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Category: branding / packaging
My Role: art director and associate creative director on the majority of brand, design, and web.
the creator of the brand came to us with nothing more than a product. at fir nw, we gave this wonderful product a name, an identity, and a face so that it can live in the real world.
When I started on this account, we barely had a name. I joined as an art director and graphic designer on the packaging team. We created a target consumer, did research in the field on trends in our product sector, and worked hand in hand with the client to build a packaging that truly represented the Tihli brand and her identity alike. After several months of work, we produced complete packaging, an eCommerce platform, and a brand guide to help the brand continue to grow and develop.
Shipping packaging
Brand Guidelines
I was the only designer developing the packaging for Tihli, and I worked with two copywriters as partners as well. When I was thinking about what we were trying to accomplish, I was inspired by an old box of slides for those old Kodak Carousel slide machines. The case slid out, revealing a tray holding the slides, almost like a box of memories. I felt like that captured the spirit of Tihli, the spirit of life and rejuivination.
The Target Consumer
Sara Jones, 27
Mid Level HR at a modest Portland Tech company (Vacasa, Wacom, etc.)
Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, but work isn't a huge passion compared to personal life and relationships
$40k Salary with benefits
Single + dating
Health is a value, but not a main motivator (works out in group classes, not crossfit)
She's motivated by a general sense of happiness and control in her day-to-day
Value she finds in the product: self care and beauty
How the product makes her feel: elegant, healthy, beautiful, luxurious
Shops at Nordstrom, Steven Alan, Sloan, etc.
As I'm sure is no surprise to you, I don't look much like our target consumer, on paper or otherwise. So my copywriter partners and I set out into the world to see what kind of products someone like Sara Jones is purchasing.
When it was time to develop the packaging itself we had a couple of constraints to work around. Our client was new to the market and would be unable to meet minimum order quantities posed by most domestic manufacturers and with out international relationships outsourcing wasn't an option. So, I designed packaging that could be completely produced using only two sheets of 8.5x11 inch sheets of paper. Plus a small label for the bottle of course. Once I finalized the dimensions of the design we used die-cutting to create a scaleable manufacturing solution. We used typefaces that could be integrated through all brand communications without licensing fees and a stock pattern we could adjust to meet our color and design needs for the brand.


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subset: commoncrawl


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Checkmarx Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing
Software Exposure is the new unknown. But not for long.
Manage Software Exposure at the Speed of DevOps
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing, 2019
The Complete Guide to Developer Secure Coding Education
CISO of Brussels Airlines answers "Why Checkmarx?"
Checkmarx is pioneering Software Exposure
Checkmarx allows you to seamlessly plug security testing into your SDLC
and CI workflows empowering developers to deliver secure applications.
Shifting security left allows organizations to launch secure applications while reducing costs and avoiding release delays. Integrate Checkmarx in your IDEs, Code Repositories, Build Servers and Bug Tracking tools to automate detection and mitigate potential risks as soon as they are introduced rather than identifying these risks just before the release schedule is due.
But your security doesn't stop there. The best approach to application security is to combine two or more solutions, and together, CxSAST and CxIAST provide complete coverage by ensuring security tests are automated all throughout the software development lifecycle. This is the way to create a multi-layered security strategy with the goal of detecting as many vulnerabilities as possible before your application hits the market and to ensure that releases will be secure and on-time, minimizing the need for costly post-release maintenance.
Automatically log vulnerabilities and assign action items to ensure proper follow up on issues of all urgency levels. Maintain continuous visibility of project security states and monitor your application security posture at all times.
Empower Your Developers to Deliver Secure Software Faster!
The ROI of Shifting Left
How Travis Perkins Increases DevOps Security
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing on our website,
you consent to our use of cookies. To find out more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.


text: If you're following me on my Instagram, you'd know how much I love centella asiatica. It is also known as Indian Pennyworth, Gotu Kola, or simply cica. It has a lot of skincare benefits and it is preferred for those who have sensitive skin types for a number of reasons. Now I'd usually review a skincare product after at least 30 days from first use. But due to a deadline of sorts, I'll be discussing this cream from Natural Derma Project today even if I've only used it for at least a week. Continue reading


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Fellowship Bible Church, Myanmar
In 2003, Pastor Benjamin completed missionary training school, received his Bachelors of Theology degree, and began ministry with his wife. Because the military junta, which governs the country, prohibits public gatherings of more than five people, ministry is difficult. The couple's strong desire for people to come to a saving knowledge of Christ drives them to continue ministry. Under the leadership of Pastor Benjamin, the church is growing and people are coming to know Jesus.
Church services in Myanmar are held in homes due to the prohibition of public gatherings. In an area outside of Yangon, home churches meet under the leadership of men that serve as pastors of these home fellowships.
Orphan Care
The ministry has evolved over time to include the care of children. Nearly 140 children are currently being supported through Fellowship Bible Church. Some of them live in a rented house near Pastor Benjamin, others live among the homes of congregation members. These families are provided with assistance from FBC in the form of food and school fees for the children.
In 2010, Fellowship Bible Church started Myanmar Bible College with a class of 13 students. These students complete a 4-year curriculum which prepares them to plant churches and begin ministry on their own. To date, MBC has graduated 39 young men and women. Many of them now serve in churches in their home villages, while others are pursuing advanced degrees.
- Urgent Needs At Myanmar Bible College September 4, 2019Read More
More articles from this partner >
November 4 – November 11 – Teaching English at Myanmar Bible College. If interested, please contact us.


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Social Media Can Destroy Your Business
Social media is a great way to build up a business, but it can tear it down again just as quickly. Here are 50 examples.
Social media is a great way to build up a business, but it can tear it down again just as quickly. Here are 50 examples.
Routine Business Events, Routine People Events, Recognition, Community Participation, Trending and Controversial Topics, Products and Services, General Marketing, B2B Relationships, Business Information, Fund Raising.
Welcome to the business side of social media: We're all selling something and we're all talking. Is anyone listening?
1. No plan, no value
2. It isn't shareable
3. It doesn't encourage deeper engagement
4. No one's measuring results
5. No call to action
CEB research shows that consumers are overwhelmed by the volume of messages coming at them from brands. The key to driving sales is make the purchase process simple and straightforward.
Why Simplicity Should be at the Heart of Your Small Business Marketing Strategy
Learning how to blog is no easy task. It takes time and commitment to get your blog off the ground. If you're serious about learning how to blog then you'll want to read this multi-author comprehensive guide.
Capture your reader's attention within 8 seconds to make an impact. Storytelling creates a connection and buys you more time to connect and convince your readers:
As featured in the Amazon best-selling book, The Social Employee: How Great Companies Make Social Media Work (McGraw-Hill,) this infographic shows how employees can be engaged in branding from the inside out.
Article: [INFOGRAPHIC] The 7 Traits of the @SocialEmployee (McGraw-Hill) #socbiz | Blue Focus Marketing.
Laura Roeder is on a full-tilt mission to create fame for small business owners that don't quite know what to do with social media. Learn how Laura transitioned her former web design company into an online education offering and why she believes entrepreneurs should follow their natural strengths.
Founder Laura Roeder Tells All on Creating 'Social Media' Fame for Small Business Owners.


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Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about.
Happy Creek Knowles Subdivision
Happy Ridge Drive East to include Rte. 606, Happy Loop, Leach Run Parkway
Subdivision from Commonwealth Drive to Colonial Drive
Jamestown Rd East to include Horseshoe Drive, Wines ST, Braxton Rd, Charles St, Marshall St, Henrico, Gloucester a
Rte. 55 East John Marshall Hwy from Jamestown Rd to Town limits
If any questions, please call the Water Treatment Plant at 540-636-7474.
Mike Kisner
Manager of Water


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I have two boyfriends whom I love very dearly, but neither of them is actually very good in bed. I do have another friend who is really good, though, and my boyfriends have been okay with me sleeping with him in the past, especially when we all first started to become sexually active. However, it's been a while since the three of us have seen any action, and I kind of find myself craving the company of this other friend again, but I'm afraid my boyfriends' feelings will be hurt if I call him over instead of doing them. I really don't want to tell them that they don't sexually satisfy me, because they already have self esteem issues and might think that they're "not good enough" for me, which isn't true at all. What's the best way I can bring this up without hurting anyone's feelings or making them feel unwanted?
You "really don't want to tell them," but the thing is, healthy relationships require clear and open communication. Fortunately, there are ways to talk about this that don't come off as cruel or shaming.
First, think about what you like in bed that is missing from your sex life with your partners. Is there something your friend does that really gets you going? Is there something your partners do that you don't particularly like? It is okay to get idea from porn, erotica, your personal fantasies, or other partners! Then, see if you can frame them in a way that is a positive suggestion, rather than a criticism:
- I read an erotica/saw a porn where they tried [sex thing], and it was really hot. Would you be interested in trying that?
- It was really sexy that one time you did a little bit of [sex thing] - do you want to do more of that?
- When you do [sex thing], it really doesn't do it for me. Is that something that you get a lot out of, or could we take it off the table?
If it's less an issue of wanting to do/not do something, and just general technique, you can also communicate about that:
- I like my [sex part] to be touched like [this] - when you do it so [fast/hard/slow/soft/dry], it doesn't work as well for me.
- Last time, you did [sex thing] for long enough that my [sex part] was a little raw - could we try to switch it up more frequently so it's more comfortable?
Be sure to communicate during sex as well! Let him know what's working, guide his hands or other body parts to the angles/speeds/techniques you like, and don't be afraid to ask for him to go slower/harder/faster/gentler.
You could also suggest doing mojo upgrade together!
It might take some effort on your part to get back into the groove: sometimes people can get stuck in a loop of not seeing their partner as sexy, so it's harder to get revved up for sex, so the sex isn't as fun, and so on. Try experimenting with different types of condoms, lubes, and toys. Try writing erotic fantasies back and forth with each other. Watch porn or read erotica together beforehand to get in the mood.
If, through all this conversation and experimentation together, you discover that the issue isn't general good-at-sex-ness, but a particular thing you enjoy that you share with your friend and not your partners - if, for example, he's very submissive and knows exactly how to tap into your inner dominant, while your other partners don't really enjoy or do power-exchange, that's another conversation to have! But first, start from a perspective of teaching, guiding, and learning together and see if you can't boost your "awesome sexual partners" count from one to three.
Of course, if you're fundamentally incompatible and just really don't ever enjoy having sex with your partners, if sex feels like a chore or you feel pressured, you don't have to stay in a sexual relationship with someone who you don't want to have sex with.


