The Most Misused Song in GOP Politics: Van Halenâs âRight Nowâ
nike dunk shoesIf Republicans are on the campaign trail, Van Halen is back in vogue. For years, Republican candidates and politicians have been using Van Halens song, Right Now, as the walk-in jingle at rallies and events. The first time I recorded its use was November 5, 2006, when then-President George W. Bush used the tune to enter a rally in Greeley, Colo., not far from the slaughterhouse in a hall that smelled of cow manure. McCain used it in 2008, and over the weekend, Sarah Palin used the song to enter a rally in Wisconsin over the weekend. Connoisseurs of early -1990s hair rock know this is funny, even if Palin, Bush, and McCain never seem to get the joke. The song was cut for Van Halens ninth studio album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, which not only refers to criminal sodomy in its title, but also makes a snappy, not-so-Republican acronym. hermes birkin handbagsAs Sammy Hagar, the lead singer, explained at the time, I wanted to name the album just fk. The song also spawned one of the great rock videos in hey day of music television. As the band sings, phrases like Right now oil companies and old men are in control flash across the screen. During its 2004 reunion tour, Van Halen flashed phrases on a video screen as it played the song. One of them read,Right now, nothing is more expensive than regret, superimposed over visuals of President George W. Bush. Perhaps the greatest irony is that Van Halen has long tried to stop Republicans from using the song at events. Coach Outlet After McCain piped it in after announcing Palin as his running mate in Ohio, Van Halens management released a statement to TMZ saying, Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given.
Apocalypse Today: Visiting Chernobyl, 25 Years Later
nike sb shoesThe 18.5-mile (30 km) radius around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known officially as the "zone of alienation." Abandoned cars, tractors, buildings and homes litter the landscape and are slowly being devoured by trees and shrubs. A classroom bulletin board not far from the central Lenin Street in the town where the plant workers used to live reads, "No return. Farewell, Prypyat, April 28, 1986." This eerie landscape about 50 miles (80 km) from Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, provides a snapshot in time of the frenzied evacuation following the meltdown 25 years ago today of reactor core No. 4, a meltdown that produced a radioactive plume across the northern hemisphere in the worst nuclear accident in history. It also presents a stark vision of the possible future thousands of miles away in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, where emergency workers are in the seventh week of a battle to cool several partially melted reactor cores. (See pictures of the Chernobyl zone, 25 years after the nuclear disaster.) Even now, the effort to contain the Chernobyl accident is far from over: workers in white suits and respirator masks show up for work every day, constructing a new concrete shield to replace a massive sarcophagus built in 1986. hermes birkin handbags The sarcophagus, which contains the molten core, is starting to crumble and could collapse, which could release another radioactive cloud into the air. Chernobyl offers many lessons about what Princeton University physics professor Robert Socolow calls the "afterheat" of a nuclear disaster but it's the generational lesson that's the most important one. Because the isotopes released during a nuclear accident remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years, cleanup is the work not just of first responders, but also of their descendants and their descendants' descendants. cheap coach handbags outletIt's messy, it's expensive, and it's the kind of job that forever denies the workers themselves the satisfaction of standing back and admiring the results of their efforts. Asked when the reactor site would again become inhabitable, Ihor Gramotkin, director of the Chernobyl power plant, replies "at least 20,000 years." (See pictures of the worst nuclear disasters.) That timescale makes things more than simply frustrating. Over the course of millennia, after all, how can safety measures be maintained? Already, the financing of cleanup and maintenance operations is proving difficult. On April 19, the Ukrainian government hosted an international donor conference in Kiev to raise money for the $1.1 billion concrete shelter. Coach Scarves The government fell some $300 million short of that goal and is holding out for further pledges. But even the gigantic concrete shield which is 360 ft. (110 meters) high and weighs 29,000 tons has a woefully brief life when measured in radiological time: it will need to be replaced in a century unless the extremely radioactive and molten core inside can be safely removed and stored somewhere else, itself an expensive and difficult operation. "Neither Ukraine nor the world community has the right to turn its back [on Chernobyl]," Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said at the end of the conference. "The accident left a deep wound that we will have to cope with for many years." Everything to do with radiation moves at an insidiously slow pace. coach handbags outlet Exposure to radioactive particles increases the risk of cancer, but the level of the danger depends on the dose and the age and health of the affected population. When radiation does kill, it can still take years. Around Chernobyl, no accurate dose estimates on the most heavily affected population were made until after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and, as a result, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine all use different techniques for measuring exposure.
nike sb shoesLast week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that President Obama's order to cut $400 billion from national-security spending over the next 12 years will force the U.S. military to curtail some of its far-flung duties. "This needs to be a process that is driven by the analysis," he said, "as well as missions that our elected officials decide we should not have to perform, or can't perform anymore, because we don't have the resources." Well, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile. While working on a recent piece on how to cut $1 trillion from the $7-trillion-plus U.S. defense budget over the coming decade, I stumbled upon a provocative analysis by Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University. He says the U.S. has "mis-allocated" -- others might say "wasted" -- $8 trillion since 1976 protecting the oil flow from the Persian Gulf that fuels much of the global economy. Especially since in 2010, when the U.S. was the destination of less than 10 percent of the oil flowing out of the Gulf. The U.S. has insisted, since the days of the Carter Administration, that the oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf is a vital national-security interest of the U.S. Beyond that, Presidents and the Pentagon have said, the narrow Strait of Hormuz is a vulnerable bottleneck for shipping headed out of the Gulf. cheap hermes birkinAny troublemaker -- especially Iran -- could bring the U.S. and world economies to their collective knees by shutting it down by sinking a couple of tankers as they pass through. Consequently, the U.S. has poured tons of money into the region since then, including three wars. It has bulked up its military forces in the neighborhood -- including the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, headquarters in Bahrain, smack dab in the middle of the gulf -- to keep the oil flowing. Balderdash, says Stern. He uses more technical terms, but his bottom line is the same: Iran and other nations in the region have just as much, if not more, need to keep the oil flowing than the U.S. Think of it as your right hand -- angry at your left hand for some casus belli -- pinching their shared aorta to punish the left hand. Both would quickly begin turning blue.cheap coach handbags More critically, Stern argues, the U.S. military's emphasis on the Gulf has diverted precious defense resources away from the western Pacific, where China poses a far graver long-term threat to American interests. "On an annual basis, the Persian Gulf mission now costs about as much as did the Cold War," Stern says in his paper, which appeared in Energy Policy, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, in April 2010 to scant notice. Coach Colette Handbags He also suggested it could be costly in more ways than one: "Without the extensive long-term US military presence in the Persian Gulf, it seems an open question whether anti-US suicide terrorism such as the USS Cole and 9/11 attacks would have taken place."
