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Zach: So Thank you for sending along that essay, and thanks for agreeing to talk with me – I’m really excited about having this conversation be part of the Undercommoning Project.
Zach: I really enjoyed reading both the “curricular objects” piece and the Critical Ethnic Studies piece again.
I guess if we could start out by you telling our theoretical listeners about — well, I guess from reading both of these pieces, one of your major scholarly interests seems to be the politics of institutionalization and disciplinarity. It seems like you’re reading it both as a form of capture but also as constitutive of the very conditions by which particular forms and fields of knowledge are shaped. I’m wondering how you became interested in that topic, and what your own history or genealogy of your approach to this topic is.
Nick: A couple things happened. I started grad school in 2005. So, a little over 10 years ago, and in the course of me being in graduate school, especially me being in graduate school in California, things just went wild – we had the financial crisis that played out more or less right in the middle of while I was studying for my PhD, and I was involved, to a certain extent, in the campus struggles in the UC system, especially in Santa Cruz, where I was studying for my PhD. I was living in Oakland at the time, so I was able to get involved with struggles at Berkeley as well. Along with that, I was also doing work, to a certain extent, in prison abolitionist organizations that were trying to think about — especially with regard to questions of state funding and institutional investments — what the relationships between the university and California’s investment in the prison system were.
At the same time, I started doing my PhD with the expectation that I was going to write on the discursive production of black masculinity in hip hop visual cultures, and realized pretty quickly that that wasn’t getting at the questions that felt urgent to me at the time. So I had some really good training, some really good comrades, that encouraged me to get deeply involved in studying the history of the field that made my study possible, and at the same time using that as an occasion to engage with the constitution of the university as the site that was making my own study possible. Two quarters of my six years in graduate school, I didn’t teach. The first quarter, I think it was my first year, my task was just to go into the library, I think the e187 section, which is how the Dewey Decimal System classifies black studies, and just try and read everything — to get a real immersion in what was where in the history of the field. Doing that gave me a deep appreciation of the amount of work that had gone into everything — the amount of sweat and tears and time.
Simultaneously, the constant struggles with the university to transform the labor conditions of graduate students contributed to the urgency of trying to think about what the contributions were of inhabiting the university at the moment, but also to think about when our movements were successful and when our movements weren’t successful how those successes and failures had to do with our own position in relation to the university. If nothing else, it gave me a real appreciation for both the extent and the degree to which social movements had been critical in the transformation of the university, but also to the ability of the university to respond — the university’s incredible flexibility to, if not absorb, to find inroads through the languages, through the demands, through the positioning and through the contradictions of social movements, and in some ways outmaneuver those very movements through those contradictions. Just inhabiting the university at the moment of that real complexity was really the foundation of the theories and projects that I’ve been involved with since.
Zach: it’s really interesting to hear you talk about the way that this project emerged from its own particular set of struggles, because it seems to me one that’s very attentive both to the longer duree of struggles over university resources and extra-university resources but also does have a lot to say about more contemporary moments. So, I wrote down a ton of question which fill up a page and a half of a google doc, and I’m a little worried that they’re all the same question. Hopefully we can kind of work through them and maybe have some kind of useful conversation will come out of them, but, uh, I’m warning you, I guess!
So I guess I wanted to start out by talking about the piece that you recently published in the Critical Ethnic Studies journal, which is a keywords piece on the Critical Ethnic Studies Intellectual. I think it’s a really powerful essay, and it gave me a lot to think through, and I think one of the most provocative aspects of it is the way you tackle “the material, discursive, and psychic forms that undergird a certain confidence that it is through knowledge that racial justice in one measure or another can be done.” You outline a series of fantasies that surround and constitute the intellectual. I’m wondering if you could talk about what you see as at stake in these fantasies, what work these fantasies of criticality and critique themselves do.
Nick: Well, the first thing I’d say is the terms the essay tries to sketch out, especially in thinking critically about the way that we think and talk about and perform critique, especially in the contemporary university, have to do with a set of conversations, and a set of works that have come out pretty recently. I’m thinking here certainly about Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons, I’m thinking about Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons, I’m thinking of course about Timothy Brennan’s important work in Wars of Position and his recent books, especially the one on Vico and Hegel – Borrowed Lights. And also Rita Felski’s recent book The Limits of Critique is something that I’m in conversation with but not necessarily in agreement with. So, what a lot of those works are pushing towards is reconsideration, at least, of the politics of critique.
I was invited to contribute a keyword to the inaugural issue of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal. I was present at the conference in Riverside in 2013 – critical ethnic studies and the future of genocide — and when I was writing that essay, I was just about to enter into a tenure track job at UC Riverside, so really the epicenter of this turn toward critical ethnic studies, which has been crucial in trying to reinvigorate the project of ethnic studies to try and confront the ways in which ethnic studies has in some ways become very complicit or comfortable with its positioning within liberal multiculturalist institutions – the same institutions that ethnic studies, at least in its inaugural moment, we imagine, was against.
I am, in the first instance, not the most convinced that, at least turning back to the historical record, that the oppositionality we would want to imagine ethnic studies having had in its inaugural moment, in the student-led social movements that were demanding it, was as opposed to the dominant logics of the university as it might be convenient to imagine that it was nowadays. And of course, we make our own historicities and we call on that history in order to try and animate the movements that we want to build today. So even if I think that’s not entirely accurate, I am definitely in step with so much of what the effort to reanimate ethnic studies through a turn toward criticality or critical ethnic studies would like to do, to embrace a radical, transformative, anticapitalist ethnic studies that imagines its aim as foremost being a critique of the dominant structuring logics and the historicities not only of the university but of global civil society writ large, whether it’s slavery, settler colonialism, global war, heteropatriarchy, genocide. Those languages are very important to my work.
And, at the same time, I think that what I want to do, and what I think that my contribution and the way that I approach my scholarship and activism pushes me to think, “what’s the investment in criticality, and what’s also motivating it beyond our own desires?” Part of what I wanted to get to there is these kinds of fantasies that we invest in, that make it so we can keep on going to work every day. It’s not easy to keep doing this work that’s extremely extractive in the university, to keep on imagining, and keep on imagining that we’re building momentum towards the movements that we want to build. Sometimes fantasy is the space where all the contradictions of our work can get resolved. It’s a psychic form through which all of these contradictions are playing out in particular. So thinking about the historicities of the kinds of fantasies that animate the critical work, and especially the critical turn in ethnic studies — where it all comes from is largely what’s at stake in that piece. First and foremost, the question for me is ‘what does fantasy crowd out?’ The fantasy of ethnic studies intellectualism.
My scholarship and activism pushes me to think, “what’s motivating our investment in criticality beyond our own desires?” What kinds of fantasies make it so we can keep on going to work every day and keep on imagining that we’re building momentum towards the movements that we want?.
And, just to back up for a second again, the reason that the essay focuses on the intellectual is that — rather than making pronouncements about the social world at the level of abstraction, which a lot of recent critical ethnic studies work has done, how do we make sense of the actual practitioner? The person who’s actually being inserted into the practice of critical ethnic studies?
So much of the fantasy I was thinking about had to do with the idea of criticality — criticality as an opportunity for renewal, criticality as an opportunity for communing with the version of the past that we imagine ourselves as in step with. Criticality as returning to the insurgent force of social movements that constituted ethnic studies. Just in the historical representation of the ethnic studies movements of the past, there’s already a kind of fantasy playing out. Some people will call it nostalgia. Nostalgia is certainly one way of representing it. I think in that piece I say that the dominant indication of the inaugural social movement that fought for ethnic studies often looks much more like family romance, like we could choose our own genealogy, choose our parents, rather than history. What brought ethnic studies into the university was not only social movements; it was the university itself, and that university was one that became in the course of engagement with social movements, incredibly adept in the absorption, rearticulation, and rerouting of activist desires into forms of institutionalization. By this I mean not only programs and departments, but schemas of labor, labor practices, and other social forms that were easily conformed with the transforming university that students were demanding in the context of ethnic studies. One of the arguments that I make in my book is that it’s actually an early form of university casualization that made black studies possible.
There’s a really direct history that gets us there. At San Francisco State, before the student strike where the Third World Liberation Front joined with the — I always get confused — at Yale the BSA, at San Francisco state, it was the BSU, the Black Student Union — so the Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union joined to demand a college of ethnic studies. The TWLF demanded 50 faculty positions. The Black Student Union demanded 20 faculty positions among other major demands. The BSU wanted across the board admission of all black students who applied to San Francisco State.
If we want to claim the radicality of the social and liberatory vision that emerged out the struggles of the late-60s we also need, simultaneously, to attend to the labor practices that emerged in that moment and that made it possible. If we’re thinking about the history of university casualization, this is a cycle that actually inaugurates it.
But the forms of study that make that possible emerge through an experimental college at San Francisco state that was institutionalized partly because of the intensely exploitative labor conditions that existed for San Francisco state faculty. There were professors there who were teaching 5-5 loads. One of the ways the San Francisco state administration responded to this glut of students for whom they needed classes was to institute an experimental college in which students could teach their own classes. All of the sudden, the university is extracting teaching labor from student populations. All of the sudden you have students who are paying fees – not necessarily tuition, to provide teaching labor for the university. If we’re thinking about the history of university casualization, this is a cycle that actually inaugurates it. So if we want to claim the radicality of the social vision and the liberatory vision that emerged out of that moment we also need, simultaneously, to attend to the labor practices that emerged in that moment and that made it possible. The forms of fantasy want to have one part of that history – the fantasies of that moment want the radicality without attending to the materiality of the labor practices that make it possible.
Another argument the book makes is that in this moment you see a major shift in the category of the adjunct. By the mid to late 60s the adjunct was still, not uniformly, but generally, kind of an honorific term. It was a term that acknowledged someone who had a form of expertise that the university desired, but who was employed elsewhere – who had a kind of full time employment elsewhere. But the university was acknowledging their specialization within a field, and therefore wanted to employ them and to use that expertise to benefit the student population, generally speaking. But the category of the adjunct becomes productive differently, in the context of trying to staff these emerging black studies, and, by the end of the 60s, women’s studies programs, where, by the turn of the seventies, there’s a full-fledged form of casualization that is being articulated through the adjuncts when university administrators realize it’s useful, particularly to be able to en masse hire people to be in these programs.
But also – this is how the administration is imagining that they can politically outmaneuver the student movements when there’s no longer the kind of large scale articulated force of student social movements, or when the political economy of universities has either pushed student activists out or graduated them (because graduated is a major term in the political economy of the university but one that masks it at the same time) it can either not rehire those same people who have been hired into the programs or fire them, as San Francisco state president (In the UC system the heads of different campuses are chancellors and at SFSC it was the president) so SFSC president Hayakawa, when the black studies faculty submitted their budget 20 minutes late, I believe in 1970, he just fired the entire department! They had no recourse. They weren’t tenure-track faculty. They had no structural recourse to protections. And then he just reconstituted black studies under his own vision.
