text: Home > Blogs > William Buscemi > William Buscemi's (wncbill) Blog bookmark_border jackson county moratorium By William Buscemi Real Estate Agent with wnc brokers May 25, 2007 06:13 AM week of <!-- #BeginEditable "date" -->date<!-- #EndEditable --> <!-- #BeginEditable "headline" -->Moratorium opponents suffer setback<!-- #EndEditable --> <!-- #BeginEditable "byline" -->By Becky Johnson • Staff Writer<!-- #EndEditable --> <!-- #BeginEditable "body copy" --> A group of Realtors and developers challenging the legality of Jackson County's five-month moratorium on new subdivisions lost the first round in court Thursday (May 24.) The group argued that it is being financially harmed and that the moratorium should be lifted immediately. It was not a full-blown trial on the validity of the moratorium, but rather a hearing for a temporary injunction. A full-blown trial will come later. But the Realtors argued they are being irreparably harmed with each passing day and need relief from the moratorium in the meantime. "They are losing daily, weekly, monthly thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of dollars because of the stoppage of development by the moratorium and the signal that has been sent," argued Charles Clement, an attorney from Boone representing the Realtors. Jackson County's attorney argued that lifting the moratorium pending a full-blown trial would allow a flood of developers to launch subdivisions counter to the county's aim of controlling growth. Jackson County would be irreparably harmed if the temporary injunction was granted, argued Sharon Alexander, the attorney representing the county. "You cannot go and undo those subdivisions," Alexander said. "Jackson County and its citizens would suffer extraordinary and irreparable harm by the recordation of subdivision plats willy-nilly with no compliance." Judge Marlene Hyatt, who presided over the hearing, ruled against granting a temporary injunction. The Realtors and developers failed to meet the two-part litmus test for a temporary injunction: that those seeking it are suffering irreparable harm with each passing day; and that they deserve relief in the short term because they have a likely chance of winning their case at a full-blown trial down the road. "They have demonstrated financial loss, but not immediate and irreparable damage," Hyatt said. Hyatt also said the group had not demonstrated a likelihood of success at trail. Hyatt said they did demonstrate a stake sufficient enough to move forward with a trial. Following Hyatt's ruling, the attorney for the plaintiffs indicated they might appeal the decision. None of the plaintiffs would comment following the trial, however. Chilling effect? The moratorium on new subdivisions in Jackson County was enacted in February by a 4 to 1 vote of county commissioners. The commissioners were embarking on the county's first-ever slate of development regulations, a move that would end the free-for-all climate previously enjoyed by developers. Seeing the writing on the wall, many developers sought to get their subdivisions recorded before new regulations went into effect. The number of lots being recorded tripled just before the moratorium was enacted. Clement argued that the moratorium has placed a cloud over real estate industry in Jackson County, turning would-be developers away and quelling land sales. In other cases, pending sales were lost. One of the Realtors claims he lost a $1 million sale that had been in the works prior to the moratorium. Alexander argued that the alleged losses are not concrete enough to constitute real damage. "The allegations of damage are that a couple plaintiffs would like to earn a living on buying and selling real estate. Because folks are now not willing to buy and sell real estate during this five-month period, they cannot earn the commission they would otherwise earn. That is speculative," Alexander said. Hyatt did rule that the plaintiffs had established a "sufficient stake" and "financial loss," only that it wasn't irreparable with each passing day. One of the plaintiffs is a developer who claims his progress on a subdivision was thwarted by a moratorium. But Alexander argued otherwise. "One of them said they were getting ready to go to their surveyor — getting ready to," Alexander said. "None of them say they had hired a surveyor and spent money and had a plan for a subdivision of their property that they now can't do." For that developer, the problem isn't so much the moratorium but the development regulations Jackson County is expected to pass in coming weeks. The regulations will both increase costs for developers and reduce the number of lots they can put on land — ostensibly affecting the bottom line for developers compared to the old days when they could do whatever they wanted. That could be one motive of the lawsuit. The goal might not simply be getting out of the moratorium — since it ends in five weeks anyway — but getting out of the regulations that will follow. If the plaintiffs had succeeded in their temporary injunction, they could have promptly record subdivisions and been grandfathered in by the time new development regulations go into effect. The regulations are poised to be some of the most protective in Western North Carolina — mandating everything from open space in new subdivisions to the portion of a lot that must be left natural on steep slopes. The county argued that all its planning would be for naught if the moratorium was lifted and developers given a window to record subdivisions before the regulations go into effect. Alexander said the pace of uncontrolled development had become detrimental to Jackson County residents as a whole. Alexander said towns and counties have an inherent right to enact a moratorium while studying regulations to solve such problems. The moratorium does not apply to existing subdivisions or subdivisions already underway in some form or fashion. Even if lots hadn't been officially recorded, a developer could be exempt from the moratorium — along with development regulations coming down the road — if he could show he made a substantial investment already in surveying, planning or marketing of a subdivision. The moratorium also does not stop individual lot owners from building homes, or people with existing lots from selling those lots, or the sale of acreage. It applied only to the creation of new subdivisions, namely preventing tracts from being subdivided into multiple lots through the register of deeds office unless a landowner could prove it was a project he already had in the works. Alexander argued the county was within its bounds to enact such a moratorium. "The had determined there as a need to control growth in Jackson County. It was a very limited subject matter. It wasn't on building permits. It wasn't on construction. It was only on subdividing," Alexander argued. The attorney for the Realtors and developers argued that the moratorium is not valid, however. (See next week's issue of the Smoky Mountain News, out on Wednesday, May 30, to read more about the arguments in the hearing.) <!-- #EndEditable --> Like favorite_border favorite_border 0 repeat 0 Share: bookmark_border Short link: https://activerain.com/droplet/fRYF Copy


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University City feeling the impact school closings and consolidation threat cast
This story is the product of a reporting partnership on the facilities master plan between the Notebook and PlanPhilly.
They were only 142 words, comprising just one proposal among 84 others on the leaked Philadelphia School District's facilities closings list published last spring by the Public School Notebook.
The gist was simple: close Alexander Wilson Elementary, move the students to Lea Elementary, and, to relieve overcrowding, consider redrawing the boundary for the University of Pennsylvania-sponsored Penn Alexander Elementary School.
They were recommendations. Nothing was final. But those 142 words were enough to sharply slow sales of single-family homes in an increasingly exclusive section of University City, re-ignite a decade-old debate about gentrification and lead some residents to question if they wanted to stay in the city at all.
Powered by the runaway success of the 10-year-old Penn Alexander School, the residential neighborhoods west of Penn are in the midst of one of the most pronounced economic and demographic shifts now occurring anywhere in Philadelphia, a fact that is dramatically underscored by newly available Census data.
The community is one of several in the city where a small but growing group of middle and upper middle class parents – many of whom are white – are hoping to stay in Philadelphia, and send their children to public schools, instead of fleeing for the suburbs or paying private school tuition as was virtually automatic in earlier years.
Some powerful people and institutions, such as the Center City District, have started to contend that improving low-performing public schools in relatively well-off and rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods – from Passyunk Square, to Fairmount, to University City – is vital for the future of Philadelphia, as it is perhaps the most effective way to keep middle and upper-middle class families in the city.
"This is not an either/or choice for the School District: it can serve families whose only choice is the public school, while simultaneously craft policies to attract families with the means for mobility, but who want to stay," read a highly-publicized report published by the Center City District last month.
Full disclosure: my family is one of those that could leave, but wants to stay. My wife and I moved from Center City to West Philadelphia and bought a home just outside the coveted Penn Alexander enrollment zone in 2006. We have a two-year-old son who we'd planned to enroll in public school. Now, we're not so sure.