The Slap that Triggered the Arab Spring "Was Impossible"
nike dunk shoesIt was an injustice that led a 26-year-old Tunisian street trader called Mohammed Bouazizi to douse himself in petrol and strike a match. The resulting conflagration killed Bouazizi, crackled through Tunisia, chasing out its despised President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and sparked uprisings across the region that are still burning fiercely. On December 17, Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller, was quietly doing business on the street in his home town of Sidi Bouzid when a female municipal inspector confiscated his cart and his wares and, adding grave insult to financial injury, slapped him. Bouazizi wasn't killed instantly by the fire he set but clung on until Jan. cheap hermes birkin4. Ten days later Ben Ali fled the country. The rest is history in the makingexcept for Bouazizi's story, which appears to be history in the remaking. The municipal inspector Fedia Hamdi has broken her silence to contest this version of events. A British journalist Elizabeth Day tracked down Hamdi, 46, after a tribunal cleared her of the assault last Tuesday. The sole accuser claiming to have seen the slap had a grudge against Hamdi; four witnesses disputed his evidence. Hamdi herself claims when she asked Bouazizi to leavehe was hawking his wares without licencehe became angry and grabbed her hand, hurting her finger. cheap coach handbags"I would never have hit him. It was impossible because I am a woman, first of all, and I live in a traditionally Arab community which bans a woman from hitting a man. And, secondly, I was frightened," Hamdi told Day. Hamdi spent 111 days in detention awaiting the tribunal and says now she has been "a scapegoat." Coach Kristin HandbagsBouazizi's suffering triggered the Arab Spring, but it seems he may not have been the only victim that day last December.
nike dunk shoesIt was the "Little White Donkey" incident that pushed many readers over the edge. That's the name of the piano tune that Amy Chua, Yale law professor and self-described "tiger mother," forced her 7-year-old daughter Lulu to practice for hours on end "right through dinner into the night," with no breaks for water or even the bathroom, until at last Lulu learned to play the piece. For other readers, it was Chua calling her older daughter Sophia "garbage" after the girl behaved disrespectfully the same thing Chua had been called as a child by her strict Chinese father. (See a TIME Q&A with Amy Chua.) And, oh, yes, for some readers it was the card that young Lulu made for her mother's birthday. hermes birkin handbags "I don't want this," Chua announced, adding that she expected to receive a drawing that Lulu had "put some thought and effort into." Throwing the card back at her daughter, she told her, "I deserve better than this. So I reject this." Even before Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Chua's proudly politically incorrect account of raising her children "the Chinese way," arrived in bookstores Jan. 11, her parenting methods were the incredulous, indignant talk of every playground, supermarket and coffee shop. A prepublication excerpt in the Wall Street Journal (titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior") started the ferocious buzz; the online version has been read more than 1 million times and attracted more than 7,000 comments so far. coach handbags outletWhen Chua appeared Jan. 11 on the Today show, the usually sunny host Meredith Vieira could hardly contain her contempt as she read aloud a sample of viewer comments: "She's a monster"; "The way she raised her kids is outrageous"; "Where is the love, the acceptance?" Chua, a petite 48-year-old who carries off a short-skirted wardrobe that could easily be worn by her daughters (now 15 and 18), gave as good as she got. "To be perfectly honest, I know that a lot of Asian parents are secretly shocked and horrified by many aspects of Western parenting," including "how much time Westerners allow their kids to waste hours on Facebook and computer games and in some ways, how poorly they prepare them for the future," she told Vieira with a toss of her long hair. "It's a tough world out there." (See Nancy Gibbs' take on the challenges of parenting.) Chua's reports from the trenches of authoritarian parenthood are indeed disconcerting, even shocking, in their candid admission of maternal ruthlessness. Her book is a Mommie Dearest for the age of the memoir, when we tell tales on ourselves instead of our relatives. Coach Heels&Sandals But there's something else behind the intense reaction to Tiger Mother, which has shot to the top of best-seller lists even as it's been denounced on the airwaves and the Internet. Though Chua was born and raised in the U.S., her invocation of what she describes as traditional "Chinese parenting" has hit hard at a national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to survive in the global economy. Her stories of never accepting a grade lower than an A, of insisting on hours of math and spelling drills and piano and violin practice each day (weekends and vacations included), of not allowing playdates or sleepovers or television or computer games or even school plays, for goodness' sake, have left many readers outraged but also defensive. The tiger mother's cubs are being raised to rule the world, the book clearly implies, while the offspring of "weak-willed," "indulgent" Westerners are growing up ill equipped to compete in a fierce global marketplace. One of those permissive American parents is Chua's husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor at Yale Law School). He makes the occasional cameo appearance in Tiger Mother, cast as the tenderhearted foil to Chua's merciless taskmaster. When Rubenfeld protested Chua's harangues over "The Little White Donkey," for instance, Chua informed him that his older daughter Sophia could play the piece when she was Lulu's age. Sophia and Lulu are different people, Rubenfeld remonstrated reasonably.cheap coach handbags "Oh, no, not this," Chua shot back, adopting a mocking tone: "Everyone is special in their special own way. Even losers are special in their own special way."
