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Home / Strategy After Ferguson
Interview with Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee/Action Against Black Genocide
Interview with George Ciccariello-Maher, of the Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee/Action Against Black Genocide, from Viewpoint Magazine's "Strategy After Ferguson" feature.
What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future?
As the energy sparked nationwide by the Ferguson rebellion wound down, Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee / Action Against Black Genocide (TMOC/AABG) coalesced as a radical pole organizing against the police, and in particular around the murder of Brandon Tate-Brown by Philadelphia Police in December 2014. Since then, the group has repeatedly antagonized Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and helped spearhead a militant march in solidarity with the Baltimore Rebellion (two of our comrades had been arrested in Baltimore, and one is still facing charges).
Despite Police Commissioner Ramsey's efforts to paint himself as a representative of a gentler form of hands-off, "21st-Century policing" to curry favor with Obama, we have used direct actions to shatter that image and reveal just the same old brutal, white supremacist policing in Philadelphia. When our comrades got in Ramsey's face at a town hall in the Lawncrest neighborhood, his thugs arrested ten but we eventually beat the charges in court. At this point, we're like a bad dream Ramsey can't wake up from: he can't hold a public event without us putting him on blast. As a result, he has repeatedly caved to our demands, albeit without ever giving us credit: he released the names of the murderous cops who killed Brandon Tate-Brown, he released the video of the murder, and he promised that the names of police who kill will be released within 48 hours.
Momentary confrontations and direct actions are only one part of the equation, however, and we are also beginning to lay the groundwork for a text-based police brutality rapid response network in the city that we hope will provide a more durable form of participatory community self-defense – think a more generalized form of Copwatch without the specialized teams of observers – and eventually even an alternative to calling the police in the first place.
During the Millions March in Washington DC, many of the young grassroots organizers who have driven the direct actions against police violence were prevented from speaking by the older leadership. This pattern has continued. What are the politics behind this clash – why is the older, local black political and clerical leadership trying to keep protests contained and controlled, and what kind of alternative strategies can younger militants put forward?
While clashes like the one that occurred at the Millions March indeed look like generational clashes, they are in fact political clashes. After all, there are many older militants from the revolutionary Black freedom struggle around, and their age doesn't negate their militancy in the least. What we are instead confronting today is the incorporation of certain sectors of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s into the political institutions of the United States, and these sectors are tasked with controlling the militancy of the grassroots and upholding a false narrative of social change. The historical narrative and containment function are tightly intertwined.
The historical narrative of the civil rights movement is often a sanitized and whitewashed caricature of the Black freedom struggle, which is cast as a polite affair carried out by well-behaved leaders – often religious and almost always men – who ask nicely, make rational arguments, and patiently await the (white) nation's conscience from within. The reality was far different: messy, violent, impolite, often sustained by women and those unrecognized organizers that Malcolm X called the "small people" who "haven't got anything to lose."
It was not only or even mostly a movement of leaders but one of masses in the streets: rioting, rebelling, and organizing. It was grounded not in rational argumentation – the idea that somehow you could convince white supremacy of its own illogic – but instead found sustenance in Frederick Douglass' insistence that "it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." You can't argue with white supremacy, just as you can't guilt it into submission, and so the Black freedom struggle was not centrally an appeal to the guilty conscience of white America. This explains too why it was not strictly nonviolent: as Stokely Carmichael insisted, "in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience – the United States has none."
This sanitized history served not only to save the wounded pride of a white supremacist nation, but worse, to undercut the revolutionary impulse and demands of the concrete struggles in the streets. The same Martin Luther King Jr. who had been denounced by the FBI as a communist was – in light of the growing threat of Black revolutionaries – quickly embraced and exalted. And when he took more openly radical positions, he was executed by the same system that would then christen him a national hero.
What did those struggling in the streets want? To fulfill the program of Radical Reconstruction, then already a century overdue, without which no substantive freedom would be possible. For W.E.B. Du Bois, this meant far more than political equality, which after all had been briefly granted after the Civil War. It meant something fuller and more complete that he – writing at the height of Jim Crow – was pessimistic would ever be accomplished: "the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876 – Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat."
Here we are, nearly a century and a half later, and Du Bois' words ring truer than true: formal political equality (Leading) is nothing without economic equality (Land) and education (Light). Moreover, both the formal political equality of the Voting Rights Act (1965) and the formal school desegregation promised in Brown v. Board (1954) have since been gutted and reversed by a string of judicial decisions. "Material force must be overthrown by material force," and just as Radical Reconstruction itself only existed under the dictatorship of Federal armies, without which it was beaten back by white terror, so too with many advances of the 1960s.
In light of these reversals, what was once a shield for bruised white egos has since come to uphold the misleading idea of a "civil rights generation," and a cover for new forms of domination. This is a spectrum: on the one hand are well-meaning participants in the Civil Rights Movement who wrongly believed formal political rights would be enough. For some, the struggle came to an end in 1965, and those who continue to complain are ungrateful for sacrifices past. On the other extreme are those who have assumed power directly over the mechanisms for oppressing the Black community. If Ferguson looked a lot like old-school, pre-1965 white supremacy, Baltimore – with its Black mayor and former Black police commissioner – represents this newer, post-1965 form.
But despite the efforts of some more conservative sectors of Black elites to uphold a clean historical division at 1965, it's also worth remembering that the contemporary struggle between the youth in the streets and the entrenched leadership is itself a repetition of the very conflict that Malcolm X identified in 1964. When Black youth of a previous generation slipped the yoke of the established, nonviolent political leadership, they set into motion the combative dialectic that forced formal equality into the law, and therein lay the hope for today as well.
On September 25, 2013, a 12 year old black girl named Laporshia Massey died of asthma in a Philadelphia school, since there was no nurse there to treat her. She died saying "I can't breathe." She was only one of several children in Philadelphia who have died as a result of systematic, racialized poverty and the city budget cuts that have recently deepened it. This is a kind of murder by poverty and urban segregation; it hasn't received as much attention in the national media as the recent police murders, but it's a fundamental and ongoing element of American racism. What is the strategic value of centering antagonism towards the police? How have you been able to link up this movement against the police to other related struggles, such as the Fight for $15, anti-gentrification, anti-austerity, and prison abolition work?
Policing is and has been the central mechanism for upholding white supremacy in the United States since before the Civil War. But this is only because, as a process, policing has never been carried out solely by "our enemies in blue," to borrow a phrase from Kristian Williams. Instead, white supremacy and policing have been nearly indistinguishable since slavery.
In the United States, police were basically invented to patrol Black people, and their centrality increased after slavery was formally abolished, because they took on the task of disarming and controlling the movement of the ostensibly free former slaves by enforcing vagrancy laws. Every white person, according to Du Bois, was effectively a member of the police, making the South "an armed camp for intimidating black folk." Inversely, to police was to be white, since policing was a concrete mechanism in both the material and psychological "wages of whiteness," providing and income to some poor whites, but a feeling of superiority to all.
As a result, to struggle against white supremacy is to struggle against the police, and vice versa. This is not an abstract truism, as recent years have reminded us: nearly every major insurrection in the United States has been a response to police violence against Black people. Moreover, given the unfulfilled aspirations of Radical Reconstruction, these struggles are always concretely unified as well: labor struggles are nothing if they neglect those who are massively unemployed and warehoused in the prisons, and struggles for education cannot confront a militarization of schools that seeks to cut the "schools" out of the "school-to-prison pipeline." Struggles against gentrification, moreover, are but the Janus face of struggles against mass incarceration: each confronting a complicit element in the simultaneous containment-displacement of Black Americans.
The necessary unity of these struggles is easier to express in theory than to build in practice, however. Inmate organizing faces nearly insurmountable barriers, although connections are slowly developing. From the California hunger strikes originating in Pelican Bay to more apparently spontaneous outbreaks from Georgia to Pennsylvania, the prison is imposing itself as a locus of struggle. It would be an error to insist that unity is an additive relation, however: while it's important to do as much as possible to link concrete struggles around, for example, labor and prisons and schools, it is arguably more important to recognize that struggles against prisons and police are labor struggles and are education struggles.
An important turning point for the black freedom struggle in the 1960s were the urban rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other cities, which involved a great deal of property destruction and looting. Much has changed since then, but the political economy of urban development is still a central dynamic of racial inequality in places like Baltimore, Oakland and Ferguson. Are riots also still politically relevant, or has their meaning changed? And what about those places with similar conditions where major riots have not happened, like New York or Philadelphia? What other metrics might we use to measure the development of struggle beyond street militancy?
Riots are more relevant than ever, and not only here: from housing estates in London to the Parisian banlieues, from Oakland to Ferguson and Baltimore, to Turkey, Venezuela and beyond. Structural conditions previously reserved for colonized and racialized people are in some ways coming to dominate the landscape as surplus populations expand, geography is carved up in new ways, and our world moves increasingly toward Mike Davis' apt description: a "planet of slums," in which the street– not the point of production– tends to serve as the preferred locus of radical action. But alongside these objective conditions, subjective conditions lope forward unpredictably – propelled by and propelling in turn political events: just as rebellions grow out of existing conditions, they transform what we see as the horizon of the possible.
Riots have come to dominate our theoretical and practical landscape and recent U.S. history has proven this beyond a doubt: the Oscar Grant rebellions in Oakland in January of 2009 radically transformed the city and constituted an opening salvo against the postracial myth fostered by Obama's inauguration that same month. We don't know the name Ferguson because Mike Brown was murdered there – we know it because people said enough is enough and stood up. And just when it seemed that Ferguson would be the central reference-point of our moment, Baltimore followed suit and even upped the ante: a rebellion not against old-style white supremacy but against a more pernicious form of disguised white supremacy overseen by a Black mayor and Black police commissioner. Those who mourn the effectiveness of riots – in frequent pronouncements that it's only the "negative" and destructive elements that get attention – tacitly attest to this effectiveness, suggesting that popular rebellions are in themselves creative forces, or at the very least a necessary precondition. As I have put it elsewhere, riots work.
Much could be said about where riots have not happened – but this says more about our outdated expectations than anything else. Phil Neel has rightly argued that the Ferguson rebellion reflected a new racial geography and a suburbanization of poverty that has effectively decentered large cities as sites of unrest. As gentrification reclaimed city centers, the poor – especially non-white – have been expelled beyond the city limits, creating new tactical and strategic situations. Tactically, poor suburbs like Ferguson are a very different space than Brooklyn or the Bronx, but more interesting is the strategic implication: the very political institutions and Black leadership and religious structures that emerged strengthened from the 1960s to contain Black rebelliousness tend to be centered in the cities, leaving other geographical spaces more susceptible to rebellion outside the apparatus of hegemonic containment.
While the subsequent riots and rebellions in Baltimore could be seen to disprove Neel's analysis, I don't think this is the case: after all, Baltimore isn't New York or Chicago, West Baltimore is nothing like its gentrifying core, and the utter disregard shown by city leadership undercut even containment efforts. The point is to be aware of a geographical unevenness that points toward future sites of rebellion– to cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, and St. Louis, and moreover to their respective suburban peripheries, deep West Baltimore neighborhoods like Mondawmin, Camden, NJ and Delaware County, East Oakland and Richmond, and Ferguson itself.
While political and religious leaders and nonprofits were quick to rush to Ferguson and Baltimore (one Baltimore Sun headline is telling: "City's nonprofit sector springs into action after rioting"), the political terrain was both resistant (in the well-deserved treatment meted out to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in Ferguson) and too extensive to possibly control preemptively. Hegemonic control is an expensive endeavor, and as poverty increases and state and nonprofit revenues decline, the forecast will call for ever more explosive responses in the streets. Fleeting and explosive moments are not enough, however: we need to press creatively toward durable forms that can outlive the riot, but without falling – as leftist orthodoxy too often does – into the prison of preexisting forms.
There is a long history of solidarity between radical black movements in the United States and anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles abroad, including Algeria, Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Members of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers were in contact with Palestinian guerrillas in the early 1970s. The Black Panther Party had an international office in Algeria. How does international solidarity figure in the movement today? Beyond the rhetoric of a shared struggle, what could material support across borders between movements look like? And most specifically, how does today's movement connect with the struggle in Palestine?
At first glance, our current moment shares little with previous waves of revolutionary struggle: the Black Power movement coincided with a global wave of anti-colonial resistance, with domestic movements simultaneously inspired by and inspiring to revolutionary movements elsewhere. Our present is apparently very different, posing both internal and external barriers to building relationships of international solidarity between Black struggles today and decolonial (not postcolonial) struggles elsewhere.
Externally, it seems difficult to find a revolutionary process to identify with: some latch onto affirmative struggles in Nepal, Kurdistan, or Venezuela, while others – partly due to the hard lessons of the past – are skeptical of a too-easy solidarity model. While there seems to be a universal sympathy with the eternal victims of our time – the Palestinians – most who oppose Israeli genocide can't seem to stomach active resistance by the wretched of the earth in Gaza or the West Bank. Here, too, the internal barriers rear their head: while many struggling against U.S. white supremacy have built important bridges with the struggle against Israeli apartheid, some, like Frank Wilderson, insist on the specificity of the U.S. Black experience in a way that sets it apart from global decolonial struggles (this argument has taken an even more caricatured form on Twitter).
In terms of the contexts and subjectivities of the movements involved, moreover, the parallels are important: where Black Americans confront the limitations of a merely formal emancipation, those that Du Bois called the global "dark proletariat" today confront the limitations of a merely formal decolonization. In both cases, the promise of change was betrayed and amputated, a situation that Fanon foresaw on the horizon in 1961: "a few reforms at the top, a flag, and down at the bottom a shapeless, writhing mass, still mired in the Dark Ages." (As important struggles break out today around the Confederate Flag, these words are worth recalling – a perennial warning about focusing only on the flag, at the expense of the emergence of movements and pressing of other demands).
But both internally and externally, I would argue that the grounds for building international solidarity are as strong as ever. Like the previous moment of upsurge, we are living through a fracturing of the unipolar hegemony of U.S. neoliberalism, and this fracturing of power has opened up a space for popular struggles that have circulated from Latin America through the Arab Spring, before crash landing back in the global core with the riots in London and Paris, the Spanish indignados, Occupy, and the Greek crisis. Building these relationships will take many forms: reviving and transforming a stale solidarity model inherited from Stalinism; insisting on building direct relations between movements, not state-mediated anti-imperialism; and refusing the radical posturing so prevalent today in favor of a revolutionary humility.
Last May, we published an analysis of the uprising in Baltimore, focusing in on the dynamics of white solidarity. The essay confronted a tension pervasive throughout the movement, on the simultaneous necessity of strategic alliances between different struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples, and the possibility that including other groups might obviate the specificity of anti-Black racism. As the movement has developed, it's proven to have strong resonances with non-black people, drawing in participation and support from a range of different sectors and struggles and sometimes offering models for others. How do we maintain the resonance between different struggles with shared antagonisms, without effacing what is specific to this movement?
The question of Palestine raises this question precisely, because anti-Black racism does have a powerful specificity, especially in the U.S. context, where chattel slavery and the one-drop rule seized upon the anti-Blackness forged in colonial Latin America but took it to radically new levels of absoluteness and Manichaeism. It's out of this very real history that the permanence of anti-Black racism in the U.S. and the status of Black Americans as the "ultimate exploited" grows. And it is this specificity that must be maintained if this movement – and those that come after it – are to avoid being effectively drained of their historic content and watered-down into oblivion.
This of course raises the specter of #AllLivesMatter, but this is too easy an enemy to waste time on. More complicated are questions historically surrounding the fraught category of "people of color," which can function to erase that specificity under the heading of unifying the oppressed (and which has led some to formulate the concept of non-Black people of color, NBPOC, in response). And what do we do about the accounts from Oakland of white men in "Black Lives Matter" t-shirts preventing a young Black person in need of medical attention from taking refuge in a store because they were afraid of looting?
In some ways it's correct to see Black Lives Matter as a response to or a maturation of questions and strategies that emerged in the Occupy Movement. One of the central questions swirling around Occupy was whether or not it had a built-in limitation when it came to the intersection of race and class, whether it was truly as universal as its rhetoric proclaimed or simply a movement mourning the lost privileges of the downwardly-mobile middle class. In practice, Occupy failed miserably – albeit unevenly in different places – to grasp the specificity of anti-Black racism as the foundation of U.S. capitalism, often reacting with hostility to any claims at all that were seen as particular rather than universal (for example, the establishment if POC caucuses). BLM responds to this empty universalism by reasserting the particular as universal: the only way we will all be free is if Black people are free, and we are a long fucking way from Black people being free in this country.
This reverse swing against the universal is not without its own set of risks, however: in particular, the danger that this particularity of Black existence can be easily captured by precisely those forces that today criticize it, that it can be co-opted as a simple demand for recognition as opposed to a radical demand for revolutionary transformation (thus the danger of recent meetings between BLM "leaders" and presidential candidates). Here the danger is built into the name: in a system for which Black lives simply don't matter, there is a risk that the name could assume the role of comforting incantation for the nation's guilty conscience instead of symbol of continued struggle.
With the 2016 elections already in swing, the debates around the incorporation of BLM into the political status quo are sharpening. But while we debate whether or not BLM will endorse a candidate, or even who is authorized to speak for so broad a movement in the first place, foundations are pledging hundreds of thousands – soon to be millions – to undercut the dangerous potential this movement contains. If they succeed, divorcing movement leadership from the radical demands of the base and reducing #BlackLivesMatter to a self-righteous hashtag – becoming in the process yet another tragic repetition, another containment apparatus rather than a mechanism of liberation – then the real movement for the abolition of white supremacy may well go underground only to resurface inevitably at some future point.
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Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee
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Strategy After Ferguson
Interview with Unity & Struggle
Interview with Ann Arbor Movement for Black Lives
Interview with Baltimore Bloc
Interview with Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression
Interview with Cooperation Jackson
Interview with #ItsBiggerThanYou
Interview with Organization for Black Struggle
Interview with Qilombo
Interview with Wyldfire! Collective
Contribution from Advance the Struggle
Building these international relationships will take many forms: reviving and transforming a stale solidarity model inherited from Stalinism; insisting on building direct relations between movements, not state-mediated anti-imperialism; and refusing the radical posturing so prevalent today...
George Ciccariello-Maher, Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee