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Having been out of action for the past week, due to circumstances beyond our control, we return with a digest of some of the news that you may have missed.
Malta, Italy and Libya:
The stretch of the Mediterranean between Libya and the Malta/Lampedusa area has long been a major route for clandestine migration into Europe, and the Maltese and Italian governments have long sought solutions to decreasing the numbers attempting to cross the sea from Libya. Italy and Libya have recently concluded a pact that saw them agree to operate joint naval patrols and for Italy to be able to return migrants (contrary to international law) directly to Libyan waters without processing any potential asylum applications.
At the same time the simmering political row between Italy and Malta over maritime jurisdiction has reached boiling point. The Italian island of Lampedusa is 200km south of Sicily and 130 km west of Malta (Malta itself is only 90 km from Sicily) and there has long been disputes over exactly who is responsible for dealing with migrant boats in the area, each having refused to take responsibility for vessels that they say are in the other's maritime 'search & rescue zone'.
Now both sides are taking an even hard line on dealing with each other, as well as with floundering migrants. Malta has long argued that it bears a burden out of all proportion to its size and its detention centres have been grossly overcrowded for years, whilst the recent increasingly repressive political atmosphere in Italy has seen the Italian navy even less likely to render humanitarian aid to migrants in trouble at sea. Now they merely tow them back to the African mainland.
The latest flare-up stems from an incident on 20 August when a boat with 5 exhausted and weakened Eritreans, including a 7-year old boy, landed on Lampedusa. The Eritreans claimed that they were the only survivors and that the other 73 passengers had all died of lack of food and water and been thrown overboard. The boat had left Libya 3 weeks before but had run out of fuel 3 days into the voyage. They had been given bread and water by a passing fishing boat at one point but apparently had refused assistance, other than life jackets and fuel, from an Armed Forces of Malta (AFM) vessel 2 days before they arrived at Lampedusa, saying they wished to continue on to Italy.*
Both the UNHCR and the Vatican were quick to express their outrage and blame both sides. However, that did not stop the Italian opposition from claiming the migrant's arrival on Italian territory as a failure of the Berlusconi regime's immigration policy, a policy that will see the migrants face a fine of €10,000.
Franco Frattini, Italy's Foreign Minister in turn blamed Malta, claiming it's search & rescue zone was "too large for tiny Malta", sparking a war of words with Maltese officials. He also turned his fire on the rest of the EU for not doing enough to stop the migrants from reaching Italy and not sharing the 'burden' of those that did. In response the EU's duty president, Swedish Premier Carl Bildt, promised that the matter would be discussed by EU foreign ministers at the end of October. A relocation project is also due to be unveiled in September by the EU justice commissioner, Jacques Barrot.
The mainstream Italian media were also not slow to get involved in the controversy, whipping themselves up into a frenzy, with Il Giornale claiming that Malta is the "most racist country in Europe." And, in an act of rank hypocrisy, the paper also warned of the threat of growing far-right and police brutality against immigrants in Malta. [video link]
In recent day more boats have been intercepted in the area. Two days ago 57 migrants were rescued by Italian coastguards off of Lampedusa. One was evacuated to the island suffering from dehydration whilst the remainder were taken to Sicily. And just today 79 Somalis landed in two groups on Malta, with one dead migrant from one of the groups being recovered from the sea.
It seems that however much the Italians and Maltese want to bicker over who is responsible for the migrants that make it across the Mediterranean alive, no one wants to take responsibility for the ones that fail in their quest for a better life. Migrants from across the world will continue to want to come to Europe however high EU governments high they build the walls of Fortress Europe and however loud they trumpet their desire to keep them out.
* The AFM has also released a photograph of the 20 August boat casting doubt on the migrants' story and claiming that it is far too small to have set sail with 78 passengers.
On 24 August G4S announced that its profits have soared since winning new contracts to run Brook House and Tinsley House IRCs at Gatwick airport. The 2 detention centres are expected to generate £10 million and £5m a year respectively for the company over the next five years.
In other news G4S was fined £5,000 after UK Border Agency officers found the firm had employing an illegal worker at its Glasgow offices. A spokesman for G4S claimed that it was an "isolated incident" after it was found an employee was working in excess of the 20 hours a week permitted for a resident on a student visa.
In the early hours of 23 August part of the construction site of a new detention centre at the Fairoaksbaan, Rotterdam Airport in The Netherlands was set on fire. On-site offices used by the management of the planning and construction companies responsible for the construction were targeted in protest against the continuing construction of Fortress Europe and was planned to coincide with the start of the international No-Border Camp on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Canada, Roma & Fingerprints:
Canada has imposed swingeing visa restrictions on Czech citizens in an attempt to prevent Roma people form going to Canada to claim asylum. Canada's Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, claimed the aim was to stop "economic migrants jumping the queue" who could easily move to "26 other Western democracies in the European Union." He also paid lip-service to the fact that the Roma faced social and economic discrimination but that the Czech Republic was "in compliance with the European human rights law" and that there "is no policy of state-sponsored persecution against the Roma."
This clearly ignores the fact that, whilst the Roma have the right to free movement within the EU, their chances of finding work in other countries is severly restricted because of widespread anti-Roma prejudice. And in the Czech Republic itself, despite recent anti-discrimination legislation designed to put the country in step with European Union human rights law, persecution of the Roma is on the increase.
Amnesty International recently said that, "Roma in the country continue to suffer discrimination at the hands of both public officials and private individuals, including in the areas of housing, education, health care and employment. Not only do they face forced evictions, segregation in education and racially motivated violence, but they have been denied justice when seeking redress for the abuses against them."
Other recent news sees the signing of a data sharing agreement between the UK, Canada and Australia to share fingerprint data of people applying for asylum or resisting deportation. New Zeland and the United States are expected to sign-up in the near future, mirroring the type of cooperation between the five states that operates under the UK-USA Security Agreement on signals intelligence. It is not known whether this agreement will give the 4 non-EU countries access to Eurodac fingerprint data system.


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We have had some lovely coverage of our Hydrating Beauty Balm and Rejuvenating Facial Elixir in the Toun Cryer Beauty feature dedicatedto Rose. this is what they said
Top of our wishlist for smooth, hydrated skin is the Hydrating Beauty Balm from MBotanicals, which contains rosehip oil to repair, hydrate and firm skin. Ideal for dry skins or as a night treatment facial oil, it smells gorgeous too.
Image credit: Wild Fawn Jewellery


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PARIS - Renault has slashed production targets at its new plant in Curitiba, Brazil, as a result of the country's economic crisis.
Company sources say Renault will make 20,000 cars this year at the new plant instead of the 30,000 originally planned. Renault planned to make 22,000 Scenics and 8,000 Clios in 1999. 'The target is now 16,000 Scenics and 4,000 Clios,' said a Renault insider.
Scenic production started in late November and is running at about 50 units daily. Clio production is scheduled to begin this summer. Scenics are sold in Brazil and Argentina. Clios will be sold mostly in Brazil.
Renault has cut its 1999 sales forecast in Brazil to 33,000 units. Last December, Renault said it planned to sell 40,000 units this year, 80,000 in 2000, and 120,000 in 2001.
Meanwhile, Renault announced plans to open a $120 million engine plant in Curitiba in early 2000. The plant will make 1.6-and 1.0-liter gasoline engines initially, and later 1.8- and 2.0-liter gasoline and diesel engines.
Brazil's auto industry has been in a slump that started with Asia's economic crisis in 1997. Car sales continue to decline in 1999, after plunging 26 percent in 1998 to 1.4 million units. Sales were down 25 percent in the first quarter.
The crisis has also affected other carmakers. Ford has announced that it would not go ahead with plans to build a $200 million plant in Guaiba, Rio Grande do Sul state.
The decision came after governor Olivio Dutra decided to hold back a grant for infrastructure improvements at the plant site.
DaimlerChrysler began A-class production in late April at its plant in Juiz de Fora. But the initial target - 40,000 units this year and 70,000 in 2000 - now appears optimistic.
'We will not be using anywhere near the capacity of that plant,' said D/C Co-chairman Robert Eaton.