Nike outletA week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,. The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. birkin bag The browser wont be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing appsfor one thing, it doesnt use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser). One thing Firefox mobile doesnt have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. replica coach handbags I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone. Some other features I really like in the browser is the way it handles tabbed browsing, its snapping zoom, and the Awesome Screen. Your tabs are always available in a thin column on the left which can be accessed with a simple swipe. If you are on a webpage that is not optimized for a mobile device, you can snap the zoom with a double tap to align with a column or box on the page and then scroll up and down normally. The Awesome Screen is the mobile version of the Awesome Bar on FireFox desktop.replica coach outlet As you type, it makes suggestions based on your previous browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs.
nike dunk shoesGreg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. Instead, Jeloudov arrived at Fort Benning, Ga., for basic training in May 2009, in the middle of the economic crisis and rising xenophobia. The soldiers in his unit, responding to his Russian accent and New York City address, called him a champagne socialist and a commie faggot. He was, he told NEWSWEEK, in the middle of the vipers pit. nike sb shoesLess than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them. What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, its an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for military sexual trauma at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hella soldier cant just quit his job to get away from his abusers. But now, as the Pentagon has begun to acknowledge the rampant problem of sexual violence for both genders, men are coming forward in unprecedented numbers, telling their stories and hoping that speaking up will help them, and others, put their lives back together. birkin bag We dont like to think that our men can be victims, says Kathleen Chard, chief of the posttraumatic-stress unit at the Cincinnati VA. We dont want to think that it could happen to us. If a man standing in front of me who is my size, my skill level, who has been rapedwhat does that mean about me? I can be raped, too. In fact, it is the high victimization rate of female soldierswomen in the armed forces are now more likely to be assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed in combatthat has helped cast light on men assaulting other men. For most of military history, there was neither a system nor language in place to deal with incidents of soldier-on-soldier sexual assault. It wasnt until 1992 that the Defense Department even acknowledged such incidents as an offense, and initially only female victims were recognized. Coach Ergo Handbags But last year more than 110 men made confidential reports of sexual assault by other men, nearly three times as many as in 2007. The real number of victims is surely much higher. Even among civilians, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. In the military the silence is nearly complete. By the Pentagons own estimate, figures for assaults on women likely represent less than 20 percent of actual incidents. Another study released in March found that just one in 15 men in the Air Force would report being sexually assaulted, compared with one in five women.
discount gucci bagsLosing weight comes with a host of health benefits including making your brain sharper. Yes, it turns out that in addition to being bad for your heart, carrying excess weight may impair cognitive functions such as memory and attention. Losing weight, therefore, may help improve these mental functions, according to new research led by John Gunstad, assistant professor of psychology at Kent State University, and reported in the journal Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases. A growing body of evidence suggests that obesity is linked to cognitive deficits, and it is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, dementia and stroke. So Gunstad and his team speculated that losing weight might improve mental function. For their study, they measured memory and attention in a group of 150 overweight participants, some of whom underwent gastric bypass surgery for weight loss and some who did not. coach outlet All of the volunteers completed mental-skills tests to assess their baseline abilities of recall and attention at the beginning of the study, and again 12 weeks later, after some of them had the operation and lost weight. To begin with, about 24% of the patients showed impaired learning and 23% showed signs of poor memory recall when tested. By the end of the study, those who had lost weight (on average they shed about 17% of their initial body weight) had boosted their scores into the average or above average range for cognitive functions. Scores for the volunteers who didn't undergo weight-loss surgery dropped even further. "We were cautiously optimistic going in that we would see a positive effect from the weight loss, but it was still great to see it," says Gunstad. Why would body weight have anything to do with brain function? It turns out that obesity works on a number of different metabolic pathways that can affect the way we process information. Gucci D Gold Bags"Obesity affects a number of physiological mechanisms that can have an adverse effect on the brain," says Gunstad. "Hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, all of which are consequences of being overweight, are all bad for the brain." Focusing on patients having weight-reduction surgery helped Gunstad to establish relatively quickly whether losing weight had any effect on mental function. Those who have the procedure, he says, tend to lose weight rapidly in a short period of time, faster than people who diet and exercise. Now that he's seen the positive impact that weight loss can have on memory and attention, he says he will next study those who opt to shed the pounds by eating healthier and getting more active. He anticipates that losing weight the old-fashioned way will have a similarly positive effect on the brain. "If we can improve the condition with surgery, then we can see if we can produce the same change with behavioral weight loss as well," he says. Gucci Indy BagsAnd prove that a healthy weight is good for both body and mind.
