#being a problem is also a significant part of why i use heavyweights. as i had demonstrated to that player in some prior matches. teehee

[beatcroc]

[arcticdementor]

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate or discussion about their views, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it for ages, probably a year at this point. Surely you’ll have noticed that they don’t tend to engage in debates or conversation?

It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation.

…

There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.

…

The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.

In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.

…

Bailey’s point is clear: the usual tools by which we identify provisional truths and settle scholarly disagreements are part of the hegemonically dominant system that, by definition, cannot be sufficiently radical to create real revolutionary change (a “third-order” change, as Dotson has it). That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.

The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.

…

Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place. Critical Social Justice Theorists genuinely believe getting away from the “master’s tools” is necessary to break the hegemony of the dominant modes of thought. Debate is a no-win for them.

Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.

…

Secondly, the organizing principle of their worldview is that two things structure society: discourses and systems of power maintained by discourses. Regarding the systems of power, their underlying belief is genuinely that of the Critical Theorists: society is divided into oppressors versus oppressed, and the oppressors condition the beliefs and culture of society such that neither they nor the oppressed are aware of the realities of their oppression. That is, everyone who isn’t “Woke” to the realities of systemic oppression lives in a form of false consciousness. Members of dominant groups have internalized their dominance by accepting it as normal, natural, earned, and justified and therefore are unaware of the oppression they create. Members of “minoritized” groups have often internalized their oppression by accepting it as normal, natural, and just the way things are and are therefore unaware of the extent of the oppression they suffer or its true sources. In both cases, though in different ways and to different ends, the falsely conscious need to be awakened to a critical consciousness, i.e., become Critical Theorists.

Adherents to this worldview will not want to have conversations or debate with people who do not possess a critical consciousness because there’s basically no point to doing such a thing. Unless they can wake their debate or conversation partner up to Wokeness on the spot, they’d see it as though they’re talking to zombies who can’t even think for themselves. Unwoke people are stuck thinking in the ways dominant and elite powers in society have socialized them into thinking (you could consider this a kind of conditioning or brainwashing by the very machinations of society and how it thinks). We will return to this aspect of the problem further down in the essay.

…

Again, it is difficult to express from within the liberal paradigm (to their point, I guess) just how fully and profoundly they believe this. Their view constructs, in fact, a metaphysics of discourses that, in some sense, becomes the operative mythology underlying all of society and its operation. Because of the already critical orientation of the postmodernists and then the further amplification of taking on Critical Theory much more fully later, Critical Social Justice views this metaphysics of discourses in a very particular way with regard to the moral valence of how discourses are constructed.

…

That’s a bit complicated, I admit, and so a simplification of this idea is that adherents to Critical Social Justice see discourses—ways we think it is legitimate to talk about things—as the true fabric of reality and thus the core site of ethical consideration. This is their mythology, in a nutshell. As such, they will not be willing to participate in any process that reinforces, maintains, upholds, reproduces, or legitimizes the unjustly dominant discourses, as they see them. Supporting those is, in fact, just about the highest sin one can commit in the Woke faith. The discourses must instead be engineered into a state of perfection—God’s Kingdom through Perfect Language—and it would not be permissible to engage in any behavior or process that allows oppression to be spoken from or into our discourses. Conversation and debate with people who speak from and in support of the dominant discourses would certainly therefore be considered highly problematic, and anyone who participates in it intentionally or even neglectfully would similarly be problematic.

…

Thirdly, adding to this is a theme we draw out significantly in the eighth chapter of Cynical Theories: they believe all disagreement with them to be illegitimate. If we followed from Dotson in the paper named above and another slightly earlier one (2011) about “epistemic violence,” it could be pinned on what she calls “pernicious ignorance.” Robin DiAngelo would call it “white fragility” to disagree. Alison Bailey refers to it as an attempt to preserve one’s privilege under the kind of term George Carlin lived to make fun of: “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” (four words, twelve syllables, one hyphen). Further, Bailey said all attempts to criticize Critical Social Justice thought, because they come from that “critical thinking” and not the “critical theory” tradition (within which they’d obviously agree), generate “shadow texts” that follow along but don’t truly engage (in the correctly “critical” way; i.e., agreement with her). Barbara Applebaum said similar in her 2010 book, Being White, Being Good, wherein she explains that the only legitimate way to disagree with Critical Social Justice education in the classroom is to ask questions for clarification until one agrees (which, you might notice, isn’t disagreeing at all).

In general, as mentioned a bit earlier in the essay, if you disagree, you either have false consciousness or the willful intention to oppress, and so your disagreement isn’t genuine. Only disagreement that comes from a Critical Theory perspective would be genuine, but this isn’t actually disagreement with the Woke worldview, only with superficial aspects of how it is playing out. The Woke view genuinely is that unless you agree with the Woke worldview, you haven’t disagreed with the Woke worldview in an authentic way, and therefore your disagreement cannot be legitimate. Read it again: unless you actually agree, you didn’t disagree correctly (cue Jim Carrey as the karate teacher defending against the knife attacker).

…

Fourthly, the Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible. They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. Not only that, they are willfully so, and their main objective is to defend and spread their hateful ideology in the world. If you truly believe this about the people you’ve been asked to have a conversation with, would you be about to help them do that by giving them a platform and lending your own imprimatur to them? Of course not. Such views are not even to be tolerated, much less entertained, engaged with, platformed, or amplified.

Furthermore, because of the theories of complicity in systemic evils that live at the heart of Theory, such a stain is automatically contagious, in addition to whatever real damage it does to further its advancement into the world. As they tweet, so they are: “ten people at a table with one Nazi is eleven Nazis at a table.” And not only are they supposed to endorse the platforming of that by sharing a stage with people they see this way, but they’re supposed to do it in ways that the dominant system, which is all of those things as well and their guarantor, approves of and advances its own interests through. These horrible ways include civil conversation and debate, which aren’t happening.

To give you some idea of just how extreme they are in their fear of being associated with people “on the wrong side of history,” there is a (somewhat fringe) concept within the Critical Social Justice worldview called “non-consensual co-platforming” (two words, nine syllables, one hyphen). What this concept describes is the following situation. Imagine that a Critical Social Justice Theorist were to publish an essay in the New York Times Opinion column this month, and a couple of months from now, I were invited to do so and did. Now we’re both people who have essays published in the New York Times Opinion column. The logic of “non-consensual co-platforming” would be that the editors of that column did a bad by putting me, a known undesirable, in the Opinion pages where there is also a Woke purist, obviously without having first got her consent to have been “co-platformed” with me in the same publication. (This example is rare, but more common is the same claim made about being platformed to speak at the same conference.) Now, the Woke purist is in the unpleasant situation of having been published in a place that is willing to sully its own reputation later by the publication of some deviant rascal. This is how seriously they take the stain of guilt by association.

…

As a fifth and final point, since this is getting pretty long already, remember that Critical Social Justice activists tell us more or less constantly how exhausting it is to fight this constant uphill battle in which no one takes them seriously (read: fight shadows of their own nightmarish projection). They tell us constantly about the high emotional labor costs of doing the “work” they do (and never being taken seriously for it). To invite them to a public conversation or debate is to ask them to get exploited in this way for other people’s benefit by getting up on stage in a dominance-approved paradigm with a bad-faith moral monster who just wants his opportunity to reinforce the very dominance that exhausts them in front of an audience who not only doesn’t but can’t actually get it, unless they already do. Again, that’s not happening. Even if very handsomely (read: ridiculously and exorbitantly) paid for their “emotional labor” to subject themselves to this situation, the other four points make it a nonstarter (and would drive up the price to basically literally infinity).

In Sum

One of the biggest mistakes we keep making as liberals who do value debate, dialogue, conversation, reason, evidence, epistemic adequacy, fairness, civility, charity of argument, and all these other “master’s tools” is that we can expect that advocates of Critical Social Justice also value them. They don’t. Or, we make the mistake that we can possibly pin Critical Social Justice advocates into having to defend their views in debate or conversation. We can’t.

These principles and values are rejected to their very roots within the Critical Social Justice worldview, and so the request for an advocate to have a debate or conversation with someone who disagrees will, to the degree they have adopted the Critical Social Justice Theoretical ideology/faith, be a complete nonstarter. It’s literally a request to do the exact opposite of everything their ideology instructs with regard to how the world and “systemic oppression” within it operates—to participate in their own oppression and maintain oppression of the people they claim to speak for.

These facts about the Critical Social Justice ideology extend from the microcosm of engaging in debate and conversation to each of those specific “master’s tools” a—science, reason, epistemic adequacy, civility, etc.—every bit as much as they do to the whole system that these tools combine to form: liberalism in the Modern era. This is a system that advocates of Critical Social Justice repeatedly tell us must be dismantled in the sparking of a “critical” revolution that replaces the whole of it, including its basic epistemology and ethics, with Critical Theory.

The hard truth is this: if you don’t yet understand this, you don’t know the fight we’re in or have the slightest idea what to do about it.

[frontproofmedia]

DOLO FLICKS: REVIEW - The Kings: Part Four: A Champion Never Quits

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Follow @Frontproofmedia!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id))(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

Published: July 01, 2021

"People love to follow a good story, and they hope to get a good ending. And we had all that in the 80s. People came to a fight to see right there that something could happen. But the guy buying the ticket doesn’t know. They think it's just two fighters going against each other like flesh and bone. No, it’s all the emotions. That’s what you’re fighting. In a lot of cases, you’re beating parts of yourself. Both guys know that. Only they understand what they’ve been through. And that’s something that I think makes this sport so special. In the ring, that the one time there is no prejudice. There is no race. There is no religion. There is no politics. It's just two men. Just two men trying to find themselves. And that’s why people came to watch a boxing match. To see that miracle."  -- Teddy Atlas

The fourth and final installment of Showtime Sports’ documentary series "The Kings" that looks at the careers and lives of Roberto Duran, Thomas Hearns, Ray Leonard, and Marvin Hagler, reached its conclusion in dramatic fashion.

The fourth episode heavily focuses on the bout between Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler, exploring what happened before and after.

After defeating Thomas Hearns in 1985, Hagler finally reached the zenith of notoriety and popularity he had yearned for his entire career. Appearances on television shows, commercials, and talk shows were plenty as he stood on top of the boxing world.

The episode also examines how Hagler contemplated retirement following the win over Hearns, along with Leonard seeing an opportunity to make a return to the ring after Hagler’s fight with John Mugabi.

After some posturing and negotiating, Hagler finally agreed to face Leonard in a fight that he was able to get all the financial advantages. In contrast, Leonard got the competitive advantages such as the fight being 12 instead of 15 rounds.

At the time, the fight was the richest in the history of the sport, with Hagler taking home roughly $17 million and Leonard earning upwards of $11 million.

Leonard had been out of the ring for almost three years before stepping in the ring with Hagler and fought most of his career in the Welterweight division. Needless to say, Hagler was the heavy favorite and, in some respects, despite the financial gain, was in a lose-lose situation.

“Even if Marvin in the back of his mind, kinda knew he was past his prime, he didn’t think he was gonna have any problem at all with Ray Leonard,” stated Steve Farhood in the episode.

