Monday, May 30, 2011

GOVERNO DO ESTADO NÃO APRESENTA PROPOSTA SALARIAL

Em reunião realizada hoje (30/05), entre o Sind-UTE/MG e a Secretaria de Estado da Educação, não foi apresentada nenhuma proposta para viabilizar o pagamento do Piso Salarial Profissional Nacional (PSPN), de acordo com a Lei 11.738/08.  O Governo também não apresentou a minuta de edital do concurso, alegando que está em fase final. A informação é de que ainda esta semana será encaminhada a minuta ao Sindicato.

O governo estadual apresentou sua versão para o Piso Salarial. De acordo com a Secretaria de Educação, o governo já paga o Piso através do subsídio. A Comissão de Negociação do Sind-UTE/MG refutou esta interpretação. Resgatou a decisão do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), que votou a Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade nº 4.167, estabelecendo exatamente o contrário da interpretação da Secretaria de Educação de Minas Gerais, ou seja, o Piso Salarial é composto apenas do vencimento básico, excluídas quaisquer vantagens e gratificações. O subsídio, ao contrário do Piso Salarial, é composto de toda a remuneração do profissional da educação. Portanto, subsídio não é Piso Salarial.

O Sind-UTE/MG deixou claro, ao final da reunião, que a posição do Governo do Estado pode desencadear uma nova greve por tempo indeterminado, uma vez que aguardamos por quase dois meses para que o Governo negociasse o Piso Salarial, o que não ocorreu. A categoria avaliará esta reunião no Conselho Geral e Assembleia Estadual, que serão realizadas amanhã, dia 31 de maio.

Fonte:http://www.sindutemg.org.br

GOVERNO DE MINAS PRORROGA MAIS UMA VEZ PRAZO PARA ESCOLHA DE REGIME DE REMUNERAÇÃO

Com o retorno em massa dos servidores ao regime de remuneração antiga o governo de Minas Gerais anunciou que irá prorrogar mais uma vez o prazo para o servidor escolher seu regime de remuneração. Com a campanha de esclarecimentos realizada pelo Sind-UTE, o servidor está percebendo a armadilha que representa o subsídio.

O servidor da Educação de Minas Gerais não quer o subsídio e sim o Piso Salarial Nacional. esperamos que nesses dois meses de prorrogação o governo anuncie o cumprimento da lei federal que instituiu o Piso Salarial Nacional da Educação. Em Muriaé, com as orientações efetuadas, percebemos grande retorno dos servidores ao regime antigo...e isso, é questão de muito bom senso !

AnnaLynne McCord's Sunny NY Candids

Out and about in Manhattan on May 27 was a summery-looking AnnaLynne McCord. Matching in with her nails, AnnaLynne wore some bright yellow shorts, even more color coming along with her zesty Somaly Foundation beads.Her current fave Miu Miu leather bag and Ray-Ban brand sunglasses accessorized.If you're brave enough to try out the yellow shorts look yourself, check out Volcom's Frochickie II

Paris Hilton's Purple One-Shoulder Look

Paris Hilton looked glam in purple for her appearance at the Young Hollywood Studio back on May 17.Paris wore a purple one-shouldered dress with slick black Dior sunnies, and high hidden platform pumps.Get a similar style to Paris with the £27 Dorothy Perkins Purple One Shoulder Dress.Pics from Celebrity-Paradise

Taylor Swift's Girly Shopping Candids

Out shopping in L.A., Taylor Swift was in her usual girly style wearing a white full-skirted dress with a cardigan, her Ralph Lauren satchel, and uber-girly pink bow-topped heels.For a similar pink shoes look, see Enzo Angiolini's "Mezzo" Pumps. in Light Pink Patent, costing $69.30.Pics from taylorpictures.net

