little to do, although controversies did crop up. Bush angered many Christians when he ignored appeals by Pope John Paul II and Pat Robertson to stop the February 1998 execution of pickax murderer Karla Faye Tucker -- she had found religion in prison -- only to commute confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas' death sentence six months later. That same year, Bush had to answer the charge that he got rich off the public when Dallas businessman Tom Hicks bought the Texas Rangers and the Ballpark at Arlington, which had been paid for with taxpayers' money, for $250 million. Bush made $14.9 million on the sale -- an astonishing profit on an initial investment of $606,000. That's not the only way Bush made money off the public, either. During much of his first term, he held interest in Crescent Real Estate Equities, a company owned by Richard Rainwater. As governor, Bush approved Crescent Equities' purchase of two office buildings from the state's Teachers Retirement System. The state lost $44 million on one building, and wrote off $7 million in principal and $19.4 million in interest on the other, while Crescent profited handsomely.
The Crescent deal angered some voters, but it was Bush's theme of abstinence before marriage (which continues into his presidential campaign) that made many snicker. Bush proposed spending more than $9 million on a statewide effort to "encourage young people to save sex for marriage." When reporters asked him about his own behavior before marrying Laura at thirty-one, he said only that he had been "irresponsible." "Do as I say and not as I did," he told his young audiences.
Throughout 1998, Bush also had to deal with claims that he was soft on crime. In 1994, he'd attacked Richards on the issue of criminals being released from prison early, saying Texas was "the third most dangerous state in the nation [because] in the last three years, 7,700 criminals have been released early." But during Bush's first term, more than 60,000 prisoners were released early. One was even involved in the racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr., in Jasper. "That should have been his Willie Horton," says one Democrat, "but the public didn't care." Why? "There's a cult of personality with George W.," says a Republican. "The public loves him." Apparently. On November 3rd, the night Jeb succeeded in being elected governor of Florida, George W. won, too, getting sixty-nine percent of the vote to Mauro's thirty-one.
After George W. was re-elected governor, he began to take serious steps toward a presidential run, again emulating his father. "It doesn't take a genius to see there's something Freudian going on here," says John Calvin Batchelor, a Republican historian. "Or Shakespearean." Rove started to systematically court potential Bush supporters. Almost every weekday, late in the morning, buses and vans would line up in front of the governor's mansion and state politicians, party officials and businessmen from all over the country would pile out to have lunch with Bush. By having them come to Bush, Rove was able to limit the national press corps' access to the governor. Many of these visitors have ended up contributing money to Bush's campaign, which is one reason why Bush had raised a phenomenal $36 million by the end of the second quarter of this year. Rove also instituted what became known as the "front porch" strategy, which had Bush ensconced in the relative safety of Austin (where local reporters have been unusually lenient on him), until the biannual legislative session was over at the end of May.
During this time, Bush -- with the help of Rove -- was also honing his theme of compassionate conservatism. He began to mention Myron Magnet, the neoconservative pundit at the Manhattan Institute, as his "guru." In his 1993 book, The Dream and the Nightmare, Magnet made an argument that appealed to Bush: It was the overall decline of morals in America, prompted by the counterculture movement and sexual revolution of the 1960s, that had led to the rapid growth of the underclass. This idea fits in neatly with Bush's belief that the "if it feels good, do it" mentality inaugurated in the Sixties had begun a widespread moral decline in this country.
With his party's overwhelming support and his message ready to be sold to the public, Bush finally hit the campaign trail in June, playing to wildly cheering audiences eager to hear his message of moral righteousness and reform. His rhetoric is perfectly tuned to the times -- compassionate conservatism being a finely wrought catch phrase that allows him to come across on the one hand as a rock-ribbed right winger and on the other hand as an everybody-wins pork slopper. But when one looks beyond the slogan and examines the life of the man, George W. Bush seems less like a moral visionary and more like a man who, above all else, knows how to work the inside game -- a consummate opportunist. His entire life has been the pursuit of accommodating himself to power -- to his father, to his father's wealthy and influential friends, and, in his current incarnation as politician, to the Democratic leaders who controlled the Texas state legislature.
In the end, what Bush really seems to stand for is business as usual. His greatest achievements all seem to involve an almost magical ability to position himself in the channels where the money flows, from the oil bailouts of the 1980s to the fortune he made off of the sale of the Texas Rangers and lastly to the staggering amount of money he has already raised for his presidential campaign.
The shadows of his father's successes are never far from George W. What ultimately doomed George Sr.'s presidency was the perception that he had no vision for America and that he broke his promise not to raise taxes. Now comes the son, a man who wants to be president because it will bring him not just more power and prestige but also personal vindication. Should he achieve this goal, he will finally be able to say that he is just as successful as his father.
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Florida gets a B- in a nation-wide education policy report released this week (1/7/13) by Michelle Rhee's group StudentsFirst. The organization ranked states based on how closely they follow the group’s platform, looking at policies related not only to tenure and evaluations but also to pensions and the governance of school districts. Nearly ninety percent of them got less than a C. Eleven states got an F. D.C. schools which has started implementing the reforms Rhee instituted got a C. Some suggest the lacks sufficient evidence and says the scores indicate StudentsFirst is building a reputation as a harsh grader. View Florida's report.
The report was released days prior to a PBS documentary on Rhee's tenure as DC schools chancellor hit the airwaves.
Upside Down Agenda: Diane Ravitch responds to the report
Parents' Group Issues Report Card on Rhee and StudentsFirst
School Reform Group Rates Florida No. 2
Michelle Rhee’s right turn: The school-reform advocate touts her "bipartisan" bona fides, but more and more of her allies are conservatives.
Can Michelle Rhee Reshape American Education?: Harvard Political Review
|The Prize Patrol Finds the Winner: Who knew a few computer clicks and a membership card activation could lead to a free vacation. Ashley VanHolten is the winner of the FEA/ ACCESS membership card activation contest. Watch the FEA Prize Patrol visit.|
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The SCOTUS decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission could unleash nearly unlimited expenditures of corporate treasury funds in politics.
One view is that the full impact of the decision probably will not be limited to an unprecedented expansion of corporate political advocacy directed at policy and the election or defeat of candidates for political office. Another view, as articulated by Dr. Stephen R. Weissman, a former associate director for policy at the Campaign Finance Institute, is that the “decision is unlikely to change the political situation on the ground very much.” Los Angeles Times, Opinion (January 28, 2010). Link: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/28/opinion/la-oe-weissman28-2010jan28
In any event, the decision in Citizens United is also likely to usher in a new era of political rapid responses by savvy politicians on a range of policy issues affecting corporations.
As corporations raise their profiles, advocate and engage in politics by hitting politicians for their positions on policy issues, savvy politicians intuitively will respond and hit back. Increased spending for corporate speech and political advertising should generate significant media coverage. That spate of news articles, commentaries and editorials on corporate public affairs matters ostensibly will heighten the public’s interest.
Heightened public interest expands the political playing field. The more intense the debates, the attacks on politicians and the media coverage, the better for the politics in general. Savvy politicians and candidates for political office can take advantage of the new found political play, expensed for the most part by corporate political money, and prosper!
Certainly, there will be legitimate concerns expressed about the possible corrosive influence of corporate political money on policy making and the outcomes of elections.
But, good politicians should be ready to hit back if they are attacked by corporations.
And, shrewd candidates for political office should position themselves to take advantage of corporate political activism.
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Chicago Teachers v. Rahm Emanuel
Chicago Teachers v. Rahm Emanuel - by Stephen Lendman
Except for Harold Washington (1983 - 1987), Chicago never had populist mayors. Father (Richard J.) and son (Richard M.) Daley ran the city like their private fiefdom for over 40 years.
In his book "Boss," noted journalist Mike Royko described Richard J. as follows:
"If ever a man reflected a city, it was Richard J. Daley." He was "strong (and) hard-driving." He had Texas-sized ambitions. He was also "arrogant, crude, conniving, ruthless, suspicious, intolerant, raucous, hot-tempered, devious, big and powerful." He was Chicago.
Time magazine said Richard M. "wield(ed) near-imperial power."
Current Mayor Rahm Emanuel matches them and then some. Add war criminal and corporate predator to his credentials. As White House chief of staff, he was part of Obama's war cabinet. As Chicago mayor, he's waging it against labor.
Candidate Emanuel promised draconian anti-worker cuts. Chicago's budget deficit must be attacked, he said. "No sacred cows" are tolerable, he stressed. "Tough choices" must be made.
As mayor, workers struggling to get by are targeted. Slash and burn is policy. Layoffs, wage freezes, and benefit cuts notably affecting healthcare and pensions followed. Teachers were hit hard.
After one month in office, he rescinded a contractual 4% raise owed them. Weeks later, he fired 1,000 summarily. School closings eliminate more jobs. He wants more closed, larger class sizes, longer school days at no extra pay, and other draconian measures creating greater hardships.
He wants Chicago schools privatized and made another business profit center. Richard M. began the process. Emanuel wants it completed. He wants education sacrificed for bottom line priorities.
He wants Chicago schools run by marketplace rules. He wants labor rights abolished. He put bureaucrats in charge of what's best for children. He created a two-tiered, class and income-based system. It favors affluent communities over poor ones.
Teachers have no rights. Poor kids are denied real education. Emanuel's destroying their futures. He's more tyrant than mayor. He reflects the worst of city governance.
On August 30, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) held perhaps its largest ever meeting. Hundreds attended. Presiding officers included president Karen Lewis, vice president Jesse Sharkey, financial secretary Kristine Mayle, and recording secretary Michael Brunson.
A large screen displayed CTU resolve, saying:
"RESOLVED that the House of Delegate shall set a strike date of September 10, 2012. The strike is necessary to achieve a labor contract with acceptable wages, benefits and job protections; and for all other purposes for which a strike is authorized under law. The strike is also necessary to protest unfair labor practices committed by CPS against out membership."
Without a fair and equitable contract, members unanimously approved the resolution. An Executive Board motion requested it. CTU president Lewis called for ayes. The hall roared. She then asked for nays. Silence followed.
Schools were already in session. Over 240 so-called Track E ones operate year round.
A special House of Delegates meeting also approved a resolution calling for other union members to wear red in solidarity with teachers.
Chicago is occupied territory. At midnight Sunday night, teachers walked out. It's their first strike in 25 years. On Monday, the Chicago Tribune headlined "CPS, teachers fail to reach deal to prevent strike," saying:
Despite progress on some issues, both sides remain far apart on others. CPS (Chicago Public Schools) officials have a contingency plan. They'll open 144 schools from 8:30 AM - 12:30PM. At issue is whether state law will be observed. It prohibits CPS from offering classroom instruction without certified teachers.
"Parents are being urged to find alternatives and use the schools only as a last resort."
Charter ones aren't affected. They operate as quasi-private ones. Veteran English teacher/union delegate Jay Rehak spoke for others, saying:
"I think people feel like they've been bullied, so they're (saying) 'OK, let's do this this. Let's dance.' We know a strike is really going to be painful. People will be hurt on both sides. But in the end, it's like saying, ‘I'll be bloodied and you'll be bloodied, but at least you'll know not to bully me again.' "
The nation's third largest school system is affected. Picket lines formed in front of City Hall. They're also at school system central and other administrative offices.
Monday morning, they spread across over 600 schools. More than 20,000 teachers were joined by other school employees, parents and students.
School Board president David Vitale and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard never negotiated in good faith. In fact, they weren't directly involved. A highly paid private law firm represented them.
CEO Brizard never appeared at bargaining sessions. His absence showed contempt for teacher rights. He and Vitale reflect top-down Emanuel-imposed diktat authority.
Claims about too little money in the system don't wash. They reflect efforts to divert city resources for corporate interests at the expense of vital services. Chicago schools, teachers, and support staff have been hit hard. They and other city workers bear the brunt of draconian budget cuts.
Negotiations began last November. Dozens of sessions were held. No agreement was reached. At 10PM Sunday, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Karen Lewis issued a formal statement. In part it said:
"CPS (Chicago Public Schools) FAILS TO NEGOTIATE FAIR CONTRACT TO PREVENT FIRST LABOR STRIKE IN 25 YEARS"
"More than 29,000 teachers and education professionals will not report to work today 9/10"
"After hours of intense negotiations, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent the first teachers strike in 25 years."
"Pickets are expected to begin Monday at 675 schools and the Board of Education as early as 6:30 a.m. Teachers, paraprofessionals and school clinicians have been without a labor agreement since June of this year."
"Union leaders expressed disappointment in the District’s refusal to concede on issues involving compensation, job security and resources for their students."
"We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve."
"We want job security." Thousands of teachers' jobs are at stake. "As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day and an elected school board. Class size matters."