Hunting for Planets from the Comfort of Your Own Home
discount gucci bagsIn the two years since it went into space, the Kepler satellite has revolutionized the search for planets around other stars. Before Kepler went into space, about 500 so-called exoplanets had been found, one by painstaking one over the course of more than a decade. Since then, Kepler has added another 1,200, and that's just a fraction of the planets the probe will ultimately discover. (To be technical, the bodies Kepler finds are known as "candidate planets" that need confirmation, but no one doubts that the vast majority of them are real.) One reason Kepler has been so wildly successful is that it stares at a huge number of stars some 150,000 of them, around the clock looking for tiny dips of light. That change in luminescence indicates that a planet is passing in front of the star. No human could possibly sort through all that data, so the Kepler team has created a kind of sifter software that looks for patterns hinting at orbiting planets. (See TIME's photoessay "The Labor of Space Exploration.") But while computers are terrific at high-volume data-processing, nothing beats the human eye for pattern-recognition which is why a project dreamed up by Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, a veteran planet hunter and Kepler project scientist, has turned out to be so extraordinarily useful. cheap nike shoes store Called Planethunters.org, it lets ordinary folks with no scientific training at all help find planets the Kepler software has missed. It works so well that in just a few short months of operation, the more than 22,000 visitors to the website have found nearly 50 potential planets, which are being sent on to Kepler headquarters at the NASA Ames Research Center in California for followup. You might think the planethunters team would require people who click on the site to undergo a fair amount of online training before allowing them to look at real data but you'd be wrong. Gucci Abbey Bags"We've got all sorts of online tutorials which explain the science," says Fischer. "But people don't have to look at them, and most don't." Instead, you can cut straight to the real stuff : a simple explanation of what you're supposed to look for (a series of regular dips in a given star's "lightcurve," which is just a graph of its brightness over time) and how use an onscreen box to mark any suspicious spots. That's pretty much it except that the last screen asks: "Logged in users get to see the best stars and get credit for their work. Would you like to login?" Think many folks say no? (See amazing photos of the sun.) Once they start looking, says Fischer, some people stay only a short while, but others hang in, looking for dips and answering simple online questions about them. "We have people doing 100 [stars], 5,000 the users created their own 5,000 club and even 20,000." No one sighting qualifies as a likely detection, but if enough users finger the same star, the scientists take notice.
Finland's Educational Success? The AntiâTiger Mother Approach
discount gucci bagsSpring may be just around the corner in this poor part of Helsinki known as the Deep East, but the ground is still mostly snow-covered and the air has a dry, cold bite. In a clearing outside the Kallahti Comprehensive School, a handful of 9-year-olds are sitting back to back, arranging sticks, pinecones, stones and berries into shapes on the frozen ground. The arrangers will then have to describe these shapes using geometric terms so the kids who can't see them can say what they are. "It's a different way of conceptualizing math when you do it this way instead of using pen and paper, and it goes straight to the brain," says Veli-Matti Harjula, who teaches the same group of children straight through from third to sixth grade. Educators in Sweden, not Finland, came up with the concept of "outside math," but Harjula didn't have to get anybody's approval to borrow it. gucci handbags on saleHe can pretty much do whatever he wants, provided that his students meet the very general objectives of the core curriculum set by Finland's National Board of Education. For math, the latest national core curriculum runs just under 10 pages (up from 3? pages for the previous core curriculum). (See "Paying Kids for Good Grades: Does It Work?") The Finns are as surprised as much as anyone else that they have recently emerged as the new rock stars of global education. It surprises them because they do as little measuring and testing as they can get away with. They just don't believe it does much good. They did, however, decide to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And to put it in a way that would make the noncompetitive Finns cringe, they kicked major butt. The Finns have participated in the global survey four times and have usually placed among the top three finishers in reading, math and science. In the latest PISA survey, in 2009, Finland placed second in science literacy, third in mathematics and second in reading. cheap nike shoes storeThe U.S. came in 15th in reading, close to the OECD average, which is where most of the U.S.'s results fell. Finland's only real rivals are the Asian education powerhouses South Korea and Singapore, whose drill-heavy teaching methods often recall those of the old Soviet-bloc Olympic-medal programs. Indeed, a recent manifesto by Chinese-American mother Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, chides American parents for shrinking from the pitiless discipline she argues is necessary to turn out great students. Her book has led many to wonder whether the cure is worse than the disease. (See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.) Which is why delegations from the U.S. and the rest of the world are trooping to Helsinki, where world-class results are achieved to the strains of a reindeer lullaby. "In Asia, it's about long hours long hours in school, long hours after school. In Finland, the school day is shorter than it is in the U.S. It's a more appealing model,"Gucci New Jackie Bags says Andreas Schleicher, who directs the PISA program at the OECD. There's less homework too. "An hour a day is good enough to be a successful student," says Katja Tuori, who is in charge of student counseling at Kallahti Comprehensive, which educates kids up to age 16. "These kids have a life." (See pictures of summer-school programs.) There are rules, of course. No iPods or portable phones in class. No hats indoors. (They also tried a no-coat rule, but it was just too cold.) But not much else. Tuori spots a kid texting in class and shoots him a reproachful glance. He quickly puts the phone away. Gucci Pelham Bags "You have to do something really bad, like hit somebody, to actually get punished," says Tuori.