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Short Layered Hairstyles

wedding_hairstyles_down_curly

justin bieber new haircut 2011

justin bieber new haircut 2011haircut-plus-you-can-get-his-cut-off-hair2BIEBER-CUT-2ent_bieberjustin bieber haircutJustin_bieber_Hair_cutJustinBieber1justin-bieber-new-haircutJustin-Bieber-Never-Say-Neverjustinbiebernewhaircutjustin-bieber-new-haircut-

Memorial Day

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President Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg Address
Audio -- Johnny Cash
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gettysburgaddress.htm

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'Il Silencio' (The Silence)
The conductor of the orchestra is Andre Rieu from Holland.
Melissa Venema, age 13, is the trumpet soloist.
The Original version of Taps was called Last Post, and was written by Daniel Butterfield in 1801. It was rather lengthy and formal, as you will hear in this clip, so in 1862 it was shortened to 24 notes and re-named Taps. Melissa Venema is playing it on a trumpet whereby the original was played on a bugle.
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http://www.flixxy.com/trumpet-solo-melissa-venema.htm
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Vietnam War Casualties Listed by Home of Record-
http://www.virtualwall.org/iStates.htm
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Cpl. Jared Kubasak's FCJrROTC Scholarship
Franklin County Virginia
http://www.lars1.com/Kubasak/
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Arlington National Cemetary
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/photo_gallery/index.html
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Medal of Honor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor
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If I Die Before You Wake
Tribute to Our Troops
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRWoWoX1ugI
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Saturday, May 28, 2011

Kim Kardashian's Glam White Look

With her new Lorraine Schwartz engagement ring on show, Kim Kardashian may have had bridal dresses in mind when she picked out this white halter for the Amber Fashion Show in Monte Carlo on May 27. Gold accessories of a McQueen Knuckleduster clutch and Christian Louboutin heels complimented the dress perfectly.Pics from Zimbio

Miley's Mexican Photocall Look

Promoting her Gypsy Heart tour in Mexico on May 26, Miley Cyrus wore the boho-rocker look of sheer top and black bustier (both from WTB) along with dark pants, brown booties and a mix of ethnic jewelry. Pics from Celebrity-Gossip

Selena Gomez's Bikini Style

Selena Gomez and beau Justin Bieber have been soaking up the rays in Maui.Selena showed off her cute bod' in a fuschia pink bandeau bikini from American Eagle. Later she covered up in white shorts from the brand and a white macrame top.Selena's items are now either unavailable or sold-out but, for a similar bikini look, see Lands' End's Bandeau Bikini, in Violet Rose. Pics from Flynet

January Jones' New York Promo Styles

January Jones has been out in New York promoting her new movie X-Men: First Class.At the premiere on May 25, January wore a Preen dress and Prada heels.The eye make-up, although not so great from a distance, looked much better close up and really made her blue peepers pop.It was much the same color palette the following day when January wore a blue-and-black Doo.Ri dress with nude Rosegold heels

Amber Heard's 3.1 Phillip Lim Dress

An elegant look from Ms. Amber Heard here, as she attended the Twentieth Century Fox Television even on May 26.Amber was wearing a beige-and-black 3.1 Phillip Lim dress with black Brian Atwood heels.Unlike with a lot of celeb styles, Amber's Silk-Blend Organza and Lace dress is currently widely available, on-line at brownsfashion and net-a-porter to name just a few sites currently stocking it. 