"….(W)e do not intend to sign an agreement until (all key) matters are addressed."
"….(W)e are committed to staying at the table until a contract is in place. However, in the morning no CTU member will be inside our schools. We will walk the picket lines. We will talk to parents."
"We will talk to clergy. We will talk to the community. We will talk to anyone who will listen. We demand a fair contract today. We demand a fair contract now. And, until there is one in place that our members accept, we will on the line."
"We stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters throughout the state and country who are currently bargaining for their own fair contracts. We stand with those who have already declared they too are prepared to strike, in the best interests of their students."
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) represents 30,000 teachers and educational support staff. They serve more than 400,000 students and families. They reject Emanuel's diktats. They want equity and justice.
Last May, teachers and Occupy Chicago members staged school sit-ins. They picketed school board meetings. They chanted "fight" and "strike." Outside the downtown Auditorium Theater, they rallied for rights Emanuel wants destroyed.
Over 90% of union members endorsed striking. A new state law requires 75%. Legislators thought tough rules would prevent them. They guessed wrong.
Major issues are at stake. They include unfair reduced education funding, job security, draconian teacher evaluation standards, tying their pay to testing, weakened seniority rights, recall procedures for those laid off from school closings, equitable pay and benefits, class size, longer unpaid school days, inadequately heated and cooled classrooms, and key wrap around services.
They include psychologists, social workers, nurses, no library facilities in many schools, standardized testing, loss of experienced teachers, abandonment of arts, drama, music and language classes, and school privatization plans.
Throughout negotiations, CTU officials were flexible. They remain so. They'll bend on some issues, but not key ones too important to lose. School Board/CPS negotiators are hardline. Emanuel demands it.
A Final Comment
On September 9, Women's Media Center co-founder Gloria Steinem issued the following statement:
"Tonight, I proudly wear a red t-shirt in support of the Chicago Teachers Union strike. They have been forced to strike for the first time in 25 years - by the false economy of firing and penalizing the experienced teachers most needed by the students and by new teachers; by lengthening the school day as warehousing without educational services, healthy school buildings, and paid teachers; by what they have the knowledge to call the 'apartheid-like system' of differential discipline policies; and by what seems to be a national tactic of demonizing teachers in order to turn public schools into corporate profit centers."
She cited a Stanford Study. It found public school students outperform charter ones. A 1994 Money magazine report concluded that:
"students who attend the best public schools outperform most private school students, that the best public schools offer a more challenging curriculum than most private schools, and that the private school advantage in test scores is due to their selective admission policies."
Nonetheless, public education in Chicago and across America is on the chopping block for elimination. So-called education reform facilitates it.
George Bush's 2001 No Child Left Behind Act took direct aim. On January 8, 2002, it became law. It's long on testing, school choice, and market-based reforms.
It's short on real achievement. It's built around rote learning, standardized tests, requiring teachers to "teach to the test," assessing results by Average Yearly Progress (AYP) scores, and punishing failure harshly.
Teachers and principles are fired. Schools are closed. Others become charter or for-profit ones. Total privatization is planned. A 377 year tradition is being destroyed.
Diogenes called education "the foundation of every state." Horace Mann said "(t)he common (public) school is the greatest discovery ever made by man." He called it the "great equalizer common" to all. It's fast disappearing in America.
Obama's Race to the Top follows the same destructive path. It pits one state against another, promotes school closures, endorses mass teacher/staff layoffs, and mandates wage and benefit cuts. It's a draconian scheme to qualify for federal funding.
It force-feeds its mandates on states. It's a dagger at public education's heart. It denies millions of American children an educational foundation to build on.
Chicago schools alone have been wrecked by closures, teacher firings, budget cuts, militarized high schools, growing numbers of quasi-private charter schools, and kids hung out to dry for bottom line priorities.
Emanuel demands more. He wants city schools privatized. He wants kids cheated out of futures. His world isn't fit to live in. How can it be under marketplace inequality.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War:
Visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
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At this point we've all had a laugh over the "giant enemy crabs" meme spawned at last year's Sony E3 press conference. In case you missed it, the joke is that one of the game demos on display for Genji 2 (now known as Genji: Days of the Blade) for the Sony PlayStation 3 was introduced as being based on actual Japanese history just as a giant enemy crab appeared onscreen. Like many of us I assumed that I must have missed the day in high school history class when the discussion topic featured Japan versus the giant enemy crabs. Now I find out that not only are there giant enemy crabs in Japan's past, but there have been a number of animal-based invasions and military campaigns throughout history. Metafilter's own "robocop is bleeding" gives us a little history lesson during yet another discussion of the giant enemy crab meme.
Listen, our forefathers did not risk it all fighting giant enemy crabs so that we could sit back today and laugh at some Sony jerk. They did it for our freedom.
Great Historical Creature Fights:
10. Napoleon vs Giant Sting Ray (1807) Napoleon single handedly takes on the giant protector of of the Dutch harbor.
9. Third Battle of Ypres (1914) Bees, bees, bees!
8. Benedict Arnold vs "The Canadian Leviathan" (1775) Scholars now believe that Arnold's account of "a massife beaste covered in fangf, flame, and terror like unto Revelationf" was actually a wayward dairy cow.
7. Teddy Roosevelt vs the Lobsters of San Juan Hill (1898) Victory wasn't the only thing savored by the Rough Riders that night!
6. Tokugawa Ieyasu vs the Giant Ape of Marune (1560) Ieyasu-sama wisely planned ahead for this fight by bringing the Giant Ape's only weakness, fire and lots of it, to the seige.
5. Saladin vs Nur al Din (1169) Nur al Din, empowered by his horrible lycanthropy is dispatched in his sleep by his nephew Saladin with a silver scimitar. By freeing the Muslim world from the werewolf's curse, Saladin unites the people and later retakes Jerusalem.
4. Octavian vs the Walrus (31 BC) Anthony and Cleopatra, desperate to avoid a military confrontation with the future Emperor dispatch an unique assassin. The assassin fails, and later as Emperor, Augusts bans all walrii from the Empire.
3. George Washington vs Lakitu (1779) Our future First President stomps on spiny Hessian mercenaries before defeating their leader with a hammer.
2. Native Americans vs Microbes (1492 - 1860) Sadly, the beasts won this one.
1. Sparta's 300 vs Xerxes' Elite (480 BC) Herodotus records the perfect precision used by the Spartans to flip over Xerxes' elite giant crabs in order to deliver Massive Damage.
I always knew that those walrii were trouble. But seriously, I think we've hit the high point of the giant enemy crab gag. It's been a wild entertaining ride, but nothing new in the giant enemy crab genre is going to top robocop's historical review (unless, of course, Genji 3 allows players to take on missions as the giant enemy crab).
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*** NOTE ***
By Karen Herland
The woman standing in front of the tiny, red-saturated canvas in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) looks a little nervous. But within a few minutes she is animatedly engaging fellow students in a critical discussion of just what the Nude on a Red Sofa might be thinking and what Kees van Dongen likely intended when he painted the brothel worker wearing only jewels and makeup.
Atara Bentob’s presentation is the culmination of two terms of study in CE 2352. This year, the course is co-taught by Anita Grants of Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Linda Goossens, a professional educator at the museum.
Students who take “Becoming a Musem Guide” learn about the MMFA’s collection, but more important, they learn how to present that information as guides for visiting elementary school students, tourists or art undergrads. Grants is responsible for 30 hours of theory related to the collections. Goossens provides 30 hours of museum pedagogy; she is completing her MA in Education. The two trade off weeks over the two-semester course.
The Continuing Education course has been offered every second year for over a decade. Passing it is a requirement for anyone who wishes to apply to the museum as a volunteer guide. The few who are accepted as volunteers must then take another four- or five-day course before they can volunteer at the MMFA.
Bentob was presenting a partial practice run of a tour she had devised herself. The students were asked to thematically link six works in the museum’s collection in a half-hour package tour that would appeal to museum-goers.
As Bentob discusses Nude on a Red Sofa, the artist, Fauvism, and the early 20th century, when the painting was produced, her peers time her and evaluate her every gesture.
The students’ critiques are based on a checklist used to evaluate actual volunteer guides. The students check one another’s vocabulary and body language, and cheer each other on.
Students need to be familiar with the museum’s collection across different periods, styles and works. The training is as pedagogical as it is content-driven, with students evaluating each other on the accessibility of the information and their ability to help their audience connect to challenging or unfamiliar work.
When Jackie Moore introduces her chosen painting, she recalls her own son’s reaction to seeing it for the first time. Diane Russell deftly fits her chosen artist’s personal life and preoccupations into the story his work tells.
Mary McQueen Reidy is semi-retired after raising three sons, working as a nurse and later teaching a new generation of nurses. She said she took the course because she had always been interested in art, but felt uncomfortable and out of place in a museum environment. Now she confidently moves up and down the stairwells of the MMFA’s two buildings, pointing out favourite canvases along the way.
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CONCORD -- Some Bay Area cities would like Daniel Meyers to be the new poster boy for copper thievery. In an era when copper thefts are soaring and thieves loot with near impunity, Meyers' arrest was surprisingly routine.
Police say that on May 21, Meyers cut and took $1,050 worth of copper wire from a rural area near Columbus Parkway in Vallejo, put the stolen goods in a Cadillac Escalade and drove to an apartment.
Thanks to tracking technology, police followed his every move. The 32-year-old was arrested a short time later. He has since pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in April on charges of grand theft and receiving stolen property.
This electronic tracking technology is what Vallejo officials hope will put an end to the copper theft bonanza. Other cities also are eyeing the prospective solution to what has, in recent years, become a scourge that affects traffic lights, park lighting, building wiring and other public and private facilities that run on electricity.
Once a major component in making 1-cent coins, copper now is costing cities a pretty penny to replace. Thefts have soared along with the price of copper: The metal now goes for $4 a pound at salvage yards, nearly three times the price four years ago. But it's costing cities much more to replace.
A 2012 report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau shows that since August 2009, metal thefts -- especially of copper -- have steadily increased across the nation,
The repair costs have hit taxpayers throughout the Bay Area. In San Jose: $160,000 to repair 500 lights. In Fremont: nearly $500,000 to replace copper wiring stolen from streetlights during late 2011 and early 2012. For BART: almost $100,000 in 2011 to replace copper wiring along its tracks. And on Bay Area highways from the South Bay to Concord, 59 metering lights have been vandalized over the past year; Caltrans has replaced 18 at a cost of $35,000 apiece.
"There's no city that's immune to copper theft," said Mike Schreiner, assistant maintenance superintendent for Vallejo. "It's going to happen in Danville, and it's going to happen in Oakland. Copper is copper."
Concord has spent more than $1 million since 2007 repairing and replacing copper wiring. Thieves have hit Concord City Hall, several city parks, and lighting and signals along Port Chicago Highway and Highway 242. Even Camp Concord, a city-operated camp in the Lake Tahoe area, has been plundered.
Authorities in Concord have worked with recycling centers to deter thefts, but a major obstacle remains: Even if copper wire is determined to be stolen, it is difficult to link that wire to a specific location, said Sgt. Jeff Krieger of the major crime unit.
"In a nutshell, it's very hard to prosecute," said Concord police Lt. David Hughes.
A solution may be found in Vallejo, which two years ago invested in technology to curb its surging copper thefts.
City officials were hesitant to discuss the specific anti-theft technology they bought, lest aspiring thieves learn too much about it.
But Eric Hutchinson, CEO of Michigan-based The Copper Stopper, described some options that are on the market. One is to insert a microscopic tag in the wire that is invisible to the naked eye but can be identified by authorities. This is particularly useful at recycling centers, where thieves often bring stolen copper wiring.
Another method is to embed a tracking device on the wire. The company is alerted when the device is on the move and can follow its path, Hutchinson said.
"Even the slightest little movement will set off an alarm," said Concord Public Works Director Justin Ezell, whose city is considering similar technology.
San Jose has a homegrown form of defense: a new LED lighting system, which connects to a central management center. It allows the city to be notified almost immediately after a streetlight burns out, or when copper wiring is cut, said Hans Larsen, director of San Jose's department of transportation. Quicker responses could result in more arrests, he said.
In Vallejo, which had spent about $400,000 to replace copper in recent years, copper thefts have plummeted since implementing the new technology, Schreiner said. Vallejo police made their first arrest three hours after installing the trackers, a source familiar with the technology said. Police have since made more than two dozen arrests, including Meyer's.
"We don't have any street wire missing in our city at this time ... the first time in almost two years," Schreiner said.
Momentum against copper thieves may be building, but the anti-theft technology is still new and hasn't been extensively tested in the field.