Leonard’s own friends and family were hesitant and worried about his prospects in facing Hagler. The episode tells a story about Leonard almost being knocked out during a sparring session leading up to the Hagler bout. Leonard may have been one of a handful of people in the world that believed he stood a chance at winning against Hagler.

“I thought Ray was on a suicide mission of some sort." - Larry Merchant.

On April 6, 1987, Leonard stepped in the ring with Hagler at the outdoor arena in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for the middleweight championship.

The episode, much like those that preceded, gave a breakdown of the match, highlighting significant moments and all of the major action.

Hagler-Leonard is one of if not the most debated matches in boxing history. Many observers are adamant that Hagler did more than enough to warrant a victory. Others believe Hagler's slow start where he fought orthodox instead of in his traditional southpaw stance cost him the fight.

Judge Lou Filippo scored the fight 115-113 for Hagler, and judge Dave Moretti had the fight for Leonard at 115-113.

The third judge Jose Juan Guerra turned in one of the worst scorecards in boxing history, having Leonard winning 118-110. Guerra isn’t interviewed in the episode to explain how he saw the fight.

Despite feeling like he was cheated, Hagler was still present for the post-fight interview and post-fight press conference. There was a level of dignity and honor that Hagler always showed, and he was no different in the face of defeat.

“He overthought it, Hagler,” said Teddy Atlas. “Because he was trying to capture something that was never given to him. Acceptance. What he thought he should have had. And how great he was. So maybe, in the end, he was a co-conspirator in his own demise.”

In many respects, Hagler-Leonard is the final chapter in the “Four Kings” era. Afterward, Hagler walked away from the sport and never returned. The remaining fights featuring Hearns, Leonard, and Duran all felt like epilogues.

Hagler was the one fighter of the four that didn’t overstay his welcome; there weren’t any losses and beatings that took place long after his prime. There was never a moment of sadness at seeing a shell of the fighter that used to be so great taking a beating at the hands of someone he would have destroyed in his prime.

“Now I’m trying to use boxing and not have boxing use me.” - Marvin Hagler

Following the segment on Hagler-Leonard, the episode transitions its focus to Hearns. The winner is often the focal point after a major fight, especially those as significant that took place between the “Four Kings.”

With Hearns, the episode makes it a priority to give attention to the fighter who was on the losing side of his biggest fights and how he managed to forge his own legacy.

“I really didn’t know how to accept it, and I was down on myself because I felt I let the public down, and I felt like I let Emanuel down,” Hearns stated. “I wanted so badly to go back in there to fight Ray and redeem myself. And after Marvin Hagler won that fight, I didn’t know what to do, how to think.”

Hearns would end up becoming boxing’s first four-division and five-division champion, winning titles at welterweight, junior middleweight, middleweight, super middleweight, and light heavyweight.

In 1994, Ring Magazine named Hearns the greatest junior middleweight in boxing history.

In a rematch with Leonard that took place in 1989, Hearns gained a measure of redemption in getting a draw in a fight that most observers felt he had clearly won.

“Not getting a victory, to me, it was like a letdown,” stated Hearns regarding the rematch with Leonard. “But I knew in my heart, and people knew who won that fight. And that meant a lot to me, too.”

The finale of the episode focuses on the first king, Roberto Duran. In this segment, the political landscape is again explored with the United States invasion of Panama in 1989 and Duran’s supposed ties with Manuel Noreiga.

The final triumph of Duran’s career against Iran Barkley is also shown. The Barkley fight furthered his legacy in winning a middleweight title. He became just the third fighter in history to win titles in four weight classes.

Mike Tyson, who became the biggest name in boxing following the ascension of the “Four Kings,” was used to show how much boxing has changed since the era of Duran, Leonard, Hearns, and Hagler. Tyson is somewhat painted negatively as the anchor for boxing’s continual decline in popularity over the years.

After all four episodes, “The Kings” did its job of showing how important those four men were to boxing. The 1980s may have been the last truly great era in boxing.

Something isn’t great because it lasts forever. Its greatness is measured by what can be remembered. All four “Kings” provided fans with a lifetime of memories. Fights that raised the bar on what boxing could be at its best.

[gyrlversion]

Deferred Dreams: How Student Loan Debt Disproportionately Affects Entrepreneurs Of Color

By Nicole Castillo

As a 35-year-old single mom and first-generation student preparing to put herself through law school, Ramona Ortega needed student loans for more than just an education; she needed them “just to survive.”. But nine years later, she still holds what she describes as “extreme student debt” of over $200,000. Though astronomical, that number didn’t deter her from starting her dream company, which she founded to help young people facing similar situations.

As the founder and CEO of the personal financial management platform My Money My Future, she works to help millennials of color understand what their financial options are throughout their lives, and then select the options that will best align them with achieving their goals. “It’s because of the financial hardship that I have been through, [that] I started this company,” Ortega told MTV News. “I was solving my own problem.”

Ortega isn’t the only recent college graduate with a drive to start her own business, but she’s still among a certain minority. Millennials and Gen Z graduates of color are entering the job market with an “entrepreneurial spirit” — they have the vision to upend business as usual, they value mission over profit alone, and they are solutions-focused and idealistic. But fewer are pursuing entrepreneurship in comparison to older generations. The desire is there, as is the know-how. It’s the financial burden that is holding many innovators back.

This is in no small part due to overwhelming student loan debt, which in 2019, reached $1.56 trillion, sending ripple effects across the economy. Students are graduating and stepping into the workforce with financial burdens that are causing them to delay getting married, having children, saving for retirement, and buying a home. While young people are more likely to work non-traditional jobs like working for rideshare and tutoring companies and freelancing in tech and media, few take the full plunge to become entrepreneurs — the key difference being that entrepreneurs create an entirely new business model, while those in the gig economy work within the confines created for them.

This is frustrating for any number of reasons, and undoes core tenets of American capitalism that have been sold to us for decades: That we can, one day, start a company, build a business, and become our own boss. What’s more, entrepreneurs could be one of the strongest antidotes to a sluggish economy. New businesses drive innovation, increase productivity, and create more jobs.

But not everyone can take the entrepreneurship leap, which is why political heavyweights are introducing plans that would chip away at student debt, and create more opportunity for entrepreneurs of color. Legislators on the left have proposed a tax on the richest Americans and Wall Street and argued that if we can bail out big banks as we did in 2008, and other bastions of corporate America, we should be willing to bail out student debtors, too.  Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student loan forgiveness plan would eliminate up to $50,000 based on household income up to $250,000, while Senator Bernie Sanders wants to cancel all debt including undergraduate and graduate loans. Warren has also created a plan specifically targeting entrepreneurs of color, by delivering $7 billion in funding to underserved groups. Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s Douglass plan aims to invest $10 billion in entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds, and defer some student loan repayment for those who decide to start a business. Senator Kamala Harris has proposed forgiving up to $20,000 of student loan debt for Pell Grant recipients who start businesses that operate in underserved communities.

Carlos Vera, the 25-year-old Founder and CEO of Pay Our Interns, a national advocacy organization working to ensure that legislative interns are paid and diverse, believes that forgiving student loan debt is not only “the moral thing to do,” but makes the most economic sense.

“People ask, ‘Where are we going to get this money?’ We just passed a tax cut of over a trillion dollars for the super rich last year. If we can do that for them, why can’t we do the same for millions of hard-working Americans?” Vera told MTV News. “Especially because we know this is dragging down our economy. Folks are not purchasing homes and starting businesses because of their student loans.”

The main factors stopping young people from becoming entrepreneurs — access to startup capital and a lack of financial stability to weather the first few years of entrepreneurship — are intensified for millennials of color. Black students carry more student loan debt than any other racial group, a fact compounded by the racial wealth gap. In the U.S., the average white family has seven times more wealth than Black families and five times more wealth than Latinx families. While Latinx students carry less debt, they are more likely to drop out because of financial barriers; have lower wages post-graduation; and are thus, more likely to default on their student loans. And the idea that a college education is a surefire route toward economic prosperity for Black and brown students must be reconsidered. The Economic Policy Institute reports that a college degree or more will not reduce the Black-white wage gap.

Many of these young people feel that student loan debt limits options in terms of jobs they can take, so graduates often opt to pursue less risky forms of employment and take whatever jobs they can to pay their bills on time. Even so, millennials of color are leading the conversation when it comes to diversifying entrepreneurship, and some see self-employment as the best option for building wealth. Millennial Black women, in particular, believe that starting one’s business is the best road to prosperity.

Rica Elysee is a first-generation Haitian American who started BeautyLynk, a company that creates opportunities for beauty professionals to connect directly with consumers, as well as build their own brand and reputation. As the company’s founder and CEO, 33-year-old Elysse knows that these opportunities are indispensable for her clients to pay back their debt — but she is still quick to admit that college debt can be “stifling.”

“It’s changed the way people think about building businesses or even if they have a shot at building one,” she told MTV News.

That was certainly the case for Katia Alcantar, the 29-year-old co-founder of the legal advice app Text A Lawyer, who carries $85,000 in student loans.“With one of my student loans, I have paid 20 percent of the loan and none of that has been on the principal,” she told MTV News. Faced with $1,000 monthly payments, her debt is so significant that it has prevented her from investing in her own company, which connects attorneys with clients 24/7 via text for legal advice.

Because Alcantar wasn’t alone in her endeavor, she was able to take some risks: Her co-founder had the financial means to bootstrap the project, thus enabling her to quit her job and move her family from Texas to Oregon to join the company. Not everyone can afford to make those kinds of decisions, though, and for those still strained by their student loans, debt forgiveness proposals have become a beacon of hope.

The burden of student loan debt, however, is not as simple as the government eliminating your balance from Sallie Mae or Navient; it’s also about reforming the entire cost of college and predatory loan systems and ensuring livable wages for all.

Many of these issues, 32-year-old Omama Marzuq believes, can be solved by investing in entrepreneurs.

“Being your own business owner, you are creating opportunities and growth for your community,” the entrepreneur and mentor for E for All: Entrepreneurship for All told MTV News. “Entrepreneurs can hire people in their communities, create internships, and fund scholarship opportunities.” It’s a cycle that can provide young entrepreneurs with the hope that their work is worth the toil, and proof that while risks can feel solitary, success is not received alone.

The post Deferred Dreams: How Student Loan Debt Disproportionately Affects Entrepreneurs Of Color appeared first on Gyrlversion.

from WordPress http://www.gyrlversion.net/deferred-dreams-how-student-loan-debt-disproportionately-affects-entrepreneurs-of-color/

[theconservativebrief]

[Author’s note: this article was originally published on June 5, 2018.]

President Trump rescinded an invitation to the White House for the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles on Monday, claiming it was because they “disrespected” the flag by “staying in the locker room for the playing of our National Anthem.”

As my Vox colleague Jane Coaston noted, no Eagles players stayed in the locker room or kneeled during the anthem throughout the season, but that’s not really the point.

This is just latest episode in a story that began in the summer of 2016, when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to protest police brutality and racial injustice by taking a knee during the national anthem before games.

