#a publisher would have put the kibosh on this whole thing | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

solarpunkpresentspodcast · 7 months

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Scrape

I want to talk about the recent news of Tumblr and Wordpress parent company Automattic being in talks to sell user content to AI companies OpenAI and Midjourney to train their models on. All that we know is currently in that sentence, by the way; the talks are still in progress and the company’s not super transparent about it, which makes sense to me.

What doesn’t make sense to me is the fact that a lot of Internet users seem to think this is outrageous, or new, or somehow strange behaviour for a large company, or that it is just starting. It seems obvious, given AI companies’ proclivities to go ahead and then ask forgiveness, not permission to do the thing, that Tumblr/Wordpress users’ public data has already been hoovered up into the gaping maw of the LLM training sets and this is a mea-culpa gesture; not so much a business proposal as a sheepish admission of guilt and monetary compensation. One wonders what would have happened had they not been called out.

When I was in publishing school back in the early twenty-teens, it was drilled into us that any blog content could be considered published and therefore disqualified from any submission to a publication unless they were specifically asking for previously published pieces. There was at that time a dawning awareness that whatever you had put on the internet (or continued to put out there) was not going to go away. Are you familiar with how Facebook saves everything that you type, even if you don’t post it? That was the big buzz, back then. Twitter was on the rise, and so was Tumblr, and in that context, it seemed a bit naïve to assume that anything written online would ever be private again (if it ever was in the first place…). It was de rigeur for me to go into my privacy settings on Facebook and adjust them in line with updates every few months.

So, for example, this little post of mine here wouldn’t really count as submittable material unless I substantially added to or changed it in some way before approaching a publisher with it. (The definition of “substantially” is up to said publisher, of course.) This might have changed with time (and depending on location), but my brain latched on to it and I find it safest to proceed from this assumption. For the record, I don’t think it’s foolish or naive for internet users to have the opposite assumption, and trust that the companies whose platforms they are using will handle their content in a respectful way and guard their privacy. That should be the baseline. It is a right and correct impulse, taken egregious advantage of by the morally bankrupt.

In any case, I at first have interpreted this whole debacle as …slightly empowering to users, in a way, as now there are opt-out procedures that Tumblr users can take to put the kibosh on a process that is already happening, and now this scraping of data will be monitored by the parent site, instead of operating according to a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. I have to wonder if the same will be extended to Reddit users, or the commenters on CNN or Fox news. And whether my first impression will bear up under any weight of scrutiny whatsoever.

On social media, I assume that everything I post will always and forever be accessible to anyone with enough skills (or money) to want to access it. Same with email, anything in “the cloud” that is not hosted on a double-encrypted server, my search engine preferences, and really any site that I have a login for. My saving grace thus far has been that I am a boring person with neither fame nor wealth nor enemies with a reason to go after me. Facebook got big when I was in my undergraduate years; given that social media was extremely nascent back then, I put a lot of stuff up that I shouldn’t have. Data that I care about. Things I would like to keep secret, keep safe. But I’ve long made my peace with the fact that the internet has known everything about everything I was willing to put up about me for my entire adult life and continues to grasp for more and more. At least on Tumblr, I can say “no”, and then get righteously indignant when that “no” is inevitably ignored and my rights violated.

I hate this state of affairs. But I also want to be able to talk to my family, connect with other solarpunks, do research, communicate with my colleagues … to live in a society, one might say. I try not to let it bother me much. However, I DO sign anything and everything that comes my way from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to legislating the shit out of these corporations that have given us free tickets to unlimited knowledge and communication for the price of our personal data, and effectively excommunicated anyone who does not agree to their TOS. The EFF is US-based, but given that most of the social media and AI giants on the internet are also US-based, I feel like it’s relevant.

In my solarpunk future, the internet does still exist, and we can access and use it as much or as little as we like. But it is tightly controlled so that the reckless appropriation and use of art, writing, content, personal data, cannot happen and is not the fee charged for participation in the world wide web. I want to live in a world where my personal data is my own but I can still reach out to my friends and family whenever I’d like, about whatever I want; isn’t that a nice thought?

#AI #internet #artificial intelligence #Automattic #Tumblr #consent #content #Facebook

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raindrop-on-a-spiderweb · 1 year

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Quieta State of the Union

I might shelve Wayfaring Daughter for good. The story I had planned is far, far too long and complicated, the themes I would be dealing with would be too controversial to publish, and to be honest the plot restructuring put the whole thing into a kibosh and I went off track. This has been a long time in coming, I'm afraid, and I have been thinking the same thing for several years. I might pick it up eventually, but for now, it's on indefinite hiatus.

Appointment in Samarra is 3 or 4 chapters away from being finished. Given that it's almost over, I believe I've finally found the story idea I'll go with after it's done.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the adopted daughter of a famous actress seeks out her trueborn siblings. They go on the run in search of their missing father.