"The tragic part of it is it's a crime against the whole community. It's coming out of taxpayer dollars," said Greg Patterson, The Copper Stopper's director of business development. "We want to be able to go in and help them solve the problem."
David DeBolt covers Concord and Clayton. Contact him at 925-943-8048. Follow him at Twitter.com/daviddebolt.
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Sunday, May 19, 2013
By Tux Turkel firstname.lastname@example.org
PORTLAND — Representatives from The Nature Conservancy, the Forest Society of Maine and the Plum Creek timber company came together Tuesday to celebrate a new conservation easement that's considered one of the largest ever in the United States.
Mount Kineo rises near Moosehead Lake. The conservation easement covering 363,000 acres in the region is one of the largest in U.S. history, according to participants in the deal. They also hope the agreement will boost recreational tourism and improve the area’s struggling economy.
2007 photo by Fred Field
The parties say the easement they negotiated on 363,000 acres in the Moosehead Lake region connects existing lands to create one of the nation's most extensive conserved working forests. It links a landscape of more than 2 million acres stretching from the St. John Valley to Moosehead Lake to Mount Katahdin, an expanse roughly the size of Yellowstone National Park.
Beyond conservation, participants hope the deal will boost recreational tourism and lift the struggling economy around Greenville. They say businesses can promote the area with an assurance that land will remain open to the public, to accommodate the long tradition of recreation and sustainable forestry in the Maine woods.
"For more than a century, local foresters and hunting and fishing guides have built a livelihood from this forest," said Mike Tetreault, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine. "The plan for balancing community goals with the needs of nature will allow that long tradition of multiple-use forests to continue."
Tuesday's event also helped mark the end of a long battle for Plum Creek, the Seattle-based timber company that owns and manages 883,000 acres in the Moosehead Lake region. It first introduced a Moosehead Lake conservation and development plan in 2004.
More than two years ago, Plum Creek won state approval for a concept plan to rezone more than 400,000 acres as part of the largest single development in Maine history. The plan rezones 16,900 acres for development, including 821 residential units and two resorts – a 1,852-acre resort at Lily Bay with 404 units and a 4,200-acre resort at Big Moose Mountain with 800 units.
The units are expected to be built over 30 years.
Plum Creek's development ideas were opposed by the Natural Resources Council of Maine, the Forest Ecology Network and RESTORE: The North Woods. The groups fought it all the way to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled in March that state regulators followed proper procedures in approving the plan.
Opponents continued to be critical as they reacted to Tuesday's news.
"The easement deal is great for Plum Creek shareholders, who are getting $10 million, as well as millions more for selling other lands for conservation," said Jym St. Pierre, Maine director of RESTORE: The North Woods. "Whether it is a good deal for the people of Maine and for the land and wildlife in the region, time will tell."
St. Pierre's group continues to push for protecting the land within a Maine Woods National Park.
The Natural Resources Council of Maine said it remains concerned about the size and location of Plum Creek's development, particularly on the Lily Bay section of Moosehead Lake. The group's future involvement may hinge on whether the company seeks permits to build near Greenville, which already is developed, or on Lily Bay.
"If and when that time comes, we may choose to be involved in the permitting phase to help protect the lands, water and wildlife in the Moosehead region," said Lisa Pohlmann, the group's executive director.
With the housing market flat, residents and visitors won't see any activity for years, said Luke Muzzy, the former Greenville real estate agent who is Plum Creek's senior land asset manager.
Plum Creek has set no timetable to seek approvals for a specific subdivision plan, he said. "We've always seen this as a long-term plan."
In Greenville, a real estate broker said he thinks current land values will make it difficult for Plum Creek, or any large developer, to recover the cost of putting in roads and utilities.
(Continued on page 2)
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Online banking? Don't be afraid.
Online banking is commonplace these days, but many customers are hesitant to use it for fear of online scams, lack of computer skills, or difficulty finding convenient Internet access. Here's how to make online banking work for you.
When I wrote 365 Ways to Live Cheap in 2007, online banking was a feature that was far from standard, yet well on its way to becoming a standard. I often recommended to people that they seek out banks with online banking because it was a useful and valuable feature to have.Skip to next paragraph
The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds – we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money.
Teach kids personal finance through experience: six tips
High gas prices? 14 ways to save money on fuel.
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Renting vs owning: When is buying a house worth it?
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As I write this in 2012, if your bank doesn’t have at least some level of online banking, it’s definitely an outcast.
Still, I have many readers who do not use online banking as part of their normal money management routine.
The biggest hurdle for many is technophobia. They hear of internet scams and it convinces them not to use the service. Others simply aren’t all that adept at computers for various reasons.
Another hurdle is lack of convenient internet access. They don’t have internet access at home, so they don’t use many of the incredibly valuable online tools that can really save them money.
Falling into either group, unfortunately, means that you’re simply leaving money on the table. Online banking is an incredibly valuable resource.
For starters, it makes balancing your checkbook and checking your balance incredibly easy. This simple step alone can prevent many overdrafts. Many of the overdraft stories told to me by readers result from a misplaced digit in their checkbook ledger. Online banking largely eliminates this risk by making it very easy for you to always be aware of your balance and your transactions, both posted and otherwise.
For me, the biggest value in online banking is online bill pay. If I pay a bill online via my bank, I’m not using a stamp. That’s $0.45 saved on every bill I pay using online banking instead of paying via check. It’s also more secure, as I’m not passing my check (with my name, address, signature, routing number, and account number) through the postal service which relies on trust of postal employees (they are trustworthy, but it’s still a security risk).
Also, if you’re willing to bank online, many more banking options become available to you. Many banks, such as ING Direct, operate almost entirely online. To make up for the lack of a storefront, they often pay great interest rates and offer other features that make them quite tempting (like a very robust online bill pay). If you include these banks in your survey when you switch, you’re likely to end up with a bank with lower fees and higher interest than you would have found otherwise.
Online banking is one of the services that pays for my internet connection. Without it, I would most likely mail in my bills and I most likely would have savings and checking accounts with lower interest rates. I’d also be devoting more time to banking practices.
If you’re a technophobe, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Online banking is pretty easy to use, and if you avoid a few basic security pitfalls, you’ll be fine. My quick suggestions: never click on links in your email, use a password with lots of numbers and upper and lowercase letters, and always make sure you’re visiting the correct URL for your bank. Those three steps alone take care of the vast majority of paths to internet fraud.
If you can’t afford home internet access, don’t be afraid to use community resources for internet access. One local bank, for example, has a computer available there that people can use to access their online banking and bill pay features. If your bank offers that, use it. Every bill you pay online saves you $0.45, after all. Just take your bills there a couple times a month.
Online banking is nothing but a value for the customer, as long as you’re careful and use basic security precautions. It provides extra savings, better services, and more convenient access.
This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere.
The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on www.thesimpledollar.com.
Making a Difference
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To the Editor:
Virginia is no longer “the best state [in which] to do business.” We lost that coveted designation when the state leadership made national headlines and punch lines by focusing on their social agenda instead of our dwindling transportation resources. If we continue to neglect the problem, our transportation construction money, including our federal matching funds, will be depleted in 2017.
Governor McDonnell has called for new revenue. The centerpiece of his transportation plan is a proposal to eliminate the gas tax and replace it with additional sales tax. The plan diverts general fund revenue that supports education, public health and public safety to transportation, and raises vehicle fees, especially on alternative fuel vehicles. The plan also assumes tax revenue for transportation from a bill that has not yet been introduced in Congress, let alone passed. This ephemeral revenue source alone counts for more than one third of the funds in the governor’s plan.
We have been talking about transportation funding shortfalls in Virginia for a generation, and the governor made the issue a priority in his 2009 campaign. His plan has been called “bold” by its champions. But bold is not the same as wise. If the governor got every cent of funds in his wish list, in five years we would have less than half the funds we need for transportation funding today.
Legislators, including members of the governor’s own Caucus have offered competing plans or even downright criticism, including the no-tax disciples of Grover Norquist. Nine northern Virginia legislators—including local delegate Barbara Comstock—have taken the “No Tax Pledge.” How do they reconcile their pledge with our need for more transportation money and congestion relief?
Meanwhile, legislators in the current session are calling for more graduates from our colleges and universities, smaller class sizes for K-12 students, armed guards in schools, and improved mental health support and awareness. As we add these responsibilities to our general fund requirements, where will we siphon off funds for transportation?
Despite calls for reducing dependency on foreign oil the governor proposes a $100 annual fee for vehicles that are cleaner and use less fuel. Why punish good practices?
Arguments against the proposals to eliminate the gas tax and replace it with a sales tax have been aired on these editorial pages (“Transportation Money”, January 16-22). But the essential question remains: Why should we forego a “user fee” gas tax, shared broadly beyond Virginia, and depend primarily instead on a tax that falls squarely on Virginia citizens?
State leaders recently announced that the federal and state transportation construction revenue is forecast to be down by over $700 million over the next five years. We need new revenue for transportation that we can count on—approximately $1 billion annually statewide—and we need to know that funding our infrastructure does not come at the expense of our education system, the key to our future workforce and continued prosperity.
Now that the governor has renewed the call for transportation funding, a good place to seek common ground might be the 2007 transportation legislation that passed both houses of the legislature. With some adjustments we might get something for everyone, including revenue that stays where it is generated! The “No Tax” crowd might object, but their pledge is their priority instead of our prosperity.
Our northern Virginia citizens and business leaders want to earn back our “best state to do business” label. We know what it means to our communities. We know that if we are short-changing our own transportation and education needs, we are neither pro-business nor pro-jobs. Working together, we can solve transportation funding problems that have not been successfully resolved in a generation, but we need dedicated, sustainable revenue, and we need it soon.
Achieving that would be bold!
Margaret G. Vanderhye
Former State Delegate
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To The Editor:
Tax credits have been given a bad rap lately.
Legislators are looking for ways to cut the state’s budget and tax credits seem to be a big target.
However, there is a special class of benevolent tax credits that promote charitable giving to programs serving Missouri’s abused and neglected children. Allowing individual donors to utilize these benevolent tax credits can reduce the impact on taxpayer resources in the future.
The Children in Crisis (CIC) tax credits increase private giving to Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) programs, Child Advocacy Centers and Crisis Care Centers.
These tax credits have enabled them to raise much needed funds to help foster children in Missouri.
Unfortunately, these tax credits are set to sunset on Aug. 28.
CASA advocates for the best interests of abused and neglected children so they can thrive in safe, permanent homes. There are 22 local CASA programs throughout Missouri. The unclaimed portion of the Special Needs Adoption Tax Credit finances the CIC tax credits.
Since its inception, the tax credits have enabled CASA programs to raise over $900,000.
To allow the tax credits to sunset would be a huge detriment to Missouri’s most vulnerable children.
CASA volunteers are appointed by judges to advocate for foster children, to make sure they don’t get lost in the overburdened legal and social service system or languish in foster care.
Volunteers stay with each case until it is closed and the child is placed in a safe, permanent home.
For many abused children, their CASA volunteer will be the one constant adult presence in their lives. National studies have shown that children with a CASA volunteer are half as likely to spend time in long-term foster care.
CASA advocacy saves taxpayer dollars as well. If the median length of stay were shortened for children in foster care by just one month, it would realize a national savings to taxpayers of approximately $2.75 billion.
Missouri has 22 local CASA programs throughout the state, with approximately 1,300 volunteers serving over 2,200 children. As of February 2012 there were 10,604 children in foster care in Missouri.
The funds raised, with the help of the CIC tax credits, serve to expand CASA programs ensuring more of Missouri’s children are appointed a volunteer advocate.
These benevolent tax credits should not be allowed to sunset.
Missouri’s foster children depend upon it.
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Every graduate student, except those with non-degree status, must be enrolled as a full-time, half-time, or less than half-time student each fall and spring term to maintain his or her status. All degree graduate students must enroll in either: adviser-approved course work; thesis, professional project, or dissertation credits; one of the continuous enrollment courses; or a combination of the above. Degree students who fail to enroll for every fall and spring term must apply for readmission to their program. (See Readmission)
A full-time graduate student is defined as one who:
A half-time graduate student is defined as one who:
A less-than-half-time graduate student is defined as one who:
* "Cumulative" means adding all credits taken in all modules within any one term.
Note: During fall and spring terms, the status attained is effective only for the module(s) in which the credits are taken. For the summer term, the status attained applies to the entire term regardless of the module(s) in which the credits are taken.
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WASHINGTON Construction of new U.S. homes rose in June to the highest level in seven months, a sign builders are starting to regain confidence as they emerge from the housing bust.
The Commerce Department said Friday that construction of new homes and apartments jumped 3.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 582,000 units, from an upwardly revised rate of 562,000 in May.