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The IAA PKW is the world's leading trade fair for mobility. The fair first took place in 1897, now operating more than 120 years. From the beginning it is closely linked with the development of automotive industry. This year company Šumer is joining the biggest brands in the industry. The 2019 core topics are electric mobility, networked and autonomous… read more →
Development made our company continuously grow for 40 years. Today we a took a moment to appreciate all the effort and people who made it happen. Join our community and be a part of what is coming next!
🏆🏆 Gold is ours!🏆🏆 On 30.05.2019 there was an award ceremony for innovative companies in our region. We got the proof of the quality of innovation that come to life in our company! Now we compete with the best companies in Slovenia for the title of THE BEST INOVATION OF 2018! We are proud of our colleges who made it happen!… read more →
In company Šumer d.o.o. we are taking care of connecting entrepreneurial environment with educational. On April 11, 2019, we organized a professional excursion for the students. The company was fully presented by Mr. Boris Novak, General Manager . Mr. Novak first explained the history of the company's development, provided information on where the company all has its units, who are… read more →
In March we had a meeting, regarding cooperation with Faculty of Engineering Kasetsart University from Thailand. We set goals with focus to establish long term relationship and international knowledge exchange! #universities#engineers #internalization #cooperative#research #sumerdoo
Company Šumer participates on IZB Show in Wolfsburg from 16 to 18.10.2018. Show has been organized by VW Group for their suppliers. On our booth 7/7108, we present our competences of Injection moulding, Over-moulding, Stamping and Deep drawing, Spring and Wire Bending Products, Turning, Laser cutting, Heat treatment and Assembly.
It is useful in wide range of applications from electronic components, houseware components, medical components to automobile components. It is applicable to spot welding of highly reflective material, such as Cu, Al or Au, where high energy level is required and to seam welding where repetitive output is required.
New stamping machine with its 350 tons (stamping force), opens new future opportunities into our company and extends our product range.
We provide laser cutting, CNC bending and welding of sheet metal
Fiber laser with nominal power 3kW is sophisticated alternative for fast cutting of sheet metal. Best results are achieved up to the 8 mm thickness. Common structural steel can be cut up to thichness 20 mm.
Cut capacities:
-structural steel up to 20 mm
-stainless steel up to 10 mm
-aluminium up to 8 mm
-brass up to 5 mm
-copper up to 5 mm
CNC bending machine ensures precise bending up to 10 mm thickness and 3000 mm length.
- Laser cutting and CNC bending of sheet metal
-structural steel up to 20 mm
-stainless steel up to 10 mm
-aluminium up to 8 mm
-brass up to 5 mm
-copper up to 5 mm
Our company was IFA is the world's leading trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances.


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April 18 - CrossFit Estero
Food: Gluten free pizza. Red pepper flakes, sea salt, oregano
Shoulder Press - 1×20 – Goal is to pick a weight and complete 20 reps for 1 set. Weight should be moderate…60% or more. You may rest with bar on back but no racking until set is complete. Utilize spotters when going for full set
As many rounds as possible in 12 minutes of:
1 Rope Climb
Max rep Bench Press #135/95
CrossFit Football with Jeremy Howard @ 7pm Monday-Thursday
Strength: High Bar Back Squat: 8 min EMOM 2x @75%
Skill: 6x Burpee 10 yd sprints
WOD: 20-10-5 For Time: Deadlift (225/135), Shoulder Touches, Situps
1. Follow this link to sign up for classes: CLICK HERE


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privacy policy
How we handle your data:
I would like to assure you that your personal information will be stored securely, remain confidential and will only be used for our own marketing and will therefore not be shared with any third parties without express prior permission.
We would like to keep in touch with you from time to time when we have information regarding new products and special offers which we think might be of interest to you. We will only send you this information if you have actively subscribed to our newsletter or have previously purchased one of our products.
You can change your preferences or remove your consent at any time by contacting us at firstname.lastname@example.com


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Michalina Kos-Kaczyńska
Michalina Kos studied law at the University of Gdansk. She is a graduate of the School of the American Law organized by the Chicago - Kent College of Law and the University of Gdansk. She also graduated from the Polish and International Legal Studies Programme at the University of Gdansk.
She completed legal trainings in the Office of Competition and Consumer protection, in courts, in several law firms and the law department of the biggest Polish bank. She specializes in banking law, real estate law and intellectual property law and unfair competition law.
She is fluent in German and English.
E-mail: email@example.com


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October 2005
The repainting of the tower has finally begun. After many months, the paperwork was completed, proposals received, a contractor selected and final details put in place.
J. Goodison Co., Inc. of East Providence, RI, is the contractor, and work began on September 15, 2005. The scope of the project includes sealing and resurfacing the deck, repairing and replacing the railing as needed, and prepping, caulking and painting the exterior of the tower. The project is expected to take two to three weeks, depending upon the weather.
Scaffolding has been erected, and the tower is now totally encased in vinyl. Although the vinyl will prevent visitors from following the day-to-day progress, it will keep the area cleaner and prevent the paint from blowing onto neighboring surfaces. All workers will follow required safety procedures and wear proper protection.
The lighthouse will continue to be open for tours on Sundays from 1-4 p.m. until October 30.