Why They Fight: Civil War Re-enactors and the Battle over Historic Sites
gucci outletTo create these pictures, photographer Gregg Segal collaborated with Civil War re-enactors to construct scenes at historic battle sites that have been compromised by modern development. The past is never dead, wrote William Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi. Its not even past. In Europe, they know this. Modern apartment buildings in Rome are built on Renaissance foundations that in turn contain bits of ruins that are thousands of years old. In Germany its not unusual for a work site to shut down suddenly, or for a neighborhood to be evacuated, after the discovery of an unexploded bomb from World War II. Americans, though, have always focused more on making the history of tomorrow, rather than remembering the history of long ago. cheap gucci outlet storeAnd so, 150 years after the Civil War, many of the fields on which soldiers bled and died are nearly forgotten, buried beneath parking lots and subdivisions and interstate highways. Yet, at the same time, the wounds of that terrible war have never fully gone away. They live on in the mental terrain even as they are wiped from the physical landscape. Photographer Gregg Segal decided in 2009 to try to bring the ghosts of the war back to the places they once inhabited so fearsomely. coach outlet Working with the renowned re-enactor Robert Hodge and his colleagues, Segal identified battlefields from Gettysburg to Nashville, Cedar Creek to Atlanta. Places where the mundane humdrum of today covers ground that was once, to borrow a phrase from historian Stephen W. Sears, landscape turned red. State of the Union is a juxtaposition of two contrastive eras, Segal says of the finished project, an idealized Civil War embodied by period re-enactors vs. the commercialism of contemporary life. I wanted locations where actual Civil War battles had taken place and that were now part of the commercial world, Segal continues. Rob was very familiar with just such locations as hes been fighting for years to preserve battlefield land from development. The images, which are first of all very inviting with their bold color and dramatic lighting, pack a complex wallop. At first they are funnyproving the theory that humor arises from the unexpected collision of jarring frames of reference. But deeper lies a strong poignancy. These ancestors are all around us, if only we could see them. Gucci New Jackie Bags And what do they think of us, and of what weve done with the world they passed along? These pictures ask us to remember that it happened right hereright where our car slowly drips transmission fluid onto the vast parking lot outside Staples, or where we stand and drink a beer with the neighbors while steaks sizzle on the shiny new gas grill and kids thumb their new Xbox controllers in the basement. And they tell us it could never happen again. Were too busy shopping.
Russia, U.S. in Space Anniversary Double-Header This Week
cheap gucci outlet storeNASA's probably breathing easier this week after last's near-catastrophic government shutdown, and what better way to pop a celebratory cork (or two) than with a couple big anniversary events. Tomorrow marks both the 50th anniversary of humanity's first trip into space, as well as the 30th anniversary of NASA's first ever Space Shuttle launch. discount gucci bagsWho was first into space? Yuri Gagarin (that's him up top), a Russian cosmonaut whose tiny torpedo-like Vostok spacecraft completed a full trip around the Earth on April 12, 1961. It took America and NASA another month to get Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard into orbit (though Shepard's original flight had been planned for as early as October 1960). Tuesday's other glass-raiser would be the April 12, 1981 launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia, NASA's first in the Shuttle series--also, tragically, the second (after Challenger in January 1986) lost to catastrophe, along with its crew, when it broke part during reentry on February 1, 2003. It sounds like the six astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station will partake of celebration pleasantries (though whether with actual libations or astronaut-friendly substitutes, who knows). The final spot of Tuesday space-news has to do with NASA announcing which museums will have dibs on retired Space Shuttles for public display. Gucci Positano & Hysteria BagsAccording to ABC News, the ISS astronauts "say they're impartial" to who gets what.
thickens on ancient temple walls. Rivers swell and flush their trash and frothing human waste into the sea off Kuta Beach, the island's most famous tourist
attraction, where bacteria bloom and the water turns muddy with dead plankton. "It happens every year," shrugs Wayan Sumerta, a Kuta lifeguard, who sits with
his love-struck Japanese girlfriend amid dunes of surf-tossed garbage. So why, in early March, did the Bali authorities warn tourists that swimming there for
over 30 minutes could cause skin infections? The lifeguard tenderly strokes his girlfriend's naked leg. "I guess some people just have sensitive skin," he
says.
Itchy ocean? Just add it to Bali's growing list of seemingly intractable problems: water shortages, rolling blackouts, uncollected trash, overflowing sewage
-treatment plants and traffic so bad that parts of the island resemble Indonesia's gridlocked capital Jakarta. And don't forget crime. In January, amid a
spate of violent robberies against foreigners, Bali police chief Hadiatmoko reportedly ordered his officers to shoot criminals on sight. You've heard of the
Julia Roberts movie Eat Pray Love, which was partly filmed in Bali? discount gucci bagsNow get ready for its
grim sequel: Eat Pray Duck. (Read about Bali's travel boom.)
Most of Bali's woes stem from a problem that rival resorts would love to have: too many tourists. In 2001, the island welcomed about 1.3 million foreign
visitors. Ten years later and despite bombings by Islamic extremists in 2002 and 2005 that killed 222 people, mostly Australian tourists the island
expects almost twice that number. And there are millions of Indonesian visitors too.
Hotels, shopping centers and restaurants are springing up everywhere to accommodate them. The cranes looming over Kuta are building at least three malls and
a five-star hotel. But the less glamorous stuff roads, power lines, sewers, parking spaces often remains an afterthought. " Nike outletThe infrastructure is not keeping up with the development," says Ron Nomura, marketing director at the
Bali Hotels Association. The island's lack of reservoirs, he says, is a case in point. "Can you believe there is this much rain and we don't have enough
water?" (See "The Best of Asia 2010.")
When it comes to Bali, newspaper editors have a seemingly bottomless stock of "Paradise Lost?" headlines. Its rich Hindu culture is so distinctive that many
people mistake the island for a separate country rather than a province of the world's most populous Muslim nation. That Bali's tourism industry has survived
terrorism attacks and a global recession is a cause for pride. But amid unchecked growth and a creaking infrastructure, it is also a source of complacency.
"It's like Bali is slowly committing suicide," says local journalist Wayan Juniarta.