Has much changed in regards to how you help your character grow stronger, or is the game still mostly pay2win.
I enjoy bossing however will NEVER be able to do many of the bosses as spending endless hours merchanting to boredom or spending hundreds of dollars on NX does not appeal to me. Simply wondering if the pay to win aspect has changed any.also; is Demon Slayer a good class still?
I think Nexon's been making decent progress on reducing the pay-to-win aspect of the game lately. You can earn 10 cubes a month by doing bosses/star planet, crafting cubes is now a thing, and bosses and ore veins even drop a few now and then.
Unfortunately, those only go so far. Earning the 10 cubes would take a minimum of like, eight days. And that's if you max out, which is tedious. I personally earn like, 1.5k a day - ~1000 from Star Planet, ~500 from bosses (Zak/CZak, HT/CHT, Normal Hilla, Normal Pink Bean, Gollux, Normal Ranmaru, Easy Magnus).
A Master Craftsman's Cube costs about 50m to craft in Galicia; Meister Cubes cost about 110m maybe?
And getting cubes as drops is sorta rare-ish. I'd be lucky if I even find ONE in a day doing daily bosses on two characters lol. I only have the Big Spider familiar to help with drops, though. With a lot of +drop rate %, you'd be dropping cubes fo' days.
So unless you're super rich and can drop billions crafting cubes, or you have a lot of drop rate % to farm them from bosses, it's gonna take a while to get decent potential lol.
Also, scrolling/enhancing has gotten a lot less pay-to-win with the addition of Star Force enhancement. Normal equipment has no chance to boom until 12 stars if you're enhancing with this new system, and it's a really low chance. Plus, if you boom, you can keep the potential and scrolling of the boomed item to an identical one. Also, previously CS exclusive scrolls are available in limited quantities in the rewards shop, and even as drops in-game.MapleStory is slowly becoming less pay2win.