That was better than the 530,000-unit pace economists expected, and the second straight increase after April s record low of 479,000 units.
In another encouraging sign, applications for building permits, seen as a good indicator of future activity, rose 8.7 percent in June to an annual rate of 563,000 units. Economists polled by Thomson Reuters expected an annual rate of 520,000 units.
The jump in housing starts reflected a more than 14 percent rise in construction of single-family homes.
Over the past three years, the collapse in the housing market led to soaring loan losses, a severe banking system crisis and the longest recession since World War II. Even with the better-than-expected figures, analysts don t expect a quick rebound in housing. That s because the economy is still shedding jobs and home prices are falling, making people hesitant to commit to buying a new home.
The National Association of Home Builders said Thursday that its housing market index rose two points to 17 in July, the highest level in nearly a year. Readings below 50 indicate negative sentiment about the market. The last time it was above 50 was April 2006.
While housing normally leads the economy out of a recession, a glut of unsold homes and a record wave of mortgage foreclosures dumping more properties on the market is expected to temper demand. Despite the rise in housing construction for June, activity still was 46 percent below the year-ago level.
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Hotline Tip: Can I Notarize For A Signer Suffering From Dementia?
Does California law specify that a Notary Public cannot notarize documents for a person known to suffer from dementia or Alzheimer’s? -- K.K. of Fresno, California
There are currently no California statutes specifically addressing competence. However, Notaries do have three very important responsibilities. They are responsible for ensuring that signers are aware of the significance of the transaction; that they are signing the document of their own volition; and that they are positively identified. If the Notary doubts the signer’s understanding of the document, he or she should draw the signer into a conversation. If the signer can communicate effectively, the Notary may consider the signer aware. However, if a signer is unable to respond coherently, the Notary should refuse because awareness and comprehension are in doubt.
Non-Members: A full listing of Hotline archives, as well as additional coverage of Notary-related news updates, reports and information — is available exclusively to NNA Members, through the weekly, online Notary Bulletin. Find out how to become an NNA Member and receive this benefit.
Members: For more hotline tips, news stories, and information, log in to this week’s Notary Bulletin.
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After protests across the Web—including on its own social networking pages—Facebook has backed down from its policy that posted information about the shopping habits of its users.
The program, called Beacon, informed Facebook users' friends when purchases were made on certain online retail sites, including Zappos.com, Fandango.com, and Overstock.com. In some cases, friends were even informed exactly what item was purchased, which ruined some holiday gift-giving plans. The group MoveOn.Org Civic Action started a petition, signed by thousands, protesting the program on the grounds that it violated users' privacy.
Previously, Facebook users were able to opt out either by clicking on a box that briefly popped up when they made a purchase or when they next logged into the social networking website (news of a purchase wouldn't go out until the user had logged back in). But many users said they didn't notice the opt-out option until it was too late.
The widespread discontent—the Facebook group that protested the program had 50,000 members—seems to have contributed to Facebook's announcement late yesterday that it would change the opt-out process. Now, users will need to hit "Okay" before news of their purchases is broadcast. Facebook's turnaround was reminiscent of its decision last year to make parts of the news-feed function optional after users complained that they didn't always want updates on their life, including their relationship status, sent to all their friends.
In response to Monday's Alpha Consumer story on the topic, readers expressed their frustration with the Beacon program. "I think Facebook should keep their nose out of people's pocketbooks," wrote Gracie Jones of San Jose, Calif. "What I do and what I purchase is private," one anonymous commenter said.
Robby Stephenson of Pasadena, Calif., said he was irritated after he rented a car from Hotwire.com over the holidays and then discovered that all of his Facebook friends had been informed of his activity. "While it may seem insignificant, my renting a car is a private fact that neither Hotwire nor Facebook should be selling or exchanging with each other," Stephenson wrote.
He complained to both companies and says he may never use either again. The Beacon program, he says, "is akin to having someone stand behind me and make notes about everything I do online."
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Emiko Kameyama has two close friends she likes to hang out with. In addition to their monthly dinners and the occasional trips they take together, two years ago the trio began a new tradition — playing the Jumbo takarakuji (lottery).
With their eyes set on winning the first prize of 200 million yen, the three friends from Nagoya spend 3,000 yen buying 10 tickets for each of the thrice-yearly Jumbo takarakuji from a lottery booth near Nagoya Station that’s famous for having had many winners.
“The woman born in March goes to buy them, because Pisceans are supposed to be luckiest when it comes to the lottery. Then my other friend makes copies of the 10 tickets and distributes them to us,” Kameyama explains. “I’m the one who just prays,” she adds with a laugh.
Kameyama 49, and her 53- and 46-year-old friends then just have to wait and hope — and dream — that the six-digit number and two-digit group on one of their tickets will match those selected by the machine that determines the Jumbo takarakuji winners in June, August and December. Of course it’s all down to sheer luck, but it’s the lottery’s one certainty that keeps these ladies and millions of others coming back for more: If you do win the first prize, you’re an overnight millionaire — and you don’t even have to pay income tax on your fortune.
But a Jumbo takarakuji ticket bought from one of the nation’s 15,000 lottery booths isn’t the only way to get rich quick in Japan. First, there are takarakuji run in a similar way to the Jumbo but with lower first prizes — such as 20 million yen and 10 million yen — that are held occasionally during the year.
And then there are three other types of takarakuji, each of them drawn weekly — and each a little more interactive.
For the games called Numbers, Mini Loto and Loto 6, which are each 200 yen a shot, players select numbers themselves and mark their cards in one of several different ways. After that, if your numbers come up — in the right combination — you win, though the amount varies depending on the number of other cards also marked the winning way.
If all this is too challenging — or you simply don’t set your sights as high as tens of millions of yen — there’s always Scratch, with its 1 million yen top prize. To play this, all it takes is 200 yen for a ticket — and something to scrape off the wax to reveal the hidden pictures or numbers.
But whatever the odds against winning, and despite the dwindling fortunes of other publicly-run forms of gambling — such as horse, motorboat and bicycle racing — in these deflationary times, takarakuji marches steadily on, pulling in ever more punters and swelling the coffers of the 47 prefectural governments and 13 cities authorized to operate some kind of lottery. According to the “Leisure White Paper 2003″ put out by the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development, in 2002 takurakuji participants reached a record high of 45 million — who between them, according to the Japan Lottery Association, shelled out a record 1 trillion yen in fiscal 2001 and then 1.092 trillion yen in fiscal 2002.
Ease of participation is an advantage. “Gambling such as horse-race betting [with so many factors to evaluate] have become more of a thing for enthusiasts; it’s also not easy for people to participate in those activities in the course of a normal day,” says Hisaya Yanagida, a researcher at JPCSED who took part in compiling the White Paper.
The rise is also partly due to the introduction of new takarakuji like Numbers, Mini Loto and Loto 6 in the past decade. According to Masatomi Toriumi, an official in the takarakuji division of the finance bureau of Tokyo Metropolitan Government, these games allowing participants to choose their own numbers were introduced in response to demands from lottery fans for more variations.
But most of all, it’s the big money that attracts people. The first-prize money had gradually been increasing over the decades, but it leaped to 200 million yen after the lottery law was revised in 1998. At that time, the maximum prize money was raised from 200,000 times to 1 million times the price of a unit. For Loto 6 — which is the only lottery with a roll-over system — should one week’s jackpot go unclaimed, the law permits its maximum prize money to be 2 million times the price of a ticket — theoretically, up to 400 million yen.
“There is no form of gambling that gives you as much money as takarakuji if you win,” says Ichiro Tanioka, professor and president of Osaka University of Commerce who has researched people’s lottery behavior. “More people purchase takarakuji tickets when the first-prize money is larger than when there are more opportunities to win but with smaller amounts of prize money,” Taninoka observes.
Lotteries are now established revenue-raisers for governments, both local and national, around the world.
In Japan, the takarakuji launched in October 1945 was first promoted as a fundraiser to help rebuild the nation’s ruined postwar cities. Later, as economic growth forged ahead in the 1960s and ’70s, special lotteries also helped to support major events like 1970′s Osaka Expo and the Winter Olympics in Sapporo in 1972.
Currently, local governments receive 40 percent of a ticket’s price, 46 percent is paid out in prizes and 14 percent is used for design, printing and promotion and sales of the lotteries — jobs largely taken care of by Mizuho Bank.
Winners of any prize have a year to claim their money, but after that it is forfeited as an “acquisitive prescription” and is acquired by local governments. Last year alone, an astonishing 24.3 billion yen was unclaimed in this way, according to Mizuho Bank.
Although profits from takarakuji are “an important source of income for local governments, which must use them for public enterprises as stipulated by the law,” as Toriumi of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government confirmed, precisely how the funds are used is left up to the prefectures and municipalities. Hence, while some may pour their gains from gambling into their roads, rivers or parks, others might spend it on care for the elderly. “Compared with grants from the national government for very particular purposes, this is a flexible budget for us to use,” Toriumi said.
However, Tanioka of Osaka University of Commerce sees this as a problem. In particular, he points out that the lottery law, despite having been revised more than 10 times since 1948, still says that local governments can operate a takarakuji when there is “a special financial need because of war damage.”
“Although that initial goal was achieved, local governments couldn’t resist continuing the lottery because it was attractive. Now, though, takarakuji’s role and position in society must be overhauled,” Tanioka said.
His research in 2002 revealed that the leading group of lottery spenders comprises those with lower income and education levels, and those desperately in need of a large sum of money — to pay off debts, for example. “This is like a tax on the socially weak — which local governments can then use almost however they want,” he said, stressing that the purposes to which takarakuji income is put need to be more tightly specified.
All that, of course, is only of academic interest to the millions for whom the takarakuji has no appeal at all.
For 31-year-old Koji Takizawa from Tokyo’s Meguro Ward, for instance, lotteries are just not exciting compared with the horse-race betting he does at least once a month. “In horse racing, there’s the thrill of seeing what you put your money on. So whether you win or lose, it’s fun,” he says. “But takarakuji is boring because there’s no room for guesswork.”
For the many people who play takarakuji, it’s simply about whether or not they will ever get lucky.
As for Kameyama and her friends, if that ever happens they have a written agreement to split the win three ways — into 66.66 million yen each. “It will be awesome if we win, but we buy tickets really for the fun of it,” says Kameyama, who has never won more than a 300 yen consolation prize. “Ninety percent of me thinks I will never win — but there’s that 10 percent saying I won’t win it if I’m not in it,” she says.
How will she spend the money if she ever wins? “I want to build a nice traditional-style ryokan in the Gero Spa area of Gifu Prefecture, and let my parents and relatives stay there as much as they like,” she says, briefly closing her eyes to live her dream. “Since both my husband and I work, I have no complaints about my own lifestyle, so I don’t mind using it like that.”
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“We come from China! Huangyan Island is Ours!”
This message welcomed early morning visitors to the University of the Philippines (UP) System’s website (up.edu.ph) on Friday as the state university suffered a cyberattack from what seem to be pro-China hackers claiming ownership of Panatag Shoal, off the Philippine coast.
Posted with the message is a map of China’s so-called "9-dash line," supposedly indicating the superpower’s territorial claim in its southern seas —which extends to the Philippines and even to Malaysia’s coastline.
The UP System's website is the main online portal for news and events relevant to undergraduates and alumni of any of the UP campuses across the country. As such, it is regularly visited by distinguished academics and influential alumni from around the world.
The website is currently inaccessible, but UP Diliman Professor Lawrence Velasco managed to get a screengrab at 4am (local time) before it went down.
“Magchecheck ako dapat kung may list na ng mga summa cum laude tapos yun na,” said Velasco, who is currently in France.
The attack comes amidst the Philippines’ ongoing standoff with China regarding "Scarborough Shoal", the international name for the disputed region.
“We strongly denounce the attempt to deprive the UP community of vital information,” said UP Assistant Vice President for Public Affairs Danilo Arao via a text message to GMA News Online.
Arao confirmed that the attack happened around 3am, and that the the university’s System Information Office, IT Training Center, and Computer Center are still working to restore the website as of 11:30am.
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|View single post by Widow|
|Posted: Fri Nov 10th, 2006 08:17 pm||
|Wow, Tom, what a great piece on Lowell, the gentle warrior.
To think that he went chasing all over Mosby's Confederacy, right in my own neighborhood. Oakton is only three miles from Vienna on Chain Bridge Road.
Even though Lowell wasn't involved in Mosby's fight with the 2nd Pa. Cavalry at Miskel's farm on 31 Mar 1863, you probably ran across an account of it in your research. Here I quote from Mosby's Rangers, Jeffry D. Wert, 1990, p. 51.