Bali's Governor I Made Mangku Pastika knows it. In January, he issued a moratorium on new construction in certain built-up areas, and later warned that his
lush birthplace might turn into a "dry land full of concrete buildings." Pastika is popular he investigated the bombings as Bali's then police chief
but his moratorium isn't.Gucci D Gold Bags "Some people says he's trying to slow down
Bali's growth," says Nomura. "That's not necessarily true. What he's looking for is more responsible growth."
Gucci Indy BagsHe probably won't find it. Nobody I talked to reckoned that Pastika's
measures would influence who built what where. Bali's spiritualism might be a bewildering blend of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, but the island's planning
Europe Interest Rate Hike: Will the Fed Be Forced to Follow?
discount gucci bagsCentral banker see. Central Banker do? We will see. On Thursday, the European Central Bank for the first time in nearly three years raised interest rates. Even though the rate is only going from 1% to 1.25%, it's a significant move because the ECB becomes the first central bank among so-called wealthy nations to raise interest rates since the beginning of the financial crisis. And it's a major shift from just six months ago, when central bankers around the world seemed to be doing anything possible to lower the value of their currencies, in order to make their countries' products cheaper to the rest of the world and boost growth. And that meant keeping interest rates low. But that was before this year's rapid rise in food and other commodities prices. That has caused a number of emerging market economies to raise interest rates. China has raised rates a number of times. gucci handbags on saleAnd now Europe. So will that put pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise rates in 2011 as well? Perhaps a little. Here's why: Interest rates are generally used by central banks to slow and speed the economy. But they can also have significant affects on the value of the local currency as well. Central bankers can target either inflation or the value of their currency not both. To drive down the value of money, bankers lower interest rates. But lower rates typically lead to higher economic growth, an influx of foreign capital and, potentially, inflation. The biggest sufferers may be workers in poor countries. Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, worries that if developing nations continue on their current course, we are likely to see wage disputes and riots. "Workers get angry when wages don't keep up with prices," says Eichengreen. So when the ECB raises interest rates that should cause investors to flock to the euro and therefore cause the dollar to fall. nike dunk shoesnike dunk shoes The move came at a time when the Fed was already cutting U.S. rates, weakening the dollar. The ECB move sent funds surging into both the euro, as the major currency offering the best interest rates, and into oil, as a commodity hedge against dollar weakness. The result was a one-day, $16 surge in the price of Brent oil futures in London, to $138 a barrel, on the way to a ruinous $147 the next month (not to mention an equally stunning post-bust $30 in December 2008). The issue is that oil is generally priced in dollars. So when the dollar drops in value that usually causes oil to rise in price, and that is a concern. Oil has been been one of the main drivers (pun) of inflation recently. Fed chair Ben Bernanke has said that the oil price spike was probably temporary, but if the dollar drops then oil's rise will continue.
Nike outletIn a thundering blow to Muammar Gaddafi's standing and the morale of his regime, Libya's Foreign Minister, Moussa Koussa, defected to London on Wednesday night, in the regime's most high-profile break since the Western bombing campaign began nearly two weeks ago if not, indeed, the most momentous split in the Libyan government in years. Koussa, who had long been one of Gaddafi's most trusted aides, landed at London's Farnborough Airport at about 9 p.m., after slipping across Libya's border into Tunisia earlier this week. He was flown on a British military jet, and immediately requested political asylum. "Koussa is not happy about how the government has handled the conflict," said his friend Noman Benotman, a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was aligned with al-Qaeda until 2008, speaking to TIME late Wednesday night. Nike outlet storeBenotman said Koussa revealed earlier this month that he was distressed that Gaddafi had once again turned Libya into a pariah state, after years of Koussa's careful work in restoring its standing in the U.S. and Europe. "He was the key figure to rehabilitate Libya with the international community," Benotman said by phone. "Now it is all gone." (See pictures of Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli.) Koussa's defection comes just one day after Western and Arab leaders met in London for a key coalition meeting to decide the next steps in their campaign against Gaddafi. There, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other leaders warned Gaddafi that his time in power was quickly running out and invited those around him to ditch the regime before it was too late. Koussa appears to have been the first to flee but Benotman says he is unlikely to be the last. Nike Dunk SB Low"I'm aware of dozens of people in Tripoli who are not happy," said Benotman, who was in Tripoli when the revolt erupted in mid-February, and who has close contacts with high-level Libyan officials. "The message being delivered is that they have to make a decision now." Koussa is more than just a familiar face to Western leaders. He fled Libya carrying a wealth of information that could prove extremely valuable to the coalition as it tries to assess how to end the military conflict and get Gaddafi to step down after nearly 42 years in power. As one of Gaddafi's closest aides, Koussa presumably would be informed about Gaddafi's war plans and state of mind after 11 days of aerial bombing by the coalition, as well as whether Gaddafi is open to negotiating a deal regarding exile for himself and his family. (See "Libya's Ragtag Rebels: Why They Fight.") In addition, Koussa was the long-standing chief of Libya's intelligence service before he was appointed Foreign Minister in 2009. That means he likely holds critical information that could ultimately lead to international indictments against Gaddafi and his family, including data on whether the Libyan leader ordered the Lockerbie bombing in Scotland in 1989, an attack that killed 270 people. Nike Dunk High Koussa might also be able to provide insight and information about more recent events, including the Libyan military's decision to shoot unarmed protesters in Benghazi and other towns in eastern Libya in mid-February. Those actions are believed to be the most likely basis for a possible indictment of crimes against humanity, which could be handed down by the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Thursday that his government would not give Koussa immunity from prosecution.