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Q: Find data and confidence "ellipses" (regions?) for a bivariate median? I'm wondering about ways to compute data and confidence ellipses around a bivariate median. For example, I can easily compute a data ellipse or a confidence ellipse for the bivariate mean of the following data (here just showing a data ellipse)
library("car")
set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(x = rnorm(200, mean = 4, sd = 1.5),
                 y = rnorm(200, mean = 1.4, sd = 2.5))
plot(df)
with(df, dataEllipse(x, y, level = 0.68, add = TRUE))

But I'm struggling with how I'd do this for a bivariate median? In the univariate case I could just bootstrap resample to generate the required interval, but I not sure how to translate this into the bivariate case?
As pointed out by @Andy W, the median is not uniquely defined. In this instance we used the spatial median, by finding a point that minimises the L1 norm of the distances between observations at that point. An optimisation was used to compute the spatial median from the observed data points.
In addition, the x, y data pairs in the actual use case are two eigenvectors of a principal coordinates analysis of a dissimilarity matrix, hence x and y should be orthogonal, if that provides a particular avenue of attack.
In the actual use case, we want to compute the data/confidence ellipse for groups of points in the Euclidean space. For example:

The analysis is a multivariate analogue of a Levene's test of homogeneity of variances among groups. We use spatial medians or standard group centroids as the measure of multivariate central tendency, and wish to add the equivalent of the data ellipse in the figure above for the spatial median case.

A: This is a nice question.
I'll follow @amoeba's suggestion and bootstrap the spatial medians, using depth::med() with method="Spatial". However, there is a slight complication: med doesn't like it when there are duplicate data points, so we can't do a straightforward bootstrap. Instead, I'll draw a bootstrap sample and then jitter each point by a tiny amount - less than the minimum distances in each of the $x$ and $y$ dimensions in the original data sample - before calculating the spatial median.
Finally, I'll calculate the smallest ellipse covering a specified proportion (95%) of bootstrapped medians and plot.
library(depth)      # for med()
library(MASS)           # for cov.rob()
library(cluster)    # for ellipsoidhull()

# create data
set.seed(1)
df <- data.frame(x = rnorm(200, mean = 4, sd = 1.5),
                 y = rnorm(200, mean = 1.4, sd = 2.5))

# find minimum distances in each dimension for later jittering
foo <- outer(X=df$x,Y=df$x,FUN=function(xx,yy)abs(xx-yy))
delta.x <- min(foo[upper.tri(foo)])/2
foo <- outer(X=df$y,Y=df$y,FUN=function(xx,yy)abs(xx-yy))
delta.y <- min(foo[upper.tri(foo)])/2

# bootstrap spatial medians, using jittering
n.boot <- 1000
pb <- winProgressBar(max=n.boot)
boot.med <- matrix(NA,nrow=n.boot,ncol=2)
for ( ii in 1:n.boot ) {
    setWinProgressBar(pb,ii,paste(ii,"of",n.boot))
    index <- sample(1:nrow(df),nrow(df),replace=TRUE)
    bar <- df[index,] +
      data.frame(x=runif(nrow(df),-delta.x,delta.x),
                 y=runif(nrow(df),-delta.y,delta.y))
    boot.med[ii,] <- med(bar,method="Spatial")$median
}
close(pb)

# specify confidence level
pp <- 0.95

# find smallest ellipse containing the specified proportion of bootstrapped medians
fit <- cov.rob(boot.med, quantile.used = ceiling(pp*n.boot), method = "mve")
best_ellipse <- ellipsoidhull( boot.med[fit$best,] )

plot(df)
points(boot.med,pch=19,col="grey",cex=0.5)
points(df)
lines(predict(best_ellipse), col="red")
legend("bottomright",bg="white",pch=c(21,19,NA),
    col=c("black","grey","red"),pt.bg=c("white",NA,NA),lwd=c(0,0,1),
    legend=c("Observations","Bootstrapped medians","Confidence ellipse"))

Finally, note that the bivariate spatial median is asymptotically normally distributed (Brown, 1983, JRSS, Series B), so we could also dispense with the "jittered bootstrap" above and directly calculate the ellipse, trusting that $n=200$ is "asymptotical enough". I may edit this post to include this parametric confidence ellipse if I find the time in the next days.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Porsche's Forgotten Carrera GT Was a Front-Engine Turbocharged Homologation Special
Meet the 924 Carrera GT.
By Chris Perkins
Hear the name "Carrera GT," and your mind will inevitably turn to Porsche's amazing mid-engine V10 supercar from the mid-2000s. It wasn't the first Porsche to wear the Carrera GT name though. You might be surprised to learn that there was also a version of the unloved 924 that carried the Carrera GT name.
Originally developed as a sports car for Volkswagen, as Ate Up With Motor explains, the 924 went on sale in 1976 as Porsche's entry-level model. The first water-cooled, front-engine model from the Stuttgart company wasn't well received. A clever rear transaxle helped the 924 achieve a near perfect front-to-rear weight balance, but with only 125 hp from its off-the-shelf VW four cylinder, it wasn't quick. Early US-spec 924s had less than 100 hp, but quick upgrades brought this figure up to 110.
The original Porsche 924.
And while the 924 was a lot cheaper than the 911, it wasn't cheap. When it went on sale in the US, it cost over $9000, which is around $40,000 today adjusted for inflation.
So Porsche didn't exactly have a hit on its hands. That was a big problem as the 924, along with the more expensive V8-powered 928, would eventually replace the aging 911, which was slated to end production in 1981. That led then Porsche CEO Dr. Ernst Furhmann to kickstart development on a better 924.
The initial result of that was the much-improved 924 Turbo, but to homologate the car for FIA Group 4 and IMSA GTO racing, a more extreme road car was needed. That result was the 924 Carrera GT.
The 1981 924 Carrera GT.
According to Sports Car Market, Porsche built 406 examples of the 924 Carrera GT, only for the 1981 model year. A heavily revised engine managed to put out 210 hp, while a heavily upgraded suspension, lightened body panels, and upgraded brakes made the most of it. Big fender flares also helped muscle up the 924's looks too.
Porsche brought a handful of 924 Carrera GTs to compete in the GTP class in the 1980 Le Mans 24 hour race, with the best car finishing sixth overall. Further development of the Carrera GT platform led to even more homologation specials, culminating in 1981 with the wild 924 Carrera GTR.
1981 was a significant year for Porsche. Towards the end of 1980, Dr. Furhmann was ousted in favor of American Peter Schutz, who started on January 1st, 1981. In one of his first acts at the company, Schutz saved the 911, but like his predecessor, he also saw the value in an entry-level model.
A 1981 Porsche 924 Carrera GTP that raced at Le Mans.
Porsche took learnings from the 924 Carrera GT and created the 944, which used the same platform, but with an all-new 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine. An engine that actually made its debut at Le Mans in 1981 in the 924 Carrera GTP.
With power and style to match its excellent chassis, the 944 was what the original 924 should have been, and it proved to be a sales hit.
But even the geekiest Porsche geeks, of which I consider myself one, forget about the 924 Carrera GT from time to time. I was reminded of it by this new Petrolicious video featuring Porsche collector Magnus Walker and his silver 924 Carrera GT.
It's a shame the 924 Carrera GT is forgotten about, since it was such an important car for Porsche. Perhaps it's inevitable, when it shares its name with one of the most spectacular Porsches of all time. But in any case, the 924 Carrera GT is well worth remembering.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