Thomas and Lydia Miskel farmed a section of Loudoun County where Broad Run emptied into the Potomac River. A young couple, with a son and a daughter, the Miskels toiled on land which had nourished Virgininians for over a century. Their two-story L-shaped clapboard farmhouse dated from ca. 1750, with the wing added about 1810. Behind the house a hay barn provided storage for the harvests and shelter for the livestock.
I'm not sure the farmhouse is still there. But my hairdresser knows its location. Her house faces the Potomac, only two blocks from where Broad Run joins the river. She has a pond in back and keeps a couple of horses. I told her that the Gray Ghost probably rode across her back yard when he escaped from the Miskels' place. Maybe Lowell chased him across her front yard at one time or another. Of course the whole area was excavated during construction of the house, but there may still be a few buttons or horseshoe nails down in the dirt.
One of your sources, Battledrums and Geysers: The Life and Journals of Lt. Gnstaves Cheyney Doane, Soldier and Explorer of the Yellowstone arid Snake River Regions, looks fascinating. The Yellowstone and Snake are two of my favorite rivers in two of my favorite parks.
Now the Bear Flag and Bay State book, that sounds cool too. Oh, dear, here I am thinking about buying more books!
Thanks for all this great info. Patty
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By Nadav Malin
The KPF-designed BASF headquarters recently achieved double LEED Platinum certification, reflecting support for LEED 2009 from one of the largest chemical companies in the world.
In a surprise move, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) announced today that it is postponing plans to ballot the next version of LEED until as late as June 2013. With this announcement, USGBC promises to keep LEED 2009 available for a full three years from now, although it intends to gradually ramp up incentives for teams to move to the new version of LEED during that time.
The move came in response to a growing outcry from architects and other building industry professionals—including many who have been core supporters of LEED since its inception—who had three related concerns:
• The proposed changes in the rating system were too much, too fast, especially in a weak real estate market.
• Some of the changes needed more refinement , especially in the Materials & Resources category, where whole new approaches to material selection had been introduced and had changed significantly with each public comment draft.
• Tools and resources needed to achieve the credits would not be widely available by the time the new system was slated to launch in November 2012.
Compounding these concerns were doubts about the ability of USGBC’s sister organization, the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) to develop an effective certification process in such a short timeframe—fears that linger after the release of LEED 2009, which was marked by an ill-fated attempt to outsource the certification process to third-party certification bodies and glitches that marred the usability of LEED Online.
LEED users conveyed their concerns directly to USGBC staff and board members, expressed them in formal comments on the various drafts, and debated them on the LEEDuser forums
, where Robert Watson of EcoTech International, founding chair of the LEED Steering Committee, argued vehemently for a more measured approach to changes in LEED.
No longer tied to a particular year, USGBC is also reverting to a version naming system for the rating system, so the new version will be called “LEED v4” instead of “LEED 2012.”
Even as it frustrated the many volunteers on the LEED committees who have labored for years on many credits in the proposed draft and are anxious to see them introduced to the market, the new announcement was celebrated by many practitioners in the industry.
”It is gratifying to see that an organization that is nearly twenty years old with 15,000 member organizations still can as be nimble and responsive as the start-up we remember,” noted Russell Perry, FAIA, vice president and office director at SmithGroupJJR. “The Council heard many of its members when we said that we were going to need some time to test out the new ideas and make sure they worked in our markets.”
The committees have been anticipating these changes for a long time, after the decision with LEED 2009 to minimize technical changes and focus on the reorganization and weighting of the credit structure. As a result, the credit requirement changes in the proposed LEED v4 rating system are the most extensive in LEED’s twelve-year history.
The new announcement comes just a few weeks after USGBC had tried, with limited success, to allay these concerns by postponing the planned ballot from May 2012 to August and by promising to keep LEED 2009 available to project teams for at least six months after the introduction of LEED v4. At that time, USGBC had also announced plans for a “beta test” of the new rating system, but critics had questioned how such a test would be useful if the changes it purported to test were already locked in by member ballot.
The new plan gives time for that beta test to proceed while allowing for its results to inform a fifth public comment draft, which is scheduled to run from October 2 to December 10, 2012. That timeframe encompasses the annual Greenbuild Conference and Expo, allowing for in-person interaction among USGBC members and other stakeholders about the proposed changes.
USGBC asserts that language in LEED supporting the highest standards of forest certification and pushing for transparency and avoidance of chemicals of concern will not be watered down during this extended process, despite unprecedented attacks from the chemical industry, which recently joined the mainstream forest products industry in seeking to undermine LEED
by pushing Congress to prohibit the federal government from using it.
For more information:
U.S. Green Building Council Blog
Letter from Rick Fedrizzi
LEEDuser Guide to the Third Public Comment Draft
LEEDuser Guide to the Fourth Public Comment Draft
June 4, 2012
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By Claudette Habesch, General Secretary of Caritas Jerusalem
Greetings from the Holy City of the Resurrection, City of Hope where life conquered death.
This week will see an important event for us all in Palestine and Israel. The Palestinian Authority will request the United Nations to vote on the recognition of Palestine as a full member state.
At Caritas Jerusalem, we have seen the ravages of the occupation on the people for the past 44 years. There is the destruction of houses and crops, the discrimination for access to resources and services, the fear of random arrest and the creeping despair that eventually we might lose the our land to Israeli settlers. The feeling of injustice and humiliation is in every heart. If Palestine becomes a UN member, Palestinians will regain their dignity. They will be considered as equals in peace negotiations and when defending their cause in the UN forum. They will have access to the International Court of Justice to protect the rights of their land. They will finally believe in a peaceful future in Palestine for their children.
A positive vote will not result in an instant peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. However, this is a real opportunity to restart the negotiations. The vote is a chance for us Palestinians to demonstrate our determination to achieve a rue stable and democratic state living peacefully alongside Israel. It is also a chance for the international community to show that they truly support the two-state solution and the principle of self-determination of people enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
Please show your support to Palestine’s bid to the UN, write to your government, sign petitions and take part in peaceful demonstrations.
We do pray with all our heart for the voices of peace and justice to prevail on both Palestinian and Israeli sides. We pray for Jerusalem to witness a true miracle – from a City of Hope to become a City of Peace.
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When I mention “currency,” what picture pops into your head? If you’re like most of us, you’ll envision a pile of gold coins or stacks of paper money.
We often forget that in the 21st century information has become a form of currency – often worth its weight in gold. Since the best information can actually help us save the physical currency we so readily envision, the savvy homebuyer gathers as much of the stuff as she can get her mind around before negotiating the price of a home.
Negotiating Requires Information
Go into the purchase negotiations locked and loaded with as much information as you can gather. First, have your agent prepare a market analysis.
Known as a comparative market analysis or CMA in real estate lingo, it is a compilation of homes similar to one another in size, age and location – adjusted for differences in amenities – that have sold over the past three to six months. The sales prices of these homes, when compared to the one you’re interested in purchasing, will give you the home’s market value.
Now, if the market is on the upswing and values are rising, you may be disappointed with the results of the CMA. But it’s important information, either way. It gives you a basis from which to negotiate the price of a home.
Look carefully at the section of the CMA that mentions “days on the market,” or DOM as it is called in real estate circles. This number is important because when a home has been sitting longer than the market average (ask your agent for this number), a lower offer is more likely to be accepted.
Negotiating Requires Answers
Buying a house is a huge purchase – one of the biggest you’ll make in your lifetime. That said, you’d be surprised how many buyers go into the process without doing any research whatsoever. Many folks research new cars more thoroughly than they do houses.
Remember, information is your friend and you can never have too much of it.
You may not get answers to the questions you should ask, but ask them anyway. Here are a few things you should snoop around about:
- Vacant? If the home is vacant, it’s a safe bet that the sellers had to move on with their lives and most likely can’t wait to get rid of a house payment on a house they don’t even live in.
- Motivation: Why is the seller moving? The answer to that question will tell you a lot about the home seller’s motivation. A seller who has a job waiting for him a couple of states away is pretty heavily motivated to get his house sold.
- Keep tabs on the local real estate market. Although it seems subtle, changes can happen quickly and we can go from a buyer’s to a seller’s market pretty quickly.
Know When to Stop Negotiating
Or, at least know when to consider it. Now that you’re smartened up with market information, you should determine just how high in price you are willing to bid. In fast-moving markets with lots of buyers bidding on the same house, you may get caught up in the bidding frenzy. Having an exact figure in mind – your top bid – will allow you to walk away from negotiating with a home seller and avoid overspending.
Everyone’s a Winner
Finally, if you really want the house and the seller won’t budge on price, give in. That’s right: capitulate on the price. Then, go deep on the terms.
Author Robert Irwin, in his book “Tips & Traps for Negotiating Real Estate,” tells the story of a gentleman who was about ready to give up on a bank-owned house he really wanted. The lender refused to negotiate on the price and the buyer didn’t have the money to both pay for the house and the subsequent work required to make it livable.
At Irwin’s suggestion, he agreed to the bank’s price and countered the terms of the agreement instead. He ended up getting the house, with cash back from the lender to make the needed repairs.
Negotiating is an intimidating process for many people, and when the item you’re negotiating for costs as much as a house, it can be truly frightening. Just remember to keep your emotions in check and arm yourself with the hottest currency in the 21st century, and you’ll do fine.
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Recent data reveals that around 40% of the positions of ‘sweeper’ in the central government are now filled by non-dalits. Does this suggest a more progressive society, or simply one where the post of government sweeper is acceptable for the security it offers, but the work continues to be done by the socially-excluded, asks Alok Srivastava
|Average across groups A-D, including sweepers||24.3|
|Average across groups A-D, excluding sweepers||15.6|
|Source: Poverty and Social Exclusion in India, World Bank, 2011|
|Note: Calculated from data of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions (2009)|
A recently released book by the World Bank,Poverty and Social Exclusion in India, states that, according to data from the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions (2009), 59.4% of sweepers in central government services (all ministries except two) in 2006 were dalits (scheduled castes). SCs are over-represented in the least skilled employment levels in government.
But looked at another way, this means that over 40% of posts for sweepers are filled by non-dalits. Put simply, two out of every five sweepers in government offices belong to social groups that are non-scheduled caste.
Does this reflect a progressive society, or does it bring out the real picture: Sarkari naukri ke liye kuch bhi karega (will do anything for a government job)? Government jobs ensure a regular income and other benefits and, to some extent, less accountability. Perhaps this is why government offices and public places are usually so dirty!
Considering a lot of effort is being made by government and non-government agencies to work towards social inclusion of SCs in the mainstream, this data on non-SCs filling the post of sweeper, which not so many years ago would have been ‘objectionable’ to any member of the so-called ‘general castes’, is revealing. Is it a good example of ensuring social acceptability of scheduled castes by encouraging non-SCs to fill positions that are considered ‘reserved’ for socially excluded groups?
However, the fact that such a high percentage of non-SCs are taking up sweepers’ jobs -- till recently considered ‘fit’ for a few sub-groups within SCs only -- throws up some evidence for repeated claims that the work is ‘outsourced’ by the ‘real’ employee. Though there is no concrete evidence to support this view, as the saying goes there can be no smoke without fire. It is extremely likely that non-SCs fill the post of sweeper only in order to get a government job with its attendant economic security. But when it comes to delivering their job responsibilities, they hire unemployed SCs to work on their behalf at a much lesser wage whilst they engage in other economic activities, thereby keeping themselves ‘clean’!
So, while the post of government sweeper appears to no longer be a socially excluded one, the work related to the position continues to be so. Can we at least say there is social inclusion at the job selection level? It seems non-SCs are no longer considered outcastes because they work as sweepers.
Another noticeable feature associated with efforts made by the government at the community level towards social inclusion of excluded social groups is to provide habitations dominated by these social groups with basic amenities like a drinking water source, electricity, all-weather roads, and in some cases, anganwadi centres and school buildings. Though this may be considered a good effort on the part of government, central or state, a closer look into the consequences of these initiatives suggests that an already marginalised social group continue to remain excluded. The reason for this is simple: providing them facilities at the doorstep means that people from these sections of society do not need to visit other hamlets to avail of services. In a way we are telling them: you do not need to go to other hamlets; you have the facilities in your own hamlet. Therefore they continue to be excluded.
As a matter of fact, social inclusion is not just about making services available at the doorstep of socially excluded groups. Accessibility to these services should be available to them anywhere (any hamlet/part of the village). Earlier, for instance, the so-called upper castes would not allow members of the scheduled castes to enter the village to collect water or even touch water sources as these marginalised social groups were considered ‘untouchable’. Now, despite laws being in place, people from the ‘general’ castes still do not allow SCs to use water sources, offering other reasons: you have handpumps and wells in your own hamlet, why do you come here for water? You do not maintain/take care of the sources available in your hamlet; after they become non-functional you come here to fetch water. And so the exclusion continues…
Similarly, if the government builds an anganwadi centre in a hamlet where most households are from the socially excluded community, the chances of children from SC families mingling with children belonging to other social groups become slimmer.