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You've gone too far. Reloading last forum page...
Caroline Forbes
Caroline Forbes ♥Caroline アイコン Competition♥ Closed until S4!
CullenSisters-X posted on Oct 23, 2010 at 01:15PM
Hi everyone!
A couple of weeks ago I made a pick asking if you wanted an icon competition, and 94% of you said yes! So here it is :)
All you have to do is post an icon based on the theme I say...
The rules are simple:
1. You can only post ONE icon,
2. You can't vote for yourself,
3. You have to MAKE the icon, not find
4. Stick to the theme!
5. The icons must be 100x100
You'll have 3 days to post your icon, then I'll make a pick to decide the winner!
1st place-3 props
2nd Place-2 props
3rd place-1 prop
Have Fun!
:) ♥
Round 1- Caroline with Matt:[Winner-lilyZ]
Round 2- Caroline in season 1 Pilot:[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 3- Caroline and Katherine:[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 4- Caroline In Miss Mystic Falls:[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 5- Vampire Caroline:[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 6- Caroline in 'Masquerade':[Winner: Darya96]
Round 7- Caroline and Tyler:[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 8- Caroline in 'Founders Day': [Winner: lilyZ]
Round 9- Candice Accola:[Winner: KatherinePierce]
Round 10- Caroline and Elena:[Winner: DelenaLover]
Round 11- Caroline in 'The Sacrifice':[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 12- Caroline in 'Kill Or Be Killed':[Winner: modernfan]
Round 13- Caroline and Damon:[Winner: lilyZ]
Round 14- Caroline in 'Family Ties':[Winner: Klema]
Round 15- Caroline in 'Haunted':[Winner: MsJeremyGilbert]
Round 16- Your favourite Caroline icon:[Winner: IceWomanPro]
Round 17- Caroline in 'Bad Moon Rising':[Winner: Vampire_Orchid & XNaley_JamesX]
Round 18- Caroline and Stefan:[Winner: 123Naki456]
Round 19- Caroline in 'Friday Night Bites':[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 20- Caroline smiling:[Winner: willow96]
Round 21- Caroline in 'History Repeating':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 22- Caroline and Bonnie:[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 23- Caroline in 'The Descent':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 24- Caroline in 'Daddy Issues':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 25- Your favourite Candice icon:[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 26- Caroline in 'Rose':[Winner: MsJeremyGilbert]
Round 27- Caroline in 'Unpleasantville':[Winner: MsJeremyGilbert]
Round 28- Caroline in 'Isobel':[Winner: Klema]
Round 29- Caroline in 'Memory Lane':[Winner: Klema]
Round 30- Caroline in 'You're undead to me':[Winner: Klema]
Round 31- Caroline's best episode:[Winner: maryam1311 (Masquerade)]
Round 32- Caroline in 'The House Guest':[Winner: el0508]
Round 33- Caroline in 'A Few Good Men':[Winner: maryam1311]
Round 34- Candice as Caroline on set:[Winner: modernfan]
Round 35- Caroline in 'Katerina':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 36- Caroline, Bonnie and Elena:[Winner: modernfan]
Round 37- Caroline in 'Plan B':[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 38- Caroline in 'Brave New World':[Winner: Vampire_Orchid]
Round 39- Caroline in '162 Candles':[Winner: Juilet1234]
Round 40- Black and white Caroline icon:[Winner: Juilet1234]
Round 41- Caroline in 'The Last Dance':[Winner: modernfan]
Round 42- Caroline upset:[Winner: spikeluva]
Round 43- Caroline in 'Night Of The Comet':[Winner: katherine1731]
Round 44- Caroline with...(Your Choice):[Winner: Juilet1234 - (Tyler)]
Round 45- Caroline in 'As I Lay Dying':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 46- Caroline in 'By The Light Of The Moon':[Winner: shannon9396]
Round 47- Random Caroline icon:[Winner: YyzV]
Round 48- Caroline in 'Know Thy Enemy':[Winner: Vampire_Orchid]
Round 49- Caroline in Fancy dress/ Costume:[Winner: omfg]
Round 50- Caroline with straight hair:[Winner: katherine1731]
Round 51- Caroline in 'The Sun Also Rises':[Winner: katherine1731]
Round 52- Caroline and Liz:[Winner: Joy3570]
Round 53- Caroline in 'Crying Wolf':[Winner: Joy3570]
Round 54- Your favourite Caroline scene:[Winner: el0508]
Round 55- Caroline OR Candice:[Winner: modernfan - Candice]
Round 56- Your favourite Caroline friendship:[Winner: charmed_phoebe]
Round 57- Caroline in 'The Birthday':[Winner: el0508]
Round 58- Caroline icon with text:[Winner: charmed_phoebe]
Round 59- Caroline in 'The Last Day':[Winner: charmed_phoebe]
Round 60- Caroline in 'The Turning Point':[Winner: modernfan]
Round 61- Caroline drinking:[Winner: Joy3570]
Round 62- A given picture [1]:[Winner: katherine1731]
Round 63- Caroline in 'Disturbing Behavior':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 64- Your favourite Caroline kiss:[Winner: Joy3570]
Round 65- A given picture [2]:[Winner: ania2612]
Round 66- Caroline in 'The Reckoning':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 67- Cute Caroline:[Winner: CylerJJ]
Round 68- Caroline in 'Ghost World':[Winner: Joy3570]
Round 69- Eyes [Icon focusing on Caroline's eyes]:[Winner: el0508]
Round 70- Caroline at School:[Winner: charmed_phoebe]
Round 71- Caroline in Season 3:[Winner: mariatsaltaki7]
Round 72- Caroline in the Salvatore Boarding House:[Winner: katherine1731]
Round 73- Caroline Hug:[Winner: EllieLupin91]
Round 74- Caroline in 'Our Town':[Winner: i_heart_tvd]
Round 75- Caroline looking down:[Winner: xsophiefx]
Round 76- Caroline cheerleading:[Winner: el0508]
Round 77- Negative Space:[Winner: EllieLupin91]
Round 78- Caroline in 'Dangerous Liaisons':[Winner: ania2612]
Round 79- A given picture [3]:[Winner: ania2612]
Round 80- Caroline with an Original:[Winner: modernfan]
Round 81- Promotional photo:[Winner: KarinaCullen]
Round 82- Caroline in 'All My Children':[Winner: Desara]
Round 83- Hair:[Winner: ania2612]
Round 84- Caroline wearing your favourite colour:[Winner: OTHjovana - Blue]
Round 85- 1x22 or 2x22:[Winner: modernfan]
Round 86- Close crop:[Winner: En-]
Round 87- Fighting:[Winner: el0508]
Round 88- Jewellery:[Winner: En-]
Round 89- Caroline in 'Bringing Out the Dead':[Winner: En-]
Round 90- Caroline at the Lockwood mansion:[Winner: el0508]
Round 91- Full body:[Winner: OTHjovana]
Round 92- Large text:[Winner: OTHjovana]
Round 93- Outside:[Winner: Any_SJ & KarinaCullen]
Round 94- Caroline in 'The Murder of One':[Winner: modernfan]
Round 95- Yellow:[Winner: MusicOfTheNigt]
Round 96- Back:[Winner: Any_SJ]
Round 97- A given picture [4]:[Winner: EllieLupin91]
Round 98- Caroline in 'The Departed':[Winner: OTHjovana]
Round 99- In a group:[Winner: modernfan]
Round 100- Celebrating 100 rounds icon:[Winner: OTHjovana]
last edited on Jun 30, 2012 at 02:15PM
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text:
We demonstrate the fabrication of high-quality LPFGs in simplified hollow-core photonic crystal fibers, composed of a hollow hexagonal core and six crown-like air holes, using CO2-laser-irradiation method. Theoretical and experimental investigations indicate that the LPFGs are originated from the strong mode-coupling between the LP01 and LP11 core modes. And a dominant physical mechanism for the mode-coupling is experimentally confirmed to be the periodic microbends rather than the deformations of the cross-section or other common factors. In addition, the LPFGs are highly sensitive to strain and nearly insensitive to temperature, and are promising candidates for gas sensors and nonlinear optical devices.
©2011 Optical Society of AmericaFull Article | PDF Article
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text:
Finally decided to start painting one of the Forge World turreted Vanquishers that I got last year. Using this one as a testbed for some new techniques and thus a whole new sequence of steps in painting my armor.
The steps I go through will be
-Base color
-Decals & Scripting
-Pick out details
-Clear coat
-Powder pigments
The steps that are added with this tank are the color modulation, filter, washes, and streaking. The modulation was made possible by my new Badger Anthem aribrush which I mentioned in my last post. The latter are all made possible my AK Interactive's weathering line which I found at a local hobby store, Section 8 Hobbies. They are all spirit based and thus allow plenty of time for clean up and add the ability to apply and then dilute and streak with the solvent while on the model. I got this hull painted and stripped it as best I could, but it's still come out kinda rough with a few details with too much old paint. The washes have allowed me to bring the lines out much better than if I had not started doing all this extra work.
As of right now I am on the streaking grime step, which is completed on the turret and the hull I will get to tomorrow. Really glad I found these products, they really make the vehicles come out so much better with just a bit more effort than I already put into it. Another new technique I used was doing the chipping with a sponge. Overall, I think that technique worked out great on my Dust walker, but not as well on this. I think it's better suited to light colored armor. For future IG tanks I will use it, but as a secondary effect to my brushed on chips and scratches.
Of course, it's not complete without an addition from the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer.
I think my next project is going to be the repainting of my Baneblade, Zeal. I was really happy when I first painted it, but as I have progressed so far it's time for an update. Expect a finished summary of this tank this week.


text:
Technical Product Manager
Technical Product Manager
WW is looking for candidates to help change people's lives. We are a global wellness technology company inspiring millions of people to adopt healthy habits for real life. We do this through engaging digital experiences, face-to-face workshops and sustainable programs that encourage people to move more, shift their mindset and eat healthier while enjoying the foods they love. By drawing on over five decades of experience and expertise in behavioral science, we build communities in order to deliver wellness for all.
To learn more about WW and jobs with a purpose, visit ww.com.
General Summary:
The Technical Product Manager for Omnichannel Commerce will be responsible for rolling out our Commerce platform across all channels of business including online, retail, B2B and more. You will work closely with internal stakeholders to identify and document the user stories, use cases and system integrations to ensure that technical delivery is closely aligned to business needs while identifying new opportunities to improve efficiency and ensuring alignment with the WW key performance metrics.
Key Responsibilities:
- Working with a very talented group of engineers and representing the voice of the business taking their needs and defining the services to meet their needs
- Working with internal stakeholders (Business, Product, Architects) to develop technical user stories that define internal and external facing services
- Working with engineers in an agile environment to plan sprints and deliver functioning code to production on a continuous basis
- Prioritizing and managing the technical product backlog
- Developing a roadmap to enable stronger planning and help manage dependencies between different teams
Experience Required:
- 4+ years of relevant work experience
- Understanding of service-oriented concepts such as Micro Services, RESTful APIs, databases, etc.
- Comfortable navigating front-end experiences (web, native mobile) as well as back-end stacks
- Experience writing user stories that define enterprise-level systems
- Ability to work closely with technical and non-technical partners to derive the features that are necessary to be built
- Ability to dig into the data yourself (SQL mostly)
- Experience grooming and prioritizing a product backlog
- Ability to understand and manage dependencies between teams
- Experience working in an agile environment
- Previous experience as an Engineer will be advantageous
- Strong communication skills
Location: NYC
As a company, our purpose is to inspire healthy habits for real life. And as an employer, we inspire the greatest people to do their best work. We provide benefits for real life to help protect your health, finances and overall well being, including:
- Competitive compensation and profit sharing plan
- A 401K plan to help you plan for your future, plus company match
- Health care coverage starting on your first day
- Tuition reimbursement and online courses to help you reach your career aspirations
- Commuter benefits
- Yearly well-being allowance for your physical, financial, social and emotional well-being
- Free WW membership for you plus 3 free WW memberships for your friends and 3 for your family
- Free fruit, snacks and coffee to get you through your day
- Summer Fridays, happy hours, and company outings
- Robust employee referral bonuses
- Developmental opportunities and assignments to grow your career
WW is an equal opportunity employer. WW does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, creed, national origin, marital status, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, or disability.
Any offer of employment is contingent upon the satisfactory results of reference and background checks.


text:
Former WWE CEO and current Administrator of the US Small Business Administration Linda McMahon was featured today in a White House Cabinet spotlight.
You can check out some highlights below:
Administrator McMahon Launches Two-Year SBA Ignite Tour Across the Nation
The SBA Ignite Tour is a listening tour where Administrator McMahon will travel to the 68 SBA district offices and meet with local small business owners to hear their experiences and concerns. This provides an opportunity to not only spread the word about SBA, but provides the Administrator with real issues that she can bring back to Washington as she continues her main role as America's small business advocate.
Read more
SBA Re-Imagined
Administrator McMahon has been finding that the general public tends to think of SBA as primarily loan-driven, rather than understanding the full breadth and scope of its full business assistance programs. The Administrator is planning to increase public awareness of the agency and its offerings with an updated brand and marketing plan to better reflect today's entrepreneurs, due to be introduced by Small Business Week in April 2018.
Improved online resources for small business owners
Administrator McMahon is focused on creating an efficient and effective SBA that is responsive to the needs of today's busy entrepreneurs. Two good examples of improved services are the expanded online HUBZone map and Lender Match. The new online HUBZone map helps small businesses in urban and rural communities determine if they are eligible for participation in HUBZone's program. Lender Match is an online referral tool to connect small businesses in need of small business funding with participating SBA lenders. It was recently updated to create a more user-friendly experience.
Read more