Kaepernick’s protest, initially overlooked, ballooned into a massive national story. Soon, other players followed his lead and it became a weekly drama for the NFL. Conservative media pounced on the story, ignoring Kaepernick’s stated intentions and instead accusing him of being unpatriotic and disrespectful of the American flag.

The controversy exploded when Trump weighed in at a rally for Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange. Before a crowd of (mostly white) Southerners, Trump fantasized about firing the protesting players. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners … say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired!’”

The NFL protests were always about race in America; Trump’s remarks turned them into a full-blown culture war. Since then, I’ve wondered if there’s something unique about football and the NFL that makes it a hotbed for this kind of racial tension. There’s nothing new about race and politics overlapping with sports, but football seems to be the source of the most controversy today.

I reached out to Ben Carrington, a professor of sociology and journalism at the University of Southern California and the author of Race, Sport and Politics. I asked him why NFL owners (virtually all of whom are white) are so scared of Kaepernick, and why he considers sports the “most racially tinged spectacle in modern society.”

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Were you surprised that the Seattle Seahawks, arguably the most progressive team in the NFL, recently canceled its workout with Colin Kaepernick after he refused to say he’d stand for the anthem?

Ben Carrington

Nope, and it’ll be interesting to see if Seattle can hold on to its reputation as the most “woke” NFL team. My understanding is that the team asked Kaepernick to confirm that he wouldn’t kneel anymore. So they weren’t asking if he was actually planning to protest; they wanted a guarantee that he wouldn’t.

This is extraordinary if you think about it. The team is saying, “We’re going to restrict your rights to speech and your rights to protest, and we need you to confirm ahead of time that you’re not going to speak out on any issues as you have before.”

And this gets to the crux of the matter: It’s about power. Kaepernick has shown agency and power in speaking about political issues, which is far rarer in the NFL than it is, say, in the NBA. So this was about an organization trying to reassert its power over the player.

Sean Illing

Race and sports and politics have always overlapped, but, as you just alluded to, there seems to be something unique about football and the NFL that produces this sort of racial tension.

Ben Carrington

Well, there’s a lot going on here. NBA players have always had more power than NFL players, and there are reasons for that that we probably don’t want to go into here. But it’s worth noting that black NFL players have less collective power than black players in other sports, so that’s obviously a factor here.

But I think football also embodies certain ideals of American masculinity in a way other sports don’t. It’s a violent sport, a physical sport. And it’s replete with all these military metaphors: It’s played on a “gridiron” and there are “blitzes” and “bombs thrown into the end zone” while teams “march” down the field to conquer one another.

So it signifies, in a weird but real way, a certain notion of American militarism, American patriotism, American strength and violence, in a way that a skill game like basketball doesn’t.

“People like to talk about sports as a post-racial space in American society, but it’s probably the most racially tinged spectacle in modern society”

Sean Illing

There’s also the fact that the NBA is accepted as “black sport” in a way that the NFL isn’t. Both sports are dominated by black athletes, but the cultural significance of the NFL for white Americans is just different.

Ben Carrington

Absolutely, and it’s such a crucial point. Roughly 75 percent of the players in the NBA are black, and there are very few prominent white American males in the NBA. The NFL has a majority of black players, but it’s not the same as the NBA. And the quarterback position, which Kaepernick plays, has sort of become the last great position of the “Great White Hope.”

Going all the way back to the early 20th century with the famous black heavyweight champion boxer, there’s always been this element of the American sports world that has longed for a white person to reclaim the mantle of masculinity from black athletes.

Quarterbacks are today’s last Great White Hope. It’s a position that the average white American male can identify with to show some type of sporting supremacy in a landscape where, as that atrocious 1997 Sports Illustrated cover story said, “Whatever happened to the white athlete?”

Sean Illing

And no doubt this is something that NFL team owners are acutely aware of.

Ben Carrington

Unquestionably, and the owners still wield almost all of the power in the NFL. To circle back to your point, the real threat that Kaepernick posed isn’t that he’ll bring more attention to police brutality or racial injustice; it’s that he’ll mobilize players and encourage them to assert their rights in a way that’s similar to the NBA. That’s what really scares the NFL.

Sean Illing

I’ve often wondered how different the reaction would have been a few years ago if it were predominantly white players taking a knee to protest something President Barack Obama was doing.

Ben Carrington

But we kind of know, right? Sean Hannity would be praising them with long monologues about how brave the players are for speaking out. He’d make comparisons to Jackie Robinson, saying this is exactly what America is about. People like him would reverse the narrative and claim that soldiers die on the battlefield so that Americans can exercise their First Amendment rights.

What’s interesting to me is you have people like Laura Ingraham on Fox News telling LeBron James to “shut up and dribble,” and yet Fox News is littered with B-list actors and country singers who are posing as political experts and I don’t hear anyone telling them to “shut up and sing.”

Sean Illing

The Fox News audience is attuned to this deeper message, and so I doubt that the hypocrisy is a problem. These are the same people who hear Trump dismiss black NFL players as “sons of bitches” and know exactly what he means.

Ben Carrington

A big part of the history of US sports is this idea that sports in America are preserved for white men. That this is how sports were founded; this is how they were understood. Anyone who has gained entry into sports who aren’t white men, and that includes women, that includes people of color, had to do so with a kind of deference. And they had to be grateful that they were allowed onto our parks, onto our pitches, onto our courts, because these are our spaces.

And so when Trump says, “Wouldn’t you love to fire those sons of bitches?” he’s imagining a kind of re-segregation. He’s telling people to imagine that they’re one of these owners, that they could fire these “sons of bitches.” You don’t need to understand a ton of American history to recognize the racial politics of this moment.

People like to talk about sports as a post-racial space in American society, but it’s probably the most racially tinged spectacle in modern society.

“People like Laura Ingraham [are] on Fox News telling LeBron James to ‘shut up and dribble,’ and yet Fox News is littered with B-list actors and country singers who are posing as political experts and I don’t hear anyone telling them to ‘shut up and sing’”

Sean Illing

Something that I’ve noticed as a white guy who watches a lot of sports is the language commentators and analysts use to talk about white and black athletes. Race is always there, always looming. People call white quarterbacks “heady” or “hard-working” or “coach on the field,” and black quarterbacks are “mobile” or “athletic” or “explosive.” We’ve got all these stereotypes that are constantly reinforced with this coded language.

Ben Carrington

Yeah, and it’s powerful precisely because we deny that it’s there. We have this strange paradox in which we deny the existence of something which we know is there, and then we enjoy it partly because it’s there.

There’s a great bit by the comedian Bill Burr from a few years ago where he talks about how frustrating it is as a white guy watching how good black athletes are, and the inability of white guys to stay in the NBA. He’s like, “I just want the white guys to get out the way when the black guys are dunking on them.”

I think he taps into something real. He talks about watching the Olympics and just hoping the one token white sprinter can at least come in third. It’s hilarious, obviously, and Bill’s a great comic, but it’s a quite honest reflection of white emasculation on the one hand and loving sports on the other.

And this is part of the reason I think sports concerns and confirms the notion of racial difference more than any other cultural medium.

Sean Illing

I assume that’s a big reason why you think we should take sports more seriously as a cultural object and as a space where politics happens.

Ben Carrington

Yeah, that’s right. I think we have to expand what we mean by politics, because we tend to define it too narrowly. Politics is about Democrats and Republicans and Congress and all that, but it’s also about how we live our lives. It’s about identity.

In that sense, sports and popular culture is inherently political. I remember when Trump made his “sons of bitches” comment, I kept hearing cable news pundits say, “Why can’t we get back to speaking about politics? Why are we talking about the NFL?” I thought they were completely misunderstanding what politics is.

Trump was elected to shore up a lot of anxieties that white people have about the state and direction of the country, and that’s why the issues around Kaepernick and sports are so important. It’s part of who we are as Americans.

The games we play aren’t simply games. They’re also about identity, which is why they’re so popular. And if they didn’t tap into identity, they wouldn’t be so popular.

Original Source -> Race and football: why NFL owners are so scared of Colin Kaepernick

via The Conservative Brief

[beautyandthewolffanfic]

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018): Impressive performance at a premium price Review

New Post has been published on http://www.dailygadgets.net/apple-15-inch-macbook-pro-2018-impressive-performance-at-a-premium-price-review/

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2018): Impressive performance at a premium price Review

The alarm bells have clearly been ringing at Apple’s ‘spaceship campus’ HQ in Cupertino. After years spent focusing all its efforts on the all-conquering iPhone, Apple has begun to realise that the Mac risks losing out on important new technologies such as VR and AR. Those concerns were no doubt exacerbated when its most recent financial results revealed a significant fall in Mac sales.

As a result, this year’s update to the MacBook Pro range has delivered more than the straightforward speed-bump that was expected following the introduction of Intel’s Coffee Lake processors.

The first model to ship was the 13-inch version of the MacBook Pro, which stepped up from a quad-core to a six-core processor that doubled the laptop’s raw processor performance. But, despite its high price, the 13-inch MacBook Pro still lacks a discrete GPU, relying instead on the more modest integrated graphics of the Intel processor. Professional users who need high-end graphics performance from their laptop should therefore consider the new 15-inch version of the MacBook Pro, which is now available.

The basic design of the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro remains the same: it measures 15.5mm thick and weighs 1.83kg.

Image: Apple

Features

Like its 13-inch counterpart, the 15-inch MacBook Pro looks largely unchanged on the outside, with an admirably sleek, portable design that measures just 15.5mm thick and weighs 1.83kg. That’s impressive for a 15-inch laptop, especially when compared to rival high-end laptops such as HP’s ZBook x2 G4, which weighs in at close to 2.2kg with a smaller 14-inch display.

But Apple’s lightweight design comes at a cost, as the 2016 revamp that introduced the new slimline design — along with the context-sensitive Touch Bar — also limited this ‘pro’ laptop to a maximum of 16GB of RAM. That clearly didn’t impress professional users of apps such as Photoshop and Apple’s own Final Cut Pro, so the memory of the 15-inch model can now be upgraded to 32GB. Unfortunately, this is only available as a build-to-order option at the time of purchase — and for a hefty £300 (ex. VAT; £360 inc. VAT, or $400) — as the MacBook Pro still doesn’t provide any scope for user-upgrades or repairs at all.

When it comes to upgrades and expansion, Apple places all its bets on the MacBook Pro’s four Thunderbolt 3 ports, along with its recent embrace of external GPU upgrades, such as the Blackmagic eGPU that’s currently being promoted on the Apple Store.

Top ZDNET Reviews

The 15.4-inch display is also unchanged, offering an admirably bright and colourful 2,880-by-1,800-pixel resolution (220dpi), although this is now complemented by the True Tone technology from the iPad, which adjusts the display depending on ambient light conditions.

This year’s MacBook Pro has “an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing”, according to Apple.

Image: Apple

Apple has modified the keyboard, claiming that it’s now quieter — and, hopefully, less prone to the problems that have affected the ‘butterfly’ mechanism used in the MacBook keyboards in the last couple of years. Unfortunately, I still find that the thin keyboard panel feels rather lifeless and unresponsive, especially when typing at speed.