ALESSANDRO RAHO, NEW PAINTINGS


Alessandro Raho, 'Pablo', Oil on canvas, 274 x 198 cm, 2011


Pablo and Adham


Jessica and Jessica


Alessandro Raho, 'Jessica', Oil on canvas, 264 x 195 cm, 2011


Alessandro Raho, 'Adele', Oil on canvas, 271 x 195 cm, 2011


Alessandro Raho, 'Ewan', Oil on canvas, 271 x 195 cm, 2011


Ewan again


and Ewan and Pablo


Press Release:
ALESSANDRO RAHO
The Pavilion of Realism
11 May - 24 June 2011

Internationally renowned Alessandro Raho, one of the youngest artists to be included in the groundbreaking "Brilliant! New Art from London" at the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis in 1995, is to present one of his most important exhibitions to date. Opening on 11 May 2011 at Thomas Williams Fine Art, the artist will show a selection of innovative large-scale portraits. Deliberately choosing to paint siblings and friends, Raho's subjects directly look back at us, challenging our gaze whilst stimulating our sense of emotional engagement. On display will be two life-size male and female nudes; the artist's first attempt at the subject. While contemporary culture is saturated with pornography and artificially enhanced bodies, these two figures deliberately stand apart. Unexposed and uncorrupted, their sense of autonomy is preserved with powerful effect. In this must-see exhibition, Alessandro Raho's new work undeniably affirms is position as a principle figure in the generation of contemporary artists leading the current revival of figurative painting in the UK.

Alessandro Raho was born in the Bahamas in 1971. After training at Goldsmith's College, London for a degree in Fine Art he has gone on to achieve international acclaim. His previous exhibition venues include the Kunsthalle, Basel, Cheim and Reid in New York and Taro Nasu in Tokyo, to name a few. In 2004 Raho was commissioned by London's National Portrait Gallery to paint the actress Dame Judi Dench. Examples of his work can be found in many important public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Berardo Collection, Lisbon. He lives and works in London.

Thomas Williams Fine Art Ltd
22 Old Bond Street, London
http://www.thomaswilliamsfineart.com/exhibitions/42

http://www.alessandroraho.com/

Friday, May 27, 2011

Global Cooling Will Stop Tornadoes

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Roanoke Times, 5-26-11, Pg 1 & and 7; Global Warming Causing Tornadoes
Global warming “may” be storm culprit says "a scientist"
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If Global Warming is causing Tornadoes, then Global Cooling Will Stop Tornadoes, Right? You know, Global Cooling like we had from 1940 to 1975! Apparently you can’t make two wrongs equal a right!
http://denisdutton.com/newsweek_coolingworld.pdf
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This article, like most of its ilk, expounds on the Gore-AWG opinions of someone labeled a “scientist” without any data or references to data to support any of the claims or hypothesis. This is yet another Roanoke Times propagation of Gore&Associates Alarmist Heifer-Dust. Do they get paid to push this stuff, or is this just a free ad for their friends? There is no valid scientific data anywhere that establishes a cause-and-effect relationship between tornadoes and our less than one degree-C temperature rise in the last 130 years (1880 to 2010). Stop publishing this pseudo-science tripe in the gross effort to mislead and scare the public!
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There is something called “Tornado Alley” in the US and it has been in existence for many years, well before any warming issues became the current “boogey-man” to explain any and all of earth’s weather anomalies.
“One of the deadliest tornado in American history was invisible. In 1925, the Tri-State Tornado ravaged a mile-wide path for 220 miles across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana at 60 to 70 mph—twice the forward speed of the average tornado. It lacked the classic funnel cloud, but the damage was catastrophic: nearly 2,000 people were injured, property losses totaled more than $16 million, and over 700 people died. This event also held the known record for most tornado fatalities in a single city or town: at least 234 in Murphysboro, Illinois.”
http://www.fwmuseum.org/tornado-alley-0
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There is a cataloguing program that is documenting US tornadoes. They have only gone back to 1950, but have already documented 54,529 tornadoes resulting in 5,064 people killed. Their web site shows the map locations of these storms. Hopefully they will be able to extend their research back to 1900 which would include the above example.
TornadoHistoryProject.com
Over 54,500 tornado maps. U.S. tornadoes 1950-2010.*
Click-on link to view maping of all 54,500 tornadoes.
http://www.tornadohistoryproject.com/custom/592136
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Tornadoes, over time, should not be measured by their impacts to people and facilities. In 1920 there were 106 million people in the US, now there are 308 million.
From a tornado’s view we have become a “target-rich environment”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get back to real-science and the scientific-method that served us so well and leave tabloid tripe to the tabloids!
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Prior Items:
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/05/crop-loss-and-heifer-dust.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-im-skeptical-of-man-caused-global.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2010/12/blizzards-of-2010-yet-more-global.html
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MATHIEU COPELAND, 'STUDIES FOR AN EXHIBITION' AT DAVID ROBERTS ART FOUNDATION, LONDON