text:
How To Do Now
by Alan W. Moore
"A permanent IV drip of absolutely pure bullshit is progressively suppressing the immune system of the American state."
– William Gibson (@GreatDismal, May 11, 2017)
In the face of government rot and citizen despair, we're talking city-building. . . in the sense of building organizational possibility, sites of assembling and production of political imagination. This has been done, time and again, and today it exists already, albeit fragmented and in-cognizant of its fellows. This is the kind of world Chris Carlsson described as coming into being in his 2008 book, Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future Today.
"What is to be done?"—the classic question of revolutionary politics, of oppressed majorities everywhere when faced with the machinery of power. We don't have to build the revolutionary party with a steely cold-blooded vanguard as Lenin commanded. Artists are great do-ers. We need to make the little molehills, the tiny initiatives that can grow together as they are to make the new society. We need to network them so that they reinforce each other. And we need to put them at the disposal of political movements to sustain, grow, and inspire them.
A key political question for cities in the USA is how to synergize the forces for change. African-Americans who require racial justice confront not only systemic police violence and incarceration but also historic exclusion from housing, which is ramping up again with the new cycles of gentrification. Young people of all colors face precarious employment, massive loads of debt from education which should have been free, new debt from health care costs, and similar exclusion from affordable housing. All of us are looking at a reversal of the already-minimal efforts to preserve the habitable natural environment. A black-green-red political alliance could rule our cities for the century to come. The question for us all is how to forge it.
The question of taking power, of organizing resistance, and making changes happen is always a conversation. How do we do it? What should we do? "A politics that works begins by listening / A politics that works never stops listening," says Marc Allen Herbst.
While it is as yet an emerging movement, municipalist ideology has many strains. The deepest is a belief in the efficacy and power of citizens' assembly. That is at the heart of Murray Bookchin's conception of libertarian municipalism. It is behind the remarkable electoral success of the Spanish municipalist platforms which came out of the 15M movement. General assembly became the guiding form of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Zapatistas rely on it in Chiapas. This is a politics based on listening and discussion that can cut across political party lines.
More than an ideology, the citizens' assembly is a practice. This isn't some bogus-assed town meeting shit where you see people on stage. Fred Dewey, an artist who worked on neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, holds that assemblies should be preeminent in all governance. He traces this philosophical political tenet in US history—our real exceptionalism—inflected by the thought of Hannah Arendt. His is a strong voice for face-to-face governance and constructing the "space of appearance."
I talked with Fred Dewey in Berlin in June. Fred is an absolutist of popular assemblies, as he explains in The School of Public Life. That is, he believes in the right not only to meet, but to govern: direct face-to-face democracy. Citizens' assemblies are the spine of municipalism as Bookchin conceived it. Pull them out and you have invertebrate politics. Yet this is something municipalists who adapt their program to the electoral systems of western democracies simply will not insist upon. But we citizens can. It's something that really scares power.
Municipalist platforms are also deeply informed by ecology, made urgent by the global climate crisis. Feminism, expressed through an overall governing ethic of care and stewardship for all. Open borders, "no one is illegal," protection of refugees. Care for the socially excluded and marginalized people. "Historic memory"—redress of old and continuing wrongs inflicted on parts of society.
This ideological mix varies from time to time and place to place. The injustices of historic and present-day white supremacist policing and discrimination in jobs and housing are urgent concerns for African Americans in the USA. Protection of migrants and refugees looms large in Germany and Greece, where the neo-fascists use prejudice to build their movements. Similarly, aggressive deportations of Americans from the USA is a burning issue for Latino/a people there.
Chaia Heller on Libertarian Municipalism, excerpted directly from a transcription of a video by Oliver Ressler, recorded in Leverett, Massachusetts (2005) ( Watch Libertarian Municipalism from Oliver Ressler on Vimeo.)
…There is a tremendous concern among leftists about what is democracy, what ought it to look like, and what ought it to become. As a social ecologist for me there is the sense that we have the potential to have a direct democracy, which means, that people in cities, towns and villages would gather as citizens in a local town meeting, which you could call a general assembly, or public assembly, or citizens assembly, and it is that body that would be the driving force for policy making in society in general.
The idea is that the rule would be by the general populace, on behalf of the general populace, and they would be making policy for the general populace. Libertarian Municipalism is an attempt to formalize that vision of a directly democratic society without turning it into a recipe or blueprint or how do manual, which is I think a very dangerous thing and would drain all the poetry from the vision.
The vision of Libertarian Municipalism is intentionally vague in general, because it believes that people themselves in movements have to struggle how to particularize their general principles of non-hierarchy, cooperation, direct democracy, social justice, and ecology. Those are some general principles, and I could add more, or I could take some away.
The question is: how do you create a politics, how do you draw out a politics from these general principles? The idea of Libertarian Municipalism is that through the principle of direct participation or the principle of self-determination, we have this notion of people govern themselves, direct democracy, and how this is different than a representative democracy that you find in a republican democracy that dominates much of the modern world. There you have the idea that the masses are really not capable of managing themselves. What they do is they try to get together and figure out the best person to represent and articulate their hopes and dreams in a way that will come closer to the way in which they like that to happen. We do this through elections that can be at a municipal level or on the state level, and people elect officials who have policy-making power.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance that in a representative democracy the representative, who is supposedly acting on behalf of a disempowered constituency, has policy-making power. In a libertarian municipalist vision there would be no representatives. There would be citizens who gather together in the popular assemblies, who speak directly on behalf of themselves. And it is this citizen's assembly that has policy-making power.
For administrative purposes, for particular local municipalities to coordinate with other municipalities or part of the confederation, the various groups would empower a delegate, which is very different than a representative. A delegate is very similar to a messenger, the delegate is basically giving the will of the group, the mandate of a group and goes to the confederate council and delivers that mandate. The delegate is always recallable, the delegate has always a limited term or limited engagement, and that role of a delegate is never professionalized. Within a direct democracy of Libertarian Municipalism you would never have professional politicians. You would have again an active general citizenry. This would have revolutionary implications for the way democracy would work. There would not be lobbying to politicians and representatives to present us more accurately. We as citizens would be speaking on behalf of ourselves and would bring our own hopes and dreams and our own understandings of the way things ought to be to the popular assemblies directly ourselves….
From care, from life – Toward a feminized politics
One of the most prominent ideological strains in municipalism in Spain now is feminist. Both mayors of Barcelona and Madrid are women, as are many if not most of their teams. How the feminist line—the "feminization of politics"—plays out in practice is perhaps not so well understood.
The feminization of politics is not, as many (male) US pundits see it, a matter of personal style (the slogan "the personal is political" being here misapplied), nor a new set of virtues to stand in for the decrepit "republican virtues" derived from pre-Caesarian Rome. Rather, the feminization of politics means gender equality in representation and participation, challenging gender roles that structure patriarchy, and finally, a different way of doing politics which centers care and community. As we heard at the "Fearless Cities" conference in Barcelona in May 2017, the Women's March is a movement.
Feminists have long pointed out that the massive amount of labor that sustains human life is unpaid and hidden from the view of economic analysis, just as the common resources extracted from the earth are unreimbursed by corporate capitalism. A key theorist here is Silvia Federici of Wages for Housework and the Zero Work group.
A report from a years-long project called "The Grand Domestic Revolution" (GDR) clearly lays out the program of valorizing the labors of care, maintenance of community, and upholding of the Ur-democratic principles of the commons, which lie behind a total re-imagining of political life. As a reviewer notes, this is a data-rich, theoretically informed and practically grounded reference book that is encyclopaedic in its approach to its subject.
The GDR was a commission for a biennial of social design undertaken by an art institution. It was a sequential combination of investigative techniques interrogating conditions of daily life, domestic labor, and the economy of reproduction (aka living). The team posited the politicization of everyday life against the post-war capitalist project of commoditizing daily life. The GDR included long-term living in an apartment, action research, reading groups, discussion, and policy groups. And of course they undertook video and photographic projects linking artists and domestic workers, squatters and organizers. Through their work on the "domestic apparatus," and a "revolutionary home," the GDR constructed micro-societies for creative research.
The GDR derives from a 100-year-old practice of "material feminism" committed to the quotidien conditions of women, seeking to communalize their daily domestic labor. They critique the "individualized and commodified home" as a new site of extraction for capitalism. Guiding ideas were drawn variously, especially from Bachelard, de Certeau, Lefebvre, Russian Constructivist domestic design, and feminist economics. After a year of work, activity was returned to the gallery with a series of installations and meetings, including a town assembly. Next phases of the project investigated cottage industry, co-housing and communes, personal dynamics of squatted houses, gardens, and plants, again punctuated by town meetings. Also on the menu: feminist political economy, gentrification, radio and public speaking, daycare, bicycling, history of activism for the homeless, housing on the commons (shantytowns), philosophy, and legality of the commons. Thereafter the GDR travelled, performing variously in London and Amsterdam. The book ends in 2014. Is it over?
Resource: roarmag.org
Stepping up
Building an effective political platform based on local self-government is a long and complex project. Nothing can beat the effectiveness, the deep political and educational affect of face-to-face assembly. How that can happen in cities around the USA is a burning open tire-fire of a question. Fortunately this generation has social media. The existing forms have been used effectively by political movements around the world and are the subject of intensive research and development. Face-to-face assemblies are considered basic necessities in the development of municipal movements. In Spain they were accomplished through the nationwide 15M movement of encampments. (Occupy Wall Street did not succeed to generate concrete political results from its equally extensive encampments.) The assembly, post-Facetime and in between, has become easier to continue, to permanentize outside of meat time, with the many new digital platforms for organizing which citizen hacklabs have been building.
There are many lessons to learn from movements in other lands, in other political cultures. And lessons to be remembered from our own country, examples which have been willfully forgotten, erased from official US (school-taught) histories, and the daily public news stream: the "first draft of history".
Municipalism is dangerous to the powers-that-be
Expect resistance
The pigs have their snouts in the public trough so deep they will be very hard to dislodge. Ever fight a pig for its dinner? Their first thought is how they can add you to the menu. . . The US political structure is designed to undermine, negate, and finally destroy the kinds of popular power municipalist politics depend upon. Their main tool is preemption. "A local council or municipal government gets its power to pass laws through a law of the national or regional government which specifies what things the town or city may regulate through bylaws. It is therefore a form of delegated legislation" (Wikipedia). Republican-controlled state and federal legislatures are pulling out all the stops to keep cities from governing themselves. The legal and legislative struggles over the sanctuary cities movement are a case in point. That means citizens have to resist. The law will be used against them by a corrupted political regime—as the quote ascribed to many an autocrat has it, "for my friends everything, for my enemies the law."
This is the challenge that has led many past left movements in Europe to understand themselves as "extra-parliamentary oppositions," opposed to the grand coalitions that sustain a planet-depleting oppressive system. These are the politics – anarchist and autonomous communist – which support the movement of occupied social centers.
The recent assembly-based US Occupy movement, meeting and camping in common public space, was shut down across the country by coordinated federal action in 2012. This new political phenomenon—in essence an ad hoc extra-parliamentary opposition—was deemed too dangerous to continue. To date, they have not re-Occupyed.
Artists have a particular edge in conceiving provocative symbolic defiances of law. Russians are especially adept—from nailing their scrotums to Red Square and sewing shut their lips, to the Voina group nailing shut bureaucratic offices, holding orgies in museums, and publically hanging excluded persons in shopping centers.
American artists have been somewhat more practical. In New York, Not An Alternative built tools for the Occupy movement, and Rueben Kincaid did the same for squatters in Chicago. They have also been effectively symbolic, as in 2005 with Allison Smith's "The Muster." (This event also served the sure function of all assemblies and campings – networking artists and civic activists.)
Collectively artists can certainly demand more of the cultural institutions they support with their work and patronage. They can demand that they serve democratic functions. This is no radical point of view. As a voice of bureaucratic Europe wrote wheezily: "The artistic community must foster endeavors that contribute to restoring the standing of the public sphere."
Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.