Pricing & options

There are more significant changes on the inside, with the 15-inch MacBook Pro also stepping up to six-core processors. Thankfully, though, Apple’s pricing hasn’t changed this year, with the ‘entry-level’ model remaining at £1,957.50 (ex. VAT; £2,349 inc. VAT, or $2,399) with a Core i7-8750H running at 2.2GHz (4.1GHz with TurboBoost) along with 16GB of 2400MHz DDR4 RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a discrete Radeon Pro 555X GPU with 4GB of VRAM.

The second standard configuration also retains last year’s price tag of £2,249.16 (ex. VAT; £2,699 inc. VAT, or $2,799) and now offers a six-core Core i7-8850H running at 2.6GHz (4.3GHz with TurboBoost) as well as doubling the storage to 512GB, and further boosting graphics performance with a Radeon Pro 560X. Our review unit was further upgraded with an optional Core i9-8950HK processor — making this the first Core i9 laptop that we’ve come across — with a clock speed of 2.9GHz (4.8GHz with TurboBoost), for a total price of £2,474.16 (ex. VAT; £2,969 inc. VAT, or $3,099).

And, if you really want to go to town, you can increase the solid-state drive to as much as 4TB, which brings the 15-inch MacBook Pro with every optional extra to an eye-watering £5,174.16 (ex. VAT; £6,209 inc. VAT, or $6,699). To be fair, the inclusion of four Thunderbolt 3 ports means that you can at least upgrade your storage with more affordable third-party drives. Even so, that still leaves our review unit costing the best part of £3,000 ($3,100), so the MacBook Pro needs to perform pretty well in order to justify that sort of price.

Performance

As we mentioned, the 15-inch MacBook Pro gave us our first opportunity to test a laptop equipped with Intel’s latest Core i9 processor, and this certainly proves to be a worthwhile upgrade for professional users who need the best possible performance from their laptop.

Geekbench 4.2 reported a score of 5,600 for single-core performance, but multi-core performance hit an impressive 24,586 — around 55 percent higher than the model we tested last year.

Geekbench 4 processor benchmarks for the 2016 and 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro, running 6th and 7th generation Core i7 processors respectively with 16GB of RAM, and the 2018 model running an 8th-generation Core i9 with 16GB of RAM.

The Radeon Pro 560X also allowed the MacBook Pro to reach 106fps when running the Cinebench R15 OpenGL test, compared to the 85fps provided by the Radeon Pro 560 of last year.

Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmarks for the 2016, 2017 and 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Even the solid-state drive romps ahead of previous models, achieving write and read speeds of 2,675MB/s and 2,732MB/s respectively.

And, despite the outstanding performance of the Core i9 processor, the new MacBook Pro manages to provide longer battery life as well. Apple’s ‘automatic graphics switching’ allows the MacBook Pro to switch between the discrete Radeon GPU and the Core i9’s integrated graphics depending on workload.

Image: Cliff Joseph/ZDNet

When using automatic switching to stream video from the BBC iPlayer, with screen brightness set at 50 percent, the MacBook Pro’s 58Wh battery lasted for 8 hours and 35 minutes, compared to 7.5 hours for last year’s model. Turning the automatic switching option off forces the MacBook Pro to use the Radeon GPU, but this still resulted in 5 hours and 15 minutes, so as long as you’re not rendering 4K video all day long you should get a full day’s work out of the MacBook Pro even when using the more powerful GPU.

Conclusions

The 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro provides impressive performance — especially if you add the Core i9 upgrade tested here. The fact that the MacBook Pro can accommodate a powerful CPU and GPU without increasing its size or weight — or affecting battery life — is no mean feat either. There are few laptops that combine heavyweight performance and lightweight design so effectively, and owners of older MacBook models will certainly view the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro as a tempting upgrade. If they can afford it, that is.

RECENT AND RELATED CONTENT

Apple MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018) review: Quad-core CPU and all-day battery life The 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro delivers strong CPU performance and good battery life, which help to justify its premium price tag. We’d still like to see a discrete GPU option though.

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2017) review: Performance boost delivers better value for money The 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro boosts both processor and graphics performance without affecting battery life, but remains expensive.

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro (2016) review: Fast, light, innovative, and expensive The 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro delivers professional-level performance in an attractive, lightweight design that also offers all-day battery life. However, it’s extravagantly expensive, and the lack of upgradeability is a real weakness.

Why are PCs sales growing while Mac sales are crashing? After years of decline, PC sales are showing tentative signs of recovery, while the last quarter was a disaster for the Mac. What gives?

How to download the macOS Mojave beta (TechRepublic) Developers who have signed up for the macOS beta program can install macOS Mojave now. Here’s what you’ll need to do to get it running.

Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar (15-inch, 2018) review (DailyGadgets) The tricked-out MacBook Pro recovers from an early software stumble.

Read more reviews

[benrleeusa]

Federal criminal justice reform bogs down again in fight over whether prison reform or broader sentencing reform moves forward

Politico has this lengthy and discouraging article about the state of federal criminal justice reform under the headline "Kushner-backed prison reform bill stumbles in House."  Here are excerpts:

The House Judiciary Committee scrapped plans to vote on a prison reform proposal Wednesday, potentially dooming one of the few remaining prospects for significant bipartisan compromise this Congress.

The last-minute postponement of the measure came as President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner visited Capitol Hill to rally support for it.  But the delay also followed what multiple House sources described as a behind-the-scenes opposition campaign from two Senate heavyweights, one from each party.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have told House Judiciary panel members to oppose a narrower prison reform bill without the addition of a sentencing overhaul they spent months negotiating, House sources said.

The Trump administration and GOP leaders want to see a prison-only bill move, not the broader criminal justice bill, but that’s not stopping Grassley and Durbin from what one Republican portrayed as meddling in the House debate.  “Frankly, I respect the two senators, but they have enough problems in the Senate,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), the House GOP’s lead author of the prison reform legislation, in a Wednesday interview. “I wish they would actually focus on passing bills over there. That would be nice.”

Durbin denied that he was telling the House to slow down on the prison-only approach: “We’re just saying that over here, the two need to be together.” But Durbin confirmed Wednesday that he has talked to the House Judiciary panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, about the importance of keeping the two bills together while Grassley has reached out to Republicans to pitch a comprehensive approach....

The Senate’s lobbying threatens to kill momentum for the Kushner-backed House bill, which would provide training programs to prisoners in hopes of discouraging repeat offenses.  The omission of sentencing changes is opposed not only by Grassley and Durbin but by dozens of powerful progressive groups including the ACLU and the NAACP. Those groups say the bill doesn’t go far enough and should also include language that would reduce sentences for some prisoners.

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) blamed Wednesday’s delayed vote on “time constraints” and said the postponement will give negotiators more time to work out “minor issues.” The panel is now scheduled to consider the bill during the week of May 7.

But the impasse doesn’t show any signs of being resolved soon. In his statement at the beginning of the hearing Wednesday, Nadler said negotiators should consider including sentencing reform in their discussions.  “In my view, considering prison reform without consideration of sentencing reform has the process backward, and avoids the difficult but necessary legislating on that critical issue,” Nadler said.

Nadler later told POLITICO he would be "very reluctant” to support any bill that didn’t include sentencing reform but wouldn’t say whether his opposition, as the top Democrat on the panel, was enough to sink the proposal: “Never say never, but I’d be very reluctant."

But supporters of the narrower prison reform push say a comprehensive strategy is a futile effort and would nix the chances of any bipartisan bill getting to the president’s desk this year.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a staunch critic of sentencing reform, opposed a similar proposal before Trump tapped him to lead DOJ and has publicly clashed with Grassley over the issue this year.

However, there’s lingering distrust among House Democrats that Sessions is operating in good faith. Democrats successfully nixed multiple “poison pill“ amendments they said were floated by DOJ during talks on the bill but said privately they’re concerned that Sessions does’'t actually want to see any criminal justice legislation come to fruition.

Grassley also acknowledged in an interview with POLITICO this week that he has yet to persuade Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to bring the comprehensive criminal justice bill to the floor.  “It’s my job to show McConnell that this bill has got plenty of support at the grass roots, that it’s got good bipartisan support,” Grassley said. “It’s something that a president needs a bipartisan bill to sign and there’s all kinds of reasons why this bipartisan bill should be brought up, whether the House passes a bill or not.”...

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), who supported Grassley’s efforts on a broader criminal justice package during the Obama administration but has narrowed his sights given the Trump administration’s opposition, delivered a floor speech Wednesday urging the two camps to come together on a prison-only approach. “I know other people have other ideas, perhaps about sentencing reform and the like,” Cornyn said, “but in this political environment, I’m for doing what we can do rather than spinning our wheels being frustrated about what we can’t do because there’s simply not the political support in the House and the Senate and at the White House to get it done.”

I am glad that Senators Grassley and Durbin remain deeply committed to getting a bigger criminal justice reform bill passed, but I continue to fear that Senate Majority Leader McConnell will continue to be unwilling to allow a floor vote on the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act.  Senator McConnell has shown in other settings his ability to be stubborn, and his enduring resistance to the SRCA leads me to be pessimistic about any sentencing reforms getting through Congress this year.

I surmise Senators Grassley and Durbin, and perhaps many reform advocates who have come out against a prison-reform-only bill, believe that passage of a broad bill through the House might make it more likely that Senator McConnell will allow a floor vote.  Perhaps so, and I hope they can get it done.  But I am not optimistic, and I continue to think that getting prison reform done ASAP can be a needed and useful first step toward an array of badly-needed statutory reform of our federal criminal justice system.

A few of many prior related posts:

Is it time for new optimism or persistent pessimism on the latest prospects for statutory federal sentencing reform?

Mapping the politics and making the case against the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017 

AG Sessions writes to Senator Grassley to say passage of SRCA "would be a grave error"

Interesting statements from Senate Judiciary Committee on Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017 ... and now passage by 16-5 vote! 

Trump White House expresses opposition to sentencing reform part of SRCA of 2017

Senator Grassley talking up Senate vote on his SRCA bill along with any prison reform bill lacking sentencing reforms

Interesting new US Sentencing Commission analysis of possible impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017

Federal prison reform bill reportedly moving forward in House of Representatives

Lots of notable reporting and commentary as federal prison reform tries to move forward

Law enforcement reform group urges Congress to tackle sentencing reform along with prison reforms 

[wrestlingisfake]

Smackdown Fake Rankings, 3/3

Men’s singles heavyweight division - babyfaces

AJ Styles (world champion)

Shinsuke Nakamura

Dolph Ziggler

Bobby Roode (United States champion)

Men’s singles heavyweight division - heels

Kevin Owens

Sami Zayn

Baron Corbin

We technically won’t know the exact plans for the Smackdown side of Wrestlemania until the 3/11 Fastlane show.  Conventional wisdom, however, is that Styles will still defend against Nakamura.  I’m expecting something involving Bobby Roode and Randy Orton (and maybe others) for the US title.  There doesn’t appear to be an actually logical payoff for the Owens/Zayn intrigue with commissioner Shane McMahon and general manager Daniel Bryan, but the only possible good match I can see coming out of it is Owens vs. Zayn, however that can happen.