Recreation of Gustav Metzger’s 1956 exhibition/display covering the windows of 30Queens, Kings Lynn, with posters he collected of the exhibition This is Tomorrow shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956/2011. Courtesy of the artist. With thanks to Tate Archive and Adrian Glew.


exhibition view




Elena Bajo, Illusion, Delusion, Allusion: The Order of Anarchy (Studies for a Movement at 66 r.p.m), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and D+T Project, Brussels.


Niele Toroni, Quand les empreintes de pinceau n°50 s’affichent sur leurs affiches – Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Pietro Sparta, Chagny.


An Exhibition to Hear Read/Une Exposition à être lue, Volume 3. Daily readings at 2pm.


exhibition view with reading plattform





Karin Sander, Mailed Paintings, 2004 - 2011. Courtesy of the artist.


Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical, 2011. Courtesy of the artists. Booklets available at the front desk.




Study for an exhibition of violence in contemporary art, Institute of Contemporary Art’, February-March 1964.


Emma Bjornesparr, The Commercial Waste Collection, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.


curators’ series # 4
Studies for an Exhibition
07.04.2011 -11.06.2011.

With Elena Bajo, Robert Barry, Emma Bjornesparr, Jarrod Fowler, Nicolas Garait, Karl Holmqvist, Bethan Huws, David Medalla, Gustav Metzger, Roman Opalka, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Karin Sander, Yann Sérandour, Cally Spooner, Sue Tompkins, and Niele Toroni.

an exhibition by Mathieu Copeland.

Mathieu Copeland is the fourth guest curator invited by The David Roberts Art Foundation to be part of the Curators’ Series. Studies for an Exhibition, explores how exhibitions are to be envisaged in regard to transient thoughts – an art that reveals itself through time, as movements of transitions, as possible studies giving the feeling of what is, and what can be.

Following a desire to not fix in form an exhibition to be, Studies for an Exhibition brings together practices that explore the possibilities of immateriality and the temporal nature of an art object. The question of time and accumulation is adamant to an exhibition that considers a recycling of our current reality as the means to generate transitory new forms.

Moments of history are revisited, as with the recreation of Gustav Metzger’s 1956 display/appropriation of the posters advertising the seminal show at the Whitechapel Gallery This Is Tomorrow, which he used to cover the entire shop windows of his then second hand shop/exhibition space 30Queens in Kings Lynn. A means to advertise what was tomorrow then, the posters can be read in parallel to the altered exhibition posters by Niele Toroni, who painted over posters advertising his own exhibitions, thereby blurring the moment of the original shows and when these are painted, and shown. Past realities are again revisited and appropriated when confronted with the entire ‘bootleg’ of a 1964 ICA exhibition entitled Study for an exhibition of violence in contemporary art.

In relation to these works of past and present readings, the ‘mailed paintings’ by Karin Sander create in the space of the gallery an unstable hanging as these are being mailed back and forth to the artist in Berlin for the duration of the exhibition. The paintings capture their own reality by acquiring marks as they travel unprotected from one place to the next. As an echo to this reality in motion for an exhibition to be, Emma Bjornesparr addresses the location of the gallery and the habits of consumption. Through a temporary sculpture that frames the entire time of an exhibition in saving the accumulated waste, the artist creates the inversed portrait of the host institution.

Since 1972 Roman Opalka marks time through the progressive inscription of numbers painted from one to infinity. The constant evolution of these paintings is accompanied by a tape recording of his own voice saying the numbers out loud as he writes them. By disseminating these recordings in the space of the gallery we are projected into an ephemeral experience of time.