A very flavorful black tea that is light liquoring and bright (Ceylon and Darjeeling). English Evening is perfect for after dinner and promotes conversation.
The Nuwara Eliya (pronounced 'nerilleeya') and Dimbula district are among the top growing districts in Sri Lanka. During its peak season (Feb/Mar) these districts roduction is characterized by a delightful flavor that is astringent and bright. The best conditions for production are noted by cool nights, a sprinkling of rain in the evenings but generally dry weather and bright sunny days. These conditions force the tea bush to expend all its energies into the new growth, giving the tea its best flavor.
The Darjeeling district is in north central India, in foothills of the Himalayan mountains where the cool air, high altitude (above 5000 feet above sea level), unique soils and Chinese genus tea bush, combine to produce a wonderful tea with an intriguing muscatel character.
The White Monkey Paw green tea (only made from the new shoots of the early spring growth during end March and early April) imparts lightness and a visual ethereal character that is not possible with a black tea.
English Evening Tea is a tea that is full of flavor but with a light character that does not detract from the flavors of the evening meal. The tea will instill an urge to pour a second cup and promote conversation and discussion with guests or with your family. This special blend was given to us by a close friend whose family has been in the tea business for more than 150 years! It has been enjoyed by many in the British Isles (from the Duke of Earl to the cockneys of London) for well over 200 years and we are certain that you will find enjoyment in maintaining this tradition.


A couple of weeks back, we talked all things business with influencer Freddie Harrel. The mother of one owns natural hair extension brand Big Hair No Care and recently opened a pop-up in Brixton. Since hair is at the heart of her business we obviously wanted to find out how she looks after her incredible afro. And since she has a baby, you can guarantee her routine is low-key but works, great for anyone time-poor (that's all of us then). Not only has she shared everything you need to know, she has also revealed the number one problem-solving product that she always has in her house.
Keep scrolling for Harrel's afro hair guide.
"Okay, so I'm going to be honest—I've been pretty bad with my hair lately, with everything being so hectic, so I got out of my routine. But usually I'll wash my hair every other week. I make a day of it! Not that it takes all day, but I do other stuff in between each of steps. I start by dampening down my hair and applying coconut oil (or sometimes castor oil) on it. I leave it for 30 minutes while I do something else. Coconut oil solves SO many problems, never run out of it," warns Harrel.
Next up, all the curly-hair inspiration you need.


Chris Brown's daughter Royalty Brown is learning the ropes to this celebrity thing. The 4-year-old hit up the 2018 Beautycon Festival LA held at the Los Angeles Convention Center with her mother Nia Guzman yesterday. And the YBF cutie totally stole the spotlight!
Little Royalty was dressed to the nines in a floral Dolce & Gabanna dress paired with a matching crossover bag and floral sandals. How freakin' cute?! Her mother looked gorge in florals as well.
One thing is for sure, Royalty is not shy and she seemingly loves the camera. Breezy's daughter hit the pink carpet like a pro, serving up poses with the best of them.
A Wrinkle In Time star Storm Reid, styling in a pink Giorgio Armani outfit, really enjoyed herself and felt empowered after attending the event.
"A place where we can all be ourselves. Unapologetically. A place where we can all feel BEAUTIFUL. Thank you @beautycon for having me. I had an amazing experience," she captioned on Instagram.
DOPE star Kiersey Clemons, who just wrapped filming Blumhouse horror movie Sweetheart, turned her girls night out into date night bringing "BAE" along with her for the fun.
"When you drag bae to Beauty Con~ @beautycon Thank you for having me moderate your Gen Z Realness panel! Beers and moderating is fun, beers in moderation, nah," she captioned on Instagram.
Whoa! We almost didn't recognize Torrei Hart. Not that she didn't already look great, but she looked AH-MAZING on the pink carpet.
For some company, Torrei brought her daughter Heaven Hart along.
North West did not have time for the shenanigans. Ice cream is life!
Yesterday, Nori tagged along with her mom Kim Kardashian West - rocking Dolce & Gabbana - to "pop up" at her BeautyCon LA pop up store inside Westfield Mall to promote her KIMOJI fruit fragrance collection.
North was twinning with her mother wearing all black and styling her hair like hers.
Inside, Kim sprayed some of her new perfume on Nori and...let's just say she wasn't impressed.
The 5-year-old just seemed over it all. Relatable.


Big Brother Canada season three premieres tonight on Global, and no one is as excited about this as the BBCAN host Arisa Cox. "It is so huge, we are so thrilled!...because it's on Global in prime time, I excited for the people who have never seen the show or have watched maybe one episode of Big Brother US and they don't know what all the fuss is about – when they see tonight's episode, they will be believers," said Arisa when I talked to her this morning.
I think all of the regular Big Brother fans were excited last year when the announcement came out that the reality show would be moving from the specialty channel Slice over to the main Shaw channel Global. With the audience reach widening, there are all sorts of opportunities to make believers out of all Canadians instead of just the die hards.
I tried to get Arisa to give me some spoilers (if I were her I would have given them to me and no one else – obviously), but she would not budge. What she did tell me, "We've got a ton of superfans in the house…everybody knows the game, everybody knows the show. They are well versed...As a production team we are going to make them throw all that stuff out the window." So basically – get ready for a season of twists.
"What we have planned for the season is so next level – you won't be able to look away," said Arisa. I am counting on it.
Big Brother Canada premieres tonight on Global TV at 9 PM MST/8 PM EST…Arisa will be wearing a navy and black dress as all the superfans walk into the house.