Concert Review: LCD Soundsystem Kicks Off Final Shows in New York
Cheap Nike outletDon't feel bad if you hadn't heard of LCD Soundsystem before they announced that they were breaking up. Despite a highly acclaimed third album that made music critics' top albums of 2010's lists, the dance punk group only made headlines when they sold out their final show at Madison Square Garden in 15 seconds. Then, fans grabbed up all the tickets for the additional four final shows at Terminal 5 that were added due to demand in less than 15 minutes. (More on TIME.com: See the top 10 albums of 2010) Whether you agree with lead singer James Murphy that LCD Soundsystem's ticket debacle was a scalper conspiracy or that the final show hype was some backroom deal made between the band and Terminal 5, the fervor to see LCD Soundsystem live one last time showed how ravenous people were for the underground group. (Okay, maybe you should feel a little guilty for not discovering them in time.) Nike Dunk shoes storeYou can always count on sold-out shows to be jammed packed with die-hard fans because no one in their right mind would wait for hours or pay exorbitant amounts of money to see just any band live. LCD Soundsystem knew that and catered directly to those needs. On the opening night of their last five final shows, the band played an epic three-hour concert. From the opening song Dance Yrself Clean, it was clear that people came to do one thing: dance the night away. Even though I had seen the band before, I knew I had to get tickets to one of their final shows. One thing that I enjoyed about LCD Soundsystem is that Murphy's producer sensibilities shone through their music. Whether you saw them live or listened to their albums, you got high-quality music from a group of rehearsed musicians who clearly loved what they did.Kids Dunk Low At Terminal 5, you could hear every ironically melancholy lyric that emanated from Murphy, and it wasn't drowned out by the crisp sound of the steady drumbeats or reverberating synthesizer notes. After the end of show's first hour, Murphy alerted the crowd that the band would return to the stage for not one, not two, but three encores. Each set seemed to represent the different musical styles that the band encapsulated in their brief, yet expansive career from rock to funk to pop to their own brand of dance floor tunes that appealed to this generation's rhythmless hipsters. By the time they closed the show with "New York I Love You, but You're Bringing Me Down," it was obvious that it was LCD Soundsystem that those in attendance were in love with, and they were depressed that the band was calling it quits. The expressions from the constantly swaying and pogoing crowd showed this night had been a religious experience for them. Nike Dunk SB Low Or, they experienced the concert on another level, thanks to some substances that weren't legally sold at the venue.
Cheap Nike outlet(TOKYO) Workers discovered new pools of radioactive water leaking from Japan's crippled nuclear
complex, officials said Monday, as emergency crews struggled to pump out hundreds of tons of contaminated water and bring the plant back under control.
Officials believe the contaminated water has sent radioactivity levels soaring at the coastal complex, and caused more radiation to seep into soil and
seawater.
The Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, 140 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, was crippled March 11 when a tsunami spawned by a powerful earthquake
slammed into Japan's northeastern coast. Nike Dunk shoes store The huge wave engulfed much of the complex, and destroyed the crucial power systems needed to cool the complex's nuclear fuel rods.
Since then, three of the complex's six units are believed to have partially melted down, and emergency crews have struggled with everything from
malfunctioning pumps to dangerous spikes in radiation that have forced temporary evacuations.
Confusion at the plant has intensified fears that the nuclear crisis will last weeks, months or years amid alarms over radiation making its way into produce,
raw milk and even tap water as far away as Tokyo. (See problems with Japan's tap water.)
Nike Dunk LowThe troubles at the Fukushima complex have eclipsed Pennsylvania's 1979 crisis at
Three Mile Island, when a partial meltdown raised fears of widespread radiation release, but is still well short of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, which killed
at least 31 people with radiation sickness, raised long-term cancer rates, and spewed radiation for hundreds of miles (kilometers).
While parts of the Japanese plant has been reconnected to the power grid, the contaminated water which has now been found in numerous places around the
complex, including the basements of several buildings must be pumped out before electricity can be restored to the cooling system.
Cheap Nike outletTPM's Brian Beutler reports that House Republicans are prepared to reject a White House offer to cut more than $30 billion from the federal budget over the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year. The sticking point, Beutler writes, is a dispute over whether some of the money should come from mandatory spending programs: Democrats are pushing for such cuts, which include the big entitlement programs, though the specific cuts they're proposing remain unclear. In an ironic twist, Republicans oppose those cuts and want to limit the negotiations to non-defense discretionary spending, a smaller subset of the federal budget. (The irony, of course, is that the GOP has pledged to include provisions to reform entitlement programs in its own 2012 budget, slated for a roll-out early next month.) With the prospect of averting a shutdown darkening by the hour, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blamed the impasse on the GOP's Tea Party wing. cheap Nike Dunk shoes "The biggest negotiation isn't between Republicans and Democrats, it's between Republicans and Republicans," the Nevada Democrat said. "The infighting between the Tea Party and the rest of the Republican Party, including the Republican leadership in Congress, is keeping our negotiating partner [from] the negotiating table." Reid certainly has cause for frustration. House Republican leaders have used the specter of a Tea Party revolt to pull off a coup: they're poised to get everything they originally wanted, plus additional concessions should they cajole their conference into accepting them. Less than two months ago, House Budget Chair Paul Ryan unveiled the party's target figure for 2011 spending reductions: $32 billion. It's roughly the same sum House Republicans are now balking at. For all the predictions that the Tea Party would box John Boehner into a corner, Republican leaders have so far wielded their rank-and-file hard -liners as a negotiating weapon.Kids Dunk High Of course, it's hard to say how much control Boehner actually exerts over the Tea Party caucus. By raising the stakes of the spending debate ever higher, they could just as easily be setting the Speaker up for a bruising fall.