Accumulation of knowledge is the focus of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’ work. Exotismo Ordinario Internacional Neotropical is an archive based on their ongoing research into plants from the neotropical region. As part of this continuous study, a series of booklets will be handed out. Elena Bajo’s commission is to be dreamt, forgotten, drawn on a wall or indeed erased. Showing the process of becoming, it is a piece that is all of its studies, changes and potentialities, echoing the exhibition in becoming a study for all that it can and could be.

And as yet another possible study discussing the form of an exhibition, Mathieu Copeland has edited a new publication, the third volume of his series entitled An Exhibition to Hear Read/Une Exposition à être lue. The book will be read out at 2pm every day for the duration of the exhibition. This publication features text based artworks by Robert Barry, Jarrod Fowler, Nicolas Garait, Karl Holmqvist, Bethan Huws, David Medalla, Yann Sérandour, Cally Spooner, and Sue Tompkins. These contributions consider the relation between a text as an art piece to be and its spoken realisation, questioning the ‘performativity’ of the act of reading from a book.

The David Roberts Art Foundation
111 Great Titchfield Street
London W1W 6RY
http://www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

http://www.mathieucopeland.net

Video Archives of Presentation of Internet of Things Conference

According to the latest communication of the  IoT 2011 Secretariat the video archives of the presentations of the Conference devoted to Internet of Things are available on the conference webpage: http://www.iot-budapest.eu/

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Yet More Left-wing Hate Speech And Vile Slurs

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Ed Schultz has been suspended (FOR ONE WEEK!) from MSNBC for calling conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham a "right wing slut" on his syndicated radio show.
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ONE WEEK! The penalty is more gross and obscene than the crime!
Yet more left-wing nasty speech that the liberal media treats as OK while jumping upon any conservative deviation from the politically correct path.
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Is there any company anywhere in the US where an employee who commits this level of obscene and unacceptable behavior on company business and in a public forum would not be dismissed?
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Where are the expressions of outrage from the Editorial Girls at the Roanoke Times?
Have they compromised their ethical standards in order to stay entrenched in the left-wing liberal club?
It’s time to take off your NOW-bras and slam the purveyors of vile slurs against one of your media-sisters!  And where are your NOW sorority sisters at times like this?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110525/ts_yblog_thecutline/msnbcs-ed-schultz-suspended-after-calling-laura-ingraham-a-right-wing-slut
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It is very disturbing that in addition to the nasty liberal lawmakers like Schumer and Waters who are often joined by friends like Sharpton and Jackson and Rheiner we must also endure a stream of nasty-mouthed extreme leftists on MSNBC of the likes of Keith Olbermann and Uncle Ed!
The recent Union thugs in Wisconsin and their Representatives and Media supporters reached a level bordering on mob-action with little reaction by the major media.
Unfortunately the Liberal-Media looks the other way, away from their friends and associates, just as many parents explain: “My child would never do that and if he did it wasn’t his fault!”
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Some prior items:
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/02/left-wing-and-democrat-hate-speech.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/01/only-conservatives-use-dangerous.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2009/06/david-gutter-mouth-letterman-friends.html
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Wednesday, May 25, 2011

DAVID LAMELAS: SOME NOTES ON HIS OWN HISTORY AND ON ARGENTINEAN ART HISTORY


drawing of the installation of 'Connection of three spaces' also known as 'Extension of a limited spatial volume' made in 1966 at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, revisited by David Lamelas in his current exhibition at Bloomberg Space in London



drawing of one of David Lamelas very early works in his first solo show at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires in 1964. Three large-scale pop paintings of tango singer Carlos Gardel, the paintings were fragmented in parts and included paint drippings. As Lamelas himself noted about the exhibition "The theme isn't painting but the questioning of popular myth", quote in 'Listen, here, now!: Argentine art of the 1960s: writings of the avant-garde' edited by Inés Katzenstein, MOMA, NY, 2004, p. 339




A brief an selected history of Argentinean art.