Thinking about the specific kinds of labor conditions that were articulated within the institutionalization of black studies offers a different way of understanding that moment of emerging. But, because it doesn’t conform to the momentum and the shape of the desire that we ask when we’re fantasizing – when we want the past as a resource, it tends to get crowded out. My interest is in trying to embrace those contradictory moments to see what sense we can make of them when we think about what those movements signified in a fuller sense.
Zach: That’s really interesting – and my own research into very contingently related histories at other universities during the same time period confirms the same timeline of casualization. As you were talking about criticality, I was reminded of Moten and Harney’s line – I think they say that the critical intellectual is the privatization of the social through the professionalization of negligence, which is I think also what you’re building on, which is an incredibly provocative but generative analysis of what work universities do.
I’m also wondering – building of off that – and maybe I’m getting ahead of myself because I have a question I want to ask later about politics and “what is to be done” – I’m wondering (how) might Critical Ethnic Studies and folks working within it engage the university as a site of labor and as the fantastic/phantasmic commodity that their intellectual labor produces. What possibilities does this argument create for critical ethnic studies as a field-in-the-early-stages-of-defining-itself-as-a-field, and for allied fields?
Nick: I’m already getting at some of the terms that — for many good reasons, I think that in Ethnic Studies scholarship writ large just don’t get emphasized to the same kind of extent. I’m just finishing right now a graduate course called “feminist ethnic studies and the university.” One of the things I was trying to emphasize in that class was the irreducibility of labor without capitulating to a highly reductive form of old-school economic determinism. It’s also the reason why when you ask about fantasy, I go to labor, because I think that one of the reasons why fantasy is able to capture the force that it does, both in terms of inspiring us to try and build new intellectual-academic movements, while also as a term that seems to signify something labor isn’t. It’s one way in which the academic conditions of the labor environment get played out.
I would love to see a re-invigorated field-wide emphasis in ethnic studies on questions of labor while being attentive to histories of thinking about labor movements and without necessarily letting the dominant ways in which the subjectivities within labor history have been articulated predetermine the terms by which that inquiry would take shape.
I would love to see a re-invigorated field-wide emphasis in ethnic studies on questions of labor while both being attentive to histories of thinking about labor movements without necessarily letting the dominant ways in which the subjectivities within labor history have been articulated predetermine the terms by which that inquiry would take shape. I think one of the reasons I do that is just because I think it’s a useful thing to do when you’re engaging with graduate students. I think it’s particularly problematic to train graduate students in ethnic studies without training them in a way that allows them to theorize the institution that, ostensibly, they’re going to be entering into. Especially if you’re going to teach them to embrace the movements that made the field they’re going to be entering into as professionals possible.
So I think in that way it would be kind of a really important critical occasion to think about what would it mean to rearticulate some of our epistemological frameworks and theoretical frameworks in ethnic studies, not just in such a way that we can add labor to them, but [taking into account instead] how we’re already engaging with questions in which labor is at the center, but not articulated in a way that allows us to form political mobilization around them and think about different political coalitions that can emerge through and in relation to them. This, again, is where my formation is showing. I think workplace level organization is often times something that we’re doing but not necessarily understanding that we’re doing [it] at that level or thinking about the depth or the ways in which that might allow us to connect with other people who are working within the institution. I think the graduate student movements in the UC system have been pretty good at being able to do this, but I would just like to see it play out in scholarship a little bit more. I see the resources there. I see the thinking. It’s there.
I would certainly like to see, in the academy, people’s labor politics being more directly confronted. I have had, and people I know have had, rather horrific experiences with academic intellectuals who are considered radical, but their practical relationship to labor is not seen as an actual test of their radicality. That, to me, seems like an actual political failure.
And I just think in the critical pivot in ethnic studies, there’s a real opportunity to build a framework that can reinvigorate social movements in ways [we] haven’t necessarily been doing, or that aren’t necessarily visible within their present articulation. That’s one general framework within which I think this work can be done. I also think it would be, given certain experiences that people I know have had working in the field, I would certainly like to see, in the academy, people’s labor politics being more directly confronted. I have had, and people I know have had, rather horrific experiences with academic intellectuals who are considered radical, but their practical relationship to labor is not seen as an actual test of their radicality. That, to me, seems like an actual political failure. When people’s actual, on-the-ground labor politics is not one of the ways that we’re testing whether we think their scholarship is radical, then we have an actual epistemological divide and contradiction between what we think is radical scholarship and the very conditions that make it possible. So, having different ways of testing that, and having different ways of making it visible within the available-to-us scholarly frameworks, I think, is really urgent.
Zach: Yeah, I’ve certainly had similar experiences, and I think maybe one of the lessons of the wave of graduate employee labor struggles that stretched from late 80s and early 90s through the Brown Decision and the NYU Strike was the failure of the radical faculty member to step outside the managerial logic of the university. And I can cite personal examples.
Nick: I’m sure you can!
Zach: And I think it’s also important to be talking about labor, and labor in the university in, for lack of a better term, an intersectional way, in a moment when this kind of zombie class determinism seems on the march in the public sphere in a way that’s kind of puzzling, but that seems to reassert itself whenever some more radical understanding of how labor is inserted into other social phenomena is put forward, that under the sign of radicalism, or sometimes even under the sign of reaction, class gets held up in a way that wants to discipline those other forms.
Nick: And also — I don’t know if I’m at the place where I actually come out as the person who writes the low end theory blog, but I guess I’m there now. One of the things that I was trying to write about when I was writing in relation to the Occupy movement was the importance of not allowing the zombie class determinism — not implicitly accepting its terms in antiracist movement building. Because one of the unfortunate outcomes of that can be the way that antiracist social movements symptomatically imagine class — ultimately affirm class determinism — by understanding class as something that is white. Allowing the category of class to lose all of its critical purchase. And I continue to think it has extremely important critical purchase, but only if we don’t, from the outset, allow it to be a whitened category.
One of the things that’s at stake for me, and one of the real tests for me, in thinking about what’s the value of these critical turns within the fields in which I work is — it’s not only not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but also to really think politically about what’s available in these modalities of analysis that if we don’t allow them to be co-opted, or to be — if we don’t accept the terms on which they’re reinscribed through the dominant. In some ways, that contradiction led to the demise of so much of the momentum, at least on the Occupy Oakland front, because we couldn’t find a way to have a conversation about it, because the terms of the discussion, the terms of the dialogue, already presumed a certain racialized division between class and race that once it was accepted, was already over. Thinking about how to strategize around that is incredibly urgent and incredibly difficult, I continue to find.
Zach: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess with the time remaining, we should talk about the curricular objects piece a little bit, and one of the ways I wanted to transition was to think about the parallels – because you’re talking in that piece about the 1960s and 1970s, and the rise of women’s studies, and the way that it’s phrased in opposition to how black studies became a discipline. One of the most powerful things you do in that piece for me is framing the tension between “women of color” as a political subject, and “women of color” or “minority women” as a curricular object, which gets used to build women’s studies in a way that winds up buttressing racial liberalism in a kind of antiracist racism in ways that I think are really insightful – your read of it is really insightful and really provocative. Are there parallels between that moment in the sixties and seventies, and the one we’re in now (in the struggles that ethnic studies as a field is going through at the moment)?
Nick: Well, first of all, no historians would really call me a historian. I’m a bad one in the sense that I think that so many of my present political concerns are ones that I work out by turning to historical questions.
When I was writing the curricular objects piece, and the curricular objects piece, I should mention, for folks who’ll be listening to this — it’s not out, it’s been rejected twice from different journals. They want no part at all of it. [laughs.] I got one good readers’ report, so thank you to whomever anonymous reader who made some suggestions for it, but I also think that it’s intended to be a little bit provocative [laughs] because of the argument that is attempting to push against a prevailing tendency that is still very much with us today to invoke the language of women of color as a kind of uncompromised form of political subjectivity, and sometimes to use it as a vanguard of criticality. So, something about the animating conditions of that, to make it a little bit clearer.
The emergence of the term “women of color” says a lot about the institutional interests and needs of certain institutionally-privileged white women at the time in consolidating women’s studies as a field and also in investing, for reasons very good and also very problematic, women’s studies with antiracist credentials.
Part of it also goes back to the movement history of Occupy that I was just talking about, where I think I got myself into trouble with the people of color caucus for saying some things, and also what I thought were some of the uninterrogated class politics going on in that field. What the piece does is talk about the emergence of the category “women of color” through a lens that imagines that “women of color” does not simply have a genealogy of pure oppositionality, but is not in fact the autonomous self-naming, self-determining embraced category of women of color. In fact, its emergence says a lot about the institutional interests and needs of certain institutionally-privileged white women at the time in consolidating women’s studies as a field and also in investing, for reasons very good and also very problematic, women’s studies with antiracist credentials.
I was interested – and this is sort of a continued tendency that’s also in the Critical Ethnic Studies piece – in how these terms whose radicality is oftentimes taken for granted especially in the corners of the left that I consider my comrades as being located in is taken without too much question. What I was trying to do in “Curricular Objects” was just to mess with the confidence that animates those kinds of invocations of “women of color.” The lesson to be learned there that’s sort of alive to the present is we have this term “women of color” that’s often presented as inherently political or inherently radical, but there’s nothing beyond appropriation, and there’s nothing that gets established in the university, beyond curricularity or otherwise, that’s had the lifespan that women of color has, that is not in some way the outcome of a compromise with institutional liberalism. And that’s not a damning thing. It’s not a damning thing, but it’s a problem that we have to contend with. And so acting as if it’s not is not going to get us anywhere, and often it inures us to certain weaknesses in our politics or our analytical habits that we don’t have to have and that I think we would do well to learn from. [Learning from them] might offer different strategies, different angles of analysis, different forms of political imagination, might open up onto different political coalitions, or, they might open up questions that we already thought were solved.
So that’s the major stakes of the piece for me. I don’t know if that gets to the heart of the question, but it’s sort of operating in the background implicitly. I think it just goes back to what, for me, is an abiding concern about antiracism: that there’s no inherent revolutionary value in antiracism by itself. That antiracism is such a complicated and varied historical phenomenon, and this is something that I think that Jodi Melamed of course argues to a brilliant extent. It’s something that one of my continued antagonists, but one of the figures I find both the most frustrating and fascinating in the Black radical tradition, Adolph Reed, is always kind of pushing up against.
There’s no inherent revolutionary value in antiracism by itself.