Uncertainty and opportunity
The talk of closings and mergers and new catchments has sown confusion and threatened to blunt not just Penn Alexander's impact, but also nascent efforts to make low-performing West Philadelphia schools like Lea Elementary into appealing options for parents with the financial freedom to send their children elsewhere.
At the same time, the uncertainty over the future of some facilities and churn in the school district's leadership may have opened a window for stronger and more formal ties between West Philadelphia's public schools and its powerful universities.
"My wish would be that Penn, Drexel, and the University of the Sciences come together and say; 'we've had some pretty remarkable success in improving the fate of the communities around us, and if we're really committed to the urban world, we're going to have to reach further,'" said Penn Professor James H. Lytle, who coordinates the university's relationship with the school district. "Now is kind of an ideal time for the three universities in the University City area to collaborate in working with the whole set of schools."
The disruption in West Philadelphia's elementary schools showcases what awaits communities across the city, as the School District of Philadelphia enacts its Facilities Master Plan: a long-in-the-works rightsizing of district properties that will likely lead to dozens of school closings, mergers, and a host of other changes that seem certain to have major impacts on both the city's physical landscape and the daily lives of many residents.
District officials say they will present specific recommendations to the School Reform Commission and the public at large by the end of the month or early November. Schools won't start closing until 2012 at the earliest, and the district does not anticipate finishing its work – which means eliminating 34,000 empty classroom seats – until 2014.
Meanwhile, the nervous parents of University City feel as though they're being kept in the dark. They want a process that gives them meaningful input into what happens to their community's schools. At minimum, they say, they need some definitive answers.
"I think there's a lot of tension. People have a lot of questions. You could almost call it hysteria," said University resident Jon Gabrielle Hermann, the former executive director of Campus Philly, a non-profit that encourages college students to connect with the city of Philadelphia. "Can I send my kid to Penn Alexander? What if I can't? Does that mean charter schools? Lea? Do I need to start researching the suburbs?"
The Penn Alexander Effect
To understand how something as arcane as a school facilities plan could create hysteria, you have to go back to 2001, when the district opened the Penn Alexander School at 43d and Locust in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania.
It was hardly the first public school to have a formal relationship with a local university. But from the beginning, Penn Alexander was different. It was built on Penn property. Penn helped select its principal, and supplies student teachers and training for the school faculty. Each year, Penn contributes $1,330 per student. And, critically, the school was constructed not just to educate local children, but also to serve as a tool for urban renewal.
By the mid-1990s, Penn had realized that its fate was tied to that of West Philadelphia, and the university was spending a fortune in its effort to make the local community safe and attractive enough so that more students, professors and staff would feel comfortable living close to campus.
But for all the investments – a business district, a huge security force, extensive capital development – the lack of a strong local public school was a deal breaker for a lot of Penn-affiliated parents with young children.
The two schools that then served the handsome residential neighborhoods west of Penn were Wilson and Lea. Some locals wanted the university to put its efforts into improving those schools, which were low-performing institutions where the vast majority of students were economically disadvantaged African Americans.
Instead, the university and school district chose to build Penn Alexander from the ground up, designing it to be the sort of public school Penn professors would happily send their children to. The school's enrollment borders – or catchment – were plucked from the areas formerly served by Lea and Wilson. As it happened, the catchment included many blocks that were already far whiter and wealthier than the rest of West Philadelphia.
In September, 2001, the school opened to kindergartners and first graders. By 2004, it was serving grades K-8. Within two years, Penn Alexander students were testing proficient on state exams at a rate twice that of the district average, and out of state delegations were stopping by to take notes on building a successful urban school.
By then the great Penn Alexander property rush was well underway. Together, Penn and the district had created the most rare and desirable amenity in the Philadelphia real estate market: a high quality public school. Philadelphians with means and children (or even prospective children) began snapping up homes in the catchment at a furious pace, including many with no Penn affiliation whatsoever.
Realtors took to marketing the catchment on for sale signs and websites (such as www.catchmentrealestate.com). Soon, catchment home buyers were paying a Penn Alexander Premium estimated by realtors to be $50,000 to $100,000 above and beyond the market price for an identical home located just outside the school zone.
Indeed, between 1998 and 2011, property values of single family homes in the school's catchment increased by a staggering 211 percent. That appreciation rate was three times the city average, and more than double the increase of Center City and the University City neighborhoods located outside the catchment.
And then, abruptly, the boom came to a screeching halt.
A community disrupted
On May 11, the West Philly Local reported that Penn Alexander's lower grades were full-to-bursting with students, and that the school district had decided it would have to start turning away students, including some who live in the catchment. A month and a half later, the Notebook published the district's leaked school facilities plan, which advised officials to "consider redrawing boundaries for Penn Alexander School."
The news spread quickly across the neighborhood like the worst sort of gossip, by text message, at the Clark Park playground and over community list-serves. Some celebrated the popping of the "Penn Alexander bubble," but most considered the news a terrible development.
"The Penn Alexander School over the last 10 years has been a powerful engine for neighborhood renewal," said Mark Wagenveld, president of the Spruce Hill Civic Association (full disclosure: Wagenveld was my editor 10 years ago). "With the enrollment cap, suddenly there's a gnawing feeling that attendance at PAS is not guaranteed, and that's going to set us back."
Veteran real estate agent Melani Lamond, who lives just within the catchment, said that only six properties had entered into an agreement of sale since the news broke in May that enrollment was capped, well below the typical pace even in a bad national real estate market. Well-priced, attractive homes within the catchment are languishing on the market or being taken off the listings by their owners, a scenario which Lamond described as highly unusual.
She chalks up the chill in the market to the sense of uncertainty about enrollment, and indeed that might be what most bothers parents in the catchment as well.
"First and foremost we would like the process of registration to be as transparent as possible. People do not know what the scope of the problem is, who is going to get priority for slots," said Michael Shashaty, a leader of a new parent organization in the catchment called Advocates for Great Elementary Education, or AGREE.
AGREE has mounted a petition drive and letter-writing campaign urging the school, the district and Penn to find room for all students living in the catchment to enroll at Penn Alexander. A good place to start, members say, would be with a little more information.
"I think if there were enhanced communication between the school and the parents and neighborhood, and potentially with some kind of written policy people could refer to, that would be the first step to diminishing the stress level of the community and then it would give us a starting point from which we could say 'is there a problem?' And if there is, 'how do we fix the problem?'" Shashaty said.
AGREE has met with a number of Penn officials, and while the university has been short on answers it appears to be sensitive to concerns of parents within the catchment. There are signs the university is working on some sort of fix.
But Penn does not want to be seen as dictating enrollment policy to the district, particularly not at a time when – with a new superintendent and a remade School Reform Commission – there may be an opportunity for the university to become more deeply involved in West Philadelphia schools beyond Penn Alexander, such as Lea and Wilson if it remains open.
Certainly there is no shortage of senior district leaders with Penn connections. Incoming SRC Chair Pedro Ramos was chief of staff to former Penn President Judith Rodin, who pushed for Penn Alexander. Fellow SRC newcomer Wendell Pritchett, a West Philadelphia resident, is a former Penn law professor, as Mayor Nutter's newest appointed, novelist Lorene Cary, is a Penn creative writing lecturer. Interim Superintendent Leroy Nunery is a former Penn vice president, as was district CFO Michael Masch.
"Penn created this situation to some degree, because it created Penn Alexander. That's had implications the university probably hadn't thought all the way through, and the school has been dramatically more successful than anyone had imagined," said Lytle, the Penn school district coordinator. "So now what?"
Thus far, the school district has been short on answers.
Penn Alexander's principal and the assistant superintendent that oversees the school said through a district spokesperson they were too busy to be interviewed. In a statement, district spokesman Fernando Gallard said "currently there are no plans to amend the enrollment guidelines."
