The Secret Behind USTigers' Winning Record

Champions are made, not born. It takes a family to produce a potential champion; and an old Chinese Proverb says that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When Brandon Ivey, Christian Yun, and Josh Liu and other champions from the USTigers Taekwondo School were ready, the master teacher appeared. That teacher is Master Dennis Kim from the USTigers World Taekwondo Federation School of Taekwondo, Haymarket, VA. Master Dennis is also an Olympic coach to the USA International Taekwondo Olympic Team.

                                                    
              (Master Dennis Kim with the 2013 Washington,DC Sparring Champion's Trophy)      

                                   

 He has been recognized by the Governor of the State of Virginia for his contributions to the State of Virginia.

Master Dennis was appointed an advisory member of theWorld Taekwondo Federation Headquarters at Kukkiwon in Seoul, Korea.

 Josh Liu has been a member of the USA Taekwondo Cadet National Team multiple times. Most recently, he represented USA at teh Cadet World Taekwondo Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan in July, 2014.

http://cgacriticalthinkers.blogspot.com/2014/04/brandon-ivey-has-reclaimed-world.html

 On March 23, 2014 Brando Ivey represented the USA in the World WTF Taekwondo Championship Tournament in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. He defeated FIVE heavy weight black belt fighters from various countries around the World. It was a single elimination tournament and Brandon went undefeated.

(Master Dennis Kim, above far right, with his twin brother Master Alex Kim, left foreground, and  Brandon Ivey, 2014 Junior World Heavyweight Taekwondo Black Belt Champion.)

 Brandon Ivey has studied the Taekwondo art since he was 7, learning "the way of the fist and the foot" and its tenets of discipline and respect from Master Dennis Kim.

"He wants to win so bad, he's willing to go that extra mile to make it happen," said Kim, owner of the US Tigers school and a coach for USA Taekwondo, the sport's governing body in this country. "His desire to win is greater than anyone else I've ever trained."
http://www.loudountimes.com/sports/article/the_path_to_the_top_ivey_brings_world_junior_taekwondo_championship_home
  A Blogger commented that the USTigers' website doesn't do them justice. Current students of USTigers have the privilege of being steeped in raw potential: all instructors at USTigers are Kukkiwon-certified fourth-degree black belts or higher, and have competed at national or international levels in Taekwondo, either in Poomsae (forms) or competition sparring. Regular classes over the past four weeks have been taught by Masters Charlie and Kyle, both friendly and vibrant characters who clearly possess skill enough to teach even higher-degree black belts and an earnestness to teach that makes even the newest beginner feel welcome. USTigers also apparently has very close ties to Phoenix Taekwondo, another local dojang, and Phoenix's excellent instructors (namely Masters Won and Jeong) have visited to teach classes. Upon simple conversation with Master Dennis Kim, the proprietor of USTigers, it is clear that he is much more concerned with instilling the values and skills of Taekwondo in his students than he is with extracting their pocketbooks. The system of payment works much more similarly to a gym than to other dojang that the reviewer has visited: students pay once a month and are allowed to attend as often or as little as they like, with there being a class to attend nearly every day of the week. However, the belt-testing system occurs and is paid for separately, and not attending classes will probably have an effect on the length of time it takes to be allowed to escalate in belt level. Finally, USTigers has the gamut of competitive teams: a sparring team (the S.E.T or Sparring Elite Team), a Poomsae team, and a Demonstration team. Practices and qualification for these teams are both extremely rigorous, and has as a result produced several outstanding members. The S.E.T, especially, has seen a two-time United States Junior Olympic team member, as well as a Virginia State Champion in Taekwondo; Master Dennis is, himself, an assistant coach on the United States National Team for Taekwondo. 
https://plus.google.com/110303337633094796208/about

 As a 10-year-old, Christian Yun envisioned big plans for himself in the Taekwondo realm—he craved a spot on the U.S. Junior National Taekwondo Team. It was a five-year process, but Christian finally achieved that goal.
From the beginning, Christian has trained with Master Dennis Kim, owner of USTigers Taekwondo, for about 12 hours per week Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The student/coach relationship has lasted eight years and is ongoing.
Originally, Kim’s business was based in Ashburn. He later opened another location in Gainesville and operated both schools until 2010, when he handed over the Ashburn location, which is now called Phoenix Taekwondo. He now solely works out of the Gainesville location, which is still titled USTigers.
Christian’s sessions with Kim resemble those of CrossFit, a core strength and conditioning program. “My belief is that if you don’t have the body for it, you just won’t succeed, so we work on their body a lot,” Kim said, noting his students don’t spend the majority of their workouts kicking and punching, despite stereotypes.
The vigorous training has obviously been worth it, as Christian has competed on the regional, state and, of course, national level.
 http://www.leesburgtoday.com/news/article_e18824b4-d1e9-11e1-a20d-0019bb2963f4.html?TNNoMobile

Federal Employees Allowed To Access Porn Sites On Government Computers During Work Hours

One man's art is another man's porn. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

 The Birth of Venus is a 1486 painting by Sandro Botticelli. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as an adult woman, arriving at the sea-shore. The painting is on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Bathsheba at Her Bath (or Bathsheba with King David's Letter) is an oil painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt (1606–1669) finished in 1654. A depiction that is both sensual and empathetic, it shows a moment from the Old Testament story in which King David sees Bathsheba bathing and, entranced, seduces and impregnates her.