But I would have to say, some of his writings, especially his writings in the 80s on the black revolution are, I would say, indispensable to thinking some of these questions, and got to questions that people in ethnic studies today are resuscitating as “cutting edge.” He was saying them in ‘79. The way that he does his politics I have all sorts of questions about. I do not share every conclusion with him, but when Adolph Reed writes, I read what he writes. There’s no inherency to antiracism because the meaty […] historical phenomenon that it embodies accommodates so much of the political spectrum that to say that one is antiracist oftentimes today says nothing. And so to be very explicit about what we mean by antiracism, and to put content to that, and to put questions of what we mean when we say antiracist to the test and to think critically and reflectively on them rather than allowing antiracism on its own to be a term that can signify some transparently left value, I think, is a problem.
I think it’s important today that activists pretty much across the board all want to imagine themselves as antiracists – i think that is generally great, but… If we want to actually learn something, if we want to create more rigorous politics, let’s actually get into what that means as a historical phenomenon.
Zach: Absolutely. So that kind of dovetails into my next question which is how or whether you see a similar logic of antiracism, official or otherwise, at work in the contemporary institutional framing and response to the movement against racialized police violence and what kinds of relations of force, what kinds of fields of power/knowledge are being produced through this contemporary moment of struggle and cooptation.
Nick: I think I would have gotten myself into trouble with Black Lives Matter in a way similar to how I got into trouble with Occupy, but I think that Black Lives Matter today is in some ways more interesting to me than what I found interesting or frustrating about Occupy. Especially because, from the start, having to do with the ways black lives matter has emerged through alternatives to traditional forms, especially within the context of black politics — traditional forms of institutionalized leadership. And so, the fact that you’ve got a movement at which queer black women, queer black gender non-conforming folks have been really at the heart of, I think is extremely important, and is not something I could have anticipated. It’s something I think is super, super, super exciting. I think it’s great.
BLM is a movement at which queer black women, queer black gender non-conforming folks have been really at the heart. I think is extremely important, and is not something I could have anticipated. I think the real question on the movement end is “what is the vision of success.” What is the interpretation of the origins of policing? Of police violence? What solutions does it call for? What movement strategies does it open onto? Who is the movement linking up with?
Then, at the same time, some of the problems with the history of black leadership still make themselves felt: the class constitution of the leadership, the ways in which police violence as an issue can often be extracted from larger structural questions. I think the real question on the movement end is “what is the vision of success.” What is the interpretation of the origins of policing? Of police violence? What solutions does it call for? What movement strategies does it open onto? Who is the movement linking up with? In general, movements against police violence have a structure that puts into place a certain kind of, if not leadership, spokesmanship: certain people being positioned as the people who speak for black people. I think, as always, it’s important to be critical of this. Who emerges as the leaders? What questions come to the forefront?
The unexpected turn of BLM recently toward the campus movement — and the folks both in Robin Kelley’s recent essay in the Boston Review and the folks responding to it have said this better than I can. The unexpected turn both raises a really important moment for that movement to expand in ways no one might have anticipated in the Ferguson moment but that I would love to see, and… both a deeper analysis of… what does it mean to say that this is the same as the Ferguson moment? Is it the same thing as the Ferguson moment?
In a sense, if this were other movements, and there were other populations who had stepped into this moment, we might call it appropriative, in fact, but partly because we don’t generally in the US Left, when we talk about black politics have a reflex way of thinking about “what is the class constitution of the kind of movements that conduct antiracism,” it’s very easy to imagine that movements that are taking place on college campuses are the same thing as movements where poor and working class people, many of whom don’t necessarily have the same institutional access to universities, many of whom do, but many of whom do not have the same kind of institutional access to universities go out in the streets and refuse to go home.
I think actually being able to embrace the complexity of what’s happened in that shift, especially in the shift from Ferguson to understanding Black Lives Matter as part of a movement that’s going on on college campuses, it raises a different set of contradictions.
I think actually being able to embrace the complexity of what’s happened in that shift, especially in the shift from Ferguson to understanding Black Lives Matter as part of a movement that’s going on on college campuses, it raises a different set of contradictions. It’s one that we can expect to see, of course, within any given movement, but one that if we don’t have the right kinds of lenses and we don’t ask the right kinds of questions, then contradictions that are there and are consequential in the way these movements play out don’t become visible to us.
One of the best articulations of campus student demands — I think they’re more radical than the SF State demands from the sixties! — especially in the context of neoliberalism. The student demands that were made by the Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union were not fundamentally at odds with the form of Keynesianism that was present within the US military liberalism of the time. The UNC demands are fully at odds with the educational logic of neoliberalism. So even if you imagine this movement as an appropriative one, then I think it might actually allow us to also come to terms with the radical inflections of the demands that are actually being articulated in ways that we might otherwise not appreciate – the different contours of the struggles playing out.
Zach: Last question: You draw, particularly in the Critical Ethnic Studies piece, on Moten and Harney’s Undercommons essay in what I think are really interesting and exciting ways, and you’re careful to frame your critique of the oppositionality of ethnic studies as an additive one — we can’t just do this, we also have to do this. I’m wondering where this leaves a formulation – where your critique of these disciplinary formations and intellectual formations, even radical intellectual formations as themselves always historically — I shouldn’t say always – you’re very historically specific with your account whether or not you or historians want to call you a historian, but I’m wondering where this leaves a formation like the undercommons – (I have to ask this because we’re the undercommoning project.) I’m wondering if that’s a term that has meaning for you, if that’s a useful way of understanding a scholarly collectivity to which you feel allegiance or you think is a useful political frame. And the other way of asking this is the “what is to be done” question, the question of the ways subjects of the university, within or beyond it, respond to or resist its discipline – the question about whether there’s a beyond to critique, and is that a useful question for you.
Nick: So I don’t think that Moten and Harney would take it as a slight to say that I don’t think I always understand what the undercommons is. And I think their refusal to define it as such is part of its generativity. It’s a necessary part of its generativity. It’s also part of what can be frustrating about it. And, you know, that’s what we work with. The part that’s more of a historian in me – i joke sometimes that to critical theorists, I’m a historian, to historians, I’m a critical theorist — the part of of me that’s a historian wants a “who,” — who do we mean when we’re talking about the undercommons. But I also embrace the generativity of the formulation – especially because I think the question of who is part of the logic that even people who find something animating in the term can find different fronts of struggle available to them that are extremely important.
As someone who occupies a tenure track position in a university, for me to say “I’m in it, but not of it” can feel a little bit disingenuous. It almost feels like, “I get to have my cake, I get to take home my paycheck, and also to claim that I am not part of the dominant logic of the institution, that it does not articulate itself through me.” Of course it does!
Within the general formulation of the undercommons by Moten and Harney, I think you definitely see this again in the Kelley piece and the dossier responding to it in Boston Review: one of the moments of important, profound confusion comes in when they’re talking about their relationship to the university being “in, but not of,” it. For me, I think this is the one that continues to raise a lot of questions. Who can claim that, from what position? And again, I don’t know if what I imagine when I’m thinking of “in the university but not of it” is the same thing that they would be thinking, or is the same thing that Robin Kelley is thinking when he’s evoking it, and the other people do. Actually wrangling with the phrase is part of what I think is useful but also vexing in the struggle over it. Who is in it? Who is of it? And for whom does that distinction mean something meaningful? To be in it and not of it. Does that place a privilege on the political gesture of refusal? To whom is that gesture available? To whom is it recognizable? To whom is it useful? As someone who occupies a tenure track position in a university, for me to say “I’m in it, but not of it” can feel a little bit disingenuous. It almost feels like, “I get to have my cake, I get to take home my paycheck, and also to claim that I am not part of the dominant logic of the institution, that it does not articulate itself through me.” Of course it does!
I think that can be part of the same kind of fantasy structure that I want to push against a little bit. And at the same time, it certainly animates important thinking about our relationship to the university. I think that, “Yeah! Repurpose the university.” Thinking about what it means to steal it, what it means to steal from it, what it means to violate the university’s property claim is an extremely important political question. Stealing from it doesn’t simply mean taking things from it, but also thinking about how to use its spaces, the dominant property claim of the university, for work that it would expel from the field. And at the same time I also think that we can use the imagination that people bring to the university that is generated by the university, and also repurpose that.
So when I think about the undercommons not necessarily as an existing coalition or collectivity we can bring to bear, but as a set of questions about how to use the institution and how to refuse the ways in which the question of our relationship to the institution is given to us in advance, I think can be an extremely generative formulation. And at the same time, like anything, I think that we ask, what are the desires that this kind of collectivity and these kinds of questions are doing for us? What’s the work that they are doing on us? My relation to it isn’t markedly different from any of the field formations or the object formations or the conceptual questions that I tend to work with in general would be, at the end of the day.
Zach: Thanks so much, that was great! Is there anything I haven’t asked that you want to respond to or say?
Nick: I think it’s really important for folks to think about the political economy of the university, but to think about how we can denaturalize it — meaning thinking about how it naturalizes itself, through the terms of opportunity and achievement. The way I start out the class that I mentioned before – the feminist ethnic studies in the university class – I actually assign Marc Bousquet’s book – and the challenge that I present to students is, “this is not a book where feminism as an object of analysis, where race as an object of analysis are central, and the point of this class is to get us to a point where the stuff that Bousquet is talking about in this book becomes, unquestionably, the object of feminist and critical race analysis.” Let’s not leave those questions to the parts of the field where they’re unmarked.
I guess the thing that’s been animating me nowadays and that I forgot to talk about, in your question about the movement against police violence, is, well, I hope that the Left can do more nowadays, and I could talk all day about even the usefulness of the Left as a political abstraction. But what the left, however fictional, should imagine as part of its work nowadays is to think about the historical demand for black vanguardism. Which is to say: the demand, which is sometimes nostalgically embraced in present day scholarship, to imagine that black struggle is always already the forefront of Left struggle. I think there is oftentimes, even for people I consider my comrades, an unquestioned way in which this happens.
I think that sometimes its political effects can be really, really problematic in the sense that we don’t account for the historicity of the demand for black vanguardism being one where the only way in which black subjects imagine themselves to be heard is by saying that our liberation is everyone’s liberation. “Our liberation is everyone’s liberation, and therefore our demands for black freedom are the most radical.” The factuality of that kind of statement is less based on analysis of the given circumstances as much as on the reproduction of a kind of condition of black legibility. Its effects can be seen not only on the demands that are placed on black subjects to imagine themselves as the most radical, the forefront of the struggle, or, by contrast, as the most oppressed, but also in the inability of the Left to recognize certain forms of complicity with neoliberalism that articulate themselves as black radicalism. Being able to recognize, to historicize that, and to think critically about that, and to not be complicit with the form of racism that says that we don’t need to think when black people speak, I think is really important right now.
The unthinking relationship to black politics is problematic not only because it perpetuates a form of racism, but also because — and i’m going to use a term that I hate — it’s not also able to recognize the forms of really hard-won excellence that have come out of black politics. I’m seeing that continually as one of the most important questions that I want to keep asking of contemporary politics.
Zach: Seems like there are really important questions around commodification there too.
Zach: Well, I can’t wait to see what comes out of that work, and to read your book when it comes out, and thank you again, so much.