Over the past year, we’ve seen WWE try to start pushes for Jinder Mahal, Baron Corbin, Dolph Ziggler, Mojo Rawley, and Mike Kanellis.  (I mean, Jinder was world champion for six months and Mojo won a prelim match where the announcers never shut up about his “killer insintct,” but in WWE-land those are both attempts at pushes.)  As of today, though, none of them seem to have a path to a meaningful match at Wrestlemania.  (At best, a couple of them may water down the US or Smackdown tag title match, which would make those matches less meaningful.)  These guys are already in a precarious position, and are the most likely to suffer once the new PPV schedule (one show per month with matches from both brands) takes effect.

Women’s division - babyfaces

Charlotte Flair (Smackdown women’s champion)

Becky Lynch

Naomi

Women’s division - heels

Ruby Riott

Sarah Logan

Liv Morgan

It’s kind of tough to rank Morgan and Logan, since they’re presented as having virtually interchangeable spots as Riott’s lackeys, but you get the idea.

For Wrestlemania, all of WWE’s attention regarding the women has been on Raw.  The most significant Smackdown match in the works is merely the possibility that Raw’s Asuka will elect to challenge for the Smackdown championship--and even if she won’t, until that question is settled they probably won’t even start promoting an alternative.

I think it’s very telling that Carmella has dropped off the radar lately, which is what you’d want to do if you were planning to have her come out of nowhere to execute her Money in the Bank contract and win the title.  Doesn’t mean it will happen, but it suggests they’re thinking about it real hard.

Men’s tag team division - babyfaces

The New Day - Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods & Big E

The Ascension - Konnor & Viktor

Men’s tag team division - heels

Shelton Benjamin & Chad Gable

The Bludgeon Brothers - Harper & Rowan

Rusev & Aiden English

The Usos are the tag team champions, but they haven’t wrestled on TV for over a month.  They’re scheduled to defend against the New Day on 3/11, which is odd since Usos vs. New Day is the best Smackdown tag match you could do for Mania, so why do it early?  Also, WWE seems to want to do something with the Bludgeon Brothers, so maybe they’ll face the winners in New Orleans?  Or maybe it’ll be a fatal six-pack tornado turmoil ladder elimination 43-man squamish match.

Part-time: Nikki Bella, Shane McMahon

No Smackdown or PPV matches in 30 days: Carmella, Fandango, Jey Uso (Smackdown tag team champion), Jimmy Uso (Smackdown tag team champion), Jinder Mahal, Lana, Mike Kanellis, Mojo Rawley, Natalya, Primo Colon, Randy Orton, Sin Cara, Sunil Singh, Tye Dillinger, Tyler Breeze, Zack Ryder

Inactive

Epico Colon (left shoulder - undisclosed injury)

Samir Singh (right knee - ACL tear)

Tamina (right shoulder - rotator cuff tear)

It’s actually pretty alarming how many Smackdown wrestlers are not being utilized.  Raw is an 50% longer than Smackdown but only has five performers that haven’t been on TV in a month (not counting the cruiserweights, who have their own show).  Remember, the great hope of the brand extension was that it would eliminate this problem.

It’s especially troubling when you look at the inactive list and realize it doesn’t matter when Epico, Samir, and Tamina will be cleared to return, because they barely got to do anything when they were healthy.

[dirkchiu6457634-blog]

Misuse And Recovery Articles.

Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are an individual and also gives you brief access to the web property. They really want a business bank card, accessibility to checking account as well as if they possess the energy coming from the bylaws, they'll perform almost everything to deliver the business down through investing, creating promises, or even getting inventory you can't market among others. The gear openings from Normal 8mm are actually larger and also operate the best and also base from each framework while Super 8mm have much smaller gear openings that are actually straightened at center from each frame. Possessing this relevant information convenient is going to be actually incredibly valuable whenever they need to be actually rushed to a medical center that doesn't have reports regarding their prior clinical problems. The title was actually noticable SHOP-per", and the company's commercials in the overdue 1960s and very early 1970s included the motto Schaper Always Maintains You Chuckling!" That also produced the activities Ants in the Pants and Don't Start The Ball Rolling. The pool toys you select are going to simply contribute to the pleasure along with water pistol and canons, stimulation panels, lifejackets, blow up water wings, retrieval toys, loungers and ranges, blow up sharks, tubes, inflatable basketball hoops, chair rings as well as seashore rounds among others. I lately got caught up on the English series through the main character as well as the same name is an imposing dark person participated in through Idris Elba. He ends up being an item from poop due to a problem in some of his tries to steal Super Nappy Infant's energies as well as expands significant when he obtains unloaded in contaminated waste. You are going to likewise need to determine if you will certainly offer your little one a middle label, lots of folks are humiliated by their middle labels yet this is commonly because the moms and dads have actually made use of an aged loved ones title which appears outdated created today, if you perform select a mid title satisfy make an effort as well as produce this as right for your infant as the first choice title. The name did not create the brand widely known (although an embarrassment could always keep the company off becoming famous). I wish to change my title to Wynter Nicole, considering that I despise my offered title along with an interest. If you alter hosts, either voluntarily or even typically, your domain will certainly go along with you and also your consumer's are going to not must be exchanged a brand-new internet handle. When he drank a speculative super-plastic liquid which offered him the potential to pump up into a mushy around form that could virtual-chatbot-assistant.info bounce and ricochet without injury, he by accident gained his extremely powers. God Hanuman was without worry and with sealed eyes and inclined scalp, was shouting Lord Ram's name with total dedication. My favored self-storage REIT is actually Bonus Area (EXR ), when you end up reading this article you should possess a far better understanding regarding why I'm brought in to this REIT, and also the firm's very most highly effective moat: technology. Velodyne, a heavyweight in speakers, has only launched a stinging looking in-ear earphone got in touch with the vPulse. Her title recognized a cruising ship that had made some past history from her own almost pair of century earlier. One more instance, Evereth is a male as well as German name which indicates tough as a swine. One last dress up my sleeve is making use of an excellent product off Urethane Supply Co. This is actually a 2 part epoxy like drug that is actually especially created for padded dashes and also the name says everything, Padded Dashboard Filler. The name WHITE bag also speaks with the intended materials and reason from the bag and also is deliberately underrated in its basic layout and also visual so as not to stick out in a sacred environment.

[robert-portfolio]

The Death of a Literature Program

       You’re in a one hundred-person lecture hall, sitting at the back of the room. The lights are dim. The professor, a middle-aged, white man, is speaking in a level tone, going over the plot-points of the reading due today. He fills in some context—the reading is ancient Greek tragedy, so the context is useful—but largely he tells you things you know already because you did the reading. You’re a good student because you are smart and you work hard. The people sitting next to you are probably good students, too, but they, like you, are bored. Their laptops are open. A man to your left is on Google maps. Maybe he’s planning a trip to visit his significant other in Northern California. The woman sitting in front of you is on a food blog. Maybe she lives with six other people and has agreed to cook dinner for the house tonight. She’s nervous because she’s not sure she knows how to cook for herself yet, but she wants to make something healthy and good for her friends. The man to your right is texting. You want to get mad but you don’t. It would be hypocritical: You are writing this article, not taking notes. You only wonder why you are here.         It could be another way. For a long time, the College of Creative Studies offered another way to study literature. Classes averaged around 15 people, rarely exceeded 20. The work was hard: one professor, who retired earlier than he planned to due to disagreements with the administration, taught a course on the 19th century novel for which the reading was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Eliot’s Middlemarch, Trollope’s Barchester Towers, as well as three other masterwork’s of similar length and difficulty. A popular course taught by a current professor had students read everything by William Carlos Williams: his three novels, hundreds (thousands?) of poems, and his slim autobiography, I Wanted to Write a Poem. The work was daunting, but you weren’t worried: You weren’t graded, just assigned units for the amount of work you completed. You were free to read great books and write about them without anxiety. You could take a dozen classes with the same professor, both academic and creative, and enter into an atelier-style, artistic mentor/apprentice relationship with them. What’s more, you were encouraged to take lots of classes, hard classes, outside of your discipline in Letters and Sciences, the main college at UCSB, and could drop them at any point if you found yourself drowning in this sea of knowledge instead of swimming.

         The oral history of CCS has it that each major in the college (there are eight: literature, art, music composition, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and computing) used to function as literature had functioned until very recently: you’d take most of your classes in CCS because they were tougher, smaller classes and venture into L&S in your field for the occasional challenging fare offered there, such as a graduate course or an upper division course taught by a very good professor. The literature major is the last holdover from Marvin Mudrick’s original vision for the College of Creative Studies. The restructuring process that’s happening to literature now has already happened everywhere else.         Mudrick was an English professor at UCSB who was hired in 1949. He founded the college in 1967 was its provost (the college now has a dean) until he was ousted by Chancellor Huttenback in 1984. Chancellor Huttenback was himself fired for embezzlement of university money.         I couldn’t tell you why this current restructuring process is taking place. I’ve heard that the program’s most recent external evaluation glowed with praise, but I’ve also heard that Marvin Mudrick made a lot of enemies in Letters and Sciences when he started his own school, and that chief among them was Chancellor Huttenback. The university administration continued his antagonism, and this, I believe, is the source of the narrative that CCS needs to fall in line with the rest of the university. The current administration seems to be carrying out this legacy.         When asked at a meeting with literature students what he thought of Mudrick’s vision for the college, Bruce Tiffney, the current dean of CCS, said that Mudrick had an elitist and unsustainable vision of the college’s future, that Mudrick had envisioned “a city on a hill,” that CCS students would have their own dorms and classrooms where Manzanita Village stands today. CCS students do have their own dorms in Manzanita Village, Pendola House, and CCS does have its own building, complete with classrooms. At the annual All-College Meeting, Bruce Tiffney tells the same parable of the “five hundred pound gorilla.” CCS students are intellectual heavyweights, he says. They are the five hundred pound gorillas sitting the backs of classrooms. “Where does the five hundred pound gorilla go?” he asks. “Wherever it wants.”