David Lamelas
David Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946, he lives and works in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires. Lamelas studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes [National Fine Arts Academy] in Buenos Aires. During the 1960s he was one of the leaders of the vanguard movement that was spawned at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella. In 1968 he traveled to London and studied at St. Martin’s School of Arts with a British Council grant. In 1978 he moved to Los Angeles; in 1988 he took up residence in New York and from 1991 to 1997 divided his time between New York and Brussels. In 1998 and 1999 he lived in Berlin, and since 1999 has been dividing his time between Los Angeles, Paris and New York.

He was the Argentinean representative at the 9th Sao Paulo Biennial (1967), where he received the Sao Paulo Biennial Award for his installation; he also represented Argentina at the 34th Venice Biennial (1968). In 1972 he took part in Documenta 5, Kassel. A retrospective exhibition of his work, David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, was shown at Rotterdam’s Witte de With and Munich’s Kunstyerein in 1997. He received a Guggenheim grant in 1993, and in 1997 was awarded another by the German Academic Exchange Service, (DAAD), Germany. In 2001, London’s Royal College of Arts organized a symposium on his work.

Lamelas has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions, among them an anthological exhibition, David Lamelas: Extranjero, Foreigner, Étranger, Auslander, held in 2005 at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. Others include: America, the Bride of the Sun: 500 years of Latin America and the Low Countries, Antwerp (1992); Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965-75, Los Angeles (1995); Global Conceptualism - Points of Origin 1950s-1980s; MIT List Visual Arts Centre, Cambridge, and Bronx Museum of Art, New York (2000); Live in your Head, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2000); Beyond Geometry, Experiments in Form, 1940s-1970s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2002), and Behind the Facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975, Fundación Joan Miró, Barcelona (2003).

David Lamelas' work can currently be seen at his exhibition in Bloomberg Space
http://www.bloombergspace.com/archive/comma36_essay.html

For more of David's work, visit
http://www.spruethmagers.com/artists/david_lamelas
and
http://www.janmot.com/david_lamelas/index.php

UVA And Global Warming Alarmists Court Ordered To Let Sunshine In

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The Elitist Global Warming Alarmists who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money are finally being forced to share with the public the who, how, when and where of their secret activities.
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It is difficult to envisage the level of arrogance of people, working in secret, who are directing the governments of the world to enact draconian changes to world energy policy, who refuse to make their data public and who refuse to openly and fairly debate the parameters of their hypothesis.
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Court Orders University of Virginia to Produce Documents of Dr. Michael Mann

If you cannot read this press release, please click here: http://www.atinstitute.org/court-orders-university-of-virginia-to/

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Contacts:
Christopher Horner, chris.horner@atinstitute.org
Paul Chesser, paul.chesser@atinstitute.org

MANASSAS, Va.—On Tuesday, more than four months after the American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center requested emails and other files from a specific University of Virginia back-up computer, the University was hauled into court and made to stand and agree to comply with the Commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Under Virginia’s FOIA, ATI and co-petitioner Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Manassas) asked UVA to disgorge the emails and files that Virginia’s Attorney General also sought under other authority. The emails are specific communications sent and received by Dr. Michael Mann during his tenure at UVA in which he corresponded with, or discussed other, leading voices that represent the climate alarmist perspective. Seminal among them include discussions about his now infamous and discredited 1,000-year temperature reconstruction known as the “hockey stick.” There also already appears — from records ATI has received – to be additional information of the kind released in the “Climategate” emails that originated at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University.