industry_corpus2: Subject Education


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The American Heart Association has awarded UM UCMC and UM HMH Gold Plus and Target: Stroke Elite Honor Roll recognition in the Get With The Guidelines-Stroke® program.
In Maryland, a stroke patient arrives at the hospital every thirty minutes. Stroke affects over 800,000 people each year and is the leading cause of disability in the United States. Both of our hospitals have accredited Primary Stroke Centers and are fully equipped to treat people experiencing a stroke. Having a dedicated and well-coordinated team specializing in the care of acute stroke patients improves outcomes.
BE FAST is a quick way to spot a possible stroke. If you or someone around you is exhibiting these symptoms call 911 immediately.
Even kids can recognize the signs of stroke! This video will help you detect stroke symptoms and B.E. F.A.S.T.

industry_corpus2: Health & Medicine


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This is is the part of the locking mechanism which operates all the hooks bolts rollers on the multi point strip. Locksmiths Local To You! 00 plus parts if required Yale lock changes from £ 60. Yale Doormaster Repair Lock Multi- point locks can become worn tired break over time.
Yale Doormaster™ replacement multi- point locks allow you to replace your existing lock without the need to replace your whole door. Many glazed windows may be opened closed, to allow ventilation to exclude inclement weather. 00 uPVC door problems from £ 48. A window is an opening in a wall vehicle that allows the passage of light, roof , door, sound air.
The most common problem with PVC windows is that the sash won' t close properly against the seal, which means you will lose money when the heat escapes outside. Check hinges: Close your sash and check the hinge side. Our focus on customer service value for money makes us the number one choice for major companies home owners alike. Espagnolette UPVC Window Lock Specialist. Often referred to as Espagnolette locks, we stock all the major brands spanning over the last 30 years. All of our locksmiths are experts in lock repairs replacements for both commercial domestic clients.
Ironically, a broken gearbox is usually caused by the door being misaligned. Pre- booked labour rates from £ 48.
The photo eye will be about 4- 6 inches off of the ground for most doors, with an eye that is about the size of a pea. It shoots a laser across the length. Simple to fit & very easy to set up. How to repair upvc door mechanism.
Modern windows are usually glazed covered in some other transparent , translucent material frame are also referred to as a window. Huge range of replacement locks for UPVC windows. Window Doctor - Essex. Most things can be repaired quickly you do not have to go to the expense of totally replacing your trouble windows doors.
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Most garage doors from the past 15- 20 years have a photo eye which detects if a person or object is blocking the door from lowering all the way. If you’ re looking for a specific model even if we don' t have it we have the connections to find it for you. Call the Window Doctor for repairs to windows doors conservatories in Essex.
The problem is caused either with the lock the hinges a dropped sash. We specialise on finding most double glazing related products but especially Upvc door locks any make , bolts model. When you have problems with your windows doors your first stop should be the Window Doctor!
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Espag type window mechanisms. A very versatile replacement window lock mechanism for UPVC windows where the locking system has failed.

industry_corpus2: Real Estate & Construction


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Nordic4 provide teaching sessions for pupils at Stoke Bishop Primary School in Assembly time. Arrangement for this is made by the school. If you would like your child to learn Nordic Walking out of school please go to: Nordic4Kids Out and About Club.
Payment is made online at the time of booking. Payment is for single or a block of lessons per term.