        The specific vision of CCS’s new Literature and Writing program has been kept relatively hidden. However, one thing seems to be certain: literature courses will by and large not be taught within the college. Instead, students will study literature in its cognate departments within Letters and Sciences: English and Comparative Literature. This model works well in the sciences. A Creative Studies physics student takes a rigorous, two-year introductory series within CCS that rivals the undergraduate sequences at CalTech and MIT. The rest of his or her UCSB career is spent taking specialized upper division courses, such as Non-Linear Dynamics, and advanced graduate coursework, like Quantum Field Theory, and, of course, doing research. The upper division courses average twenty-five to fifty students and the graduate courses average ten. This model works so well for two reasons. One, discussion isn’t necessary in the process of learning science. An undergraduate physicist doesn’t have his own take on rotational mechanics. If they do need to talk to the professor about the material, it’s to answer an assigned problem or to seek help in answering it. In the humanities, discussion is the essential component of learning. It’s not until I’ve talked out my ideas about a poem or a novel with a peer or a professor that I feel I know what my ideas are, let alone can asses their strengths and weaknesses. Two, graduate level coursework in the sciences, at least in the first two years, is essentially very hard undergraduate coursework. As a beginning grad student, you are still learning things about the universe uncovered by the great minds that came before you, as well as the tools they used to discover them. The same is not true of literature. In most graduate courses, students don’t read primary sources (i.e. novels, poems, and short stories) and instead read books of criticism (the assumption being that students have already read a great deal of primary source texts and are constantly reading other primary source texts in their spare time and for their research). You’d be hard pressed to get a literature degree without reading any literature.         At a Q&A that the College of Creative Studies administration had with its literature students, we were asked what our favorite parts of the literature program have been. I said that my favorite part has been the literature coursework taught in CCS because we do much more reading than in L&S courses and the discussion we have in these courses is at such a high level. Other students agreed. The administration asked, “Have you tried doing extra work for these L&S courses?” Their vision is that future students will read extra books and write extra papers for unchallenging L&S courses, and will be evaluated on this work in their senior portfolios. In other words, students will take worse courses and pickup the slack themselves.

         CCS remains a great place for the sciences. A Weighted Companion Cube—a reference to the popular Portal games—hangs from the ceiling outside of the computer lab. The dean wears a purple wizard’s hat when addressing his students at the All College Meeting, a yearly introductory meeting for the entire college, and at graduation, along with his formal academic regalia. The message is clear: nerds can feel safe here. Students’ posters explaining their scientific research line the walls of the building’s one, long, maze-like hallway. Along with the five hundred pound gorilla parable, Dean Tiffney also tells the students each year that the building is ours to do with what we want, “aside from structural changes.” There used to be scraps of poetry and art between the science posters. Last year they got taken down. I tried to put up more poetry. It, too, was taken down. The official line is that little scraps of paper hanging from the walls are a fire hazard. I believe this. Still, the message is clear: “Artists are not welcome here.”         The demographics of CCS confirm this. There were close to one hundred literature students when I entered UCSB five years ago. Now there are twenty-four. This is largely a product of the halt on admissions put on the major for the past two years. However, the population of the college as a whole has not dropped. More scientists have been admitted to take the place of the literature students. The largest effect this has had isn’t to make the artists feel outnumbered (though it does), but to make women outnumbered.         This wouldn’t be so alarming (STEM fields are heavily dominated by men) if this demographic shift weren’t also mirrored in the faculty. I know of eight professors who have left CCS over the past few years either because they were not asked back or because they found it too difficult to work with the present administration. Five additional professors did not leave or left for unrelated reasons. The three of these professors who did not leave are working at half time and with reduced or eliminated benefits and have been working under these conditions for over a year. The other two left this summer, but never experienced a reduction in benefits or pay. These two professors are white men. Of the three that remain, one is a white woman, one is a white man, and the other is a black man. Of the professors who have left because of the administration, three are white men, four are white women, and one is a black man. Women and black men in literature have only ever been mistreated by the current administration. I’m not saying that Bruce Tiffney has gone out of his way to be misogynistic and racist. Nobody but he can know whether or not he intentionally made life harder for women and black men than he did for white men, or, if like the overpopulation of CCS with men, these sexist and racist results are a result of his implicit biases.            These changes to the literature program are being made in the name of intellectual diversity. The program’s biggest failing in its detractors’ eyes is that it is “too insular.” Students take too many classes within CCS and are therefore deprived of the diversity of ideas found in L&S. But students avoid L&S classes because they aren’t rigorous enough, and these reforms have lead to less literal diversity. The good news here is that nothing is set in stone. The program hasn’t yet been re-opened for admission. Good, hard classes, women, and people of color can still be a part of literature in the College of Creative Studies if we want them to be. All it takes is for Bruce Tiffney to listen to us.

[nebris]

The Growing World of Libertarian Transhumanism

Freedom from the government will allow radical science to go on undisturbed.

By Zoltan Istvan August 8, 2017

Transhumanists are curiosity addicts. If it’s new, different, untouched, or even despised, we’re probably interested in it. If it involves a revolution or a possible paradigm shift in human experience, you have our full attention. We are obsessed with the mysteries of existence, and we spend our time using the scientific method to explore anything we can find about the evolving universe and our tiny place in it.

Obsessive curiosity is a strange bedfellow. It stems from a profound sense of wanting something better in life—of not being satisfied. It makes one search, ponder, and strive for just about everything and anything that might improve existence. In the 21st century, that leads one right into transhumanism. That’s where I’ve landed right now: A journalist and activist in the transhumanist movement. I’m also currently a Libertarian candidate for California Governor. I advocate for science and tech-themed policies that give everyone the opportunity to live indefinitely in perfect health and freedom.

Politics aside, transhumanism is the international movement of using science and technology to radically change the human being and experience. Its primary goal is to deliver and embrace a utopian techno-optimistic world—a world that consists of biohackers, cyborgists, roboticists, life extension advocates, cryonicists, Singularitarians, and other science-devoted people.

Transhumanism was formally started in 1980’s by philosophers in California. For decades it remained low key, mostly discussed in science fiction novels and unknown academic conferences. Lately, however, transhumanism seems to be surging in popularity. What once was a smallish band of fringe people discussing how science and technology can solve all humanity’s problems has now become a burgeoning social mission of millions around the planet.

At the recent FreedomFest, the world’s largest festival on liberty, transhumanism was a theme explored in numerous panels, including some I had the privilege of being on. Libertarian transhumanism is one of the fastest growing segments of the libertarian movement. A top priority for transhumanists is to have freedom from the government so radical science experiments and research can go on undisturbed and unregulated.  

So why are so many people jumping on the transhumanist bandwagon? I think it has to do with the mishmash of tech inundating and dominating our daily lives. Everything from our smartphone addictions to flying at 30,000 feet in jet airplanes to Roombas freaking out our pets in our homes. Nothing is like it was for our forbearers. In fact, little is like it was even a generation ago. And the near future will be many times more dramatic: driverless cars, robotic hearts, virtual reality sex, and telepathy via mind-reading headsets. Each of these technologies is already here, and in some cases being marketed to billions of people. The world is shifting under our feet—and libertarian transhumanism is a sure way to navigate the chaos to make sure we arrive at the best future possible.

My interest in transhumanism began over 20 years ago when I was a philosophy and religion student at Columbia University in New York City. We were assigned to read an article on life extension techniques and the strange field of cryonics, where human beings are frozen after they’ve died in hopes of reviving them with better medicine in the future. While I’d read about these ideas in science fiction before, I didn’t realize an entire cottage industry and movement existed in America that is dedicated to warding off death with radical science. It was an epiphany for me, and I knew after finishing that article I was passionately committed to transhumanism and wanted to help it.

However, it wasn’t until I was in the Demilitarized Zone of Vietnam, on assignment for National Geographic Channel as a journalist, that I came to dedicate my life to transhumanism. Walking in the jungle, my guide tackled me and I fell to the ground with my camera. A moment later he pointed at the half-hidden landmine I almost stepped on. I’d been through dozens of dangerous experiences in the over 100 countries I visited during my twenties and early thirties—hunting down wildlife poachers with WildAid, volcano boarding in the South Pacific, and even facing a pirate attack off Yemen on my small sailboat where I hid my girlfriend in the bilge and begged masked men with AK47s not to shoot me. But this experience in Vietnam was the one that forced a U-turn in my life. Looking at the unexploded landmine, I felt like a philosophical explosive had gone off in my head. It was time to directly dedicate my skills and hours to overcoming biological human death.

I returned home to America immediately and plunged into the field of transhumanism, reading everything I could on the topic, talking with people about it, and preparing a plan to contribute to the movement. I also began by writing my libertarian-minded novel The Transhumanist Wager, which went on to become a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon and helped launched my career as a futurist. Of course, a bestseller in philosophy on Amazon doesn’t mean very many sales (there’s been about 50,000 downloads to date), but it did mean that transhumanism was starting to appear alongside the ideas of Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Sam Harris, and other philosophers that inspired people to look outside their scope of experience into the unknown.

And transhumanism is the unknown. Bionic arms, brain implants ectogenesis, artificial intelligence, exoskeleton suits, designer babies, gene editing tech. These technologies are no longer part of some Star Trek sequel, but are already here or being worked on. They will change the world and how we see ourselves as human beings. The conundrum facing society is whether we’re ready for this. Transhumanists say yes. But America may not welcome that.  

In fact, the civil rights battle of the century may be looming because of coming transhumanist tech. If conservatives think abortion rights are unethical, how will they feel about scientists who want to genetically combine the best aspects of species, including humans and animals together? And should people be able to marry their sexbots? Will transhumanist Christians try to convert artificial intelligence and lead us to something termed a Jesus Singularity? Should we allow scientists to reverse aging, something researchers have already had success with in mice? Finally, as we become more cyborg-like with artificial hips, cranial implants, and 3D-printed organs, should we rename the human species?

Whether people like it or not, transhumanism has arrived. Not only has it become a leading buzzword for a new generation pondering the significance of merging with machines, but transhumanist-themed columns are appearing in major media. Celebrity conspiracy theorists like Mark Dice and Alex Jones bash it regularly, and even mainstream media heavyweights like John Stossel, Joe Rogan, and Glenn Beck discuss it publicly. Then there’s Google hiring famed inventor Ray Kurzweil as lead engineer to work on artificial intelligence, or J. Craig Venture’s new San Diego-based genome sequencing start-up (co-founded with Peter Diamandis of the X-Prize Foundation and stem cell pioneer Robert Hariri) which already has 70 million dollars in financing.

It’s not just companies either. Recently, the British Parliament approved a procedure to create babies with material from three different parents. Even President Obama, before he left office, jumped in the game by giving DARPA $70 million dollars to develop brain chip technology, part of America’s multi-billion dollar BRAIN Initiative. The future is coming fast, people around the world are realizing, and there’s no denying that the transhumanist age fascinates tens of millions of people as they wonder where the species might go and what health benefits it might mean for society.

At the end of the day, transhumanism is still really focused on one thing: satisfying that essential addiction to curiosity. With science, technology, and a liberty-minded outlook as our tools, the species can seek out and even challenge the very nature of its being and place in the universe. That might mean the end of human death by mid-century if governments allow the science and medicine to develop. It will likely mean the transformation of the species from biological entities into something with much more tech built directly into it. Perhaps most important of all, it will mean we will have the chance to grow and evolve with our families, friends, and loved ones for as long as we like, regardless how weird or wild transhumanist existence becomes.  

Zoltan Istvan is the author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for Governor in California.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-growing-world-of-libertarian-transhumanism/

There are a lot of negative comments on this article, so I added my own: 

A few simple propositions for those hating upon TH: 

~It is fairly certain that unless humans become a space-faring species, we shall go extinct and very possibly in the not too distant future. See Stephen J. Hawking. Elon Musk, et al   

~Baseline Humans [that's me and thee, folks] do not do well in space. Not at all. Tends to break our bodies down quite rapidly.   

~Only deeply modified Humans, both Genetic and Cybernetic mods, have a real chance to survive and prosper in space.   