NOTES: I have not found many handbooks on doing assemblies. There is "The People's Assembly Toolkit" published by altotrump.com, an immigrant rights group, just after the election. Outside the intro sheet, the guts of it is in Spanish. There is one on occupation, which the student assembly of Zagreb dared to make in 2011 ("The Occupation Cookbook, or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb" (PDF online)), in consultation with Russian and Austrian comrades. Which is a great start on making a site for parochial assemblies. But for the neighborhood assembly – "People's Assembly" on wiki.p2pfoundation.net starts from OWS; and on Wikipedia there is "Popular assembly," "Not to be confused with citizens' assembly" — well, good luck on disambiguating that! A U.S. handbook would be golden.
Tapas de "Municipalismo"—Some Direct Democracy-flavored Ideas
These are some examples of the kinds of things that build popular movements: ways to go, things you can do.
Get a place to meet. . . regularly. Be welcoming and polite, and keep it clean. This is really important. The self-organized occupied social centers of Europe (CSOAs) have been key to the growth and sustainability of local popular movements. Wherever it is—squatted abandoned public building, public library, bookstore, ratty-assed senior center, or grassy knoll—it's crucial to have a place where people can go to overcome social isolation, conceive and do projects, talk, listen, and make politics. (Most bars are poor places for this. You can't hear with the music. However, they may be good places to organize a riot.)
Work on…
An Anti-university / Un Ateneo Libertario
Teachers and professors in state- and private schools can mostly only teach what they are allowed to. "The government does not owe the people education for the simple reason that one does not owe the people what it can take for itself. And education is like liberty: it is not given, it is taken." – Jacques Ranciere quoted at: freeuniversityoflondon.wordpress.com
There's one of these initiatives met in London this summer – http://www.antiuniversity.org/
They've all got a long (anti) history, as related by artist Jakob Jakobsen at http://antihistory.org/
From the days when the Catholic Church controlled education, Spanish unions established workers' education centers, called ateneos libertarios. There's dozens in Spain today, listed at:
Emma Goldman set up one in New York in 1911 called the Ferrer Center, or Modern School, named for a Spanish anarchist educator executed by the government. Start one today in your local bookstore or coffee shop. Rope in your local eggheads. Talking, reading, talking, deciding. Who knows what comes next?
A fair of the solidarity economy / La Feria de la economía solidaria
(see laferiamadrid.mercadosocial.net)
Freegan? Barter? Local currency? Labor credits? Sustainable power vendors? Whatever you have so far, so big or so small, show it and build it. In Madrid, they have their own in-fair money, called boniatos. Build socialism like they build capitalism—quarter by quarter, annum por annum.
Workers' Co-ops
There's a new way of doing them—as online platforms, or what Trebor Scholz calls "platform cooperativism." And lots of places help out with setting them up. You can also start with an existing private business and convert it.
A key plank of the Jackson Rising People's Platform to build economic equality in Mississippi holds that city governments should support worker-run co-ops. Read a German foundation's report on Jackson at: http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/kaliakuno_jackson_web.pdf
Social Games
Have a soli-party (solidarity fundraiser for a cause, for prisoners). A Trump Roast. Fiestas and popular celebrations have long been ways of expressing and organizing politically. Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of "popular laughter" and the "carnivalesque" is based on these festive operations since medieval times, and activists have been using this method for a long time. Culture—it's not just for money anymore. Many games, like Paul Ryan's "triolectics," the "yoga of collaboration," teach collaboration and social solidarity. JoAAP co-founder Robby Herbst is working on this in California—see newnewgames.org.
Direct Political Work – Citizens' Assemblies
"I said it once before but it bears repeating"—face to face, NOT on Facebook! Sounds better than griping and fuming, pissing and moaning, and sitting still to be "farmed" by corporations and political psy-ops? Use online tools to build your local neighborhood assembly after the meetings and BBQs are over. This, as any municipalist or Bookchinite will tell you, is the first indispensable step to serious political power on the municipal level. (Also makes big trouble for state and federal as well.) Once you've got folks on the line face-to-face and door-to-door, try out this e-stuff, designed where they care more about voter cultivation than suppression.
"Technologies for 21st Century democracy: A Europe-wide project developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment."
D-CENT – Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies
Finally, everything that works is going to be very local.
We've already done it. We just forgot about it. To start, you don't need to innovate. Just replicate, replicate, replicate. Nothing new is really new; it's just re-tooled so it can cut again. Chicago is especially rich: Dil Pickle Club, Experimental Station, Mess Hall, and so much more. Fight amnesia. . . learn about your own pasts. Remember what worked before. It can work again. It's not imitation, it's emulation.
As, for example – "Organize Your Own"
A substantial resource for artists' organizing comes from the recent show in Philadelphia, "Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements" organized by Daniel Tucker, formerly of AREA: Chicago, and Rebecca Zorach. (That publication, both online and in print, is in itself a goldmine of ideas and histories.) New work by contemporary artists and poets responded to archival materials related to the history of white people organizing their own working-class white neighborhoods in Philadelphia (the October 4th Organization) and Chicago (the Young Patriots Organization), in keeping with the mandate from the Black Power movement to "organize your own" community against racism.
Fifty years ago, the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) made a historic call. Stoakley Carmichael wrote that "one of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities—which is where the racism exists—and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. . . Let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites."
Raciones—Bigger Plates to Share for the Municipalist Table
I recently wrote to Noah Fischer, the NYC Occupy Museums activist. He was in Venice for "Dark Matter Games," a sidebar event to the Venice Biennale, held at the S.a.L.E. Docks, an art space coming out of a wave of 2012 occupations in Italy. I asked Noah what political role he thought was 1) realistic and 2) idealistic/rhetorical/platformistic to demand of US cultural institutions? I asked because in Spain, cultural institutions have played significant roles in support of social movements—opening to them at key moments, enlarging and enlightening them continually.
Cultural institutions in the US are largely private—or at best, "public-private partnerships." The political interests of the governing class, as embodied in their boards of directors, do not allow their curatorial staffs to support and augment popular movements. This is in fact quite normal for European cultural institutions, most of which are state-supported.
Noah wrote: "Museums—at least the big NYC ones—seem to be schizo these days – the Trumpian days of inequity on steroids—the pure bullshit IV—with one part of the museum representing the 1% and its interests (exclusivity, property, privatization) and other part(s) trying in small ways to ally themselves with social justice movements. I saw this at the Whitney, where it was clear there was some kind of internal war within the institution. Certainly there are people in major institutions who see the need to build democratic culture/space, but I guess that museums in the US, with their interest in criticality but reliance on oligarchy, are sort of set up to permanently house this kind of stalemate. I think it's important to understand these dynamics before asking things of institutions as if they are unified platforms. Part of the dynamic is that museums play good cop/bad cop with progressive politics—inviting it in, but then denying it and its horizon from the top—we saw that with the Gulf Labor campaign. So maybe the tactical question is: how does one go about asking things from institutions that have multiple intentions?
"Museums are definitely unique as contemporary public institution. Even if they cost twenty-five to get in and are privately funded, they still have that mission of public enrichment—sometimes they still are a little bit out of the pure consumption vortex, which is why I've done six years of work to try to light up that spark in them. At the same time, I am not totally sold on a horizon where museums are simply public forums of some kind. Read about the new "Shed" art institution opening with the Hudson Yards in New York – in some ways a flexible public space is the ultimate late capitalist bare art world museum type. Many existing museums have that library-like mission to catalog and preserve their collection, even though that is where they turn conservative and freak out about actions in spaces where multi-million dollar works are hung, I've found that most political leverage for activists comes from the fact that museums must honor the logic of ideas inside of art – often radical ideas – to an extent."
By "enlightening" I mean supporting through their exhibitions and ancillary events that bear directly on themes political, eg the "Perder la forma" exhibition at MACBA at MNCARS, curations by What How & For Whom; "Playground," also at the two M's in Spain, and the "Rapto de Europa" conference produced with a political institution, Fundación de los Comunes. All of this generates thought and discussion, and shows wide varieties of tactics useful for movements. Victoria & Albert in London did "Disobedient Objects," although maybe an exception. In the early '00s, "The Potosi Principle," or "Principio Potosi," which started in Germany, was pedagogical in seven-league boots. This is just a scattershot sample.
The Ribs of Municipalism—City Cultural Agencies
In Madrid, two institutions I know have been especially active in this regard. They are models for the kind of institutions we need all over the States.
The phrase "hacking the city" appeared some years ago. Activists used it to describe urban actions that moved along with and against the codes that guide capitalist urban development. Perhaps this was a response to the "smart city" discourse among urban planners and architects around the turn of the century, predicting total digital control in the city of the future. In any case, Medialab Prado in Madrid is indeed hacking the city. In a curious evolution of a '70s era media center, this place is now a center of digital culture turned to the ends of participatory governance—the ideal being a transparent direct democracy based in an ideology of the commons.
Medialab does things in their handsome renovated building which other makerspaces and hacklabs do, but the agency also functions as the hub for a varied series of collaborative projects called "labs" and "mesas" that develop ideas, proposals, and plans for projects in the city with citizens themselves.
Funded by the city government, Medialab has been doing this kind of work for many years. With the election of the Ahora Madrid municipalist government they have greatly expanded their labs based in participation. Funded by the new city agency for participation, open government, and transparency, the array of new labs (some old) is dizzying—AvLab, CiCiLab, ParticipaLab, PrototipaLab, DataLab, InCiLab, Lab Lab—with little colored booklets describing each one.
In the new ParticipaLab citizens are invited in to work with technical experts to make collaborative prototypes of citizen institutions. This process "gives autonomy to the people to make their own process. We give the resources to build what they are really going to use for their purposes." These new projects work on a local level, in the neighborhoods, such as Experimenta Distrito, that works "territorialize Medialab." The center's community, however, is global. "The neighborhood is not our audience. It's difficult to make an activity for the diversity of the neighborhood to come." So it's best to let the neighbors, the citizens themselves, do it.
All this line of work has a lineage in a rather informal project of 2013-14 called Mesa de Ciudadanes—the table of citizens—convened at the Matadero cultural center. A shifting group of people, including activists and architectural collectives, met to discuss new initiatives and several ended up working with Intermediae on neighborhood development projects. Today, Medialab even has a lab around political participation and engagement tailored for kids called "Si te sientes gato" ("if you feel like a cat" – a gato is a third generation Madrileñx). It is part of Decide.Madrid, the city's online direct democracy initiative.
Medialab is a complex and dynamic institution. It may be best to think of it as a think tank for progressive municipalism, bubbling with ideas and teeming with genially subversive thinkers. It is the institution in Madrid that has perhaps the closest imbrication with the extra-legal social center movement. It has hosted some of the leading personalities from the long history of Madrid occupations. In this it resembles similar agencies in Amsterdam, like the Urban Resort consultancy. But that is another story. What Medialab is all about is ideas.
People working at Medialab now look to Naples, now under a new municipalist government that has been, as the Peer to Peer (P2P) Foundation blog has it, "the first Italian city to establish a 'Department of the Commons' and the first to change the municipal statute by inserting the 'commons' as one of the interests to be protected and recognised as the functional exercise of fundamental rights of the person." American readers may be familiar with Peter Linebaugh's rousing historical excurses on the history of the commons, starting from Magna Carta. Less known is the broadening strain of legal philosophy and activism around the concept. In an American variant, this might include recent victories by Native American water protectors, and the recent acceptance of a nature-as-self-defense plea by environmental activists charged with obstruction.
alberto-corsin-jimenez.org and prototyping.es
Intermediae began as a city-funded public art commissioning agency, but of a special kind, more open: "a space for the production of artistic projects based on shared experimentation and learning." Rather than working on a back-office proposal-or-nomination-only basis like most of their kin, Intermediae was already open to professionals. They also opened their doors to the Legazpi community around the then still-building Matadero cultural complex in 2007, working projects with their neighbors (like a movie-making factory called Cine Sin Autores, and literary-minded walks: Insurgencias Poeticas).
The program has fluidly adapted to the job of producing spaces of citizen activation throughout Madrid. In 2013 the agency glommed culture money for areas outside the center, and began work on projects of "expanded culture." They concentrated on barrios in Madrid Sur, Tetuan, and Vallekas, producing civic activation projects with architects' collectives.
The barrios outside the touristic city center have been historically neglected. They are called the peripheries, and they are "full of voids, and stigmatized places." In poor neighborhoods it is common that people say "nobody takes care of this." Working with groups of architects, Intermediae underwrites projects on these disused or neglected pieces of land, like hand-built assembly architecure, popular festivals, skate parks, and community gardens. The projects are organized together with community organizations afterwards take over maintaining the sites afterwards. The intention is for the people to discover that they are the owners of their own public space. They have the right to the city, and to decide how they want to work and live in their surroundings, and to be proud of them. The idea is to "build up the DNA of the civil society."