This week got off to an early start. At 4:30 AM on Monday I had to get up, and I was headed down the road from Ely, MN at about 5 AM towards Indiana. Of course, the weekend's dreary weather had gone away, and been replaced by beautiful sunny weather for my day in the car. I drove down Highway 1 & Highway 2 to the North Shore of Lake Superior, seeing what I believe was a Long-tailed Weasel on the way that ran across the road carrying what appeared to be a small bird. This was the extent of the wildlife I saw til I reached the shore, where I did see a couple of White-tailed Deer along the roadway. I decided not to stop at the state parks nearby, just so that I could get a little more driving done early. However, when I got into Wisconsin, it was still so nice out that I stopped at Amnicon Falls State Park for the first time. I got here about 7:30 AM, and just parked along the river that flows through the park (the Amnicon River). The falls & rapids are all very close to the entry road so I didn't have to walk very far. Seeing it for the first time, it was quite a beautiful section of river, very similar to the rivers on the north shore that also flow into Lake Superior. I walked along the rapids and falls for a half hour or so, hearing mainly Chestnut-sided Warblers but not actually seeing any. I left and got back on the road, and did eventually make it to my mom's house in Indiana by about 4 PM after traveling I-80 instead of I-290 to avoid the 15 odd dollars in tolls there.
Wild Rose at Plum Creek Nature Preserve!
On Tuesday, I was pretty exhausted when I got up. We had wanted to get down to Turkey Run State Park, about 100 miles south of Munster, but the weather didn't seem to be warranting the drive, and my mom had to be back early evening for an appointment. So I used this as an opportunity instead to get my oil changed since I'd already put about 3000 miles on my car since I'd left Virginia. After getting that taken care of, and not wanting to burn a day, my mom & I went for a hike at nearby Plum Creek Nature Preserve just across the Illinois border from Dyer & off of Route 30. The last time I was at this preserve, I was pretty young, but I do remember it being in either the fall or spring, with little foliage, and I remember vividly sitting still in the woods while my dad walked a large circle around me, and chased a Ring-necked Pheasant right by me, one of the few I've ever seen up close. This time, I didn't see or hear any pheasants, but my mom & I did see a surprising amount of wildlife that I wasn't expecting. When I go to Minnesota, I expect to see a lot of wildlife, just because it is very forested, and very uninhabited. When I'm in Indiana, I don't, just because of the number of people, and the environment being very suburban. But I have to say that there was actually plenty here this trip. Right away, we saw a Common Yellowthroat, several Eastern Bluebirds, some Black-capped Chickadees, and also my first of the year Rose-breasted Grosbeak (a female).
Unknown species of butterfly/moth at Plum Creek Nature Preserve.
Walking along the well maintained trails, we also sighted quite a few White-tailed Deer, which all appeared to be in quite healthy shape. The ones I'd seen in Minnesota were all very skinny, showing ribs through their hide, either from the rough winter, or just having birthed fawns. Either way, this was not the case in Indiana, a very healthy group of deer must have had plenty to feed on even in this bad winter. Also along the trail, we got another unexpected surprise, my mom spotted a Red Fox running down the trail quite a ways off that I hadn't even noticed. We tried taking a second trail to get us closer to where it looked to have dove into the woods, but we never did get a chance to relocate it. This trail traveled across a meadow where I saw several Indigo Buntings, and even more bluebirds. I also could hear a number of other species that I couldn't identify. I thought perhaps some orioles might be present just based on the habitat but never did see any unfortunately. Walking back along the same trail we saw even more deer, which must be quite common in the preserve. Since the weather was very very muggy and about 85-90 degrees, we kept the walk fairly short and headed back to the parking area, finding some Barn Swallows feeding nearby.
A Blue Jay looking for an easy meal in the picnic area at Turkey Run State Park.
On Wednesday, the forecast was for more rain in northwest Indiana so we followed through with our original plan from yesterday and drove south to Turkey Run State Park. Turkey Run is probably my mom's favorite park in the area, and its a beautiful place. Sugar Creek, a tributary of the larger Wabash River, flows through the park and is usually filled with canoeists & tubers. The trails through the park follow along the river, and the smaller creeks that feed it, most of which travel through deep canyons before emptying into the shallow wash of the larger Sugar Creek. The downside to Turkey Run is that it is about 2 to 2.5 hours away from Munster, so we got there around 10 AM, and grabbed lunch right off the bat. While eating, we had a Red-headed Woodpecker poking around over us, and a Blue Jay & Eastern Chipmunk also came in probably looking for food. When we hit the trails it was pretty hot & humid again like yesterday, but the sun was out fortunately. We walked the trails we usually enjoy, crossing the pedestrian suspension bridge and then heading up the canyon to the Punch Bowl. There was a surprising amount of families walking, I guess because school recently got out, but once past the Punch Bowl it really cleared out, this just happens to be one of the most popular hikes because you get to walk up the creekbed, and it gets pretty interesting trying to stay dry as the creek runs swiftly over sandstone in increasingly tighter spots. Throughout the canyon we saw a number of swallows, and heard some Pileated Woodpeckers, but the crowds probably kept the birds at bay. After we saw the Punch Bowl, which is just a small waterfall where the creek begins its run in the canyon, we headed up to higher ground. Here a family was watching as a rather large Eastern Ratsnake was climbing a fallen tree. Nearby I got some shots of some Chipmunks, which fortunately for them, were far enough away from the snake to not get caught. The trail continues on the high ground, going up and down a lot of stairs before reaching the head of another deep canyon. Here the trail goes down through a series of 3 ladders that are bolted to the canyon sides. It was amazing to feel the temperature gradient change between the top and bottom of the canyon. It had to be at least 20 degrees cooler at the bottom which was a wonderful shift. In this canyon as well, there was a number of swallows flying around, probably Bank Swallows I think. We continued down the canyon until we reached the banks of Sugar Creek again then headed upstream along the shore.
Eastern Garter Snake along Sugar Creek at Turkey Run State Park.
My mom got quite a scare near here as she jumped upon seeing an Eastern Garter Snake cruise out from it's hiding spot near the trail. I somehow missed it completely and had walked right by, but fortunately hearing her jump got me a chance to photograph it before it disappeared completely. Moving further upstream you head up about a hundred stairs and top out high over the river, giving a great viewpoint. From there, the trail descends slowly and returns to the suspension bridge area. Here my mom crossed and went up to the visitor's center while I kept going upstream. I made a loop from there to the far east end of the park, crossing the river, and then going back downstream to the bridge before going back up to the parking area. Along the way I saw a pair of White-breasted Nuthatches, and American Crows. I also heard a number of woodpeckers but didn't get any shots. At the far east end, you cross on a covered bridge, which gives you a look towards the new roadway bridge not far away. There was a number of swallow nests built up on the underside of the roadway bridge, and after shooting a lot of photos, I could finally tell that these were Cliff Swallow nests, which was the first new life bird I got to add on my trip! I believe I also captured some shots of Bank Swallows, a bird I know I've seen before, but have never properly identified upon seeing. This should be another one to add to my list. The standard songbirds lit the rest of the path for me walking back to reunite with my mother, Northern Cardinals, American Robins and Tufted Titmice were all over. At the visitor's center, they have a nice wildlife observation room with a number of feeders just outside the glass. We saw Brown-headed Cowbirds, American Goldfinches, and a few Ruby-throated Hummingbirds as well, which now that reminds me I did see a hummer in the first canyon we walked early on as well. After that we headed back up to Munster, pretty soaked from the heat & humidity, but another 2 birds on my life list richer.
A beautiful little Common Yellowthroat seen at Plum Creek Nature Preserve.
Friday was the next day I was able to get out, though Thursday & Friday both were overcast days. Again with the weather looking like rain, my mom & I just did another trip to Plum Creek Nature Preserve and yet again saw an unusually high number of wildlife. Just like the last time, we saw a Common Yellowthroat right away, though this time I was able to get good photographs of it as it incessantly jumped from shrub to shrub trying to avoid me. We also got some great looks nearby of more White-tailed Deer, finding a pair of fawns still showing off their white spots as well. No fox sightings this time, but we again followed the same path as before, and when we reached the meadows area, my mom finally got to see a beautiful Indigo Bunting flying around & perching in a tree. Also nearby was a number of Eastern Bluebirds, and also a very chatty House Wren, both of which were probably the same birds we had seen the last outing in the preserve. Returning to the woods from the meadow, we saw more deer, and had a pair of Turkey Vultures fly in right near us and perch on a long branch about 20 feet off the ground. Its amazing how big these birds look when you get to see their wings spread so close, and I still think they're beautiful birds even though many will state that their naked heads make them offputting. The weather continued its hot & humid assault, making that something like five days straight. We did see some rain in the distance but never received any right over us fortunately. On the route back towards the car I saw an Eastern Wood-Pewee, a number of dragonflies, some damselfies (the same beautiful turquoise & black ones I've seen in North Carolina), and even more deer. By the end I think we saw 5 adult deer, and a pair of fawns for a total of 7 on the day, many more than I'll typically see while out on my typical Virginia hikes. Saturday I did get out for about 4 miles of walking, but just around the neighborhood I grew up in Munster, of which my mom did the first 2 mile loop.
One of the many White-tailed Deer encountered at Plum Creek Nature Preserve.
To be honest I was just all around exhausted from the 2 weeks straight of taking photographs and being outdoors so it was nice to just get back and relax on my final day. Sunday I left at 4 AM from Munster and headed back to Virginia. The 950 mile ride is pretty gorgeous this time of year, with the mountains of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia completely greened up & of course I got a beautiful blue sky to drive under. I opted not to revisit the site of the Purple Gallinule sightings in Waynesboro, VA, thinking that maybe I'll get my shot next weekend with Ruth if we get up to the mountains, but I'll have to see how I feel after all this driving. I made it back to Virginia Beach at about quarter after 6 PM, which with the loss of an hour for time zones, made it a 13 hour drive, much faster than I've ever done it before somehow, perhaps it was due to the 2 stops for about 10 minutes or less each time to gas up, hit the bathroom, and eat more or less simultaneously. Unfortunately with my arrival back home, my vacation was finally at an end, but I was very happy to get home to see Ruth & to enjoy my special welcome home dinner of homemade fried chicken. That was the closest thing to wildlife I really got to see on the day, and definitely the most delicious.
A rather large Turkey Vulture perched low to the ground at Plum Creek Nature Preserve.


Windermere Primary School was established in 2011 and incorporates a number of students and staff from the former Abbotsfield, Claremont, Mt Faulkner and Roseneath Primary Schools. Windermere Primary School moved onto its new site on the banks of the Derwent River on 2 May 2011. The school incorporates the latest in learning technologies and is built around early childhood, middle and upper primary pods that are designed to support a team approach to learning and student management.