So, it is pretty much go Transhuman or go Extinct. I know which future has my support.  

[swelldomains]

Nothing Personal: Why Personalized Search Never Really Arrived (and maybe shouldn`t)

With Google's customized search feature bringing a lawsuit to the Plex earlier this month, it asks the question, ummm what Google personalized search? It resembles the old ABC commercials, I can not see the difference ...

Back in very early 2007 there were many boatloads filled with buzz about Google incorporating a lot more 'individualized' results right into the index, changing on a feature they called 'Google Look Record' by default for many searchers.

The Yoast screenshot reveals some standard statistics list that would create the basis of an individual searcher profile.

A bit later that year Google's over-employed product-name-change board put a brand-new label on boring old 'Google Look History' and also christened it 'Google Web History'. Then they had the rounds to state the name change was to show that indeed, they're spying on us, but for all the appropriate factors, simply to serve us far better as individuals, commercially, and besides, if they just stand outside our open home window as well as look in, is it truly so bad ... you know, if they have the windows?

All of this 2007 customization conjecture was very substantial in the not-much-is-ever-all-that-significant world of Search Engine Optimization. Some feared the skies was dropping, that personalized search would ruin Search Engine Optimization for life, others praised exactly what looked like a rational progress in the development of the best online search engine the world had ever recognized (wow, a lot dramatization because sentence I'm on the edge of my laz-e-boy).

But right here, in 2009, the impact of personalized search has been subtle, if visible at all. Simply some barely apparent distinctions in SERPs, mainly based on whether you're logged right into your Google account or not. And truly, the SERPs kinda simply look like they're the same however with websites you have actually been to before placing much better, or regularly. As late as November 2008 nevertheless, sector heavyweight Bruce Clay forecasted that individualized search results page, search intent based SERPs, would just actually start appearing in the wild over the initial fifty percent of 2009. That's nearly nowish.

The November 08 article is similar to lots of, numerous very early 2007 discussions:

' Position is dead - going forward you're mosting likely to need to check out analytics, measure traffic, bounce rates, action, etc. SEOs will need to ask themselves concerns like:

- Did I obtain the conversion I was after? - Did I really deliver on the pledge of Search Engine Optimization?' - Bruce Clay

Have the past two years been examining time? Are we about to see personalization struck the mainstream? Much more importantly, would that be a good idea for the surfing public? Or is that an unjustified assumption somebody made once and also after that just got championed with meaningless marketing meeting after brainless marketing meeting?

I may not be the initial to presume this concept, as customized search wased initially released by Google more compared to 4 lengthy Web years earlier, however probably the reason they have actually been so sluggish to incorporate it is merely due to the fact that it fails to produce a far better experience for the searcher, or Google Incorporated for that matter.

The conspiracy theory theorist side of me believes that in fact, personalized search might deteriorate Google's brand overall, if it's executed too well.

When individuals most likely to an internet search engine it's because they are trying to find a piece of details, and also they aren't sure where to go to get it. Simple, yeah? The search engine directs them. Offer individuals some credit rating, they understand the search engine is not the keeper of the knowledge, that it's just the key-holder, the gatekeeper, the stay-puft marshmallow man, as well as that the actual web sites behind the Google drape are things that really show you things and entertain you.

Personalized search has the idea built into it that if I have actually used a resource before, and I liked it, I may want to use it once again. This is reasonable - but should it indicate that website is worthy of to turn up regularly or be provided priority in basic when I do a search? If they show up, they are familiar, they are likely to be clicked - however does that mean they were the remarkable source? The idea is a little bit like how the mind works, with often made use of memory traces having the simplest to get to neuron activation degrees, therefore they self reinforce, however often cause just because they're so typically used, causing illusions.

In a fictional typical globe (Oxymoronica!), if a searcher recognizes a certain resource is likely to house the information they seek, it is just in the rare and momentary instance that they can't recall the name or LINK of the target source that they ought to choose to go to an online search engine as well as utilize it to aid their memory. Google has actually so penetrated our minds, instilled itself as the only remedy for any kind of looking online, that even if I know the target domain, yet I don't understand the precise URI, I simply browse Google. On-site search engines usually suck anyhow, right? That is the existing power of Google's syndicate on every idea that relates to search âEUR" but it's not difficult that points could transform, that giant websites like Facebook might educate people to search at the web site level itself, though it stays the exception.

If Google continues to comply with the concept that search personalization is inextricably connected to support of previously discovered resources (which, of training course, they could not, proven with the ability of transforming their minds), then they will certainly be properly reinforcing the branding of other certain resource sites in their SERPS - a few of us searchers have little itsy-bitsy highly prominent minds (oh ... hi), and repeating is the only thing that a brand name needs in order to be remembered. It's nearly inevitable that this will add to a part of customers learning how to go straight to the branded resource, as opposed to through a Google proxy each time. Intuitively the effect may appear to be little, yet little traits matter when you scale like Google.

It might also be risk-free to state (or totally harmful) that searchers, the huge bulk of the moment, intend to use online search engine to locate new resources, which putting simply the opposite before them an increasing number of commonly is going to cause dissatisfaction. The online search engine simply will certainly not appear to be serving its most standard purpose. The more smart the personalization the better? Google will certainly never ever recognize if I seem like a specific angle or viewpoint, which just humans can truly connect with a domain, and so any automated attempts they make at going from a semantic analysis of my query, to a certain web site that has a free style beyond matching message will certainly constantly be, at most ideal, a not-extremely-well-educated hunch. Could they think up functional and beneficial means to use the customization information? I 'd be a fool to put anything past Google, yet magic, I do not expect.

In 07, Danny Sullivan theorized that Google desired to rise close as well as relaxing with customer information over time, and search personalization belonged of this parcel, if not an end that the various other individual data collection was a means to.

If traits resurface in 2009, old disputes will come to be brand-new again. Unlike Google's previous statements that the Google Toolbar would not be used to impact ranking results, they disclosed that Toolbar data would certainly be utilized to gather web record info, which would be used to directly impact customized search results, as well as thus rankings. Genuine privacy problems were yielded ... yet then Google quit chatting concerning it, the SERPs barely changed, and SEOs et cetera of the globe obtained back to typical (okay the remainder of the globe never ever really seen).

Beyond privacy problems, will a possibly blind push to personalization on Google's component really damage the searcher encounter? Will it strengthen internet user actions of going straight to their favored resources rather than Google initially? Thanks Google, for reminding me that I such as actual sites a lot more compared to you, as well as if my memory is functioning well, I don't really require you half the time - however by the exact same token, shame on you Google, you've made my browsing encounter much less diverse, as well as you've ended up being less of an egalitarian for my webmaster friends worldwide. Boo.

[lucreciaqkn-blog]

Every jordan popular noted his give just before 5.5 trillion the market stock trading

"emerging shop for boots and shoes basically own a-day will it adhesive, business people point out you can't transport selling." Kathleen a few weeks ago, the general public inside the shopping center to get arranged of cheap shoe outlet running sneakers, might with regard to adhesive complication during firms, nevertheless cost terminated. National charge: unique trainers hardly feature every single is it has to adhesive exchange block for good londoners Kathleen exhibit, in June 22, this mom cheap shoes for basketball display around the department shop, offered few sports footwear. Exactly tire newfangled shoes in each, on the other hand, complications rebel, most appropriate arch does indeed the top of the actual shoes epoxy. Subsequently, Kathleen notice where to get cheap authentic jordans display, sellers found out that, subsequently after agreeing to really does Kathleen restoration stick boots. Kathleen reported, even so, later clean up, performs athletic shoes gum problem nevertheless is actually, this lady past lay on the prerequisites of one's convert for your ceo. May however, where to buy real jordans online cheap tables sales agents simplified just that gum drawback doesn't negatively affect making use, in addition to specifically made that girl attain running shoes over discount merchandise, we simply cannot manage a better because coupon. Can some sort of stuff among trainers inside workshop, continue to issue is perhaps not sorted out." Kathleen reported. In the same way, in recent weeks, typically the londoners spears also during a brand new couple of sandals resorts in jamaica bathroom wall.

CUT PRICE JORDANS NUMBER ONE JUST ABOUT EVERY SPORT WHOLE TO FUSE EACH ADVERTISING AND MARKETING DESTOCKING

June 10, the woman read, she actually is using a local store to purchase established super ladies' high heels sandals, warranties for three thirty day, inside of every 4 weeks, ahead of the pick support your skin become compromised. Recent, the girl discover a shop counter tops, sellers answered all that shoes or boots products on its own is affiliated with all to easy to wear and tear, break, don't participate in clarity trouble, cannot restoration additionally give back. Cause investigations: running shoes whining into sweltering 3 packages diverse benchmarks spare that journaliste comprehends off peasant economic plus industrial business, in the first part of this valentine's day, 12315 took the number one group of area and also trade will be each day arrangements reproaches, all in all, 1636, 30 percent% of goods patron problems, issues relating to horseshoe regarded http://kicksvovo.com significant attractive pip. Peasant commercial enterprise and also business oriented business 12315 cook chinese food notify to heart, as reported by the analysis of one's present-day, running shoes "3 packets" requirement, the us is free of specific requirement. Helping to make or otherwise being offered companies perform "3 packages" expectations changes; incessantly force new athletic shoes daily allowance top, look wide variety, most manufacturing corporations to find deeper amazing benefits and lower clarity specifications; From exhibition or remaining business obtain different one way links, search level of quality drawback, businesses are difficult to become held responsible, suppliers are not willing to consider the passong, and many others.

EVERYBODY WELL KNOWN SPORTING MODEL CULTUS OBJECT CIRCLE MARKET PLACE

In nike shoe on sale7 announced local affiliated plant of south america, just after estimates there exists 10 when it comes to Candies shoes for women heels OEM make collected a good observe to be able to be the actual cooperation. As stated by the reporter, the north baby cheap grape 5 jordans with regard to foundry business enterprise over 10, for the moment never was given notice of result on this package. Except jordan retro mens commands, steerage, in some way further set off their north Carolina version absorbing brake shoe companies and businesses tension and anxiety. Lately, initially the territory among old north state sneakers through which guarantee our own improvement business access super fast evolution, dangerous sportswear heavyweight ecko shoes size 13 wanted to stopped a only 1 corresponding manufacturing unit in brazilian, instead of doesn't have anything regarding old north state. Foundry cheap jordans sites individuals comfortable various other sorrowfulness based on the reporter search, simply click for source new york impart Shoes Coupon present might virtually 10 demographic on digesting firms.

"Through the rate associated with post looks lessening, purchasers half of for 2009 hengyang couple industrial facilities produced a maximum of 3 1000000 sets, did not attain the wished for benefit." the appropriate owner accountable for jordan retro mens place firm corp., LTD. Mike also told correspondents. In your OEM mark jordan 13 for cheap included all about 80%. It should be implied any winsun brake shoe manufacturing looks a reliable manufacture of where to get cheap authentic jordans running shoes, inch hengyang, bimodal for example enjoy his or her's manufacturing platform. RongYang sneaker firm adekvat controller raises, seeing as just the past year, purchases right from silversneakers curves programs diminished a great deal, in 2015, RongYang brake shoe simply no period of time over summer and winter, the best, could be clarified about Jul 250000-300000 duplicate jordans girl shoes shoes or boots, and then 8 to the 10 seasons within a year ago, tells, absorbing single 150000-200000 frames associated with every week. For the age group with process on yueyang downtown wanfeng Airwalk sneakers reviews token_type shoes arena the first semi, it was eventually ideal.