It would deal with the themes of the relationship between a cold and damaged woman who desperately wants a child and yet doesn't know what to do once she gets one, sexual abuse and manipulation while feeling like there is no one you can talk to about it, and cozy memories of our early lives despite how terrible they really were. But it would also be an adventure story about traveling the landscape of Great Depression era America, boxcars and hobos and dust storms and flamboyant bank robbers, and the dark, seedy underbelly of Old Hollywood. Inspired by Christina Crawford's memoir, Ken Burns' documentary on the Great Depression, and the paintings of Andrew Wyeth.

The working title so far is Chasing Craneflies.

#personal #writing

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crazy4tank · 4 years

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I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

New Post has been published on https://funnypics365.com/2021/01/02/i-aint-one-to-gossip-but/

I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Original Post: http://ishouldbelaughing.blogspot.com/2020/12/i-aint-one-to-gossip-but_26.html

When last we left Erika Jayne, of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Tom Girardi, we were learning that Girardi is nearly broke and ALLEGEDLY embezzled millions from his firm to keep Erika in ugly couture and ridiculous weaves. Rumors also flew that the divorce was just a sham so they could hide their coins and still be rich rich rich.

But now it looks like Erika wants to put the kibosh on those embezzler stories—at least she’s concerned—and has come out saying that Girardi has been cheating on her for years, and even spilled the name of one of his sidepieces.

Erika is now saying she filed for divorce because, after 21 years of marriage—and ALLEGEDLY all during their marriage—Tom was cheating on her. And she brought receipts to prove it, when she posted, then deleted, text messages between Tom and his ALLEGED mistress, Justice Tricia A. Bigelow, and wrote on Instagram:

“This is Justice Tricia A. Bigelow. She was fucking my husband Tom Girardi and he was paying her Saks bill and paying for her plastic surgery.”

Damn, Tom; he was set to pay Erika’s Saks bill and for her plastic surgery. And Erika posted screenshots of their texts between one another:

“Tonight was fantastic. Really. But it would be a whole lot better if I were fucking you.”

“Miss you babe. Makeup sex?”

And there’s a text where Tricia asks Tom to pay Dr. David Matlock for her plastic surgery or she’ll “ask my new boyfriend to pay if it’s a problem. He’s got big dough.”

Sounds damaging, but internet sleuths have noted a couple of oddities; based on the dates and that 3G phone, the texts are either from 2005-2006 or 2015-2016. And then there’s the ALLEGATIONS that Erika and Tom had an open marriage, so she’s known for a while about Tricia, just like Tom has known about her ALLEGED affair with Scooter Braun.

But most odd of all is that, for some reason, Erika then posted a video of her face superimposed over Daenerys from Game Of Thrones and the internet dragged her:

“Should you be making these videos right now?”

“Baby what is you doin.”

“You should probably stop posting for a while. It’s kind of shocking that no one has advised you to at this point.”

“This whole thing is…. embarrassing. Can we get Olivia Pope?”

I’m not sure where Erika goes after all this but judging from Tricia’s threat to Tom, maybe she should look up Tricia’s old boyfriend because he’s “got big dough”.

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Earlier this month, a 34-year-old woman, who can’t be publicly named for legal reasons, filed a claim in court saying that she and Prince Albert of Monaco had a “passionate affair” in 2015 that led to her having his child.

The woman, who is Brazilian but lives in Italy, says that Albert took her on trips all over the world from France to the US to Russia, where she met Vladimir Putin. The woman’s daughter is now 15 years old and the girl has reportedly reached out to Prince Albert several times including this past September when she sent him a note that read:

“I don’t understand why I grew up without a father, and now that I have found you, you don’t want to see me.”

Albert has repeatedly ignored the girl, so her mother went the legal route and now wants him to take a DNA test. Prince Albert and his legal team deny the woman’s ALLEGATIONS, but he is no stranger to paternity suits. In 1992, Tamara Rotolo claimed that Albert knocked her up, but he denied it until a DNA test … given by Daddy DNA, Maury Povich … said:

“You are the father.”

In 2005, Nicole Coste ALLEGED that Albert left her with child, too, and while he again denied that ALLEGATION, the truth came out:

“You are the father.”

Sure looks like Albert likes to spread his DNA around.

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It must be a slow gossip week when Connie Chung makes the cut, but here we are. It seems that Chung is dishing the dirt about lots of people, from Dan Rather to Barbara Walters to Hugh Grant.

Chung says Rather, was what she called “Texas nice” to her face but not so much behind her back, saying Rather has been described as being a person who “has very sharp elbows” as in:

“Maybe, if I turned my back, you know, I felt like I might be in a scene of Psycho in the shower.”

Chung parted ways with CBS; it was rumored she wasn’t a good fit because she was “too tabloid” which might have meant her marriage to the above-mentioned Maury Povich. She ended up at ABC with Walters and Sawyer, whom Chung says actively tried to sabotage her success:

“When I got to ABC News, I joined with both Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer there and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be great. It’ll be three women who get along.’ So naive and stupid. I was always playing a game of Whac-A-Mole. I’d pop my head out, and one of them would have a hammer, and whack—put me down, back in my little hole.”