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Citation: Franzluebbers, A.J., Stuedemann, J.A. 2002. Soil c, n, and p from poultry manure on grazed and ungrazed bermudagrass in the southeastern USA. World Congress of Soil Science.
Interpretive Summary: The impact of animal manure application to grasslands is of portance to the understanding of agronomic and animal productivity, soil quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental quality. Pastures have the potential to serve as a significant sink for carbon sequestered in soil organic matter. Efficient utilization of nitrogen is of concern agronomically and environmentally. Plant production can be limited by low levels of available phosphorus due to high phosphorus fixation capacity in soils of the southeastern USA. On the other hand, there is increasing concern about the excessive application of phosphorus to soil, especially when manure application rate is based upon nitrogen content. Broiler litter fertilization was effective at increasing extractable soil phosphorus to an agronomically acceptable level (50 to 60 mg/kg/15-cm depth) during the first five years, but continued application could lead to excessive soil phosphorus accumulation that could threaten water quality from surface runoff unless appreciable soil fixation or removal of forage biomass were to occur. Cattle grazing systems were effective at sequestering soil carbon and nitrogen in surface soil organic matter.
Technical Abstract: We evaluated the changes in soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) during the first five years of bermudagrass [Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.] management varying in fertilization [(1) inorganic, (2) crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum L.) cover crop plus inorganic, and (3) chicken (Gallus gallus) broiler litter] and harvest strategies [(1) unharvested, (2) low and (3) high cattle (Bos taurus) grazing pressure, and (4) haying). Fertilization strategy had the greatest impact on total and extractable soil P, while soil organic C and total soil N were minimally affected. At a depth of 0 to 6 cm, extractable soil P increased at a rate of 0.8 mg/kg/yr (4 % of total P added) with inorganic only, 2.4 mg/kg/yr (9 % of total P added) with clover + inorganic, and 8.7 mg/kg/yr (6 % of total P added) with broiler litter fertilization. Soil organic C sequestration during the first five years of management was similar between low and high cattle grazing pressures (1400 kg/ha/yr), but much less in unharvested (650 kg/ha/yr) and hayed (290 kg/ha/yr) management. With cattle grazing of forage, fertilizer contributed to forage and animal production and 67-75% of the total N applied was subsequently stored as total soil N.

industry_corpus2: Agriculture & Fisheries


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Lake Placid ice skates are an American winter tradition. Originally sold under the Aerflyte Shoe Company name in the ‘30’s, Lake Placid has been providing quality, affordable ice skates for many decades.
Lake Placid offers a full range of products, from children’s starter skates to full-grain leather figure skates and recreational hockey skates.
Whether you are going to the rink or skating outside on the frozen pond, Lake Placid skates are built for fun by offering both traditional designs and modern comforts. You can find unique features such as adjustable sizing, warm fuzzy linings, and glove-friendly closures in today’s lineup.
Lake Placid is part of the Roller Derby® family of brands. Roller Derby © has a rich history as "America’s Skate Company". Established in 1936, Aerflyte Shoe company made roller skates and ice skates and later became known as Roller Derby © and Lake Placid. Along with Pacer (America’s iconic rink skate) and Tour (roller hockey), the family of brands continue the tradition of providing skating products to millions of Americans.

industry_corpus2: Sports


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The S-617 is located on the first floor corner and features a 1 card attached garage.
The A-796 is a unique layout featuring a jack and jill bathroom, and walk in closet.
The A-724 features an island kitchen with ample storage, large walk in closet, and huge bathroom with his and her sinks and built in shelving. Extra large balcony.
The A-786 features an island kitchen with ample storage, large walk in closet, and huge bathroom with his and her sinks and built in shelving. Hardwood flooring, Columbus Skyline, Pool, Courtyard view options.
The A-862 is an end apartment with extra windows, an island kitchen with ample storage, large walk in closet, and huge bathroom with his and her sinks and built in shelving. Extra large balcony. Hardwood flooring, Columbus Skyline, Pool, Courtyard view options.
The A-910 is our largest 1 bedroom option and features a large kitchen with extra cabinetry, island kitchen, spacious living room, huge walk in closet, and enormous master suite.
The A-820 is an end apartment featuring an island kitchen and attached 1 car garage.
The C-1048 features an open living room with multiple windows, large master suite, and den. Columbus Skyline view option.
The C-1001 is an end apartment featuring extra windows, a large master suite with walk in closet. Cathedral ceiling, hardwood flooring, Columbus Skyline view options.
The C-1097 is located on the 1st floor facing the courtyard and features a 1 car attached garage.
The C-1157 is an end apartment featuring multiple oversized windows. Great master suite. Hardwood flooring, Columbus Skyline, Pool, and courtyard view options.
The C-1189 is an end apartment featuring multiple oversized windows. Great master suite. Hardwood flooring, Columbus Skyline, Pool, and courtyard view options.
The C-1213 features a spacious living area with walk in closets and a 1 car attached garage.
The TH-1305 is a two level townhome featuring bedrooms on each floor and has a 1 car attached garage.
The TH-1394 is a two level townhome featuring 20 ft cathedral ceilings in the living area, spacious bedrooms, a loft, and had a 1 car attached garage. Hardwood flooring options.
The TH-1545 is a two level townhome featuring an enormous living and dining area, island kitchen, spacious bedrooms, a loft, and had a 1 car attached garage. Hardwood flooring options.
The TH-1621 is our largest two level townhome option featuring an enormous living and dining area, spacious bedrooms, a loft, and had a 1 car attached garage.


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Poland’s current missile defence system comprises six missile battalions armed with obsolete, Soviet-made, S-125 Neva (SA-3 Apollo) missiles. Only one also boasts a long range S-200 Vega (SA-5 Gammon) system. Experts note that, in its current state, Poland's air defence system is simply unable to provide effective defence against an enemy attack.
The bill calls for a missile modernization budget of $2.5-3.7 billion from 2014 through 2023. There are plans to involve other countries, in particular France and Germany, in this modernization effort. The new system would stand alongside U.S. missile defence facilities, becoming part of NATO’s broader air and missile defence system.
The Ministry of Finance has plans to take out a loan of €1 billion from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to support local investments. The additional funds would be used to support projects in less developed regions, worth a combined €3.5 billion.
According to the Ministry of Finance, the funds will be distributed as grants for investment-related local projects for regional governments, although at this point it is impossible to designate specific areas that will receive the aid.
Andrzej Porawski, director of the Association of Polish Cities, was pleasantly surprised by the idea, but voiced concerns as to how the money will be distributed. Nevertheless local governments hope that the additional grants will above all help to finalize projects subsidized by the EU, since they are finding it increasingly difficult to put together the sums needed.
With the import season for tomatoes in Poland less than a month away, warm weather in Sicily, where a portion of those tomatoes are sourced, is expected to hamper early volume. As the season progresses, however, strong demand should be met with increasing supplies.
“We already know that, in the beginning, the quantity of tomatoes from Sicily will be lower than in other years,” said Rene Noordam of Schego Fruit Company in Poland. With domestic supplies winding down, October is usually when large quantities of tomatoes are imported. But with high temperatures during the growing season in Sicily, Noordam predicts early volumes from that region will lag.
“The summer was too hot and a lot of growers had to replant,” he said. “We expect quantities to really come one month later, in November.” He said that they will have to find supplies from other countries in the meantime since demand will only get stronger when the domestic season ends, especially because most of their tomatoes come from Sicily. But he's confident they'll be able to do that while they wait for their usual supplies to kick in.

industry_corpus2: Aerospace


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Records for all care at this facility or by this doctor.
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I understand that Towne Lake Eye Associates may not condition treatment on my signing this authorization and that I have a right to refuse to sign this authorization. A fax copy or photocopy of this consent shall be as valid as the original.
Fee Schedule: In accordance with state and federal laws, the following fees may be charged to offset the cost associated with the reproduction of records: Base fee of $23.84 plus $0.89/ page for the first 20 pages, $0.77/page for pages 21-100, and $0.60/page for each page in excess of 100 pages.


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We have a LIVE interview with Andrew and Brenna Byrd, linguist professors at the University of Kentucky who created the Wenja language in Far Cry Primal. They maintain an online presence called "Speaking Primal" and take questions on their Twitter feed. This interview beings 24 minutes into the podcast.
But first, I got to try the HTC Vive Pre and I talk about why it's probably going to be the best VR hardware to come out in 2016, and why it's the most expensive.
I put out a documentary/movie/video thing on the Voice of Geeks Network YouTube channel documenting my road trip to MAGFest because I did it in a Tesla Model S 70D - an all electric vehicle.

industry_corpus2: Gaming


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So, my original intent with this particular post and the awesome custom flooring inspiration was to share that we had bought a new condo and what flooring should I choose? But alas, it was not to be! I could write a whole entire blog on real estate woes (and quite frankly given the state of the nation at this moment real estate should really be the least of my issues and I’m grateful for luxury problems and I realize that). But after over a year of searching we finally found a pretty much close to perfect condo (I live in South Florida, you don’t buy a house here, you buy a condo or co-op. Like Geico says, “it’s what you do.”). So, this baby was perfection (as close as you can get I guess): in our price range, super well-built, did not need a lot of work, and best of all, you guys, the view!. The view was a spectacular, sweeping view of downtown Ft. Lauderdale, right on the river, close enough to wave to the boats as they cruised by. Gorgeous! So all last week I was already mentally decorating the new spot (does anyone else mentally redecorate?) and planning it all out.
But alas, due to a final hour contract clause, it simply was not to be, no fault of our own just one little thing that we couldn’t live with. So I’ve been battling real estate disappointment this week, I had even taken to running past the condo, thinking of it as mine, giving it a little wave. See what you get for doing that?! Ha! So we’re back to the real estate search though I’m somewhat inclined to just give the whole thing a rest and stay renting for awhile, things seem so up in the air here, a cabin in Vermont is actually kind of starting to look pretty good. Thanks for listening to me ramble, if you have a real estate woe story of your own leave me a comment, I’d love to hear it, and have a wonderful Friday!