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Home Design & Decorate Decorating Ideas Isay Weinfeld Unveils Latest Designs For Update Of Historic Shore Club In...
Isay Weinfeld Unveils Latest Designs For Update Of Historic Shore Club In Miami's South Beach
Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld has been commissioned to convert The Shore Club, a historic hotel in Miami's South Seaside, into a luxury complex with condominiums, hotel rooms and poolside bungalows.
Situated in the city's Art Deco District, the up to date residence will feature 100 hotel rooms and 75 apartments, many of them giving expansive views of the seashore and Atlantic Ocean.
It will also contain South Beach's largest swimming pool, measuring 250 feet in length (76 metres).
Encompassing 3 acres (1.2 hectares), the oceanfront residence at present serves as a 309-room hotel and is a key venue during Design Miami.
Built in 1949 and developed by Miami architect Albert Anis, the Art Deco building was refurbished in 2001 by David Chipperfield.
It is located methods from primary thoroughfares such as Lincoln Street, Ocean Drive and Espanola Way.
Weinfeld will reconfigure interior spaces and add new furnishings within the property's 3 present towers, ranging from eight to 22 floors.
Renderings show glass-lined balconies, light-coloured materials and lush landscaping.
The project also calls for the building of a series of two-storey homes, along with a new amenities building that will property a fitness center, yoga rooms and a spa.
Fasano, a Brazil-based mostly hospitality company, will operate the hotel, which will be renamed the Fasano Hotel + Residences at Shore Club. This is Fasano's first venture in the US, and Weinfeld's initial massive-scale undertaking in Miami.
Related story: Isay Weinfeld's 1st New York project is a luxury housing development
Development will commence early subsequent yr, with completion slated for the finish of 2017.
Weinfeld joins a developing lineup of higher-profile architects doing work in Miami. Buildings by Rem Koolhaas' company OMA, London-based Zaha Hadid, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and other folks are contributing to the city's transformation into the "capital of Latin America".
The developer is New York-based HFZ Capital Group, which has worked with top architects this kind of as Ingels and David Chipperfield.
"Weinfeld's design brings his refined sensibility and signature design to create a natural respite in the center of South Seashore," mentioned HFZ.
"He is one particular of the world's pre-eminent architects, winning in excess of 60 international architecture honours and developing Brazil's most notable structures."
Weinfeld is 1 of Brazil's foremost modern architects. Born in São Paulo in 1952, he studied at the School of Architecture at the city's Mackenzie University and launched his multidisciplinary practice in 1973.
Operating predominantly in his home country, he has made numerous private residences as well as apartment buildings, hotels, outlets, banks and eating places. He not too long ago was hired to design a luxury housing undertaking in Manhattan.
Relevant story: Renzo Piano unveils plans for glass tower on Miami Beach
Connected movie: Craig Robins: "Furnishings companies essential to regenerating Miami Style District"
Miami house developer Craig Robins explains how bringing back furniture showrooms was the catalyst for transforming the city's derelict Design and style District into the thriving luxury shopping location it is today. Bigger version + story »
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Martin Fenlon Puts Contemporary Face On Historic Bungalow Near Downtown LA
US architect Martin Fenlon cites the Gehry Home as inspiration for the renovation and growth of his own home – a cedar-clad bungalow in...


Click the button below to add the 1959 Buick Convertible Poster to your wish list.
Nice advertising photo featuring a '59 Buick convertible. There was no doubt when you drove up behind this car...... it was a Buick.


My Grandma's kitchen is the best place to beWe're ever so busy, Grandma and meWe have all sorts of gadgets that go whizz and whirAnd there's always a bowl Grandma needs me to stir Join Lulu and Grandma in the kitchen, where Lulu helps make all kinds of delicious things, like crepes with lemon and sugar, macaroni cheese (her favourite!) and apricot slice. She learns how to whisk and chop and measure ... even beat egg whites for pavlova! Lulu and Grandma also pick vegies from the garden, set up a caf? and host a dinner party where little brother Harry and Teddy are the guests of honour. My Grandma's Kitchen is both children's book and cookbook, featuring a fun rhyming story and whimsical illustrations, along with 30 of Margaret Fulton's much-loved recipes. The food is fresh, simple and perfect for making with children - try pasta with homemade pesto, cheese twists or vanilla cupcakes. My Grandma's Kitchen is a book that children will love to read as well as use in the kitchen, and is perfect for encouraging them to get involved in cooking.
Louise has previously published the illustrated storybooks and cookbooks, My Grandma's Kitchen and The Best Ever Birthday, and the successful Cooking for your Baby and Toddler plus its sister Thermomix edition (which is Thermomix's biggest global seller). Louise lives in Sydney with her husband and young son, Harry.


Magical Vegas offers an Online Gaming Platform with hundreds of casino games available to access on any device. Online acquisition of not only registrants but actual first-time depositing players is vital to their growth, where a fraction of a reduction in cost makes all the difference.
Magical Vegas had been using Facebook's Power Editor tool and wanted to improve their performance by implementing an automated solution. They wanted to take a structured test and control approach so they could clearly measure the impact of the new solution. They were a natural fit to test Marin Social's new Marin Budget Allocation to achieve a competitive primary KPI goal of increasing volume of first-time depositing players while decreasing costs.
To assure an adequate test, the media plan comprised two groups of campaigns, one with the algo and one without. There was also a month's worth of historical data to benchmark against. The campaigns ran for a full month flight with the same audience targeting parameters, creative, and potential reach. The objective was to determine if the Marin Budget Allocation campaigns could outperform the campaigns that were being manually managed. The bulk creation tool was used to quickly create new campaigns aligned with a new test structure. Slight adjustments were made to the campaign bi-weekly, with insights gleaned from Marin's context sensitive reports to determine which device was driving optimal return on ad spend.
"We were very impressed by the expertise of the Marin Social customer success team as they were able to provide a tactical execution strategy with a focus on optimization. When we heard about their algorithm based optimization feature we had to be a part of the BETA as we have very competitive KPI goals to meet. Prior to Marin Social we were spending countless hours in managing Facebook ads with manual means of optimization using the Power Editor tool. The Marin Social team delivered beyond expectations by successfully increasing the volume of first time depositing players and lowering costs. I highly recommend Marin for not only their expertise in Facebook advertising but also their innovative optimization features that set them apart from the competition."
Turning on the algorithm is as simple as activating a button when managing campaigns in Marin Social. The algorithm was refreshed in near real-time, with automatic adjustments made to the budget value across ad sets. The algorithm rewards ad sets that meet the campaign goal, including both the volume and costs of conversion.


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Mayor Adams goes to Albany to ask for legislative help to fight crime in NYC
March 2, 2022 February 14, 2022 by americanpost
Immigrants march on Capitol Hill in Albany to demand the approval of the Coverage for All Law
Albany required to vote on robust package of laws to prevent more New Yorkers from becoming homeless
the mayor of New York Eric Adamswho a few weeks ago announced his plan to reduce crime in the Big Apple, met this Monday with the leaders of the Legislature, to ask the state government for help, with changes in some laws of the penal system reform, which he assures, have increased the wave of violence that plagues the city. The mayor maintains that the reform laws to bail bondsincrease in the age of criminal responsibility and discovery of criminal records, have put dangerous people on the street who have ended up committing crimes, an indication that defenders say is not based on reality, since only the 4% of those released without bail have reoffended and be arrested.
Although conversations with Senate President Andrea Stewart-Cousins and the head of the Assembly, Carl Heastiepassed in a friendly manner, according to the politicians themselves, and the commitment to continue holding new conversations to find tools that help reduce the crime wave in the five counties was left open, albany has remained in defending the reforms made.
After his day in The state capital, Adams assured that it is clear to him that what happened on Monday is just the beginning of the dialogues with Albany, where he hopes that his cry will be heard in some way. However, he warned that if he does not receive the help he asks for, with the change in laws (seen by defenders as an act of justice with poor and backward communities), it will be more difficult for him to restore security to the City, but will work to meet that obligation.
"I shared my thoughts, they shared their thoughts and it was a very healthy dialogue… we will focus on doing what we can to keep our city safe," he said. the mayor of new york. "If they help me with this, I think we can do more things, but if they don't help me with the things that I highlighted in my safety plan, I still have an obligation to keep the city safe."
After his meeting with Albany leadersLike other state politicians, Adams gave his word to New Yorkers that he will not let the city continue with rampant crime, and that if Albany does not support him with what he asks, he is prepared.
"That's why I implemented the Anti-Weapons Unit, that's why we're going to make sure we follow the courts to fight crime… I can't turn around and say: 'Since different parties didn't help me, then that's why now the city is like this. No, I do not accept that," said the president. My job is to keep New Yorkers safe, it's my job. If I get help from other places, that's fine, but without that help, I still have to make sure New Yorkers are safe and I'm not going to use any excuses. We are going to have a safe city."
Adams was adamant that lawmakers consider amending the state's recent bail reform law, allowing judges more flexibility to hold someone before trial based on a perceived threat to public safety, something advocates say it would once again open the door to abuse and discrimination among the poor, Latinos, and blacks.
"We have to make sure we close the loopholes in the law that allow dangerous people to be on the streets.. We are using this time to identify everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system, and more than that, and that is precisely what my crime plan points out," said Adams.
The president mentioned that in his conversations with Albany, in addition to talking about security, he talked about Earned Income Tax Credit, universal child care, loans and other issues. "There are so many issues that we have to analyze that I have to navigate here. That's how it's done," Adams said.
The leader of the Senate He assured that the conversation with the Mayor was positive, but he showed that although solutions to crime must be sought, moving back the laws requested by Adams is not the plan.
"We have to recognize that we clearly have a lot of concern about crime and that the increase in crime is a national problem, but we know that we have done important things in reforming the criminal system, and we know that we have to continue looking to make the system better, in the context of COVID, in the context of weapons proliferation, and in the context of things that we know we have to do to keep New York safe," Stewart-Cousins said.
The Assembly Leader, Heastie, added: "The conversation was not about agreements or about disagreements. We know we have work to do with the Mayor, and how to work together. We have the same goal of keeping the city safe and we need to have conversations."
After his visit, the Assemblywoman Latrice Walker of Brooklynasked the Mayor that instead of requesting that the criminal reform laws be reversed, he invest in the prevention of violence.
"Today we are telling our mayor that instead of wanting to reverse a successful criminal justice policy, we need him to invest more resources in the same services to make bail reform an even bigger success," said the mayor. politics.
The Legal Aid Society He appreciated that the leaders of the Legislature have expressed their right to the regressive changes to the bail reform and the increase in the criminal age, and assured that those changes should not be moved.
"Add a dangerousness provision to the existing bail statute only move more Black and Latino New Yorkers through our broken and punitive criminal legal system, fueling mass incarceration. Going back to a system where New York incarcerates more young people won't work because it never reduced crime or benefited public safety in the 100 years before Raise the Age reform or bail was passed," Legal Aid said, via of a statement.
"Albany legislators, responding to their constituents' cries for immediate action, did well to introduce sweeping changes to a system that has historically failed to reduce crime and recidivism. Legal Aid Society stands in solidarity with Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and other lawmakers who are prioritizing communities over cages and age-appropriate responses. teenagers," they added.
No echo in Albany Adams call to review bail laws and increase criminal age
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Adams Proposal to Not Defund NYPD Meets Strong Resistance from NY Progressive Democrats
Mayor asks State Legislature for more funding for key initiatives that will make NYC more prosperous
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Theodor Zuleger (28. prosince 1858 Louka (Grün)
 – 16. dubna 1929 Chomutov) ,byl sudetoněmecký politik z Čech, za Rakouska-Uherska jeden ze zakladatelů německého agrárního hnutí v českých zemích, po vzniku Československa senátor Národního shromáždění ČSR za Německý svaz zemědělců (BdL).