To corroborate this view, I would like to narrate an interesting discussion during a recent interaction with children from the socially excluded Musahar group in Bihar. In a village in Vaishali district, the primary school currently functions out of a community building in the vicinity of the hamlet that houses families belonging to the Musahar community, one of the most marginalised and neglected scheduled caste sub-castes. A few families belonging to non-SC social groups also send their children to this school; they have no option. But their children do not partake of the midday meals served at the school, for obvious reasons. I was told that in a month or so, a new school building – away from the Musahar community -- would be ready. The school was slated to shift there. In all probability, acceptance of the midday meal, which in any case is not cooked on the school premises but is delivered by a local agency contracted to supply the cooked meal, would then increase, and its ‘boycott’ by non-SC families would end.
For governments, incidents like these throw up a Catch 22 situation. To provide or not to provide? To equip the hamlets of socially excluded communities with basic amenities knowing that this will also keep them within the confines of their own hamlets? Or to mainstream them by ensuring free access to facilities in any part of the village?
(Alok Srivastava is team leader, CMS Social, New Delhi)
Infochange News & Features, June 2012
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June 29, 1942
...It is difficult to describe in detail the history of the establishment of the Judenrat. We placed before ourselves one aim: to co-opt for the work persons of influence, who were honest and capable courageous people. There are such people among us, I will not praise them here. But one I will praise a little to his face, Engineer Barash, who is also the director of our industry, with his great ability and exceptional energy everybody knows and respects him. The German Authorities have been persuaded that we work without profit to ourselves and the attitude towards us has, in time, become tolerable... Our industry has developed, as you know, and its importance to the ghetto is so great that we saw the need for Eng. Barash to be in charge of this industry, and this has raised our reputation in the eyes of the Authorities.
Today a year of labor has ended that has been hard but full of blessing, and a new year begins, and we pray that in this new year we may be remembered for life! May the Lord, Blessed be He, continue not to abandon us; that we may be able to continue with our tasks to the benefit and good fortune of the whole population.
Eng. Barash: We could not let this day pass without gathering together and talking at least with those who are closest to us. There is nobody who could describe what has happened to us, what we survived during these past 365 days no artist, no writer, no painter. We can scarcely believe it ourselves, and I think nobody will believe it in the future, all that has happened to us in this period. It is lucky that we cannot foresee the future, for if we could we would not have lived and reached the present stage. If I were just to recite the record of our troubles, just a list without describing them, it would take a long time, a very long time. I will just recall the worst and most unexpected of them....
In short we did not have single quiet day, one in which there was no scent of danger. Many of the dangers that threatened us were countermanded, as you know, as a result of our actions.
We did many useful things:
1) Our factories, which often had to "make bricks without straw," which caused admiration among those who hate us. 2) The exhibition that was arranged outside the ghetto demonstrated our achievements and our ability to succeed. 3) At the same time we established a system of schools and trade schools. 4) Our social welfare... hospitals, etc., in many cases are more extensive than similar institutions that we had before the war. 5) Our vegetable-growing and other work show that the Jews are a very productive element.
There are differences of opinion concerning the actions of our Judenrat. But one must take the position of the Judenrat into account. After all, we are hostages, held responsible for everything that happens in the ghetto. And you have seen what that means in other cities. The members of the presidium went gray there before their time. The devotion, heart and soul, of the presidium cannot be described in words. If we survive, whole books will have to be written about it. Later there was a total change in our position, which distinguishes us from the people in all the other occupied areas and ghettos. There is nothing new to it, when the weak pay compliments to the strong, that is familiar flatter. But that we, the weak, hear compliments from those who are stronger, from those who have the power. This change came about as the result of our productive work.
I am full of admiration for the close harmony that reigns between the members of the Judenrat. Differences of opinion simply do not happen. All our decisions and actions are unanimous.
In truth, there is no place for optimism in the ghetto, but when I consider the road along which we have come and our burdens, then I am sure that we will take the Bialystok ghetto through to a happy end.
Mr. Sobotnik: ...The Judenrat did not start out as what it is today: It developed in time as it worked, thanks to the efforts of its first members who created everything that we now have. As I said, we were not chosen by anybody. The respected Eng. Barash convinced us to accept the great and difficult duties because he understood the needs of the hour. Now it has become a government, so to say, with all the offices, departments, ministers. The official chairman, Dr. Rosenman, walks around by himself to find workers for the Germans. He has gone through a great deal. His most important contribution was to have appointed the respected Eng. Barash, because the Rabbi did not have the strength to do everything that was needed. I do not wish to praise the individual, what matters to me is the job, the achievement. The respected Eng. Barash is the prime minister in our "government," as well as the minister of the interior, minister of industry, because in the ghetto everything must be concentrated in one hand. Industry, for instance, is connect with the Wehrmacht, so it becomes a matter of foreign policy. Sometimes we are surprised how he gets it all done, how it all works out. It seems like Divine intervention, particularly in the past few weeks. Everything gets done in the best possible way. The other responsibilities, it seems to me, are carried out by the other members, but it is the spirit, the direction, which is the most important thing....
What is our direction? In matters concerning the community we try always to reach agreement, compromise, so that everybody may be satisfied. From now on we shall have to stand by the letter of the law! Let him who is fearful and fainthearted return to his house! We shall have to cling to this principle if we wish to stay alive. And the ghetto must remain a productive element as well.
Of all our prayers for "Life," for a good life, for a livelihood, for a life without shame or disgrace, etc., we must today make do with just "Life"; and that thanks to Rosenman and Barash: we only help, but they, and especially Eng. Barash, labor for us!...
Blumental, pp. 214-220.
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First word to describe the storm’s damage:‘Historic’
November 1, 2012
by Jim Nedelka
Courtesy of Presbyterian News Service
New York City–It is Halloween.
On the day after the night Hurricane Sandy arrived here as a rambunctious guest, New York City and much of the surrounding Tri-State area within at least a 90 mile radius was still recovering from the shock while beginning to assess the damage caused by the hazing it received from the massive storm.
Initial reports indicate that at least five Presbyterian churches here in Manhattan suffered moderate to heavy damage. Presbyterian Disaster Assistance National Response Teams are response teams are headed to the presbyteries of New York City, Long Island, Elizabeth, New Brunswick and Monmouth.
The Stony Point Center ― one of the PC(USA)’s national conference centers ― is making space available for hurricane victims who need a place to stay.
Sandy didn’t just ring our doorbells and run away, she yanked the doorbells off the houses. In too many cases, she also yanked our houses off their foundations, leaving them strewn in the middle of highways, byways and waterways, especially along the Jersey Shore ― unfortunately located directly in the intersection of Sandy’s cross-hairs.
In other cases, she simply huffed and puffed and blew the house down.
Or she burned them down.
On Breezy Point in NY City’s borough of Queens, a stone’s throw from JFK Airport, dawn revealed the skeletons and foundations of 111 burned-out homes, described as the City’s “worst disaster for concentrated destruction.”
Up and down the Jersey Shore the word was not “JWow,” but simply “wow.” Nearly a dozen fires erupted in the early-morning hours in Mantoloking. The iconic amusement park in Seaside Heights was more in the sea than on the heights. In Atlantic City, even if you passed “Go” and collected your 200 dollars, you’d have a tough time landing on the legendary Boardwalk as huge sections of it have been washed away.
President Obama toured the Shore Wednesday afternoon with Governor Chris Christie. If he didn’t see them first-hand from his flyover in Marine One, he was certainly briefed about all the trees and boats and cars and downed power lines and dolls and walkers and wheelchairs and strollers and the rest of the spectrum of life’s artifacts randomly stacked and scattered across the landscape.
If the Jersey Shore’s troubadour, Bruce Springsteen, hadn’t written “My City of Ruins” for 9/11 he most would most certainly have a reason to do so now.
Upstate in New York State’s Westchester County, the beach at Rye Playland, the antique amusement park featured in the Tom Hanks’ film “Big” looks like a giant’s foot squashed it as the normally tranquil Long Island Sound roared ashore, trashing the boardwalk there, bending-back the fence atop the seawall at a 45-degree angle.
Here in New York City, much of the area below 34th street ― the neighborhood of Macy’s and the Empire State Building ― is still without power. In fact, all the area’s power companies conservatively estimate that 90% of their customers lost power.
In lower Manhattan, Sandy short-circuited the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, filling it with more than ten feet of salt water, equal to the level of its access roads on both Manhattan and Brooklyn sides.
Sandy also drowned the City’s 108 year-old subway system, filling many stations ― to quote Joe Lhota, the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ― “to the ceiling.” Most ironically, pictures taken in the South Ferry station showed several inches of water on its mezzanine level, located easily twelve feet above the train platforms below.
The MTA restored limited transit bus service Tuesday evening and some commuter rail service today (Wednesday). But, while they are conducting test subway runs, it may not be until after Election Day before subway service is fully restored.
The same can be said for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Trains which carry many from Newark, Hoboken and Jersey City into lower Manhattan.
On Broadway, many of the shows were planning to be back up and running for this evening’s performances, but with no mass transit, most area schools were closed for the third-straight “storm day.”
In deference to safety concerns about the countless downed power lines, New Jersey and some other municipalities postponed trick-or-treating. Unable to spare police and other first responders from post-Sandy duties, New York City postponed the 39th annual civic Halloween Party.
Yet New York City Marathon officials were still optimistic they can successfully run the five-borough race this coming Sunday (Nov. 4).
There will be questions why the failed back-up generators at NYU-Langone Hospital were allowed to age-out of their usefulness, forcing officials to evacuate the facility. There will be questions about how to lessen the chances of the ironic situation of having to let houses burn down in the midst of a hurricane-force rainstorm. There will be questions about the logic of placing power generators in the basements and cellars of flood-prone buildings, even though many were situated above the highest-record floor stage. There will be questions about why duly-warned people refuse to evacuate flood-prone areas.
While there were reports of vandalism and price gouging by some merchants and taxi drivers, and while experts unravel the conundrum of how to safely dismantle the boom of a crane dangling some 75 stories above Carnegie Hall, the Governor of Connecticut, Dannel Molloy, and his counterparts ― New York’s Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey’s Chris Christie ― enthused about the clean-up effort. Each cited the unbowed spirit of their region’s residents in pitching in to volunteer, whether at a shelter or in the cause of an elderly neighbor or were simply “there” for someone who has lost almost everything, the three men also paused to remember the more than 50 people including, sadly, some very young children who perished during the storm.
And yet, in Somerville, N.J. today, a hopeful new chapter begins as a mother suckles her newborn baby, born during the height of Sandy’s fury.
To contribute to Hurricane Sandy relief through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, click here.
Jim Nedelka, is a frequent contributor to the Presbyterian New Service, works for a major broadcast news organization in New York. A Ruling Elder, he is a member of New York’s Jan Hus Presbyterian Church and Neighborhood House.
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Linux on your iPod! Yes, and that link isn't the only one! People are determined to completely reverse engineer the iPod. Kids don't try this. Ever. Or grown-ups.
Actually, iTunes on Windows is a good bet if you can learn to encode using LAME, with the APS preset using other software. Then bring the files into iTunes. You might want to stay away from the 128 AAC format which Apple sells to innocent people--it is noticably inferior in sound quality when compared to a properly encoded music file. People fork out .99 because their ears have not yet learned to hear compression problems. Give 'em a year.
I tried both ephpod and anapod, but went back to iTunes strictly for management of the iPod unit. I do not use iTunes for ripping, burning, or music playback. This approach offloads iTunes's responsibilities, perhaps making it feel less cumbersome. The iPod plays back VBR MP3's that use the LAME encoder. Selecting the right tools for the various jobs has worked well for me. Good luck.
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'Stormin' Norman' Schwarzkopf dies
General commanded coalition forces during Gulf War
Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led allied forces to a routing of Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and became one of the nation's most celebrated military heroes of the era, died Thursday, a U.S. defense official said. He was 78.
The death of the retired four-star Army general was confirmed by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who described Schwarzkopf as "one of the great military giants of the 20th century."
President Barack Obama called the death of Schwarzkopf a loss of an "American original."
"From his decorated service in Vietnam to the historic liberation of Kuwait and his leadership of United States Central Command, General Schwarzkopf stood tall for the country and Army he loved," Obama said.
"Our prayers are with the Schwarzkopf family, who tonight can know that his legacy will endure in a nation that is more secure because of his patriotic service."