For many within the catchment, though, the status quo is unacceptable. Currently, enrollment is available to local residents on a first come, first served basis. That policy has already led to the spectacle of parents camping out overnight next to the school (in 9 degree weather this past January) to secure a spot in the limited-space kindergarten classrooms. Until last spring, those that missed out on kindergarten still were more or less sure to get in for first grade. The fear now is that, with that assurance gone, the line will form far earlier.
But it is not clear what the alternatives are. AGREE opposes both a lottery and a redrawing of the catchment. Some parents have suggested trailers or a new wing. Others, larger class sizes.
The district's statement addressed none of that. It did say, though, that the district would be evaluating "equitable access to educational options" as part of its Facilities Master Plan.
"The District will be reviewing catchment areas, demographics, projected demand and academic quality as part of the planning effort," the statement said. "We believe that the District's ongoing relationship with Penn can help in exploring a range of options for supporting schools in West Philadelphia, and addressing equitable access."
A quality public education, but for who?
Though it is not entirely clear what the district means by "addressing equitable access," there is little disputing the fact that Penn Alexander has, over time, come to serve more and more white and Asian students and fewer African American ones.
A PlanPhilly analysis of 2000 and 2010 Census data – which looked at data down to the block level, enabling a close match with the catchment area – found that the African American population within the Penn Alexander catchment declined by 52 percent in just 10 years, even as the white and Asian populations increased by 27 percent and 56 percent, respectively. (Note: the Census has not released block or tract level data for income or other non-racial indicators of community change).
Middle-class African Americans have been leaving Philadelphia in large numbers in recent years for a variety of reasons. But the decline in the black population within the catchment is so sharp that it is hard not to conclude that higher property values, fueled in large part by Penn Alexander, have displaced some lower-income African Americans from the catchment.
The figures are unlikely to surprise longtime African American residents, some of whom see the high-performing elementary school as part of a highly coordinated Penn strategy to exercise its influence over large sections of West Philadelphia, sometimes at the expense of black residents.
"Penn's plan has worked brilliantly. They created PAS for the purpose of educating professors' children, and it's done that. The problem is it displaced a lot of people, people who didn't own homes or couldn't pay the higher taxes," said Rev. Charles McNeil, a pastor at Transfiguration Baptist Church in Mantua and a resident of the 400 block of S. 48th Street, just outside the catchment.
The Census figures tell another story as well: the Penn Alexander enrollment problem may not be as huge as many catchment parents fear. Despite anecdotal accounts of an epic Penn Alexander-fueled baby boom, there were, in fact, slightly fewer children 17-and under in the catchment in 2009 then there were when the last Census was taken in 1999: 1,306 in 1999 compared to 1,211 now. Nor is there a glut of younger children. The Census counted 512 children under five years old in 1999, compared to 489 in 2009.
And according to the school district, of the 658 K-8 district students who live in the catchment, 577 are already at Penn Alexander.
What has changed dramatically is the racial composition of children within the catchment. As of 2009, there were 101 percent more white children in the Penn Alexander zone then there were 10 years earlier, and 61 percent fewer African American children. The figures are particularly stark amongst the youngest children, suggesting that over time Penn Alexander's student body will grow increasingly white and Asian as older African American students matriculate.
An alternative to Penn Alexander
That profound demographic shift was no doubt on the minds of the leaders of the West Philly Coalition for Neighborhood Schools when they wrote the organization's mission statement: "We are aware of well-meaning but ultimately paternalistic efforts to 'fix' or 'improve' neighborhood schools – that is, to remake them into a middle-class vision of 'good schools' and to fill them with middle class kids. We want to be very explicit about the fact that that is NOT the intention of WPCNS."
Disclaimers aside, WPCNS is plainly working hard to "improve" Henry C. Lea, which sits across the street from the old West Philadelphia High building. The group's members have secured pro bono design consultancy for the school from the Community Design Collaborative, acquired air conditioners for the kindergarten classrooms, collected supply and book drives and so on.
The school could use all the help it can get. Lea, at Locust and 47th, is just four blocks due west of Penn Alexander, but the academic, demographic and economic gulf between the neighboring schools is vast.
Where Penn Alexander's student body is a diverse mix of about one third African American students, one third white students and a wide array of other ethnic groups comprising the other third, Lea is 87 percent African American. Fully 90 percent of Lea students are classified by the district as economically disadvantaged, compared to 47 percent at Penn Alexander. And PAS students are more than twice as likely as Lea students to pass state proficiency exams.
Which makes it all the more unusual that the 200-plus members of WPCNS, many of whom are middle or even upper middle class, are so intent on getting involved in Lea and maybe, just maybe, sending their own children there.
That's right. As of now, few if any WPCNS members have children enrolled at Lea. Some have children a year or two away from kindergarten. Others, like WPCNS Chair Amara Rockar, do not yet have kids.
"I'm a very anxious person," Rockar said, when asked why she was working to improve a neighborhood school before she had children to send there.
Rockar and other WPCNS members say they've been inspired by the work of Jacqueline Edelberg, the author of How to Walk to School: A Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance. The book tells the story of how Edelberg, a Chicago mother, helped convince her community to take a "leap of faith" and commit their time and, eventually, their children, to a long struggling neighborhood school.
The neighborhood Lea draws from has changed considerably in the last 10 years, if not quite so dramatically as Penn Alexander's. The African American population in Lea's catchment has declined by 28 percent, and the white population has swelled by 68 percent.
Much of that is attributable to newcomers like myself and my wife: people who could not afford to live in the catchment, but were drawn to the neighborhood's handsome homes, tree-lined streets, and a distinctive community feel unlike any other in Philadelphia, born in large part from the neighborhood's really remarkable diversity . When we moved here in 2006, we were naïve enough to think perhaps the PAS catchment would expand to include our house. When it became clear that wouldn't happen, we began planning a move into the Penn Alexander catchment. Until recently, we were barely aware of Lea, much less considered it an option for our son.
The trouble with that, as Rockar pointed out in one of many online public discussions on Penn Alexander overcrowding in recent months, is that pretty much all parents "with the funds, savvy and/or connections" consider only a small handful of public elementary schools across the city acceptable for their children.
"For the continued growth of our city and strength of our neighborhood, this is clearly unsustainable," Rockar wrote. She then invited those on the list serve "terrified" about the lack of public school options to volunteer for a morning in a Lea kindergarten room.
Lea's capable principal, Dr. Lisa Bell-Chiles, welcomes the new-found interest in the school, though she seems slightly bemused by it all.
"I'm meeting a lot of new parents, who are thinking of enrolling their children. It's interesting. Some of them have children that are not ready for kindergarten yet, and maybe they won't be for two or three years, but they're still coming in," Bell-Chiles said. "They're quite welcome. I think some were surprised by what they saw here. We are an empowerment school, but we push our children to achieve, the curriculum is not dumbed down."
Seeing Lea's kindergarten classroom in person was enough to convince David Hincher and his wife Mara that they could send their daughter to Lea in two years time and be confident she'd receive a good education. It was not a decision they reached easily.
"Our household become kind of a warzone on the issue of education," said David Hincher, an architect at Kieran Timberlake, as his daughter played with other WPCNS kids at a local park during one of the group's weekly meetings, which double as playdates.
He values public education as an essential civic building block, and was adamant that their children go to their neighborhood public school. His wife, Mara, was not willing to compromise on the quality of her daughter's education to meet some sort of high-minded ideal. After seeing Lea for themselves, they think they won't have to.
Still, it's unclear how many WPCNS parents will follow through and actually enroll their children in the school. Much, it seems, will hinge on how many parents are willing to take the initial "leap of faith." Too few, and the entire effort could evaporate overnight.