Biografie
Pocházel ze staré německé rolnické rodiny. Studoval na státním gymnáziu v Plzni a na rolnické škole v Kadani. Pak působil jako rolník a ve věku 23 let převzal hospodářskou usedlost v obci Libočany na Žatecku. V roce 1883 byl v této obci zvolen starostou a téhož roku se stal i členem žateckého okresního zastupitelstva. Později byl náměstkem okresního starosty. Byl aktivní v četných regionálních spolcích. Podporoval zemědělské družstevnictví. Byl například členem místní a okresní školní rady a členem výboru svazu pěstitelů chmele a známkovny chmele v Žatci. Později byl například předsedou kuratoria vyšší hospodářské školy v Kadani. V roce 1901 byl za okresy Žatec, Postoloprty, Kadaň, Doupov, Podbořany a Jesenice zvolen na Český zemský sněm. Roku 1900 se stal delegátem německého odboru české zemědělské rady za žatecký okres, přičemž v roce 1903 se stal místopředsedou a později i předsedou tohoto odboru. Funkci zastával až do své smrti.

Počátkem 20. století patřil spolu s Franzem Peschkou k zakladatelům a předákům Německé agrární strany, která byla založena roku 1905 jako politická platforma agrárního hnutí mezi německojazyčným obyvatelstvem v českých zemích a obecněji v Předlitavsku.

V roce 1905 se stal i poslancem Říšské rady (celostátní parlament), kde reprezentoval kurii venkovských obcí, obvod Karlovy Vary, Jáchymov, Kadaň atd. Nastoupil 28. listopadu 1905 místo Franze Kliemanna. Mandát obhájil ve volbách do Říšské rady roku 1907 konaných již podle rovného volebního práva, tedy bez kurií. Zvolen byl za okrsek Čechy 114. Usedl do poslaneckého klubu Německý národní svaz (Deutscher Nationalverband), v jehož rámci patřil k Německé agrární straně. Ve vídeňském parlamentu setrval do konce funkčního období sněmovny, tedy do roku 1911.

V politickém životě se udržel i po vzniku Československa. V parlamentních volbách v roce 1920 získal senátorské křeslo v Národním shromáždění. Mandát obhájil v parlamentních volbách v roce 1925. Senátorem byl do své smrti roku 1929. Pak ho nahradil Robert Stöhr. Profesí byl presidentem německého odboru zemědělské rady, bytem v Libočanech, okres Žatec. V roce 1932 byla jeho osobnost připomenuta reliéfem na památníku českých chmelařů, který byl onoho roku odhalen na Chmelařském náměstí v Žatci.

Odkazy

Reference

Externí odkazy
 Theodor Zuleger v Národním shromáždění v roce 1920

Sudetští Němci
Čeští starostové
Čeští regionální politici
Poslanci českého zemského sněmu
Poslanci rakouské Říšské rady
Senátoři československého Národního shromáždění
Českoslovenští politici německé národnosti
Členové Německého svazu zemědělců
Narození v roce 1858
Úmrtí v roce 1929
Narození 28. prosince
Úmrtí 16. dubna
Muži
Čestní občané města České Budějovice
Politici z Ústeckého kraje

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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text:
LA Clippers News
Eric Gordon Turns Down New Orleans Offer
By John Raffo Jan 26, 2012, 10:52am PST
Share All sharing options for: Eric Gordon Turns Down New Orleans Offer
It's in Lawler's Law's Daily Clipper column (here), but I thought it deserved a home of its own on the front page. Apparently Eric Gordon refused New Orleans Hornets latest contract extension. The offer was reportedly four years for around 51 million, which is around 12 million (plus raises) a year. Gordon will become a restricted free agent in the summer.
Many of us, myself included, were initially horrified when Gordon was sent away in the Chris Paul deal. But this probably proves what we suspected, that Gordon and his agent might overestimate Gordon's value. The max for an RFA will be around 58 million for four years. With Paul and Blake Griffin requiring max extensions in the summer of 2013, there's almost no way the Clips could have kept Gordon.
Is Gordon worth the max? At his best... yes, he might be the best young two guard in the league. But right now it looks like he might miss half the season. I was surprised NOH went as high as they did. Will someone (Indiana?) pony up the big bucks?


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Even the most lowly council pen-pusher has the same political power as a senior minister, abortions are routinely performed in the nation's hospitals, the nation's leader is normally just referred to as "snuggle-wuggle-huggy-bear", and tumbleweeds made of litter adorn city streets. Crime, especially youth-related, is all-pervasive, perhaps because of the country's complete lack of prisons. Cheeseworld's national animal is the Cheese, which is also the nation's favorite main course.
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The girl is Ulla, a spunky East Berlin fräulein, a little bored with her job at the Engineering Works and her long-standing boyfriend; given a lift one day by Thomas, a suave chef at the Swiss Embassy, she finds herself more than ready to indulge in a little nocturnal East-West relations. Thomas has taken to nipping across Checkpoint Charlie for pizzas at his favourite restaurant, so Ulla suggests he take her for a quick 'Ausflug' to the West, secreted in the boot of his Merc... But, oh yes, things go wrong. Shot with all the panache of a McDonalds advertisement with music to match, the movie adds up to little more than an unimaginative love story that reduces the traumas of life in the 'divided city' to casuistic cliché. Sympto- matically, the only enlivening diversion is provided by two minor performances: Peter Schiff as Ulla's concerned Communist father, and Fassbinder regular Brigitte Mira as a toilet attendant.