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Every few months we like to put together a list of strikers hoping to expand the horizons of fight fans. When there is breathing room in the jam packed schedule of MMA events it’s always nice to unwind and explore exciting new styles through film study. We have racked up quite a list of strikers through our previous articles. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 are all worth a read. So open up YouTube, break out your notepad, and let's get going.
The world of Muay Thai can be hard to follow for anyone who doesn't speak the language. It also lacks a user friendly way of viewing a fighter's record, which makes the sport difficult to follow outside of Thailand. Then there are the names: Muangthai is currently fighting under the name Muangthai P.K Saenchaimuaythaigym but that will change if he changes gym. However it is well worth searching 'Muangthai' every few weeks just to see if he's been up to anything. Muangthai is called the 'King of the Elbow' and it is for good reason. I have often referred to Nate Corbett with this title but where Corbett boxes into his elbows, Muangthai's elbows come from everywhere and arrive in an instant. Often checking both of his opponent's hands or trying to reach behind them with a pincer motion, Muangthai loves to drag his foe's guard forward and either knee them in the gut.
Or fold his elbow over behind their guard.
But as his opponents move to check these basic attempts Muangthai makes more creative paths with his strikes. Here Muangthai's opponent raises his hands wide and Muangthai's elbow shoots straight to the target. It is tough to throw a 'straight' elbow because the arm does not uncoil to cover distance as it does on a punch but in a few inches Muangthai can get the force he needs to not just cut the opponent but knock him out cold.
The beauty of Muangthai's work is that his hand could be on his opponent's forearm, biceps, or even behind their head and he will still find a way to arc in an elbow strike through a position that would have most of us feeling like we're putting our shoulder into an Americana.
While knockouts are not as common in Muay Thai as sports which discourage extended clinchwork, and elbow knockouts are even rarer, Muangthai has earned a reputation as a ferocious finisher and you could certainly waste your time in less enjoyable ways than watching this relentless young man ply his trade.
For a detailed look at some of Muangthai's earlier work I highly recommend this article from Muay Thai Analyst.
The first competitor in the game of bare-knuckle boxing to make the list, Jimmy Sweeney is still only our second bare fisted fighter. Tway Ma Shaung, the legend of Burmese Lethwei, was our first bareknuckle fighter and the knees, throws, kicks and headbutts (which are completely legal under the rules of Lethwei) make Sweeney's semi-legal sport seem a little more tame. For those who have ever tried to learn what's going on in the bareknuckle boxing scene you will know it’s just a mess of people complaining about who won't fight whom—so the game is catching up to professional boxing in that sense—but Sweeney isn't on this list because he's the best, frankly I wouldn't know. He's on the list because he's got a damned entertaining style and he's made it work in every contest I've seen him in even if he is fighting opponents who seem to have little classical boxing ability. It is also a style which highlights the difference between fighting with big gloves, and fighting without.
Apparently a competent amateur boxer before he began fighting bareknuckle, Sweeney's in and out footwork shows the difference in the class of competitor he is now facing. Simple, swift retreats are enough to confuse most of his opponents and create the distance through which he can time his counters. Hanging his lead hand out wide he will flick in a left hook to the temple as the opponent moves forwards. While a glove can add weight to a blow, it also adds weight to the arm. Shorter punches which look like a flick of the wrist can become more authorative without the gloves on.
The lack of the extra weight on his hands also means that Sweeney can rotate his hands in front of his opponent's vision with impunity, even making the 'wax-on, wax-off' motion of Mr. Miyagi. These are simply applications of the old idea of milling. Circling the arms to hide a quick lead. Flicking jabs have proven a good weapon for Sweeney. While most of Sweeney's opponents are inexperienced enough to run onto his counters it would be fascinating to see what work he could do over a lengthy battle with his jab because cuts are so much easier to open without gloves.
While Sweeney does a lot of work to the head, most of his power hitting comes on the counter or after a very cautiously set up right hand against a stationary opponent. Fighting bareknuckle provides more of a threat to a fighter's hands than the opponent's consciousness if he connects with the wrong part of the skull or an elbow. Here Sweeney steps in to dig in a good body shot, note that he throws this with considerably more force than many of his blows to the head. Bonus points if you notice how, amid his arm waving antics, Sweeney's right palm stays up to protect him from the path of his man's jab as he gets into range to deliver the short dig to the body.
While the sport of bareknuckle boxing is unlikely to ever get an influx of quality athletic talent and accomplished boxers, it would be fascinating to see how close this form of fighting came to resembling the pugilism of the pre-gloved days if it became an accepted sport.
Jeff Fenech won his first professional title just seven fights into his professional career. While we have all been spoiled by the brilliant Vasyl Lomachenko doing the same in just his third fight, Fenech's feat has been made no less astounding. But it is style which gets Fenech in on our list. It isn't always pretty, and it isn't always clean, but Jeff Fenech was a pressure cooker. When Fenech got to the inside, especially along the ropes, he could have his way with the best boxers in the business. We would think that kind of in-the-kitchen grittiness unusual on an accomplished amateur today, with amateur boxing often favoring clean, easily seen points scored on the outside. Fenech had some class on the outside too, but he drove his pace best with his head buried in the chest or pressed into the forehead of his opponent and both hands working.
The thing about inside fighting is that fighters often make it more complicated than it needs to be. If a fighter isn't doing anything about a particular punch, the infighter can just beat that idea like a dead horse until the opponent does. The great Roberto Duran combined a scientific boxing style with a rougher edge which saw him happily beat a man over the head with the same punch again and again until an adjustment was made. Jeff Fenech was the same, he would sometimes triple or quadruple up on a punch just to make sure the opponent was having to deal with it before he would change target.
Never the biggest single punch hitter, Fenech's game was to wear opponents down and have them fall from exhaustion. Nowhere was this more clear than in his fight against Samart Payakaroon, the great Nak Muay turned boxing world champion. Cutting the ring on Samart, Fenech had him sprinting to get off the ropes and by the second round Samart's legs had begun to slow and he couldn't keep Fenech off him.
One of Australia's greatest fighters and a terrific example of pressure and pace in action amid slick flurries of work on the inside.


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Abilene, Texas is known for its sunny days, an average of more than 200 per year. That does not, however, mean that the residents there don’t get their share of storms each year. The severe weather that Houston typically gets is thunder storms, but it is not unheard of for the residents to have some effects from hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico and the occasional tornado. Thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornados and windstorms can seriously damage a home causing the homeowner to need a professional experienced in storm damage repair to handle all the work.
Disaster Pros of Abilene, Texas is your local storm damage repair professional. We understand that the process of repair sometimes requires immediate attention, so we are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to meet your needs when you need. As a FEMA approved contractor, we are experienced with disaster recovery and repair. We has been in business for more than 30 years, and we have worked hard to earn and maintain our excellent reputation and our “A” rating with the Better Business Bureau. Customer service is our number one priority and we don’t consider any job complete until you, our customer is 100% satisfied. We offer a best price guarantee as well. This means that no one will beat our prices. All of our technicians are IICRC certified, so you can rest assured that they have the knowledge necessary to bring your home back to pre-storm condition. The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification is a non-profit organization who has long set the strict standards for storm damage repair. Our technicians will always meet those standards, but they will always strive to go beyond those standards for our customers.