The questions about Wilson, a K-6 school, and its potential closure only add to the uncertainty. While Wilson has an academic record and students with economic problems that roughly match those at Lea, Wilson lacks Lea's active Home and School Association and increasingly robust community engagement. Some WPNCS parents fear combining the two schools would only further entrench Lea's poverty and poor student performance.
But Bell-Chiles says Lea has the space for Wilson's 231 students, and PlanPhilly's analysis of the Census data confirms that the district – which must scale back its underused facilities to save on operating costs – has good reason to target West Philadelphia. The 17 and under population in the Lea and Wilson catchments is down by 36 percent over the past 10 years. The falloff is particularly sharp in the Wilson area: 46 percent.
Still, West Philadelphia education advocates, including those at Penn, hope Wilson doesn't close.
"I think it'd be a mistake to close Wilson. It could be part of the answer here," Lytle said, referring to the overcrowding at Penn Alexander and the ever-louder middle and upper middle class clamor for quality public education in West Philadelphia.
Whether or not that happens depends partly on what the district decides to do with its facilities. Perhaps more important, Lytle said, is the sustained interest and activism of the community.
"Parents can help drive this agenda," Lytle said. "I think there's the prospect for some kind of responsiveness here from the university and the district."
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We, the undersigned queer Arab organizations, are appalled by the US Social Forum's decision to allow Stand with Us to utilize the event as a platform to pinkwash Israel's crimes in the region. Stand with Us is cynically manipulating the struggle of queer people in the Middle East through its workshop entitled "LGBTQI Liberation in the Middle East".
Stand with Us is a self-declared Zionist propaganda organization which describes itself as "an international education organization that ensures that Israel's side of the story is told in communities, campuses, libraries, the media and churches through brochures, speakers, conferences, missions to Israel, and thousands of pages of Internet resources".
Stand with Us has no connection with the LGBT movement in the Middle East apart from ties to Zionist Israeli LGBT organizations, yet it claims to speak for and about our movements. It has no credibility in our region, and as organizations working in and from the Middle East, we condemn its attempt to use us, our struggles, our lives, and our experiences as a platform for pro-Israeli propaganda.
Since Israel's brutal wars on Gaza and Lebanon in 2006 and particularly after the recent unprovoked attack on the flotilla of activists going to Gaza, the Israeli government has found itself increasingly marginalized by international condemnations and weakened through the growing success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. To remedy this, it has launched a massive PR campaign using organizations such as Stand with Us to convince the world that Israel is not a brutal settler-colony state, but rather a free democracy where human rights in general, and LGBT rights in particular, are respected and upheld. Stand With Us deceptively uses the language of LGBT and women's rights to obscure the fact that institutionalized discrimination is enshrined within the state of Israel.
Our struggle is deeply intertwined with the struggle of all oppressed people, and we cannot accept that we are being used as a tool to discredit the Palestinian cause. Stand with Us would have everyone believe that the Palestinian cause is an unworthy one because of the homophobia that exists within Palestinian society, as if homophobia does not exist elsewhere, and as if struggles for justice are predicated on some sort of inherent "goodness" of the oppressed, rather than on the principles of freedom, justice, and equality for everyone, everywhere. Stand with Us would have us all compartmentalize our beliefs, lives, and identities so that solidarity with the queer struggle would preclude solidarity with others.
While Stand With Us is quick to point out the oppression of queer Palestinians under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, it conveniently forgets that those same queers are not immune to the bombs, blockades, apartheid and destruction wrought upon them daily by the Israeli government, and that Israel's multi-tiered oppression hardly makes a distinction between straight and gay Palestinians.
We refuse to be instrumentalized by anyone, be it our own oppressive governments or the Zionist lobby hijacking our struggle to legitimize the state of Israel and its policies, thus providing even more fodder for our own governments to use against us. If you want to learn about our movements and struggles, engage with us, rather than with those who will use us as pawns in Israel's campaign to pinkwash its crimes.
The inclusion of Stand With Us at the USSF is an egregious oversight on the part of the forum. We ask the forum to justify this inclusion given that it violates its own principles of anti-racism, uniting oppressed communities, prioritizing marginalized voices, and opposing US foreign policy. The USSF should be held accountable to its own standards. We look forward to hearing its plans to address the situation.
Lebanese Protection for LGBT
For Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society
Palestinian Gay Women
Palestinian Queers for BDS
FYI, general USSF contact info: firstname.lastname@example.com; email@example.com; (toll free) 877.515.USSF; and USSF Coordinators' contact info: Detroit Co-Coordinators William Copeland email@example.com and Maureen Taylor firstname.lastname@example.com; National Co-Coordinators Adrienne Maree Brown firstname.lastname@example.com and Sylvia Orduño email@example.com. Click here for contact info of other staffers and working group coordinators.


text:
Spring 1997
Reputations: Michael Bierut
'The biggest challenge that faces a designer isn't the quest for novelty, but coming to grips with the fact that much of what we do has little content'
Michael Bierut was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957. He studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm's New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice-president of graphic design. His clients at Pentagram have included Alfred A. Knopf, Disney Development Company, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Princeton University and Interiors Magazine. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. He was president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1988 to 1990 and is a member of the AIGA's national board. He has been director of the American Centre for Design and was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989. In 1991, he chaired the AIGA National Conference in Chicago with his fellow Pentagram partner Paula Scher. Recent activities include the identity and environmental graphics for a new children's museum in St Paul, Minnesota, and coordinating all promotional material for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the graphic design consultant to Mohawk Paper Mills and edits its annual critical journal Rethinking Design. He is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art and co-editor, with Steven Heller, of Looking Closer and Looking Closer 2, anthologies of writing on graphic design.
Steven Heller: When did you decide to become a graphic designer?
Michael Bierut: I grew up in Ohio, in a milieu that had nothing resembling graphic design. Because I drew well, I was the guy who always designed the logo for the clubhouse or painted the band's name on the drum. I didn't know it had a name until I found a book by [former CBS art director] S. Neil Fujita in the school library. It was part of a series called something like Your Future in …Cosmetology, or Garbage Disposal, or Plumbing, and there was one called Your Future in Commercial Art/Graphic Design. Up to that moment I thought this stuff got done by Robert Rauschenberg or Franz Kline or Frank Stella banging it out on a Saturday; they'd put aside the paintings with the slashes and the stripes, and do a Three Dog Night cover. When I found out it had a name – I was fifteen years old – I went to the Parma Regional Library in Ohio and looked up graphic design in the card catalogue. They had one book: Graphic Design Manual by Armin Hofmann.
SH: What was your reaction to it?
MB: All these pictures of dots and squares hypnotised me. After repeatedly taking this book out of the library I went to a department store in downtown Cleveland and asked if they had it, expecting to get a frown and a puzzled look. Instead the saleswoman said, "Oh, yeah, we just got that in for Christmas." She led me to this pile of books, but it was a book called Graphic Design by Milton Glaser, with Bob Dylan on the front. So there were two books – one by Glaser and one by Armin Hofmann – that seemed diametrically opposed.
SH: You were at the crossroads of Modernism and eclecticism, in which direction did you go?
MB: I went to the University of Cincinnati, a school where most of the instructors were either born in Switzerland and had studied with Hofmann or had studied at Yale. It was a very Yale-Swiss kind of education – rather than the Glaser tradition.
SH: Is that how you wanted to practice?
MB: I was really good at it, but I was always very promiscuous and would do freelance jobs where I would just rip off anyone that struck my fancy.
SH: When you left school, did you see a particular place for yourself to fit in?
MB: I wanted to work for someone really, really good. It was either Milton Glaser, Chermayeff & Geismar, or Massimo Vignelli. I got Massimo on a good day.