Under FOIA the University was required to produce the documents within five days of its receipt of payment for “accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching” for the documents. Alternatively they could have entered into an agreement with ATI on when they would supply the documents, or they could have gone to court to ask for more time. They did none of the above. Instead they promised to provide some of the documents “shortly” on April 6; then specifically on May 6, 2011; and always stated they would get to the others later on. They did none of this either, so ATI went to court to compel production and compliance with the law.

ATI finally received the first approximately 20 percent of the 9,000 pages of documents that UVA says are responsive to ATI’s request and that it possesses, only after ATI filed its petition ( http://tinyurl.com/3blfohb ) , and two working days before the judicial hearing. Most of what ATI received in this seemingly hurried production, which was more focused on showing volume than content, were ads for Halloween costumes, public news releases from lay and scientific journals, and a few emails that were printed in computer code so as to be unintelligible in that form. Despite this product of (according to the University) 75 hours of review and more than four months, the University stopped work on producing anything further. Nevertheless some substance made it through UVA’s filter, which ATI will discuss after we review the withheld records.

The failure of UVA to honor its own commitments or to follow the law forced ATI to petition the court for relief. ATI filed its petition on May 16th, and the Court heard the matter Tuesday.

It took a petition to force UVA to agree to produce the documents that by statute they should already have produced. The day before the court hearing, UVA finally agreed to a date when they must produce all the documents they believe are not protected from disclosure. The court entered an order ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Production-Order.pdf ) that forces UVA to honor that agreement and to produce the documents in easy-to-read electronic form so that ATI can make them available to all who wish to review the work of this highly controversial former Virginia employee. They must produce those documents by August 22nd.

In addition ATI has won the right to look at all the documents beginning no later than September 21, including those the University refuses to make public. The court issued a protective order ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Protective-Order.pdf ) that allows ATI’s attorneys, David Schnare and Christopher Horner, to see them all so that they can challenge any further UVA refusals to supply what the public paid for. The records constitute a history of the “hockey stick” and the activities of Michael Mann, who also during the relevant time served on, e.g., the UN’s IPCC, all of which have been the subject of intense scrutiny.

“By the end of this year, ATI and UVA will obtain judicial review of the University’s obligation to fulfill the public’s right to know how taxpayer-funded employees use the taxpayer’s resources,” said Mr. Horner, director of litigation at ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “The court will determine whether this can be hidden behind the ivy covered walls of our public colleges and universities under a non-existent FOIA exemption of ‘academic freedom,’ which Virginia’s legislature has never recognized.”

ATI also put a final issue before the court. Under the Virginia FOIA, UVA is not allowed to impose fees on ATI to recoup the general costs of creating or maintaining records, or of transacting the general business of the University. The University has already admitted that it must obey several laws in fulfillment of its duty to protect some of its records, such as medical files and student information. This is part of the business of the University, just as any governmental body must protect its sensitive records. UVA, however, demanded that ATI pay $8,500 to offset UVA’s costs of doing precisely this regular business, which must be performed when releasing any information, under any authority. ATI argued, and existing case law indicates, this is simply not allowed. The University disagreed, and the court will issue its opinion on that matter on June 15th.

“ATI pursues important public issues,” said Dr. Schnare, director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center. “This case is about whether the government can put up a pay wall to frustrate the public’s right to transparency. If it can, the public can’t hold government employees to the high standards of conduct they should meet.”

See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order to Produce Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Production-Order.pdf ).

See Prince William County (Va.) Court’s Order on Protection of Documents in ATI Environmental Law Center’s Freedom of Information Act case against the University of Virginia ( http://www.atinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATI-v-UVA-5-24-Protective-Order.pdf ).

For an interview with American Tradition Institute senior director of litigation Christopher Horner, email chris.horner@atinstitute.org or call (202)670-2680.
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Some Prior Appropriate RoanokeSlant Blog Items:
http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/01/yes-virginia-uva-you-do-have-to-share.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2010/12/blizzards-of-2010-yet-more-global.html
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http://roanokeslant.blogspot.com/2011/05/crop-loss-and-heifer-dust.html
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