iOS 5 Likely Pushed To The Fall After A Cloud Unveiling At WWDC
Women Nike Dunk SB LowMany people (including myself) were a bit disappointed that Apple didnt devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: its not coming anytime soon. In fact, the plan right now is to wait to launch iOS 5 until the fall, weve heard from two solid sources. If our sources are right, this would break the pattern of Apple unveiling the latest iOS iteration in the early spring, leading up to a summer launch alongside new iPhone hardware. The spring timetable usually reserved for an iOS roadmap event is why some were hoping Apple may just rope the details into the iPad 2 event. When that didnt happen, rumors quickly spread that there may be another event in April to talk iOS 5 (and MobileMe). Women Nike Dunk SB LowBut its looking like that will not be the case this year. But its not all bad news. Heres what were hearing right now: ■iOS 5 will launch in the fall and will be a major revamp of the OS. ■It could well be previewed at WWDC, it just wont be released then. ■The iOS 5 launch is also likely to coincide with the release of a new type of iPad, which we previously reported on. ■The new iOS will be heavily built around the cloud, and we could see several new services launch from Apple that take advantage of this. ■Yes, one of those is very likely a music locker service. There is also a fall launch aim for this, during Apples annual music-themed event. ■But much of the cloud stuff will first be talked about at WWDC, Apples developer event which will take place in June. ■One of the new cloud service elements is likely a location service that focuses on finding friends and family members. ■As we said yesterday, OS X Lion is still on pace for a summer release some of the new cloud components are likely to be baked into it as well. So the next obvious question is where does this leave the iPhone 5? Again, the standard model for Apple has been to release a new iPhone alongside the new iOS version. Women Nike Dunk LowWe havent heard anything specifically about the iPhone with this news, but I would guess that its still on track for a WWDC unveiling and release shortly thereafter. If thats the case, it will just be released with a version of iOS 4.X.
Nike outlet storeLady Gaga blared from the speakers as my 16 year old daughter drove away from the house. I didnt want to like Lady Gaga, but her duet with Elton John at the Grammys changed everything. She seemed to draw strength with every traded verse, turning his phrasing to her advantage, his blues to her power. This was not a generational shift, but a reach across the eras. Now there was my little girl moving out of sight with her precious cargo, our youngest daughter, on the way to school and beyond. For a second we glanced at each other with a nervous giggle, then drank in a day with new eyes. A day where the world prepares for the coming of the iPad. A day where health care reform was debated and both Democrats and Republicans were coaxed out of hiding. Whatever you think of the merits of the positions, the debate in Washington was good for both parties. Republicans came prepared, with a clever mixture of partisan politics and pragmatic courage to avoid crossing the line from talking points to personal insults and worse. cheap Nike Dunk shoes For their part, the Democrats let Obama carry the ball, getting away with it because of his skill and command of the details but finally showing the passion that fuels their cause if it is to prevail. The media was less impressive, with Fox Business News the only cable feed that stayed with most of the live coverage. MSNBC and CNN seem to have switched roles in the year-long debate, moving away to talking heads on the former to blather on repetitively before bailing altogether for the Olympics, while capturing more of the underlying dynamics on the latter. I finally gave up switching to stay with the event and watched the rest on the MacBook Air via CSPAN. Next stop, the iPad. The tech agenda seems similarly polarized, what with Buzz this and Facebook patents that. But I get the strong feeling that no one has yet succeeded in smoking out the real work that needs to be done in the few short weeks before the iPad arrives. Theres a lot of phony outrage about Apple and Google soaking Techmeme, as though big companies with aggressive agendas is something new and more fearsome because of the scale at which net giants operate. But I keep coming back to my daughter driving off to greet the day.Women Nike Dunk SB Low At some point we have to just hand over the keys and strike out in the new day. We shouldnt be so worried about demagogues in corporate boardrooms when we face them every day in our aggregators from every nook and cranny. Trading one clever pitchman for another does nothing to solve our problems, nor does it speak to the opportunities that lurk. It seems we havent learned what its like to be a child in parents clothing. We pretend we are adults while doing whatever we can to shift the burden of choices to circumstances, class, timing, and history. We search for signs of strength and chinks in the armor where we can attack and slingshot ahead. We sneer at the callous while coveting their power. The iPad is so difficult to handicap, say the daily newsbytes: youre no iPhone, they maintain. Women Nike Dunk SB Low But after missing the signals about the iPhone, then Twitter, then realtime, then Nexus One, we shouldnt mistake the new devices deficiencies for what will be unleashed over the new platform. Look through the new eyes of the initiate, where the open road holds limitless possibilities. So much of the social media stream is meant to be routed rather than absorbed, pushed to an expanding circle of tidal pools for decoration with our behavior. Even the latest entrant, Buzz, holds promise in its naive ready-to-be-enhanced template. Its surprisingly free of constraints at this early stage, ready to be hooked in and out of the stream and shared with other systems more and less tuned to this new public thoroughfare. Right now were floundering in the tyranny of middle age, thinking we know what blogging and tweeting and social graph are all about while at the same time already tiring of the glut of mediocrity and the lack of inspiration.Cheap Nike outlet The young and the old know better, flush with an appreciation of the time before them to celebrate or squander. The understanding that whatever words come next are to be laid out like diamonds in a row, subject only to the value they represent or create. We so quickly calcify our latest inventions in the rush to quantify them, not letting the rhythm and rhyme continue to build. We cash our chips in too early, playing it safe when the world could end at any second. All the while, the detectives caution us that the moment is not profound, that the results are already in or fixed, that we should not hope for too much lest we fall even shorter for dreaming. Its a shallow way to live, pretty much not at all.