Two years ago Intermediae prepared a map—"Los Madriles," an atlas of neighborhood initiatives. It includes over 100 autonomous projects throughout the city (online at losmadriles.org). They worked with the group Paisaje Transversal, preparing the map through extensive consultations, and open meetings on active citizenship. They understood the cartographic process as an "open conversation," and the map as "the excuse and work tool to invite participation."
The name Intermediae evokes Fluxus artist Dick Higgins' concept of intermedia. And the agency does have a root concern with a continuous mixture of all kinds of art work and cultural enterprise. But they are also 'intermediate' in the sense that they continually act between their activist and artist clients and a wide range of government agencies which control cultural activity in the city—state, federal, and city—and the civil servants policing urban space to try to make projects happen, and achieve results which are not in the traditional playbook of a nice concert on a weekend evening.
Like Medialab, Intermediae's portfolio has expanded considerably since the election of Ahora Madrid. (Under the last right-wing mayoralty, they, like Medialab, were threatened with closure.) They have launched the initiatives Imagina Madrid, Miradores, and Ciudad Distrito. "They are not projects, but programs. We have grown like a monster."
Thanks to Alejandra Irene De Diego Baciero of Medialab, and Gloria G. Durán of Intermediae for last-minute interviews on the work of their agencies.
These Spanish firms are in themselves extraordinary, practitioners of "ephemeral architecture" around the world. They include Todo por la Praxis, Basurama, and the Spanish/German Zuloark. Many others like them are active internationally: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Forman, Torolab and Raumlabor come to mind. A Goethe Institut project called "We Traders" recently networked a number of these groups in Europe.
I am talking from Madrid. There are many more European initiatives and projects I have not touched upon—cultural agencies like Casco in Utrecht (referenced above), Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and many more. They don't just valorize high-priced art commodities, instead they continually generate ideas and experiment.
There are also effective baseline initiatives like the German Mietshäuser Syndikat network of mutual financial support for housing cooperative buildings, sustainable energy networks, the evolving long-established urban garden allotments, farm-to-city cooperative food networks, co-op ownership and regional associations, and much more. The key thing is to find out about these things, to implement them, and to demand that governments support them.
Non-Institutional Institutions in Spain
Both Intermediae and Medialab were preceded and paralleled by self-organized groups of motivated citizens, including many activists, artists, and intellectuals. Together with the extra-legal occupied social centers, which often provided place for their work, these groups were at one time called "monster institutions"—or, as their activities have become more normalized, citizen institutions.
The two institutions I described above were preceded by a number of "freelance" groupings, networks of activists, artists, and intellectuals coming from the Global Justice movement of the turn of the century. These include the Observatorio Metropolitano (metropolitan observatory), the Fundación de los Comunes (foundation for the commons), and La Universidad Nómada (the nomad university). Here are rough descriptions of their work, drawn from their websites:
Observatorio Metropolitano
Whoever lives in this city can experience a sensation almost universally shared by all his paisanos: Madrid changes too fast to get its pulse. To its traditional lack of memory (perhaps there are few cities less "traditional") has been joined a speed of change many judge excessive. A group of militants and investigators gathered around some questions difficult to answer: what kind of city do we inhabit? Why is it so difficult to understand? What policy is possible in a space that is so complex? In the absence of simple conclusions, it was decided to specify these questions in a research program. The Metropolitan Observatory brings together diverse multidisciplinary groups in a space of reflection on the phenomena of this transformation of Madrid, to elaborate militant investigations that provide the knowledge and the political tools to deal with these processes of change. Building a space for communication between militants, technicians, and stakeholders, and among small projects (or project embryos) of militant research that are already happening in the city and in social movements.
The Observatorio has published several books, most with the bookstore/publisher Traficantes de Sueños.
Fundación de los Comunes
This is a project of political/critical self-formation for those who want to collectively construct ways of thinking/acting aimed at transforming reality. We propose discourses and ways of doing capable of democratizing our societies.
It operates as a network with work teams in Madrid, Pamplona, Malaga, Zaragoza, Terrassa, and Barcelona. We are presently organizing courses—open spaces for generating knowledge and opportunities for debate that overflow the classic channels of university discussion, and that value subaltern knowledge. It is about generating proto-institutions, hybrids between university and non-university, which translate in theory the practices of resistance and popular creation.
The Fundación is closely identified with the Malaga social center Casa Invisible.
La Universidad Nómada
The Nomad University arises from the confluence of a series of enormously heterogeneous groups and people without too much passion for unifying. It was born with the idea of becoming a small political laboratory for the collective production of new theoretical paradigms.
Our work methodology involves the creation of forums, spaces, public, and open environments for study, research, discussion and proposal. [We enface] challenges and impasses of new movements, resistances, collective anti-capitalist subjectivities.
Today much less active, this grouping included many who were in institutional positions.
Useful Agencies for US Municipalists
The Democracy at Work Institute was created by the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) to ensure that worker cooperative development in economically and socially marginalized communities is adequately supported, effective, and strategically directed. It is the only national organization dedicated to building the field of worker cooperative development. Based in Oakland, California. (institute.coop)
Fellowship for Intentional Community
Our mission is to support and promote the development of intentional communities and the evolution of cooperative culture. Maintains online and printed guide, the Intentional Communities Directory. (ic.org)
Technologies for 21st Century democracy: a Europe-wide project developing the next generation of open source, distributed, and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment. American developers are also involved. (dcentproject.eu)
A nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation. That is a movement of movements emerging from the grassroots up to solve today's biggest challenges, which old, top-down institutions are failing to address. Behind these failing industrial-age institutions are outmoded beliefs about how the world works—that ordinary people can't govern themselves directly, that nonstop economic growth leads to widespread prosperity, and that more stuff leads to more happiness. (shareable.net)
Creative Time Reports
…strives to be a global leader in publishing the unflinching and provocative perspectives of artists on the most challenging issues of our times. (New content discontinued; site remains online.) (creativetimereports.org)
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is a Los Angeles-based artist collective whose magazine sits at the discursive juncture of fine art, media theory, and anti-authoritarian activism. Democracy is a good idea. (joaap.org)
Good Old Stuff Online:
Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008)
Creative Time produced this week-long exhibition and convergence center at the Park Avenue Armory in NYC. (Print materials only.) Ongoing: Since this event Creative Time produces a Summit meeting every year. All the brief presentations are archived online. The most recent was produced in Washington, D.C., just before the US election and entitled "Occupy the Future." Let's get on that. (http://creativetime.org/summit/)
Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics
Art Work is a newspaper made in 2009 that consists of writings and images from artists, activists, writers, critics, and others on the topic of working within depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property. (http://www.artandwork.us/)
Planet Drum Foundation (San Francisco)
A voice for bioregional sustainability, education and culture. Bioregionalism is a grassroots approach to ecology that emphasizes sustainability, community self-determination and regional self-reliance. A lifelong project of ex-Digger the late Peter Berg. Ecology with politics. (planetdrum.org)
The Wayback Machine
Group Material: Democracy (1988)
A four-month exhibition produced by the Group Material collective. (Print materials only.) (http://www.leftmatrix.com/democracygroupmaterial.html)
If You Lived Here (1989; 2010-12)
Martha Rosler's multi-part exhibition project at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, February 11, 1989–June 17, 1989. An influential type of artist-activist collaboration realized in installation form. There is a catalogue of sorts: If You Lived Here . . . The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism (1991). Rosler and e-flux continued with "If You Lived Here Still…," an archive project (2010-12), circulating the late 1980s materials in Europe. E-flux also published her series of essays on artist-led genrification: "Culture Class—Art, Creativity, Urbanism" gathered into the book Culture Class (e-flux & Sternberg Press, 2013). Parts of the original show were included in "Not Yet/Aun No" on workers' photograph at Reina Sofia museum. (Online the best is a picture search to gather the strands of writing on this project.)
Art Workers Coalition (1969-70)
Art Works Coalition (AWC) was an open coalition of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics, and museum staff formed in New York City during the Vietnam War to pressure museums for radical reforms.
+ Open Hearing: a collection of statements from the first public meeting of the Art Workers' Coalition in 1969
+ Documents 1: a collection of correspondence, press, and ephemera surrounding the foundation and rise of the Art Worker's Coalition. (http://www.primaryinformation.org/)
Activist art – making trouble
Beautiful Trouble is a book, web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective. (http://beautifultrouble.org/)
Center for Artistic Activism is a place to explore, analyze, and strengthen connections between social activism and artistic practice. Our goal is to make more creative activists and more effective artists. We aim to win. (artisticactivism.org)
The Yes Lab is devoted to helping progressive organizations and activists carry out media-getting creative actions around well-considered goals. (http://yeslab.org/)
Yates McKee's recent book, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso, 2016) traces the histories of post-Occupy projects in NYC. As with the AWC, 1969-70, this creative activism was by no means restricted to NYC, but reverberated throughout the country. (See also the ensuing discussion of McKee's book on e-flux conversations.)
Briefly to conclude. . . there is in Spain a developed ideology and intention, and a well-articulated implementation of ideas common to the left in Europe, which we in the USA are really lacking. We've been asleep for far too long, and only now are awakening to the danger. As the pillow is pressed firmly to our faces, we kick and scream and pitch fitfully about. Much as I wish them well, I do not see that the new generation of progressive political operatives can deliver much more than amelioration of rapidly escalating conditions of oppression. It is up to us as "citizen protagonists" to make the revolution.
Or, to back off the cant: A key question is what can be the active citizen's relation to the emerging political movements proliferating in all directions designed to reclaim more grassroots-based power in the Democratic party? These formations have definite ideas about how citizens can participate—donate money, knock on doors, etc.—which are not creative, and do not move outside the electoral system.
"Municipalism" for these operatives may be simply a box of strategies they will use in the ways they are accustomed to do. At the Barcelona Fearless Cities meeting, I didn't see interest among US attendees in citizens' assemblies, listening, "governing by obeying," or any of that.
A report on the People's Summit in Chicago in early June, same time as Barcelona, gave a good sense of what the electioneers are up to. But still, as reporter Ethan Young noted of the Chicago meet, "the mobilizing of the thousands of summiteers was based on connections made at the last summit, and from various social media lists of supporters. This really just scraped the surface of potential participants. Many, many more political and social movement projects have been sparked by the election than were represented at the summit. They each barely know the others exist." This is a good argument for peoples' assemblies, and "committees of correspondence"—if only to get acquainted with ourselves.
I'm revealing my anarchist bias here when I say that I think it's more effective to do something that engages your neighbors and fellow citizens directly—something that speaks to the condition of their lives and their pleasures, than it is to become a soldier for a political party in the system-as-it-is.
I don't want to pick a fight with hard-working under-funded political organizers who now are coming most effectively from communities of color, from the ranks of the most oppressed. I understand that they don't have time for artists' weird dreamy ideas. What this must be about is making sure that the new political movements leave generous space for "citizen protagonism," even if they cannot bring themselves to base their work in it. This conflict is already an issue in the municipalist governments in Spain. The relation between government and social movements becomes vexed as some of the most effective activists "disappear" inside the halls of power. A ground of understanding, and a (relatively) smooth interface between politicals and creatives is going to be one of the big challenges for us going forward.
Any and all constructions of popular power—assertions of a right to govern, as Fred would have it—acquire gravity and micro-power just by coming into being and continuing. They influence votes and consequently politicians and policy. If constructed outside of party politics, even more so. And in the course of doing this work, artists and activists must perforce be inventive, and not constrained to any pre-given political routine for its vaunted "effectiveness." They do politics from interest, from desire, and from curiosity—from the seat of the same passions that inform their art (or informe it). In this they enroll in the "school of public life," learning as much as they give. They increase their store of knowledge about how people think and feel and work together. I am arguing for artists and "cultural workers" to do politics directly—to take on political roles. Not in electoral campaigns so much (although I do not condemn it, I am realistic), but among themselves and their neighbors, along the lines of direct democracy.
Good night and good luck.
If you would like a copy of Lumpen Magazine #130, You can download a PDF copy here.