Virtually unknown to the public before the Persian Gulf War, Schwarzkopf became a household name while he oversaw the buildup of 700,000 coalition troops, including more than 540,000 U.S. forces, after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The war began on January 17, 1991, with the start of the nearly six-week air campaign against Iraq that was followed by a 100-hour ground offensive that pushed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait.
A Time magazine correspondent described the general, as he prepared his troops along the Kuwaiti border, as a man "with a John Wayne swagger and a growl like a grizzly."
Schwarzkopf, dubbed "Stormin' Norman" by his troops because of his reported temper, captured the public's imagination with his plain, frank talk about the war's progress.
He once told a room full of reporters: "As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that."
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, therefore, Schwarzkopf's commander, said the general's leadership during the war inspired the nation.
" 'Stormin' Norman' led the coalition forces to victory, ejecting the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and restoring the rightful government," Powell said in a statement. "His leadership not only inspired his troops, but also inspired the nation. He was a good friend of mine, a close buddy. I will miss him."
Schwarzkopf, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran, ushered in a new era for the U.S. military, whose exploits were broadcast live around the clock.
After the war, he was featured in his desert fatigues on the cover of nearly every major American magazine, and he joined thousands of troops for a welcome-home ticker tape parade in New York City.
England's Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight, and he received a standing ovation from Congress upon his return to the United States.
Former President George H.W. Bush, who is hospitalized, said the general "epitomized the 'duty, service, country' creed that has defended our freedom and seen this great nation through our most trying international crises."
"More than that, he was a good and decent man -- and a dear friend," Bush said in a statement released by his office.
While Schwarzkopf's leadership was heralded, critics raised questions about the decision to quickly end the ground war in Iraq and leave Hussein in power.
Schwarzkopf was heavily criticized in the Thomas E. Ricks book "The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today" for allowing Iraq to use helicopters in no-fly zones established after the war. Iraq used the helicopters to put down a Shiite uprising that had been openly encouraged by the United States.
Schwarzkopf told CNN's Larry King in a September 1992 interview that the preferred plan with Iraq was to avoid ever having to invade.
"We never wanted a war," he said. "Once the war started, we were hoping that ... they'd come to their senses and stop right then. ... After 38 days, we got to a point where we could launch the ground war and, by that time, they hadn't withdrawn."
While his role in the Gulf War made him famous, Schwarzkopf told King, war itself and the bloodshed that went with it didn't appeal to him.
"I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war," he said. "Good generalship is a realization that ... you've got to try and figure out how to accomplish your mission with a minimum loss of human life."
In his autobiography, "It Doesn't Take A Hero," Schwarzkopf outlined the reasons that coalition forces didn't press on to the Iraqi capital during the first Gulf War.
"Had the United States and the United Kingdom gone on alone to capture Baghdad, under the provisions of the Geneva and Hague conventions we would have been considered occupying powers and therefore would have been responsible for all the costs of maintaining or restoring government, education and other services for the people of Iraq."
Schwarzkopf wrote that had "we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit -- we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation."
Schwarzkopf supported the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, though he later criticized the Pentagon for what he called mistakes that included sending undertrained Reserve and National Guard troops into combat.
Schwarzkopf retired in August 1991, hit the lecture circuit and briefly was a military analyst for NBC.
He told King that he was asked to run for U.S. Senate.
"I got off the airplane and they came after me to, you know, run for senator in Florida, and I told them, 'No,' " he said. "I'm not a politician. I'd make a lousy politician."
Born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1934, he was named H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. after his father.
His father, Major Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, a West Point graduate who fought in World War I, became head of New Jersey State Police, helping to build the fledgling force and eventually leading the investigation of the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
"The day I was born, my father said ... 'That boy is going to West Point,' " Schwarzkopf recalled to King. "And that's the only thing I ever heard my entire young life."
After World War II, according to the book, the younger Schwarzkopf traveled to Iran to be with his father, who was helping advise the training of the country's police force under the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Schwarzkopf attended a Swiss boarding school and later returned to the New York region to enroll at West Point before heading to Vietnam for the first time in 1966.
"I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances," he wrote. "That guise lasted until Vietnam, where I realized that I was dealing with human lives and if one were lost, it could never be replaced. I quickly learned that there was nothing wrong with being emotional."
He was commissioned a second lieutenant and served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he received three Silver Stars. In 1983, he led troops during the invasion of Grenada.
Schwarzkopf, who died in Tampa, Florida, is survived by his wife, Brenda, two daughters and a son.
Copyright 2012 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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External hard drives offer a convenient way of storing your data, but they typically transfer data a lot slower than internal IDE or SCSI drives. By using the latest USB 2.0 protocol, Maxtor has attempted to address this performance failing with the Personal Storage 3000LE.
USB has come a long way since its inception. Although USB is an efficient way to connect a wide variety of peripherals, its poor transfer rate – 12 megabits of data per second (Mbps) for the current USB 1.1 standard – makes it less attractive in the storage market. The new USB 2.0 protocol is able to transfer data 40 times faster – at 480Mbps – and is a much more attractive proposition for external storage drives.
As yet only IBM offers a USB 2.0 integrated chip as an optional extra on some of its motherboards, while VIA will offer it as standard on all its own motherboards by early 2002. This means that, for now, the only way to use the 3000LE is via a plug-in PCI card. However, the drive is backward compatible with standard USB 1.1 ports; it just won’t work as fast.
The drive itself is a Maxtor D540X, 5,400-rpm 40GB hard drive connected by a USB 2.0-to-ATA/33 interface, and because it’s so power hungry it requires an external power source. Strangely there isn’t a power switch, so to stop the drive, you have to unplug it. Its rugged transparent case is both a strength and a weakness – it can withstand some bumps and bangs but it’s big, bulky, and weighs in at just under 1kg, so it will add a lot of weight to the frequent travellers’ briefcase.
Installing the Personal Storage 3000LE is effortless, and the drive is recognised on all Windows platforms from ME upwards. For Mac users, MacOS 9.0 and higher are also supported. For Windows 98 SE users, Maxtor provides an extra driver which can be downloaded from its Web site. Contrary to some reports, Microsoft does support USB 2.0 in Windows XP; drivers are available via the Windows Update site.
An advantage of the Personal Storage 3000LE is that you can install it on USB 1.1 ports should you not have any USB 2.0 ports, but the disadvantage is that the transfer rate dives to 900kb/s at best. But when used in conjunction with a USB 2.0 card, its speed becomes apparent. In our tests the drive achieved an average transfer data rate of 6.7MB/s, which is nearly as good as some internal hard drives.
Contact: 01923 716105
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The days of having to shout over the noise at a restaurant may be over, thanks to a new digital noise-cancelling technology designed together by Meyer Sound and former Phish manager-turned-restauranteur, John Paluska. Utilising a combination of speakers, microphones, iPads, sound-dampening materials, and human ears, the staff at Comal can make the restaurant as loud or as quiet as they like.
In a nutshell, the San Francisco Chronicle says that the system controls sound reverberation levels, meaning one can fill a space with ambient noise if things are too quiet, or they can dampen down volume if things are too loud, so that people can easily converse while eating.
Much of the technology is disguised as art around the restaurant. For example, paintings and prints on the wall are actually made of sound-absorbing cloth. Speakers are made to blend in with the decor. And air ducts are lined with fiberglass. And then there’s the tech itself.
What makes Comal’s different is that when it’s combined with Meyer’s Constellation system – a program that captures the room’s sounds and is able to leak them back into the space – the operator is able to control the level.
To do this, Germain installed a total of 123 speakers, subwoofers and microphones around the restaurant. The microphones pick up sound and send it to a computer where it’s digitally processed and regurgitated on command. Paluska does it all from an iPad as he walks around the restaurant. He can also set up some areas to get more reverberation than others. Currently, he has it so that the bar area in the front is buzzier than the dining space in the back. But from everywhere in the restaurant, he said, patrons are able to carry on a comfortable conversation.
Whoa. Depending on the size of the space, restaurants wanting to implement this technology can expect to pony up anywhere between £7,000 and £70,000. Silence is golden, but it ain’t cheap. [SF Gate via Co.Design]
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/05/new-noise-cancelling-technology-for-restaurants-uses-123-speakers-to-serve-up-peaceful-meals/
|
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
| 0.942585
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| 1.554688
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|
Scripture: Joshua 5:12 The manna stopped the day after they ate this food from the land; there was no longer any manna for the Israelites, but that year they ate the produce of Canaan.
Observation: It was great when God provided the manna in the wilderness. But His intention was that they live on the manna only so long as it took them to get into the land where they could harvest and grow their own food.
New Christians are often dependent on those leading them to Christ to direct them in reading the Bible. Questions are answered by showing them the word. But a time comes when new Christians have to find some of their own answers. Answers will still be found in God’s Word, but the new Christians will have to mine them out on their own. New Christians will then find the special joy of discovery, a joy which they can experience every day for the rest of their lives!
Application: It has been my joy the past 1,201 days to look into God’s Word and find truth that applies to my own life. It is also my joy to hear that others are blest. But the greatest joy is to hear that someone has started using the same outline (SOAP) or something similar to discover what God is saying to them.
Prayer: Lord, bless the readers of these SOAPs with a desire to read the Bible daily. May the special joy of discovering that you speak to them through Your Word draw them back again and again. Amen
Making friends for time and eternity!
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.pratttribune.com/article/20130319/blogs/130319112/0/sports
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|
en
| 0.979164
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|
THE OLD VENICE JAIL IS ROCKIN’ AGAIN
WITH A NEW JAILHOUSE ROCK!
The Social and Public Art Resource Center, SPARC, that produces and preserves community based public art works since 1976 opens “The Planet Siqueiros Peña,” a monthly space for those who love traditional Latino musical genre of romantic boleros, rancheras and sones, as well as, the more contemporary musical styles and spoken word that voice present-day, socially conscious themes.
On April 5th, at 685 Venice Blvd, SPARC’S, “Planet Siqueiros Peña” presents Dino Castro, a multi-talented young Oaxacan, accompanied by guitarist Ruben Izquierdo. Later that night, the entertainment continues with the eclectic band, “Brutus Gets The Girl.” Dino draws upon the Afro-Mexican songs of the Costa Chica and the music of the indigenous Zapotec Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with such beautiful melodies as “La Llorona”. Contrastingly, the band formed by guitarist & vocalist Silvano Barba, keyboard & vocalist Marisol Barba, drummer Mike Delgado and synth-player Joe Spelman perform songs ranging from introspective rock to spirited New Wave, British 80s Electronica, and Alternative Rock Pop Music. In between these two outstanding performances, Kaitlin Guerra Shaner will present her stories in “Shoes.”
The name of SPARC’s new community cultural endeavor, “ The Planet Siqueiros Peña,” is inspired by the revolutionary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and the South American musical Peñas. that produced a wave of music that took old rhythms to express new realities.
Historically, the Peña movement emerged during the 1960’s in Chile and in Argentina in times when oppressive military governments did not allow artists to assemble. They were safe spaces that began in private homes where poets and musicians would discretely come together to share food and wine along with their songs of despair and hope. During the following decades, forced into exile, many musicians moved north bringing the Peña spirit with them.
There is no better time for the spirit of the Peña to reach Venice than in a time of war, at the end of the Bush era, when the murals of Los Angeles are in jeopardy. Co-founder and Artistic Director of SPARC muralist Judith F. Baca, says that the SPARC building, formerly The Venice Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, was an active from 1929 until SPARC made the jail its headquarters in 1977. She loves to say that we have "liberated" the jail for the arts. The Planet Siqueiros Peña will again liberate us with songs of peace and freedom by a local women’s group at 7:30 P.M.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.artslant.com/la/events/show/15636-reinterpretation-closing-with-planet-siqueros-pea
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|
en
| 0.940839
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Okay, I am open to suggestions as to what did it. As stated there absolutely has been no fire there. And the only equipment ever near there would be four wheelers. The owner does mow the outside perimeter of the area with a tractor and bush hog (see the picture of the two does on their hind legs for example) but he would not have it in the interior of the woods. As you can see there is nothing to mow.
And we have no moose in North Alabama. Although some months back there was an elk running around the area that no one had any idea where it came from. But as I remember it was a cow anyway. The game wardens finally caught up with it and shot it.
If a buck like the eight pointer in the picture reared up on his hind legs like the two does are doing, he could rub that high and wouldn't have to back up to the tree. And notice that the upper portion is not rubbed nearly as much as the lower portion.
So okay, if you don't think it is a buck rub, what do you say it is???
(Luke 11:21 KJV) When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:
(Luke 22:36 KJV) Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.