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Nailing sidings to a wall is simple but if not done properly, the ugly features are really noticeable. Before most people used framing nailers but due to its extreme power which results in a rough finish, the siding nailers came in.
Simple task but without the right tool, the job gets nasty. It’s best if you’ll know how to choose the best power siding nailer that suits your need. Here, we’re showing the things you need to consider when buying your power siding nailers. Likewise, we included an in-depth product review for the top 10 best units for 2019.
This simply means the alignment of nails to fit inside a single magazine. Most units today can accommodate both plastic and wire-collated nails. Plastic collated nails are much affordable compared to wire-collated ones. However, they are less durable and more breakable compared to the other type.
In contrast, wire-collated or weld-wire collated nails are like thin metal strips attached to the nails. It’s more durable and reliable which justifies its slightly higher cost.
To give you wider options for work, better choose a siding nailer which can accommodate various sizes of nails. The common nail sizes are 1-1/4 to 2-1/2 inches.
When doing siding works, speed and the quality of nail matters more than power. Excessive power is not that ideal for it poses a higher risk for damaging the wall.
Doing siding works sometimes places you in a difficult physical position. Hence, most power siding nailers are lightweight and have a good rubberized handle for a comfortable and easy work condition.
It is sometimes unavoidable to have debris scattering around when doing this kind of job. To ensure user’s safety, most units have a protective guard against nail and debris coming towards the user.
Buying this power tool is an investment, hence, it must be durable enough to last several times of work. A unit made from aluminum or magnesium metal gives a more durable build.
For the price, you’ve got to pair with quality. Oftentimes, quality supersedes price. Spending a few extra bucks for quality is a good choice rather than buying cheap ones but would not last long.
The tool has a solid and balanced build, not to mention it comes with a great plastic molded case. It had no jamming or misfiring issues when used on cedar shingles. Its depth adjustment guide works great and no problems about marring or splitting once it’s set. Loading the nails comes really quick and the hook for hanging the tool on your side is so reliable. Great tool to have and worth the price.
But the trouble is you’ll need to buy the quick connect plug for air and the lube too.
This mini siding nailer impressed me with its sufficient power and speed. Very affordable and quality pneumatic siding nailer. I like its compact and solid build which adds extra versatility.
However, it is not that capable of driving a 10D or 16D galvanized nails to any depth.
This tool is really affordable and performs well for the task. It’s lightweight and the rubberized grip handle gives hand comfort while working. It’s definitely easy to use and maneuver when working on difficult positions. The magnesium housing of the tool gives it extra durability factor.
But we don't like about the plastic cover for the nails seems to be not that sturdy.
There are so many things to like about this tool. It’s very easy to set up and gives reliable power and speed. Loading and depth adjustment of the nails comes really quick and easy. No issues with jamming nor misfiring. You can see the nail coil for both feed and the remaining numbers left. Most of all, it has a 3-mode selector switch (contact, sequential and lock) for easy operation.
Unfortunately, some users experienced slight problems exhaust for the air.
I like the depth adjustment guide of this tool for it accurately works and hassle-free. The magazine is easy to load and no issues with jamming nails. The aluminum housing looks nice and durable.
Next to, the tool doesn’t come with a fitting airport but not a big problem for most users to buy their preferred quick connect plug for this.
The Duo-Fast DF225C is very lightweight and easy to maneuver nailer which helps you work on tight spaces. A fast and accurate nailing performance which gives you total satisfaction. The magazine is quick and easy to reload.
Some experienced leakage of air but that’s because they weren’t able to choose the right fitting airport for it.
The nailer shoots flawlessly and there’s no problem with jamming nor misfiring of nails. The tool is pretty light and easy to maneuver, very friendly when working on tight workspaces. Effective depth adjustment as well.
Besides, some experience misfiring but due to the variation of the nail size placed inside the magazine.
It has great power and accuracy for firing nails. Loading the magazine comes really convenient with its sideloading action and open nose design. The deflecting shield to protect the user from flying nails is really good and useful. Amazingly lightweight and easy to set up.
Sometimes fires double but mainly because of poor technique.
This effectively shows great performance when tested on a 240’ board fence where it flawlessly drove 3,000 nails in placing 680 pickets. It has enough power to drive through a Cedar at 80psi. Amazingly easy to handle and lightweight so no weary hands when using it. Overall, solid and tough tool.
However, the hammer pressure is not readily adjustable.
The tool's anti-double fire mechanism works perfectly fine. You can easily adjust the depth of nail its the dial knob. There are so many features to like from this nailer but what I like most is its shield and depth dial knob. It has a solid and sleek build.
However, some units experienced slight jamming issues.


text: Designed to the highest possible standards of quality. Extensive range of cable displays components and accessories ensure complete design flexibility. Low voltage lighting can be fully integrated. Stylish and discreet cable displays design. Easy to install with an installation service available. Kits can be designed to display posters and information, incorporate shelving, leaflet holders and low-voltage lighting. Kits come in chrome as standard.

industry_corpus2: Manufacturing


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After working to reconcile differences between the two Tax Cuts and Jobs Act bills, the Senate and House Conference Committee reached a tentative agreement on Wednesday, December 13. Although there is not yet a published version of the Conference Committee’s bill, both the Senate and House had proposed adding a new Section 4960 to the Internal Revenue Code (Code) which would, effective for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017, impose an excise tax of 20% on certain compensation paid to a covered employee by a tax-exempt organization in excess of $1,000,000 and for certain excess parachute payments. The excise tax would be payable by the tax-exempt organization. This post summarizes key provisions of the proposed excise tax provision.
During the two years following the SEC’s publication of final rules that require that companies satisfy the pay ratio disclosure requirements of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act beginning in 2018 proxy statements, many public companies, hoping for a repeal or delay in the implementation of the rules, have waited to take the significant preparatory steps necessary for compliance. As there has been no reprieve in the deadline — the pay ratio is still required to be disclosed in 2018 proxy statements — the time for procrastination has ended, and public company clients need to take immediate steps to ensure compliance in 2018.
Repeal Sections 409A and 457A of the Code and replace such Sections with Section 409B of the Code. While the repeal of Sections 409A and 457A would have been welcome news for many companies over the last ten or fifteen years, Section 409B would effectively prohibit the deferral of all compensation past the point in time when such compensation is no longer subject to a substantial risk of forfeiture related to the performance of services. Section 409B would apply to stock options as well (which were generally excluded from Sections 409A and 457A). The only exception to this rule would be the taxation of the transfer of property pursuant to Section 83 of the Code (other than stock options). While onerous, Section 409A at least permitted the deferral of compensation if certain requirements were met. Section 457A prohibited the deferral of compensation for service providers of nonqualified entities, which were limited and did not apply to most domestic entities. However, Section 409B effectively takes the requirements of Section 457A and makes them applicable to all companies.
Repeal the performance-based compensation exception of Section 162(m) of the Code. All compensation paid to covered employees would only be deductible up to $1,000,000 regardless of whether the compensation was structured as performance-based compensation or not. The House Bill also expands the definition of the companies subject to Section 162(m), expands the definition of covered employee and makes the designation of any person as a covered employee permanent rather than a year by year determination for years after 2017.
Add an excise tax of 20% for compensation paid by a tax-exempt organization in excess of $1,000,000. The excise tax is payable by the tax-exempt organization.
If your company is transferring employees to the U.S., be sure to review any outstanding equity grants and other awards of compensation (such as deferred bonuses) that they previously received under home country compensation plans that vest and are payable after they arrive in the U.S. In many cases, a company must amend the terms of such awards to comply with the Internal Revenue Code’s deferred compensation rules (Internal Revenue Code Section 409A) no later than the last day of the first year in which the transferred employees become U.S. tax residents. Failing to do so could result in a big tax bill for these employees down the road, which companies often end up paying, as well as a tax gross-up.