text:
Best Games for Nintendo Switch – 5 Best Games for Nintendo Switch
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text:
Prosecutors accused Rowlett homemaker of being a psychopath
A camera was rolling as Dallas prosecutor Greg Davis told a TV news reporter that Darlie Routier was "a psychopath" – a claim unsubstantiated and not supported by a state-commissioned forensic psychiatrist who was never put on the stand in her capital murder trial. Could questionable ethics and possible Brady violations lead to a repeat of the Michael Morton case?
By Kathy Cruz
Texas Center for Community Journalism
GATESVILLE - Every morning at 4 a.m., a cacophony of noise emanating from cell blocks inside the bowels of Mountain View make the prison unit sound like a mental asylum. Female inmates – some suicidal -- scream and sob. Some manage to find something with which to cut themselves. Others deliberately wreak bedlam by clogging toilets to cause flooding.
"Where we're living, there's no peace," said Lisa Coleman, one of 10 women on Texas' death row.
But from the midst of the chaos comes a calmer, softer noise radiating from a run of cells that house Coleman and four other death row inmates, including Darlie Routier. Before the break of dawn, the women, separated by bars, start the day with Scripture reading and prayer.
Almost 16 years have passed since Routier, a Rowlett homemaker, was sentenced to die for the stabbing deaths of her children, but there has still been no sign of the psychopathy claimed by then-Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Greg Davis. Routier has always maintained her innocence.
"She has been evaluated, and no one has said that," Dallas attorney Stephen Cooper said, referring to Davis' label of his client. Cooper and other attorneys have been fighting to save Routier since her conviction in February 1997.
Making such inflammatory, unsubstantiated claims about someone who was not a public figure like Routier – especially in front of television cameras – would likely bring a lawsuit.
For Davis, it brought job security.
Legal ethics expert Ellen Yaroshefsky said that Davis referring to Routier as a psychopath with no factual basis to back it up is "outrageous." Yaroshefsky is a professor at the Cardozo Law School in New York, and director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law. She has assisted the Innocence Project, of which her Cardozo colleague, Barry Scheck, is co-director.
"Particularly, a public servant who is a minister of justice should not be characterizing defendants in this manner. It is unethical to do so," Yaroshefsky said.
The claims against Routier were made one year after South Carolina mother Susan Smith was sentenced to life in prison after she drove her car into the dark waters of a lake with her two sons strapped in their car seats in the backseat. Routier, too, had little boys, but she says they were stabbed to death by an unknown intruder. Routier herself sustained significant slash wounds, but the Rowlett Police Department and Dallas County District Attorney's office claimed she inflicted the injuries on herself.
Cooper said there was no prior history with Routier to indicate the presence of mental or emotional disorders, and there has been no indication since. There are "specific DSM criteria" for psychopathy, he said, referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. To fit the state's claims, Routier would have had to have experienced a brief, unprecedented psychotic break that left her children butchered.
"Psychopaths don't just turn over one day, and they're all better now," Cooper said.
Davis, now an assistant district attorney in Waco, McLennan County, has not responded to several attempts by the Texas Center for Community Journalism to get his response to criticisms of how he handled the Routier case. Co-prosecutor Toby Shook told TCCJ that he has no regrets about the case and no qualms regarding Routier's future execution.
Yaroshefky said that making such a claim against a defendant when there is "nothing in the record" is "prohibited by the disciplinary rules of every jurisdiction." She said the former Dallas prosecutor should have been brought before a disciplinary committee.
Tactics used by prosecutors are a timely topic in the wake of a number of post-conviction DNA exonerations. In Texas, there have been several, but it is perhaps the exoneration of Michael Morton that has received the greatest media focus.
In February, Williamson County State District Judge Ken Anderson will face an unusual court of inquiry to determine whether he intentionally failed to disclose exculpatory evidence that might have prevented Morton from unjustly serving 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife. Anderson could face contempt of court and evidence tampering charges. According to the Texas Tribune, he also has been sued over the Morton case by the State Bar of Texas and could possibly be disbarred.
Failure to reveal exculpatory evidence is considered a Brady violation. It comes from the 1963 case of Brady v. Maryland, in which the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the 5th and 14th amendments provide for the availability of all evidence in a case. To meet the criteria of a Brady violation, the following criteria must be met:
evidence must have been favorable to the defense;
the state must have withheld that information, even if unintentionally;
and, because the evidence was not disclosed, the court was prejudiced against the accused.
Ironically, Anderson's lawyer Eric Nichols is arguing that he needs increased access to the files of the attorneys who represented Morton at trial.
Those familiar with Routier's case, including Cooper and Lloyd Harrell, a retired FBI agent and licensed private investigator who was part of Routier's defense team, say that Dallas prosecutors commissioned forensic psychiatrist Kenneth Dekleva to determine whether Routier presented a future danger.
The likelihood of a defendant posing a future danger is part of the criteria used in Texas when a death sentence is on the table. Cooper, Harrell and others suspect that Dekleva, who believed that Routier posed no future danger, was instructed not to put his professional opinion in writing. Prosecutors did not call him to testify.
Dekleva now practices from an office in Washington, D.C. In late November, a staffer in that office told TCCJ that the doctor will be overseas for the next six months.
Dr. J. Douglas Crowder, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, signed a sworn affidavit stating that in the summer of 2000, Dekleva told him over lunch that he had served as a psychiatric consultant in Routier's capital murder case and was prepared to testify that she was "not likely to constitute a future danger," but was never summoned to the stand at any point during the trial.
With no expert testimony – even during the punishment phase – about Routier being unlikely to pose a future danger, the jury that convicted the young mother bypassed a life sentence and gave her death instead.
Harrell said he is concerned that deliberate attempts may have been made by prosecutors to circumvent Brady, and Dekleva is but one example. He said that the state's blood spatter expert, Tom Bevel – who has since been tied to several wrongful convictions – implied when meeting with the defense team just prior to the start of the trial that he had been asked to not write a report. Harrell said that FBI profiler Alan Brantley also stated that he did not write a report, an atypical occurrence for an FBI agent.
Harrell said that asking experts to withhold reports could be a way to defeat the required discovery process of releasing all reports of experts who are planned to testify. If a report is written and is exculpatory – in other words, points to the defendant's innocence – such reports would most assuredly fall under Brady, he said.
The former FBI agent stated that Dekleva's name had been on the witness list, but in the era before Google searches, no one on the defense team knew who he was. Brantley's name also was supplied, but with no affiliation. His name was very similar to one of the law enforcement witnesses, he said. The FBI profiler's testimony, which supported the state's claim of a staged crime scene, came at a time, Harrell said, when the FBI was defending accusations that its profiling was "junk science."
Melissa Higgins of New Hampshire, creator of the Justice4Juveniles blog and an advocate who worked to free the wrongfully convicted West Memphis 3, said she quickly became concerned for Routier after she started reading trial transcripts at the request of a colleague.
"It was the trial transcripts that really convinced me that she is innocent - the way the prosecutors handled the case," Higgins said. "They were constantly saying 'we lost this report.'"
At a Prosecutorial Oversight panel discussion in Austin last March, Morton said that his wrongful conviction had nothing to do with race or prior criminal record or "living in a bad part of town" – common assumptions about those aggressively pursued by the justice system.
"Look at me," he said, an apparent reference to the fact that he is white and, at the time of his wrongful conviction, lived in a nice neighborhood. The prosecution's theory was that he had beaten his wife to death because she had denied him sex.
Routier, also white, lived in a two-story house in an upscale neighborhood. Prosecutors insinuated that she was motivated to kill her children out of materialism and frustration over not losing baby weight.
"Through innuendo and very salacious accusations, I was found guilty and got a life sentence," Morton said.
He was luckier than Routier. She got death.
Those who have known Routier all her life, or for a number of years, claim there has never been any hint that she would be capable of such a horrific crime.
Melanie Waits, who became friends with Routier more than 20 years ago when they were both young mothers and regularly visits her in prison, said that there was no solid evidence to back up the state's claims about her character or mental state.
When asked how her friend has managed to hang onto her sanity during the years she has been on death row, Waits replied: "By a thread sometimes."
At Mountain View, Routier has often reached out to, or on behalf of, fellow death row inmates. The interview with Coleman was at Routier's request. She had written TCCJ expressing concern that Coleman's court-appointed lawyer was not keeping her informed of key appeal developments that have been speeding her to an execution date. She also wrote about her concern for Kimberly McCarthy, who has been scheduled for execution on Jan. 29.
McCarthy, convicted in the drug-fueled murder of a neighbor in Lancaster, was prosecuted by Davis.
"She tries to help these women," said Darlie Kee, Routier's mother. She said that she and her daughter don't always agree about who is worthy of compassion.
Behind glass and mesh in the visitation room at Mountain View, Coleman's face softens and she smiles when the subject of Routier comes up.
"Darlie," she said, "has been a real blessing to me."
In an effort to determine whether Davis claims about Routier might have merit, TCCJ obtained through Open Records the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's disciplinary reports on Routier. There have been 12 write-ups in her almost 16 years of incarceration. None are for violent or dangerous offenses. The infractions are for such things as soliciting a prison staffer to make a phone call on behalf of another inmate, and having in her cell items that are not available at the prison commissary, such as magazines, tweezers and cocoa mix.
A few of the infractions are perhaps the most telling. Routier used an over-the-counter dental product in a way in which it was not intended; violated prison rules by rolling her sleeves too high in the prison yard; and had a jar of petroleum jelly that had been mixed with an unknown pink substance.
The woman Greg Davis told the world was a psychopath wanted to dye her hair, get a tan and wear lip gloss.
Kathy Cruz is a staff writer for the Hood County News in Granbury. She can be reached at kcruz@community-journalism.net.
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