SH: You worked at Vignelli Associates for ten years. What did you learn?
MB: Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that a lot of the things about design that tend to get designers really interested aren't that important.
SH: Do you mean the decorative aspects of design?
MB: More or less. See, Massimo would arrive at things from an ideological point of view. For instance, he has always had this thing about there being only five good typefaces: Garamond 3, Futura, Century, Helvetica and Bodoni. I agreed with this, not so much as a moral issue, but for the practical reason that ordinary people like my mom could only distinguish between five typefaces, and that the time that designers would spend splitting hairs between Garamond and Bembo and Sabon was a waste. Likewise all the attention designers give to clever layouts and putting the page numbers in a cool place, when ordinary people just want to read the words and look at the pictures. Massimo taught me to focus on the big ideas, and I thought that big ideas were what connected with the greatest number of people.
SH: Was this method a revelation for you, or was it accommodation to the will of your employer?
MB: It was a revelation. Maybe unconsciously the whole thing was like the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages identify with their captors. But I honestly don't think it was.
SH: Do you think Massimo Vignelli saw good design as a moral imperative?
MB: Massimo's point of view is that cluttered or self-conscious design bespeaks some sort of moral failing. But I never felt that. I always believed that if you have the time to show you were awake while you were designing, then, why not?
SH: Why do you think Vignelli has become the spokesman for and the target of reaction in terms of the old guard versus the new?
MB: To Massimo's credit, he has always felt it incumbent on him to engage with this stuff. I mean, you have Massimo on the one hand, who takes a lot of the heat from the younger generation, but then you have armies of designers of his generation whose way of dealing with it is just to grumble and pull the shades down. Massimo is always in the front row, saying, "How can you do this crap?" To me, if more designers actually stated their position and got dialogues going, it would be more interesting. It's dreary when there's just a single, stupid conversation about "You can't read that, it's ugly" versus "How can you keep doing that boring stuff?" It goes nowhere.
SH: At the end of your tenure at Vignelli's, what was going on in design that interested you?
MB: When I first came to New York in 1980 there was this thrilling ascendancy of avant-garde design as represented by the Basel School. Dan Friedman was working at Pentagram and Anspatch Grossman Portugal. April Greiman was just beginning. There were firms like Doublespace and Carbone Smolan doing things that I thought were cool-looking. But by the middle of the decade, I was surprised to see that the avant-garde stuff had been absorbed by the mainstream. What you had were many firms, fuelled by the real estate and retail and financial businesses, who were pouring out nice-looking brochures that had gradations and spaced-out type – all the stuff that had looked astonishing in Wet magazine seven years before – to sell mortgages for Manhattan banks.
SH: You absorbed Vignelli's ideas, but you also discovered your own path. At what point did you begin to have a more singular vision?
MB: Well, it began to happen slowly. But first, Paula Scher, with whom I had become friendly, was a real pipeline to the outside world for me. Paula is a perfect example of the anti-Vignelli approach in the purest way. I remember Massimo and I going to a presentation where she spoke. I just loved her work. It was exactly what made me go into graphic design in the first place. We came out, and I said, "Man, Paula is great." And Massimo said, "All that novelty stuff and those Victorian typefaces, that's not the way to do it." And I said, "Massimo, if you design 200 album covers a year, you have to be eclectic. You can't just do all the classical ones in Garamond and all the rock ones in Futura." And Massimo, of course, said, "That would be fantastic!" Paula's kind of virtuosity really spoke to me deep down inside.
SH: I have an image of you with your veins popping out, panting to jump right out of your skin and do some of this eclectic stuff as well.
MB: I could do some virtuoso stuff sometimes, but there were a lot of things I couldn't do. I couldn't just effortlessly do a Modernist-looking thing at nine o'clock, a historicist-looking thing at ten o'clock, and something else at midday. It suggests, I suppose, a kind of ideological bankruptcy to be able to slip in and out of all those clothes. But it's certainly something that I had been toying around with for almost all my life. I remember seeing things I loved, like what Katherine McCoy was doing at Cranbrook, and I'd try to do some of that. I just was bad at it.
SH: Did you accept all these approaches equally, or were you beginning to establish hierarchies?
MB: I think good graphic design can look lots and lots of different ways. In 1988, there was good Charles Spencer Anderson and there was bad imitation Charles Spencer Anderson. There was good Cranbrook and there was not-so-good Cranbrook. Just like now there is good Tomato and there is bad Tomato. The good stuff always seems to come out of someone's conviction and proceed directly from their passion.
SH: Was there any ideological or philosophical reason why the method of design promoted at Cranbrook, which later became a style of layering, was objectionable to you?
MB: I would say there are two issues. First, as a pluralist, I'm always suspicious of ideologies or movements in design. I understand formal approaches to design that grow from someone's personal point of view, but when that point of view becomes dogmatic, the work loses its richness for me. I think this was true at Cranbrook, where after a certain point there seemed to be a sense of manifest destiny, that all design history was leading up to this glorious moment where every message, regardless of its content, could now be collaged with a quote from a French structuralist, a diagram of an electrical circuit, and a Photoshopped image of the back of someone's head, and that the very nature of communication would thus be transformed. In its own way the result was as regimented as anything Emil Ruder could have dreamed up. And then, of course, when the word goes out to the people who can't afford the tuition in Bloomfield Hills but can afford an issue of Emigre, that's when the deluge of imitative sludge really cranks up. Secondly, I really think the biggest challenge that faces a designer isn't the quest for stylistic novelty, but coming to grips with the fact that so much of the work we do has very little content, very little that would actually engage normal people on a human level. So we amuse ourselves by styling what we've been handed, and the world at large continues to go to hell.
SH: So ten years have gone by. You are approached by Pentagram to become a partner. What goes through your mind at that moment?
MB: Over the years, I'd been approached by other people of Massimo's generation who thought I would just want to trade Massimo for someone else for fun. That never interested me. The other thing that didn't interest me was going out on my own. I always thought if I could just run into a partner that I liked a lot, that would do it for me. I never thought that those partners already existed, and that they were Woody Pirtle and Alan Fletcher, David Hillman and Kit Hinrichs.
SH: You were also out there movin' and shakin' in the design world. You were president of the AIGA/New York, a habitué of design conferences and mixers.
MB: I love graphic design. I've been a glutton for this sort of stuff. So being the guy who always showed up for every single event, eventually you get to run the slide projector at the AIGA. I volunteered for some AIGA committees, then eventually got on the board, then eventually was one of those few people who were smart enough to be able to be the president and dumb enough to serve.
SH: What was your goal as AIGA/New York president?
MB: To make the AIGA like the "big tent" that the Republicans always talk about. I was the guy who said "Yes" to anything. I was AIGA president [from 1988-90] when the Walker Art Center's "Graphic Design in America" exhibition was at the IBM Gallery here in New York and there was a lot of contention about who was included and who wasn't. That was why I set up a programme to have professional designers – a few of whom were critical of the exhibit – act as museum guides.
SH: Did you take a critical position?
MB: First, I loved it because it was rooms filled with graphic design. But beyond that, it seemed inconsistent. I could never figure out which part of graphic design history it was supposed to be. It wasn't so much that there was no Milton Glaser in it, because I think it's a perfectly valid view to take of one kind of graphic design history – to show the rise and permutations of Modernism, for example. But if it was about Modernism, why wasn't Rudy de Harak in the show? So I think the problem was that it was derived from a Rolodex that wasn't quite as full as it should have been. It wasn't based on a broad enough knowledge of the subject to do the right kind of thing. It either should have been narrower or broader.