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<urn:uuid:eeab0fd3-c7b0-4a05-9965-b6fead9dc1d0>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.deerhuntersclub.com/forums/70645-post9.html
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|
en
| 0.993018
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Dec 20, 2012: Introduced in the Senate, Referred to Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee
Many municipalities, particularly distressed urban municipalities, are limited by the lack of municipal options within the "tax sale law," R.S.54:5-1 et seq., from pursuing valuable opportunities for revenue generation and urban revitalization. If given the opportunity to take control of tax liens under favorable conditions, municipalities could benefit from interest, penalties on lien redemption, and the opportunity to foreclose on liens not redeemed. Those municipalities could benefit significantly as a result, both in terms of revenue generation and urban revitalization. While increasing municipal options related to tax liens can serve the public interest, participating municipalities would also face significant obligations. For that reason, it is appropriate for the State to establish a pilot program through which municipalities meeting specific criteria may pursue these opportunities under the supervision of the Division of Local Government Services. To be eligible to participate in the program, the municipality would have to qualify for aid under P.L.1978, c.14 (C.52:27D-178 et seq.). Under the pilot program, any eligible municipality will be able to submit an application to the division to participate. The application would need to include an analysis of the projected benefits of participation in the program, a plan detailing how municipal responsibilities would be carried out, a discussion of what individuals would be responsible for the program, and a discussion of larger municipal revitalization efforts. Based on these aspects of the application, the division would designate participating municipalities. Participating municipalities would enjoy greater power with regard to tax sale properties. Through resolution, the municipality would be able to direct a municipal official to bid at auction on one or more parcels of real estate whenever its governing body determines that the property would be either useful for a public purpose or financially beneficial. The municipal official would be authorized to preempt all other bidding on that property, allowing the municipality to obtain the tax lien at an advantageous rate. At its next meeting following the tax lien sale, the municipal governing body would have to approve the sale through resolution. Without this final approval, the municipality would be barred from bidding on the same property at the next tax sale. For tax liens on owner-occupied properties obtained under the provisions of this bill, for which the household income is below the region's median income, municipalities may provide by resolution that no additional interest would accrue on uncollected taxes for the first six months following the tax sale. To benefit from this interest waiver, the homeowner would have to first apply to the municipal tax collector to be found eligible. To most effectively manage its tax liens, participating municipalities may contract with the county, another municipality, or any other qualified public or private entity. Management needs may include actions such as the collection of delinquent taxes, tax foreclosure, and the resale of foreclosed properties. To fund unpaid tax liens, a participating municipality may incur indebtedness, borrow money, and authorize and issue negotiable refunding bonds in any amount determined necessary if approved by the Local Finance Board in the Department of Community Affairs. The municipality may also issue bond anticipation notes prior to bond issuance. Any bonds or notes issued will be backed by the municipality's taxing power. Municipal proceeds from the redemption of tax liens, or from the sale of associated property, would be held in a debt service reserve fund to the extent needed for repayment of principal and interest on the bonds and notes in the current fiscal year. Any amount in excess of that needed for principal and interest repayment could be transferred to the municipality's general fund as miscellaneous revenue. Bonds may be further secured with State urban aid, and designated as qualified refunding bonds, through the process required by section 1 of P.L.1978, c.35 (C.40A:3-11). Any participating municipality will be able to operate under the pilot program for no less than five years, unless removed by the division. Participating municipalities will be required to provide annual reports to the division on the status of the program. Upon municipal request, the division may extend the number of years the municipality may participate in the program, in increments of three years, without limitation on the number of extensions. If the division finds that a participating municipality is not adequately carrying out its responsibilities under the program, or that the municipality's fiscal condition is being materially harmed by continued participation in the program, it will notify the municipality, and provide a list of corrective actions that must be taken to remain in the program. At the end of one year from notification, if the division finds that those undesirable conditions have not materially changed, the division may order the municipality removed from the program. In such an event, the division shall take the steps necessary to ensure that any legal or financial obligations the municipality has entered are met. Within eight years of the effective date of this act, the director shall produce recommendations on whether or not the program should be continued.
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<urn:uuid:caf9847f-1b1e-48d4-87bc-f49be11d84f7>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.govtrack.us/states/nj/bills/2012-2013/s2400
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.937906
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| 1.570313
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|
"It wasn't too bad up there this time," said 1972 Redlands alumnus Don Davidson. "The work wasn't that hard, maybe because we haven't had much rain. I've seen it much worse."
They do it a couple of times a year, Davidson said, in the spring and in the fall. The R is not painted onto the mountainside; the visible letter is the bare soil and rock, cleared of the sagebrush and manzanita that would otherwise grow there. Markers installed decades ago show volunteers where to trim.
Redlands engineering alumnus Scott Lacy, known as "the historian of the R," put out a call for volunteers a few weeks ago on Facebook, and Davidson was the first to respond. Early in the morning on November 3, three alumni, about 10 students and some friends of the campus gathered at the Memorial Chapel with their tools. From there they went by car up Highway 330, then turned off onto a fire road for 3 or 4 miles. They did the last mile and a half - and 1,500 feet of elevation - on foot, carrying their tools.
"That can be quite a hike," Davidson said. "About an hour, more or less, depending on the person."
They started clearing brush at 9 a.m., taking time for pictures and for enjoying the panoramic view. They
The R appeared on the hillside in 1913, part of a freshman prank, according to the school's website. For decades, senior classes made freshmen clear the brush around the letter, and it was lit with highway flares for Homecoming and other special occasions.
Upkeep faltered in the 1960s and 1970s, the site says, and the letter's 415-foot by 275-foot outline sometimes was barely visible. In 1984, freshman Greg Horn led an effort to restore the R, finishing just before he graduated in 1987. Since then, alumni, students, employees and friends have made the trip to clear brush around the R about twice a year.
The letter is mentioned in the University's alma mater -- "That dear old U of R, whose emblem shines afar" - and the yearbook, La Letra, is named for it.
Davidson said the best part of a job like clearing the R is being done, and enjoying the results. "We can't wait to get back down and look at it," he said. "And we say, 'Look what we did!' "
|
<urn:uuid:e72574f4-8a79-4496-8c57-2c3747e79013>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/opinions/ci_21987689/r-mountain-overlooking-redlands-gets-annual-cleanup
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
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en
| 0.978437
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|
Consular Relations With Filipino Dancers
Who could have thought a tax case could be so … exotic? On remand from the Supreme Court in the case of New York City v. Permanent Mission of India, Judge Rakoff was required to rule on whether New York City could recover property taxes from the Philippines, India, and Mongolia on portions of buildings used for non-consular purposes. But in order to do so the court had to distinguish between consular and non-consular purposes.
In the case of the Philippines, some of the property was leased by the Philippines government to a Philippine restaurant, Philippine bank (PNB), and Philippine airline (PAL). The question was whether any of those entities were performing consular functions within the meaning of the VCCR. The court ruled that the restaurant, but not the bank, was performing consular functions. The court was also quite emphatic that they did not have consular relations with that airline, PAL.
As the court noted, Article 5 of the VCCR “defines the purposes of a consular post broadly, by reference to its functions, i.e., ‘furthering the development of commercial, economic, cultural and scientific relations between the sending State and the receiving State’, ‘protecting in the receiving State the interests of the sending State and of its nationals’, ‘ascertaining … conditions and developments in the commercial, economic, cultural and scientific life of the receiving state, reporting thereon to the Government of the sending state’, and ‘helping and assisting nationals, both individuals and bodies corporate, of the sending State.’”
In assessing whether the restaurant performed such functions, the Court noted that from 1974 to 1982 the Philippine Center leased property to the Maharlika Restaurant, which “served authentic Filipino cuisine, employed Filipinos only, and was staffed with a Filipino dance troupe and musicians who performed a show during dinner. Through its culinary offerings and the evening performance, Maharlika showcased Philippine culture, folk art, ethnic music and dance to guests of the Mission and the Consulate General.”
That was good enough for the court to find that the restaurant fell within the definition of consular relations. The purpose of the restaurant was to showcase Filipino culture, not to earn a profit. It did so by hiring only Filipino employees, presenting long Filipino dinner shows, and hosting official Philippine functions. “Maharlika was thus used exclusively for a consular purpose, and so is exempt under the VCCR.”
I love it. As long as there is Filipino dancing you fall within Article 5′s definition of “furthering the development of commercial, economic, cultural and scientific relations between the sending State and the receiving State.” As for the lease with the Philippine bank and Philippine airline, no that just won’t do. Far too much focus on Filipino commercial and economic relations, and not nearly enough emphasis on Filipino culture.
Now if the bank tellers had just doubled as Filipino dancers while serving customers, well, … who knows, perhaps Filipino “teller and dancing” would suffice. Based on this YouTube video of the well-known Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company, it looks like they could multi-task.
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<urn:uuid:da1d1cf0-a892-4b2e-a963-d9ba55cd6949>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://opiniojuris.org/2008/02/21/consular-relations-with-filipino-dancers/
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s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.965435
| 676
| 1.648438
| 2
|
An evacuation order is expected to be lifted on Monday for a small privately run ghost town in New Mexico, a sign of progress, as fire crews continue to battle the largest wildfire in the state's recorded history.
Residents and business owners will be allowed to return to the small privately run ghost town of Mogollon on Monday.
The town was evacuated on May 26 as extreme wind fueled the Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire, now at 377 square miles.
The Catron County Sheriff's Office decided to lift the evacuation order on Monday because crews were able to build some containment lines on the fire's western flank, Tara Ross, a spokeswoman for crews fighting the fire, said Sunday.
The ghost town will open to the public again on Wednesday.
Ross said that milder weather on Sunday and in upcoming days should allow firefighters to increase containment.
"It isn't getting any worse at this point," Ross said. "The weather's kind of keeping it in check.
The community of Willow Creek on the fire's northern flank remained evacuated because Ross said containment lines in the area weren't as strong.
Although the more than 1,200 firefighters on the blaze were making progress, the fire remained 17 percent contained Sunday, and there is no projection for when it may be fully under control.
The Whitewater-Baldy fire has destroyed a dozen cabins while burning in the Gila National Forest. A pair of lightning-sparked fires grew together to form the massive blaze.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is monitoring two packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves that are situated to the north and east of the fire. Last year, wolves in Arizona were able to escape the massive Wallow fire with their pups, but it's unclear how mobile the packs in New Mexico are since their pups are much younger.
Authorities also are concerned about flooding that will come in the fire's aftermath because of the denuded landscape, and federal wildlife managers are concerned about what sediment and ash in the waterways could mean for the native Gila trout.
|
<urn:uuid:b6dda898-2967-48a7-81a4-a67c73043d96>
|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
|
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/06/04/evacuation-order-to-be-lifted-in-nm-ghost-town/
|
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
| 0.970169
| 421
| 1.734375
| 2
|
RARE CASE: A federal lawsuit claims popular antidepressant Zoloft has no more benefit than a dummy pill, so patients who took it should be reimbursed for their costs.
OPPOSING VIEWS: Lawyer Brent Wisner says Zoloft shouldn't have been approved because there wasn't enough evidence it works. Zoloft maker Pfizer and several psychiatry experts say studies and two decades of use by patients show the pill is effective.
COMPLEX SCIENCE: It's hard to exactly measure an antidepressant's value. Most patients need to try a few to find one that works for them, and they help patients with severe depression the most.
|
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|
CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=448398
|
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|
en
| 0.962444
| 132
| 1.578125
| 2
|
Over 300 charcoal/pen and ink drawings of mixed subject matter and personalities (ranging from politicians to celebrities) from legendary artist Peter Green are presented in this 180 page book. This historical and comprehensive archive of his work (primarily for his editorial, advertising and entertainment clients) showcases Peter's inventive charcoal style generated between 1966 and 1986.
"I guess it started with figure drawing with charcoal in Art school and then making a living as a "hired pencil" doing state fairs, birthday parties and street caricatures. Charcoal became the ideal medium to capture the full range of values in a face from black/blacks to the most subtle highlights. Painting with a pencil as I used to call it. When I finally moved into the illustration world, it was the perfect technique for a time when color printing was not where it is today and charcoal drawings offered a change from the pen and ink style that had dominated political caricatures for 100 years.
Fast forward to today and now I have over the last 20 years concentrated on Hollywood's marketing needs which have been lots of design, photo shoots, photo manipulation and running a design/marketing firm with as many as 30 or more employees. Color printing has come into its own, much like black and white TV or feature films going color. And throughout the past 20 years, my illustration technique has gravitated to a full color approach. Watercolor and PRISMACOLOR pencil to be exact."
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<urn:uuid:e34c0b3f-b08d-44a4-952e-b627f7178030>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.blurb.com/b/812657-smear-campaign
|
s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz
|
en
| 0.971328
| 291
| 1.75
| 2
|
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