David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture created between 1501 and 1504, by the Italian artist Michelangelo.
The statue has been reproduced many times. The plaster cast of David at the Victoria and Albert Museum has a detachable plaster fig leaf which is displayed nearby. The fig leaf was created in response to Queen Victoria's shock upon first viewing the statue's nudity, and was hung on the figure prior to royal visits, using two strategically placed hooks.
By the 20th century, Michelangelo's David had become iconic shorthand for "culture". David has been endlessly reproduced, in plaster and imitation marble fibreglass, signifying an attempt to lend an atmosphere of culture even in some unlikely settings such as beach resorts, gambling casinos and model railroads.
Peter Paul Rubens was a proponent of the extravagant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality.

He was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, and "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes.

He was a classically educated humanist scholar and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, King of Spain, and Charles I, King of England.

Religion figured prominently in much of his work and Rubens later became one of the leading voices of the Catholic Counter-Reformation style of painting (he had said "My passion comes from the heavens, not from earthly musings").

His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women.

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter . He is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body. His works are marked by a frank eroticism. One of the works most popularly associated with his golden period is  The Kiss (shown above)(1907–08).
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I cannot give a working definition of porn, or of art that everyone would agree on; but, I agree with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
Justice Potter Stewart is best known for a quotation from his opinion in the obscenity case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). Stewart wrote in his short concurrence that "hard-core pornography" was hard to define, but that "I know it when I see it.

For one Federal Communications Commission worker, his porn habit at work was easy to explain: Things were slow, he told investigators, so he perused it “out of boredom” — for up to eight hours each week.
Lack of work has emerged time and again in federal investigations, and it’s not just porn, nor is it confined to the FCC. Across government, employees caught wasting time at work say they simply didn’t have enough work to do, according to investigation records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

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“He stated he is aware it is against government rules and regulations, but he often does not have enough work to do and has free time,” investigators wrote of another federal employee, this one at the Treasury Department, who viewed more than 13,000 pornographic images in a six-week span.
Investigations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Commerce Department and the General Services Administration have turned up similar cases, though memos show the employees rarely face criminal prosecution for time and attendance fraud.
A spokesman for the FCC declined to comment on what, if any, action the agency took after the FCC’s inspector general singled out the eight-hour-a-week porn peeper.

Enlarge Photo

Brian Miller, a former inspector general for the General Services Administration, said federal managers may be hoarding resources, including employees who have little work to do.

FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield said only that the agency follows Office of Personnel Management guidelines on disciplinary matters and officials could not comment on specific cases.
In another recent case, a GSA employee who spent about two hours a day on a computer looking at pornography and dating sites “sometimes became bored during these long hours at the computer and would often use the computer for personal use to pass the time,” according to a case report by the GSA inspector general last year.
In a more recent and far more costly example, U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board paralegals received salaries and bonuses for years even though they spent much of their time watching television, shopping online, exercising and wasting time on their tablet computers, according to an investigation released this week by the Commerce Department’s inspector general. Investigators estimate that more than $4 million was spent paying employees for time they weren’t working.

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The paralegals, who can’t create their own work, later told investigators that the reason was simple: Supervisors weren’t giving them any assignments. Some supervisors were reluctant to give paralegals special projects out of fear that the assignments could antagonize the labor union.Brian Miller, a former GSA inspector general who is now managing director of the consulting firm Navigant, said executives may feel reluctant to let go of employees.
“Today, federal managers are under many constraints,” he said. “With hiring freezes and budget limitations, a federal manager may hoard resources, squirreling them away for fear of losing even unneeded resources.
“It takes a very strong manager to stand up and do the unpopular thing: to manage resources efficiently.”
No matter what evidence the inspector general turns up, he said, it’s ultimately up to the agencies to hold employees accountable.
“At the end of the day, an IG may recommend a course of action, but the IG has no power to make it happen,” he said. “An IG warns, reports, and recommends, but agency managers administer disciplinary actions and make changes in the agency.”
Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union, said there is no doubt that downtime contributes to federal workplace downtime.

“There’s a reason that saying about idle hands has such a long lineage,” Mr. Sepp said. “Not everyone with excess time in the workplace will spend it helping their colleagues get caught up or knitting clothes for the less fortunate,” he said.
“There needs to be a balanced approach to reform here, one that provides more flexibility to reassign workers’ duties, aggressive enforcement of whistleblower protections, incentives for agencies and managers that save tax dollars, and penalties for those that fail to properly oversee them,” Mr. Sepp said.
Some administration officials have come under criticism for allowing workers to remain on the job even in the face of clear misconduct findings.
In March, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee railed against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not firing several employees involved in misconduct investigations. The employees included a senior executive who investigators said hired friends and family and sold weight loss products from the office.
The Washington Times reported on other time and attendance issues at HUD this year. One case involved an auditor who worked on private business from the office and later said work sometimes was impossible because the department’s computers were frequently down.

(McElhatton, Jim; Feds Go easy On Bored Workers Surfing Porn, The Washington Times, p. A-1, Aug. 1, 2014)