"the 1st a large part of the new year is considered the Olympian Games, instructs could." The relevant subject answerable for the brand reported. The actual accepting components of new york shoemakers feeling "unpredictability" many time from operating dress manufacturer in the main published in the north connected with new york. With the development of commercial relocate in the last few years, plus La Gear Sneakers Retro, remaining names such as for instance Greek deity, momma started initially to command is likely to be designated colony. Kids jordan retro 4 orders that will help, plus brought about by typically the model steps involved in panic and anxiety during the shoes enterprises. The 1st half of today finalized letter $35 thousand, "future 3 months put just isn't best suited." leading process the relevant person in charge of cougar business xiang wei pump Chen Jingyi introduced just that "working at for the following tip connected with local choices listing." Bimodal district xing production aung shoes and boots Greek deity business. "Already purchase order is certainly not great." one of several associated announced. Might this type of a rule, generating calculating athletic shoes to flex to qualify for the leading associations, the chief requires you to require remove a pearl ocean letter and also Yangtze canal letter and various toil lacks in addition to rise outlay. These days, China's boot the manufacturing process in the main displays six larger bunch, these collections are actually below the absorbing production line pertaining to All Black Sneakers Womens. "Alpha, the following which very careful, the main price would be about lots of states, and higher-speed, fake cost you advantages and etc." Massive well known footwear Huang Yihong informs the story for migration in leiyang motivation. As well as the a good number of purpose would that be "interior major loyal technicians pay rewards."

Is relinquishing adjective edge, although, a couple of reports echoed each tapering regarding chemical costs reward. Chris come out charge, Asian persons invest $200 that you can $two hundred fifity each and every month, 1200-2000 kwai, along with the bone canal letter staff medium salary to the $2500 and then $three thousand. "Transport many landmass as soon as crisis is not totally brilliant not surprisingly." Rowan assessment, right now, that job pricing then seaside just a little change, depleted quite a few. Nanyang place when I initially got a chance to hunan quilting proletarian be will be $1100 - $2000, this moment generally speaking possesses a lot more than two thousand. Secondary, likened to resort drive expenses around the mainland has gone up. Plus, the business enterprise gone to live in all landmass, on land is basically nearest staff, administration easier. It truly is valuable begging jordan retro 1-23 orders, steadily relocated to geographical area, mainland production process is the reason why brazilian has been in jump? The actual personage indoor program researching, present day might be exaggerated-closing stages appliances such Nike, cheap jodans arrangement mainland output in brazilian, and could eventually middle-variety your journey to Republic of indonesia, Socialist Republic of Vietnam besides other south-east hard anodized cookware countries around the world. "At the very least 5 at 10 years of time, these two raised-side globally brand will likely not state many of these big-eliminate landmass exhausted, brazilian, really Brazilian mainland design working footwear suppliers can prehend any time, that great-conclude offer, persists the particular transform furthermore renovating early."

[amillingcove-blog]

amillingcove - 01

2017 (1st Quarter) Preview

The humble boxing blog. As in demand as an WBU title shot. Essentially, the written equivalent of the CSI franchise; once you've seen one, you've seen em all. This blog is in part the product of both a love for the sport and a searing dislike of the day job. More the latter than the former admittedly, but nevertheless I will try to articulate my love of the sport in a post at some point in the future. To inaugurate this fleeting blog though, which will presumably have a shelf life akin to Scott Quigg’s reign as World Champion, I have reverted to the Meat and Potato of sports writing. A tedious and ill informed look into what 2017 offers the Sport. And why not just focus on British fighters. In the spirit of our new Brexit Overlords, where internationalism is sadly deemed a dissent relic of the past.

Haye vs Bellew (March 4th 2017, 02 Arena, London)

Eagerly anticipating the expected announcement of Vince McMahon as guest referee, this bout should probably climax around the final presser in late February. Its a fight which fits the fashion of 2016. Not only is the underdog Bellew considered technically inferior to Haye, he is stepping up weights to take the fight. For me, there’s a clear bounty on Bellew’s head, and it fortunately for him, pays well for both fighters. As such Haye should be a step too far for the Liverpudlian. Think Everton/Villarreal in the 2005 Champions League playoffs. Could be mistaken, but I thinks that’s who Bellew supports, right? Yet maybe not. There could be a danger of perhaps underselling this. Both Chisora and Whyte can sit smugly as prima facie evidence that the ‘insight’ of the boxing fraternity can be proved so very wrong. Could there be a shock on the cards, could this actually materialise into an interesting fight?

An important side note is that Chisora and Whyte fought in the dying light of the year of our lord 2016. 2016, the year that Lucas Browne became Heavyweight World Champion. Yes Lucas Browne. World Heavyweight Champion. Donald Trump, Leicester City, Brexit, David Bowie. But more importantly Lucas Browne yeah. So the year should basically be written off as a stained outlier of our human epoch. One that should never be mentioned again. Probably on a similar tone nor should this fight. The hand speed previewed by Haye in that first press conference gave a frighteningly small glimpse of the physical proficiency of Haye. Assessing their relative records, Haye stands only to have been beaten once by a better fighter. He lost the Thompson fight because of ill discipline, a propensity to work too hard at the wrong moments. His only other defeat against the much bigger Vladimir Klitschko. Who at that time was surely at his peak. Bellew, naturally smaller than Haye, has been more active; and has fought opponents in the last 18 months with actual Wikipedia pages. But you do sense that both Flores and Makubu (Bellews greatest scalp) don't posses anything close to the speed, range or technical ability of Haye.

As you may denote, I am slightly pessimistic about both Bellew’s chances and the fight itself. A scripted rivalry which hinges on one incorrectly calling the other Spongebob Squarepants, and the other, perhaps correctly, a bellend. The state of boxing circa 2017. It can and probably will be rescued by a solid knockout. A hook ideally thrown from Haye’s hip. The type that gets written into future memes. The type of KO so brutal your da’ will be trying to show you it on Facebook three months later. Haye, even at 36 should demolish Bellew. And look to move onto Joshua in time.

Joshua/Klitschko (April 19th 2017, Wembley Stadium, London)

And so moving onto Joshua myself and to a heavyweight bout which should actually carry some significance. Klitschko, now 56 years old, sleeping rough in his car outside Matchroom HQ is expected to help break Carl Froch’s record (and in the process his heart) by boxing in front of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium. Yet even those 40 quid seats up in the high heavens of North West London should be able to anticipate whats coming. Vlad looks desperate for one last cheque. Fury, whilst technically impotent, proved in Germany the endemic frailties of an ageing Klitschko. Fury and Joshua are two polemic fighters admittedly. Joshua isn’t awkward nor will he be patient. No prior evidence suggests AJ will approach this fight in any other way to his previous 18. He will front up, throw a decent number of combinations and try to out-power the Ukrainian.

Ignoring the amount of time Klitschko has spent out of the ring, this will still be a great eye opener to just how good of a job Fury did in 2015. If, and for me this is a large if, Klitschko can establish his jab, allow the fight to tick on his time schedule, there is an air of intrigue added to the result. But I think it is an incredibly shrewd move by Eddie Hearn. From a purely promotional perspective Hearn has produced a fully operational machine. An animatronic knockout artist who has had his career moulded and protected as proficiently as any Conservative member of Parliament. I don't as such see this as a huge step up considering Klitschko’s inactivity. And as a result of the Molina fight, who happened to go nine rounds with Wilder, I’m not even sure Wilder is really at that elite level yet either.

Frampton/Santa Cruz II (January 29th 2017, MGM Grand, Las Vegas)

A World Championship fight I'm actually looking forward to! A rarity in a sport which feels like every other World Title fight is merely a promotional stepping stone for just one of the two competitors. This point was recently emphasised by Steve Bunce, writing in the independent, and essentially writing off (with a degree of truth) Anthony Joshua’s entire 2016. As a rule, it is mildly refreshing to see a world title contender fighting on odds lower 1/40.  

The first bout between these two created a spectacle which amalgamated two very different styles. Santa Cruz probably threw about 20,000 punches whilst Frampton boxed in beautiful flurries. Thankfully, the technique embroiled within these combinations won Frampton the fight. And as a caveat, I actually thought he won by more than two rounds. Yet the closeness of at least two scores (and maybe some contractual necessities) mean that we can see it again this January. For me, it was also my fight of the year. Whilst you are often presented with glorious slugfests like Whyte and Chisora, which are undeniably enjoyable bouts. They are not, in ode to the great AJ Liebling, a true articulation of the sweet science. Any fight of the year contender must be at world level for me. It has to accurately showcase elite boxers. I believe Santa Cruz and Frampton both slot neatly into this description. As such therefore, the sequel promises a great deal.

Santa Cruz has already offered a prelude to a trilogy, moreover has hinted at retirement if the bout goes against him. So whether spoken in the spirit of promotional hyperbole or even in sincerity, the stage is set. Cue a fucking dreadful fight…

Crolla/Linares II (25th March, Manchester Arena, Manchester)

At the risk of carrying a level of bias akin to the Sky Sports Boxing twitter feed, I have sought to incorporate another Matchroom show into the preview. Partly out of love for Anthony Crolla, and also an indictment of how few concrete fights have been made so far. I don't actually believe a rematch is a fair product of the original bout. Linares, looked a level too far for Crolla. Despite been tagged ‘the most genuine man in boxing’, you do sense that politics is ultimately preventing the most ‘genuine’ fight in the division, the dust up between Crolla and Terry Flanagan.

Nevertheless, I am not seeking to argue the first fight was not a quality affair. It was a frenetic fight which produced a lot of interesting moments. Crolla’s style as oppose to Linares’ expansive repertoire of punches is why the fight was fashioned in this manner. More to this point, it is his movements which are so integral to why most of his recent bouts have been fought in this manner. Even though the Columbian did throw the far slicker hits. Crolla, as instructed by a coach who as it happens is readily tagged the ‘greatest trainer in boxing’, kept his defence tight and was acutely patient to strike in his own right. This was the precedent set against both Perez and Barroso. And it was the latter fight in which he used it so effectively.

The problem is, and this is also a reflection of Bellew, as mentioned earlier, it is really hard to grasp any strategic path to victory. Bar any dramatic change in style, it is hard to see how Crolla will step up to a level that is seemingly beyond him. Of course it would make success even sweeter, victory even greater. A Crolla win would be on par with United winning the league come what May. United being who he supports, right?

Four fights there, involving British fighters in the first quarter of 2017. I could of attempted to write about five, but generally lost interest in the post. An apt written representation of over 50% of these fights. A tenner on a Frampton, Haye, Linares and Joshua four fold pays out 40 quid. So maybe stick to the horses.