SH: In your position as a design glutton, would you presume to be the curator of such a show? If you were picking a thread, and the mandate was to create something that had some controversy, something that addressed either the issues or problems of graphic design, what would it be?
MB: What has always fascinated me is watching how style is used and abused. I think you could do real case histories. The funniest little part of the "Mixing Messages" show on at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the moment is where Ellen Lupton shows the typeface Neuland next to all those African-American book cover things. This typeface designed by a German, Rudolf Koch, in the 1930s, all of a sudden becomes the signifier for "there's African-American Literature in here."
SH: It is easy, these days, to appropriate and steal.
MB: Now we have relative freedom, it means that people who have conviction and people who just have enough time on their hands to click the mouse a few more times can achieve very similar results. It used to be that mediocre work looked bland and boring. Now it looks complicated and boring. But I think you still have the same challenge, to sort out what is really interesting and what is really original, and what is not. Also, the style cycle turns much more quickly. Cycles that took years now take months, and things that took months take weeks.
SH: In your own work, how do you avoid falling into those traps? Is it a conscious effort? Is it an instinctive effort? Is it an effort at all?
MB: The last time I really came to grips with this question was when I did the poster for the ACD 100 show in 1992.
SH: The one where your daughter did the artwork?
MB: Yes, exactly. They asked me to chair the judging of the show and I thought: "Fine." I had been cast, unintentionally, as a critic of the previous show. At that point I had a bias towards eclecticism. I was ideological about things not following one ideology, which is inherently oxymoronic.
SH: You were rather critical of the one-dimensional, Cranbrook-inspired stance of the show.
MB: I got quoted as saying that the work had a certain bias. I actually counted how many things we associated with Cranbrook, and said: "I wasn't just sensing it; there actually are a lot of things from Cranbrook in this book." Lorraine Wild, the chair of the show, thought I was accusing her of throwing it towards her buddies. I really hurt her feelings – which I didn't mean to do.
So I was asked to chair the show after that. In my essay I said: "This last show had been driven by either conscious or subconscious or unconscious commitments to certain stylistic ideologies. My era will be free of all that dogma." So then I had to design a poster to announce the show. It's not possible to design with no style. You can't. ACD ask me to write a statement for the back of the poster, and I typed out a stream-of-consciousness thing: "What is good design? Is it all these stylistic things or is it something else?" And they said, "Why don't you just print that on the front?" And I said: "Oh, brilliant – a type solution. I know how to do that." But then, of course, it's which typeface? Do you use Futura, Bodoni or Helvetica? I mean, which typeface do you put it in so it doesn't appear to admit that it has any conscious selection of style? I sweated over that for two weeks, and then finally turned to my daughter Elizabeth, who was four years old and had just learned to write. I realised that if I dictated it to her and she did it in her handwriting, that would solve my problems. She did it perfectly. It fitted on the page. It was like God telling me what to do.
SH: Some people say here is a Pentagram style and a Pentagram clique. How do you respond to this Pentagram ruling the world concept?
MB: You know, you don't get chosen to be a partner here completely at random. There has to be a certain affinity with the existing partners. So like any group that votes in its future members, it proceeds from a certain point of view. Just like in a school faculty, the challenge is to try to bring in people who are compatible without being identical. The basic premise of Pentagram, founded by five guys, has never been as single-minded as, say, an office that was founded by one person whose point of view permeates everything.
SH: Is there an exclusive design community that you've seen developing in the last ten years?
MB: Let me tell you my creation myth about the graphic design field. There used to be just good designers and bad designers. There were so few good designers that they knew each other on sight – Saul Bass was in LA, Chermayeff & Geismar were in New York. You could put them all in one room and they would all hold hands, and that was a wonderful world. Now, there are so many designers, I think there's room for groups and sub-groups. The fact that Pentagram, which is really just a single firm, can be considered any kind of group at all, is kind of funny. But what's really funny is the idea of dominance by one or the other. I know that if you live outside New York you have this fantasy that there are these people in New York calling the shots on everything. I remember in the 1980s going to AIGA meetings in the Midwest, where I'm from, and hearing questions that suggested there were Trilateral Commissions of Massimo, Milton, Ivan, Rudy de Harak and God knows who, who would sit around and decide everything that would happen in graphic design for the next twelve months!
SH: There has been a perception of a "star chamber."
MB: There is always this idea that other people are in control. I think a lot of the contention that has developed in the last few years has to do with this reciprocation between groups of people feeling the other group is in control. Believe me, there's a whole group of designers who feel like Emigre magazine rules the world, and not just fans of Emigre. It's people who would never be published in Emigre whose feelings are hurt: "Why don't they ever publish anything that looks like me and my friends." Likewise, Eye or anything else.
I think there was a period in graphic design where you might have felt like you were screwed if you didn't go to Cranbrook or CalArts. It didn't matter how much work you did, or how good you were. And they would deny absolutely there is any kind of single-minded cabal happening there. On the other hand, if you're out there in Valencia, California, you imagine that there are these East Coast designers driving really expensive cars, who have really big, bad clients, who just for the joy of it like to grind their heels right down and squelch any kind of poor, innovative designer who is trying to design an ugly-looking-on-purpose typeface.
SH: In 1997, is there a hot-button issue for our field? Or have we come to the point where we accept all standards, regardless of what is being done?
MB: Ugly versus boring was the second famous argument. The first was Tibor Kalman and Joe Duffy, which was about something different. But in the same way, it was the kind of argument that was waiting to happen, and it had to do more with personal expression versus service to the client.
Ugly versus boring was about what constitutes acceptable appearance standards for graphic design. I don't think that everything is settled. What people want is to have their point of view acknowledged and validated.
Designers of the older generation don't want to be dismissed out of hand as a bunch of schmucks who had their glory days a long time ago, and are now blindly and pathetically defending their turf against kids who have had less of a chance to have their moment in the sun. And the people that took offence on the other side don't want to be pigeonholed as a bunch of mindless nihilists who think it's fun to make things look messy because there's no reason not to. Once you acknowledge that a point of view is valid, the wind kind of comes out of some of the arguments. A mature field figures out a way to still have a discussion after that.
If there is an argument waiting to happen, it may have to do with a theoretical approach to design versus, I don't want to say an anti-intellectual, more pragmatic, approach, but a less theoretical approach to graphic design. There's this mania in America now for writing about graphic design instead of doing it. I can accept all kinds of different design, but there is something about bad writing that drives me crazy, and incenses me in a way that bad design doesn't.
SH: What constitutes bad writing in this field?
MB: That which is impossible to understand, non-specific and circular. You have to really be smart to be a writer, and I think fewer people should attempt it. If you're not smart enough to be a writer, don't simulate the process. A lot of bad writing about graphic design is produced by people who aren't quite sure what they want to say, but have learned to simulate the locutions of academic writing. It bugs me that it's becoming a new mandatory pastime for designers, the path to glory.
I guess in the big world out there, it is progress to have graphic design stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a lot of other fields that are similarly opaque in their discourse. Maybe it's enough if the graphic design department can clink a glass at a faculty party with the head of comparative literature. Maybe that's a great moment for graphic design.
SH: We worked together editing Looking Closer, a compilation of critical writing. How do you define critical writing?
MB: I would distinguish between criticism and academic writing. My favourite kind of criticism takes what we do and puts it into a larger cultural context in terms that an intelligent, interested layperson could understand. I also like it when it's tough and even mean. Academic writing, which I don't like as much, seems to be written for journal editors, fellow academics and, ultimately, the tenure committee. Words and phrases like "the privileged hermeneutics of gender" float around like "Dominus vobiscum" used to in an old Latin mass. I worry about some bright second-year design student wading through an issue of Emigre, and thinking that they can't hack it because they don't know what "hermeneutics" are.