industry_corpus2: Finance & Economics


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This article explain the conceptual and practical differences between mutable and immutable infrastructure including the advantages of using an immutable infrastructure and contextualize the complications.
In a traditional mutable server infrastructure, servers are continually updated and modified in place. Engineers and administrators working with this kind of infrastructure can SSH into their servers, upgrade or downgrade packages manually, tweak configuration files on a server-by-server basis, and deploy new code directly onto existing servers. In other words, these servers are mutable; they can be changed after they're created. Infrastructure comprised of mutable servers can itself be called mutable, traditional, or (disparagingly) artisanal.
An immutable infrastructure is another infrastructure paradigm in which servers are never modified after they're deployed. If something needs to be updated, fixed, or modified in any way, new servers built from a common image with the appropriate changes are provisioned to replace the old ones. After they're validated, they're put into use and the old ones are decommissioned.
The benefits of an immutable infrastructure include more consistency and reliability in your infrastructure and a simpler, more predictable deployment process. It mitigates or entirely prevents issues that are common in mutable infrastructures, like configuration drift and snowflake servers. However, using it efficiently often includes comprehensive deployment automation, fast server provisioning in a cloud computing environment, and solutions for handling stateful or ephemeral data like logs.
The most fundamental difference between mutable and immutable infrastructure is in their central policy: the components of the former are designed to be changed after deployment; the components of the latter are designed to remain unchanged and ultimately be replaced. This tutorial focuses on those components as servers, but there are other ways to implement an immutable infrastructure, like with containers, that apply the same high-level concepts.
To go into more depth, there are both practical and conceptual differences between server-based mutable and immutable infrastructures.
Conceptually speaking, the two kinds of infrastructure vary greatly in their approach to how servers should be treated (e.g. created, maintained, updated, destroyed). This is commonly illustrated with a "pets versus cattle" analogy.
Practically speaking, mutable infrastructure is a much older infrastructure paradigm that predates the core technologies, like virtualization and cloud computing, that make immutable infrastructures possible and practical. Knowing this history helps contextualize the conceptual differences between the two and the implications of using one or the other in modern day infrastructure.
Before virtualization and cloud computing became possible and widely available, server infrastructure was centered around physical servers. These physical servers were expensive and time-consuming to create; the initial setup could take days or weeks because of how long it took to order new hardware, configure the machine, and then install it in a colo or similar location.
Mutable infrastructure has its origins here. Because the cost of replacing a server was so high, it was most practical to keep using the servers you had running for as long as possible with as little downtime as possible. This meant there were a lot of in place changes for regular deployments and updates, but also for ad-hoc fixes, tweaks, and patches when something went wrong. The consequence of frequent manual changes is that servers can become hard to replicate, making each one a unique and fragile component of the overall infrastructure.
The advent of virtualization and on-demand/cloud computing represented a turning point in server architecture. Virtual servers were less expensive, even at scale, and they could be created and destroyed in minutes instead of days or weeks. This made new deployment workflows and server management techniques possible for the first time, like using configuration management or cloud APIs to provision new servers quickly, programmatically, and automatically. The speed and low cost of creating new virtual servers is what makes the immutability principle practical.
Traditional mutable infrastructures originally developed when the use of physical servers dictated what was possible in their management, and continued to develop as technology improved over time. The paradigm of modifying servers after deployment is still common in modern day infrastructure. In contrast, immutable infrastructures were designed from the start to rely on virtualization-based technologies for fast provisioning of architecture components, like cloud computing's virtual servers.
The fundamental conceptual change that cloud computing advanced was that servers could be considered disposable. It's prohibitively impractical to consider discarding and replacing physical servers, but with virtual servers, it's not only possible but easy and efficient to do so.
The servers in traditional mutable infrastructures were irreplaceable, unique systems that had to be kept running at all times. In this way, they were like pets: one of a kind, inimitable, and tended to by hand. Losing one could be devastating. The servers in immutable infrastructures, on the other hand, are disposable and easy to replicate or scale with automated tools. In this way, they're like cattle: one of many in a herd where no individual is unique or indispensable.
Another similar way of illustrating the implications of the difference between how servers are treated is with the concepts of snowflake servers and phoenix servers.
Snowflake servers are similar to pets. They are servers that are managed by hand, frequently updated and tweaked in place, leading to a unique environment. Phoenix servers are similar to cattle. They are servers that are always built from scratch and are easy to recreate (or "rise from the ashes") through automated procedures.
Immutable infrastructures are made almost entirely of cattle or phoenix servers, whereas mutable infrastructures allow some (or many) pets or snowflake servers. The next section discusses the implications of both.
To understand the advantages of immutable infrastructures, it's necessary to contextualize the disadvantages of mutable infrastructures.
Servers in mutable infrastructures can suffer from configuration drift, which is when undocumented, impromptu changes cause servers' configurations to become increasingly divergent from each other and from the reviewed, approved, and originally-deployed configuration. These increasingly snowflake-like servers are hard to reproduce and replace, making things like scaling and recovering from issues difficult. Even replicating issues to debug them becomes challenging because of the difficulty of creating a staging environment that matches the production environment.
The importance or necessity of a server's different configurations becomes unclear after many manual modifications, so updating or changing any of it may have unintended side effects. Even in the best case, making changes to an existing system isn't guaranteed to work, which means deployments that rely on doing so risk failing or putting the server into an unknown state.
With this in mind, the primary benefits of using an immutable infrastructure are deployment simplicity, reliability, and consistency, all of which ultimately minimize or eliminate many common pain points and failure points.
All deployments in an immutable infrastructure are executed by provisioning new servers based on a validated and version-controlled image. As a result, these deployments don't depend on the previous state of a server, and consequently can't fail — or only partially complete — because of it.
When new servers are provisioned, they can be tested before being put into use, reducing the actual deployment process to a single update to make the new server available, like updating a load balancer. In other words, deployments become atomic: either they complete successfully or nothing changes.
This makes deploying much more reliable and also ensures that the state of every server in the infrastructure is always known. Additionally, this process makes it easy to implement a blue-green deployment or rolling releases, meaning no downtime.
All configuration changes in an immutable infrastructure are implemented by checking an updated image into version control with documentation and using an automated, unified deployment process to deploy replacement servers with that image. Shell access to the servers is sometimes completely restricted.
This prevents complicated or hard-to-reproduce setups by eliminating the risk of snowflake servers and configuration drift. This also prevents situations where someone needs to modify a poorly-understood production server, which runs a high risk of error and causing downtime or unintended behavior.
Because all servers use the same creation process, there are no deployment edge cases. This prevents messy or inconsistent staging environments by making it trivial to duplicate the production environment, and also simplifies horizontal scaling by seamlessly allowing you to add more identical servers to your infrastructure.
Using version control to keep image history also helps with handling production issues. The same process that is used to deploy new images can also be used to roll back to older versions, adding additional resilience and reducing recovery time when handling downtime.
Immutable infrastructure comes with some requirements and nuance in its implementation details, especially compared to traditional mutable infrastructures.
Servers in a cloud computing environment, or another virtualized environment (like containers, though that changes some other requirements below). The key here is to have isolated instances with fast provisioning from custom images, as well as automated management for creation and destruction via an API or similar.
Full automation of your entire deployment pipeline, ideally including post-creation image validation. Setting up this automation adds significantly to the upfront cost of implementing this infrastructure, but it is a one-time cost which amortizes out quickly.
A service-oriented architecture, separating your infrastructure into modular, logically discrete units that communicate over a network. This allows you to take full advantage of cloud computing's offerings, which are similarly service-oriented (e.g. IaaS, PaaS).
A stateless, volatile application layer which includes your immutable servers. Anything here can get destroyed and rebuilt quickly at any time (volatile) without any loss of data (stateless).
Centralized logging with additional details about a server's deployment, like image identification via a version or Git commit SHA. Because servers are disposable (and frequently disposed of) in this infrastructure, storing logs and metrics externally allows debugging even when shell access is restricted or after a server has been destroyed.
External data stores for databases and any other stateful or ephemeral data, like DBaaS/cloud databases and object or block storage (either cloud-provided or self-managed). You can't rely on local storage when the servers are volatile, so you need to store that data elsewhere.
Dedication from engineering and operations teams to collaborate and commit to the approach. For all the simplicity of the end product, there are a lot of moving parts in an immutable infrastructure, and no one person will know all of it. Additionally, some aspects of working within this infrastructure can be new or outside of people's comfort zones, like debugging or doing one-off tasks without shell access.
There are many different ways to implement each of these components. Choosing one largely depends on personal preference and familiarity, and how much of your infrastructure you want to build yourself versus relying on a paid service.
CI/CD tools can be a good place to start for deployment pipeline automation; Compose is an option for a DBaaS solution; rsyslog and ELK are popular choices for centralized logging; Netflix's Chaos Monkey, which randomly kills servers in your production environment, is a real trial by fire for your final setup.
This article covered what immutable infrastructure is, the conceptual and practical differences between it and older-style mutable infrastructure, the advantages of using it, and details on its implementation.
Knowing if or when you should consider moving to an immutable infrastructure can be difficult, and there's no one clearly defined cutoff or inflection point. One way to begin is to implement some of the design practices recommended in this article, like configuration management, even if you're still working in a largely mutable environment. This will make a transition to immutability easier in the future.
If you have an infrastructure with most of the components above and you find yourself hitting scaling issues or feeling frustrated with the clunkiness of your deployment process, that can be a good time to start evaluating how an immutability could improve your infrastructure.

industry_corpus2: Computing & Telecommunications


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NASA is working towards a tentative 10 May launch date for its next shuttle flight, mission managers say. But so much work remains to be done to verify that the vehicle is safe to fly that any delays will mean the shuttle will miss its May launch window entirely, and will have to wait until at least July.
The biggest engineering hurdles left to overcome are tests to ensure that two protective ramps – designed to smooth the airflow over a cable tray on the external fuel tank – can be removed without causing the underlying cables to break free from the tank on take-off. A 0.45-kilogram (1 pound) piece of foam fell from one of the protuberance air load (PAL) ramps during the last shuttle flight’s launch, in July 2005.
Fortunately, it did not strike the orbiter, but mission managers want to prevent such large pieces of foam from coming off the tank. They want to ensure that any pieces of foam shed from the tank are smaller than 1 ounce (28 grams) –about the size of a matchbook. That should make any falling foam too small to punch a hole in the orbiter, an event that caused the shuttle Columbia to break up on atmospheric re-entry in 2003.
Engineers will begin a series of wind tunnel tests in several weeks to check the strength of shock waves created around fittings where the PAL ramp used to be, shuttle programme manager Wayne Hale told reporters on Tuesday. These will also determine if the cables are strong enough to withstand the shocks.
An additional task for engineers is to determine the risk of flying with a small sliver of metal, about 1 millimatre in size, that has become trapped inside a screen that filters out debris from a liquid oxygen tank on the main engine. Attempts to remove it have so far failed.
The tiny shard could potentially get clogged in a moving part or coolant line in the engine. And depending on the type of metal it is – this is currently unknown – it could actually ignite in the pure oxygen environment. Engineers are now running tests at a New Mexico facility to determine the risk to flight.
If flying with the shard is decided to be too risky, NASA will remove the screen and clean it. But that could actually introduce more contamination into the screen, says Hale, so engineers will have to carefully weigh the benefits and risks of such a procedure.
Such analysis means engineers will “run right down to the wire, whatever the launch date turns out to be”, says Hale. He has requested shuttle managers consider a launch on 10 May and will discuss their reaction to that date in a closed meeting on Thursday. The full launch window runs from 3 to 22 May, with the next possible opportunities from 1 to 19 July and 29 August to 14 September.
Meeting the May window will be extremely difficult. Aside from PAL ramp and fuel filter tests, there is a lot of regular work to be done. This includes mating the various parts of the shuttle system – such as its external tank, solid rocket boosters and orbiter – and preparing it for the launch pad.
Hale agrees, saying NASA must work as quickly as possible to fly the shuttle missions needed to complete the International Space Station by 2010. “Clearly you can’t have many more big, long stand-downs and still finish the ISS by that date,” Hale says.