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NIKE Records Mgmt
Nike employees make email. A lot of email. So much email in fact that they needed a corporate communication effort to quell the tide.
From logos and brochures to posters and websites, we put a creative spin on the whole initiative, developing an on-brand campaign that was designed to educate and inspire.


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DERMOTT — An Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) information meeting will be held from noon to 2 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 14, at the Dermott City Hall meeting room.
The EQIP sign up for 2018 projects ends on Nov. 17. The meeting is aimed at row crop producers, vegetable growers and livestock ranchers in Ashley, Chicot, Desha and Drew counties, according to a press release from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff School of Agriculture, Fisheries and Human Sciences.
Participants will learn how to qualify for EQIP cost share funding for conservation practices such as poly pipe installation, soil testing, deep tillage to break up hardpans and land leveling.
Livestock producers will determine their eligibility for cost share funds for watering facilities, weed or brush control, rotational grazing and heavy use areas (putting gravel around feeding and watering areas as well as for roads), according to the release.
Socially disadvantaged, beginning and limited resource farmers are eligible for an increased payment rate and may receive an advance payment of up to 50 percent to purchase materials and services to implement conservation practices in their EQIP plan, according to the release.
For details or if participants have special needs, contact Travis Collins, UAPB Extension associate and meeting coordinator, at 870-355-8400.
The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff offers all of its Extension and Research programs and services without discrimination.