SH: What would be your model of effective graphic design criticism?
MB: The best writers are those who are able to frame an argument, have a point of view, and make connections with things that ordinary people can touch and evaluate. After all, graphic designers do make things, and even if those things end up in the digital world they still have physical characteristics. Good writing always connects up with things that are bigger than what is being discussed, even with things that are outside the field of graphic design. A writer like Herbert Muschamp does this with architecture and Simon Schama does it with art.
SH: Do you think there is a dumbing-down or a smartening-up of designers?
MB: A smartening-up. All you have to do is go back to issues of CA from the 1970s and graphic design feels like the dumbest field on earth. Most of the profiles had zero intellectual content. Even if they were doing great work, they may as well have been customizing cars. Only in the reviews by Dugald Stermer and Byron Ferris might you find thoughtful, provocative things. In a very casual way, those two would let drop opinionated things that opened my eyes as a designer then. But you never got an inkling that there were things to be for or against, or things to think or worry about. In spite of my dislike of the most incomprehensible excesses of academic design criticism, it does mean that there is an attempt being made to establish a higher rigour for things that will have a trickle-down effect. The next step is for people to learn how to have fun with this stuff, to learn to disagree in a way that is erudite and smart.
SH: Let's end with this question: what is graphic design for you?
MB: One of my favourite movie scenes is in Do The Right Thing by Spike Lee. It is a pointless scene, it doesn't advance the plot, it has nothing to do with anything, but I know exactly why it's there. It's a speech by Love Daddy, the DJ who forms the "Greek chorus" for the whole thing. At about the mid point of the movie, the camera pans through the neighbourhood, and shows him doing a rap, and all he does is say the names of Black artists and Black musicians.
It's so thrilling because there's absolutely no aesthetic or ideological consistency between the names he's saying: "Run DMC, John Coltrane, Parliament, Funkadelic, Ella Fitzgerald, Prince, Sam Cooke, Steel Pulse…" It goes on and on – the names of rappers, the names of jazz musicians, the names of every possible artist from the past, from the future, just naming all of them, one after another. He never says at the beginning: "These are African-American musicians who have made a contribution" or "and now you realize how rich our field is." There's something about this recitation of names, and the differences between them, and the fact that a single idea embraces them, even the idea of ethnicity in this case.
I always thought that if graphic design is an idea, what makes it powerful is the thought that you can have a litany that goes: Alexey Brodovitch, David Carson, Jilly Simons, Alex Isley, Laurie Haycock Makela, Lester Beall, Don Trousdell, Woody Pirtle. You could go on and on and on. And I swear to God, I could list more graphic designers' names than anyone else in America. If we had to fill blackboards, I could fill more blackboards. Everyone else would have quit, everyone else would be lying dead on the floor, and I would still be writing. So what makes the field thrilling, and what always gives it a sense of possibility, is not just what I am going to do tomorrow, but what someone else is going to do tomorrow.
First published in Eye no. 24 vol. 6, 1997
Eye is the world's most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.


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YANGON — Facebook has been "too slow" to address hate speech in Myanmar and is acting to remedy the problem by hiring more Burmese speakers and investing in technology to identify problematic content, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
The acknowledgement came a day after a Reuters investigation showed why the company has failed to stem a wave of vitriolic posts about the minority Rohingya.
Some 700,000 Rohingya fled their homes last year after an army crackdown that the United States denounced as ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya now live in teeming refugee camps in Bangladesh.
"The ethnic violence in Myanmar is horrific and we have been too slow to prevent misinformation and hate speech on Facebook," Facebook said.
The Reuters story revealed the social media giant for years dedicated scant resources to combating hate speech in Myanmar, which is a market it dominates and where there have been repeated eruptions of ethnic violence.
In early 2015, for instance, there were only two people at Facebook who could speak Burmese monitoring problematic posts.
In Thursday's statement, posted online, Facebook said it was using tools to automatically detect hate speech and hiring more Burmese-language speakers to review posts, following up on a pledge made by founder Mark Zuckerberg to US senators in April.
The company said that it had over 60 "Myanmar language experts" in June and plans to have at least 100 by the end of the year.
Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments, images and videos denigrating and attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims that were on the social media platform as of last week.
Some of the material, which included pornographic anti-Muslim images, has been up on Facebook for as long as six years.
There are numerous posts that call the Rohingya and other Muslims dogs and rapists, and urge they be exterminated.
Facebook currently doesn't have a single employee in Myanmar, relying instead on an outsourced, secretive operation in Kuala Lumpur – called Project Honey Badger – to monitor hate speech and other problematic posts, the Reuters investigation showed.
Because Facebook's systems struggle to interpret Burmese script, the company is heavily dependent on users reporting hate speech in Myanmar.
Researchers and human rights activists say they have been warning Facebook for years about how its platform was being used to spread hatred against the Rohingya and other Muslims in Myanmar.
In its statement on Thursday, Facebook said it had banned a number of Myanmar hate figures and organizations from the platform.


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Eavesdropping - Henri Matisse Inspired Interior Painting by k Madison Moore
Inspired by Henri Matisse
Painting with The Masters
Art within Art Series
14 x 18 Interior Oil Painting on Canvas
Visit My Portfolio Here for more in this Series
Thanks again MD
Your collection is really growing!
I had this idea in my head of my Big Hat Ladies
having an afternoon conversation over drinks, when
I thought about Matisse's painting, La Conversation
that he painted in 1938.
I thought it would be great with this composition
because the ladies look like they are eavesdropping
on the party. Notice I even included them by giving
them their own drinks, lol!
Matisse is known for mixing many patterns in one
composition. I love doing this also because it's a challenge.
He not only mixed patterns but many colors together
that you would probably never think of using or would
not want to use together!
It's hard to do but I think I accomplished it here in giving
each lady their own color combinations. Somehow it
always seems to work out. Love the faces I gave them this
time too! So smirky!
La Conversation by Henri Matisse 1938
For Inquiries Email Me HERE
Don't forget to mention the Paintings Title


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Folsom Europe - Berlin
Germany → Berlin
11.09 - 15.09.2024
folsomeurope.berlinFetish Events
Folsom Europe is Europe's first fetish street fair attended by around 25,000 from 5 continents. The street fair is held on Fuggerstrasse and Welserstrasse.in the Schönberg area of Berlin. This legendary district is known as LGBTQ neighbourhood for Berlin nightlife.
Over the course of the event there are lots of small and big parties, bus and boat sightseeing tours and we are a platform for lots of private events on the second weekend of September. If you are in to the fetish scene pack your gear and book your trip. A 5 day event for those into fetish scene !
Book accommodation for the Folsom Europe - Berlin
Smart mobile data plans
e-Sim's to stay connected
No roaming costs!
Berlin Barcode
Fetish Men's Wear
What's Your Fetish?
Turkish Airlines
Safe Flying With A Smile
Flying Worldwide
Walking Jack is here
Greek Designed


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A New "Assassin's Creed" or: When 3 and 4 Don't Add Up
So before my mind spins out of control, let me make sure everyone is on the same page.
As previously rumored, there will be an "Assassin's Creed IV". It is officially called "Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag," and it sees you taking control of renowned pirate Captain Edward Kenway, who will be your assassin this evening.
In it, you'll wield up to four guns, captain your own ship (complete with upgrades), spend almost half of the game at sea, lead daring attacks on enemy ships, survive storms, engage in multiplayer, meet historical pirate figures, somehow "play as yourself" in the new modern day segments, harpoon whales (which PETA is already having issues with), and fulfill your land lover duties in cities ranging from pirate havens to Havana, Cuba and 50 overall various locations.
One would assume you'll also assassinate a templar or two, unless this series has decided that it's now yo ho ho, a bottle of rum, and the pirates life for it.
Now how is all of this, and more, known in roughly just 24 hours' time? Because Ubisoft told us of course. They released the details, concept art, and even a trailer, which, in typical "Assassin's Creed" fashion, is jaw dropping.
Oh, and there is one other thing. It's coming out this year. As in the 2013 calendar year.
Ubisoft is insisting though that this is not a quick cash in attempt, and instead a true continuation of the series. You may have gathered this by that spiffy IV in the title, which sources tell me usually numerically follows the III seen in the previous "Assasin's Creed" game, thus confirming Ubi's claims,but the real evidence comes from the fact that Ubisoft has reported this game has been in development since 2011.
Let's go back to those numbers for a second shall we? "Assassin's Creed III" came out in 2012, and "Assassin's Creed IV" has been in development since 2011, also known as the same year "Assassin's Creed: Revelations" came out.
That's three "Assassin's Creed" games in 3 years, not counting mobile ports, two of which are claiming to be full fledged sequels, all of which were logically at some point in the works at the same time, which even if they were being handled by different staff and teams, is a hell of a lot of different manpower spread thin over a short period of time on one franchise.
Something smells rotten here, and it's not a case of scurvy.
I wouldn't normally be upset at this much "Assassin's Creed" but, "Assassin's Creed III" is only a handful of months old, and the promotional blitzkrieg of advertisements that preceded it, as well as the amazing sales figures that it resulted in is still very fresh. I also remember buying into the hype, and buying the game as well.
What I especially can't forget though is the distinct impression that I was playing half of a game. "Assassin's Creed III" was filled with incomplete ideas and half assed execution to spare, chocking the life out of the things that made it genuinely impressive and creatively exciting. I remember the distinct feeling that I was playing a game that peaked early in the concept stages, and slacked off for the rest of its development time. For the life of me though, I couldn't understand how it happened.
It's all a little clearer now though, and a hell of a lot more disturbing. "Assassin's Creed III" didn't feel like the game it should have been, and now we're already gearing up for "Assassin's Creed IV." So what was "Assassin's Creed III" then?
Was it a preview of what was to come as the surprisingly expansive naval aspects suggested?
Was it an enhanced spin off masquerading as a full-fledged sequel for higher sales figures?
And what does that make "Assassin's Creed IV"? Is it an apology? The true sequel all along? Or was it in fact originally the spinoff now taking the mantle as a sequel because it got the true development attention during all this time?
I hate to have to ask these questions, but when you're dealing with such questionable practices what else could there be?
I'm left with nothing but questions as to why Ubisoft is releasing "Assassin's Creed" installments like they are Madden titles. How can they release a clearly half finished "Assassin's Creed III" and then expect everyone to keep a straight face while having to swallow a game that is at best an apology or the "real sequel", and at worst a cash in attempt to milk both the massive user bases of the current gen consoles as well as attack the eager wallets of the soon to be early adopters of the next generation as well when this game hits PS4?
Like I said, none of this would matter had "Assassin's Creed III" felt like everything it could be, and a game that got the full attention it deserved. It didn't in either case.
So while, everything shown so far about "Assassin's Creed IV" shows a great looking game, and is one that is certainly exciting based on early impressions alone, considering those were my exact feelings about "Assassin's Creed III" , which only left me feeling half full, should I prepare to drop another $60 on "Assassin's Creed IV" to chance filling that void?
Nah. At this rate I'll just wait for "Assassin's Creed V", no doubt under way now and scheduled for 2014.
Comments Off on A New "Assassin's Creed" or: When 3 and 4 Don't Add Up
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Tags: Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed 3 issues, Assassin's Creed 3 problems, Assassin's Creed 4, Assassin's Creed 4 issues, Assassin's Creed 4 news, Assassin's Creed 4 preview, Assassin's Creed 4 trailer, Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed III issues, Assassin's Creed III negative review, Assassin's Creed III problems, Assassin's Creed IV, Assassin's Creed IV features, Assassin's Creed IV issues, Assassin's Creed IV locations, Assassin's Creed IV news, Assassin's Creed IV opinion, Assassin's Creed IV Preview, Assassin's Creed IV trailer, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin's Creed Pirates, Assassin's Creed PS4, Assassin's Creed Theories, Assassin's Creed too soon, Do we need another Assassin's Creed, Edward Kenway, Everything known about Assassin's Creed IV, new Assassin's Creed, New Assassin's Creed Features, PETA, Setting for Assassin's Creed, ubisoft, Video Game Articles, Video Game Blogs, Video game news, Video Game Opinions, Video Games, whaling in Assassin's Creed IV, What to expect in Assassin's Creed IV


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Wuhan University
Wuhan University (WHU) is a comprehensive and key national university directly under the administration of the Ministry of Education. It is also one of the "211 Project" and "985 Project" universities with full support in the construction and development from the central and local government of China.
The history of Wuhan University can be traced back to Ziqiang Institute, which was founded in 1893 by Zhang Zhidong, the then governor of Hubei Province and Hunan Province in the late Qing Dynasty. In the process of development and evolution, the institute changed its name several times before it was finally named Wuhan National University in 1928. It is one of the earliest comprehensive national universities in modern China. By the end of 1946, the university had established 6 colleges, the colleges of liberal art, law, sciences, engineering, agriculture and medicine. In 2000, an amalgamation of the former Wuhan University, Wuhan University of Hydraulic and Electric Engineering, Wuhan Technical University of Surveying and Mapping, and Hubei Medical University was announced, which ushered in a new era in its 100-odd years of development.
For the past century, Wuhan University has built an elegant palatial architectural complex of primitive simplicity which blends perfectly the eastern architectural style with that of the west. It is honored as the "Most Beautiful University in China." Furthermore, Wuhan University's centennial humanistic accumulation boils down to its succinct motto, that is, "Self-improvement, Perseverance, Truth-seeking & Innovation."
Since its establishment, Wuhan University has cultivated more than 300 thousand professional talents in various occupations, among whom there are over 100 members of the Chinese Academy of Science and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. They have made great contribution to the national construction and social advancement. The remarkable achievements of Wuhan University have won itself an extensive international reputation. In 1999, the world renowned journal Science listed Wuhan University as one of the most prominent institutions of higher education in China.
Burgeoning are the international exchanges and cooperation of Wuhan University in recent years. It has established cooperative relationship with more than 415 universities and research institutes in over 45 countries and regions.
Now Wuhan University is endeavoring to shape itself into a world-class comprehensive research university domestically and internationally.
- Wuhan
Wuhan, China


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VirtualBox 3.1.6 released and download link included
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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Thank you for attending this presentation!
You can find the source code of the demo project on GitHub:
I couldn't present it to you, but if you want to take a look at it the project is built around the following technologies:
Download the PowerPoint presentation below:
Please feel free to contact me if you have any question about the presentation or the project.
I'm glad to announce that I will play at home March 28, 2018 7:00 PM at Lixar HQ for a presentation of Azure Notification Hubs!
Together we'll see how Azure Notification Hubs can make your life easier by giving you the ability to easily send millions of messages across multiple platforms.
In this 40 minutes session, we will discover Azure Notification Hubs through a presentation which will show you the main lines of the product, how to set it up with the Azure portal but also via ARM template.
Please note that in the same evening Eric Leonard will start the Meetup by giving a presentation about ARM Templates!
Doors open at 7 PM, and food and snacks will be served. Presentations will start around 7:30 PM.
If you are in Ottawa that night and want to learn more about Azure, Lixar will be the place to be, I hope to see you there!


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Egg and Dart – Urethane Crown Moulding – Pack of 4 – 96-1/8 in x 6 in x 7-7/8 in
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