She says Barbara and Diane competed for huge stories and interviews, and that whenever Connie tried to get one, she was told that they were for Barbara and Diane only and that she should “stand down.”

And she also had to stand down when it came to Bryant Gumbel, or men at all:

“I didn’t have a very good experience with a lot of male co-anchors, because they suffer from something called bigshot-itis, and it’s sort of delusions of grandeur and sort of narcissistic behavior and a feeling of inability to stop talking.”

Um, Connie? Stop talking. But she doesn’t … she was asked if Gumbel—with whom Chung sometimes co-hosted “Today” as a sub for Jane Pauley—suffered from the condition, she replied:

“I would say so. I’d be sitting beside him, but I was invisible.”

And then she comes for Hugh Grant, with whom she filmed a cameo for the HBO series The Undoing. She ALLEGES Grant was an asshole who acted like he didn’t know who she was, despite her interviewing him previously.

Sounds like Connie thought very highly of herself while most others did not. Also sounds like she was being interviewed by Maury for the one show a year he does that isn’t about DNA tests.

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vestedbeauty · 4 years

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Did I Just Buy the Best Desk Chair Ever? Or Did I Waste My Money? ALL33 Review

New Post has been published on https://vestedbeauty.com/best-desk-chair/

Did I Just Buy the Best Desk Chair Ever? Or Did I Waste My Money? ALL33 Review

I Paid a Small Fortune for What May Be My Best Desk Chair Ever. Here’s How I Like It.

If they ever make a documentary about me stalking my new ALL33 desk chair, I hope they get Sir David Attenborough to do the narration.

NARRATOR: Tonight, on NOVA: As daylight breaks, we catch our first glimpse of her. Massive mug full of coffee, see her approach her perch. There she will spend the next eight to ten hours, leaving only to move laundry, feed chickens, or sweep dog hair from the hallway. When she does stir, if we watch closely, we will see her rub the tension from her lower back and roll her shoulders to ease soreness and try to reestablish blood circulation. Enter the hidden world of a writer with a bad chair.

[music]

NARRATOR: Our writer friend has stumbled onto an advertisement for a chair that looks only slightly similar to those she has seen before. See as her eyebrow sinks into concave formation as she clicks the link to learn more? This is… her concentration face.

Now, if we watch carefully, cautious not to spook her, we can see her reading the details about this chair. Ahh, there it is. Did you catch her lip curling up with the hint of a smile? It only lasted a moment before her eyebrows shifted into an elevated convex shape, shooting halfway up her forehead.

Clearly, she saw the price.

[music]

Major funding for this blog post comes from the Day Job Foundation, a regular contributor to the writer’s care and upkeep.

This program is also funded, in part, by her own writing firm, which has a long history of feeding her and her brood.

And by readers like you, who, should they purchase anything through any affiliate links on this website, will send a few bucks her way - at no additional cost to you, by the way.

Why On Earth Spend So Much on an Office Chair?

When I first started seeing ads for the ALL33 chair, the company was doing some crowdfunding. So, there was a video, a bunch of info, and the opportunity to buy at a discount - assuming they hit their funding goal. The ad, if I remember right, proclaimed that this was a chair like no other. Completely redesigned to correct for bad posture, and built to cradle your backside for “active” sitting, it definitely looked different. But even then, the price seemed steep (guessing it was like $350?).

So, I shelved the idea and went back to work in the worn-out roller chair I’d gotten from Amazon a few years ago. It was black. It had wheels. Nothing distinguishing at all - unless you count the fact that the arm pads had started disintegrating.

Prior to the most boring office chair in the world, I’d experimented with an exercise ball. It gave me happy flashbacks to playing on a Hippity-Hop. (What color was yours? I remember having a red one.) The issue with that was the level of concentration needed to stay ON the exercise ball. It wasn’t like doing brain surgery, but it did require more attention than I’d like to invest in merely avoiding falling on my butt in the middle of a Zoom call.

How Well Do You Think on Your Feet?

“She who sits most dies first.” That warning hit home when I first heard it. Even though I make the effort to get up and move around during the day, it’s not enough. As a writer, I work best when I enter a flow state of deep concentration.

Picky. That’s probably the best descriptor for me while I arrange my environment. If you’re less charitable, you might call me obsessive instead. That’s okay. In my experience, when I can get into this sublime state of pure flow, the words just drop from heaven into my mind, resting there only long enough for me to tap them into the keyboard. The writing is fast. It’s pure. It’s more aligned with whatever message a piece is meant to convey. The alternative scenario involves something like wrassling. You know, like some crazy guy rolling around in the mud with an alligator, hoping for the best.

My ability to manage my environment is a huge determinant of productivity in my writing day. Every sensory input matters. Not too hot or too cold. Not too bright or dark. Either silence or the right kind of music (typically no lyrics - although I’ve found the trip hop genre to be amazingly conducive to flow).

But getting into the flow state has a dark side, one involving my backside. If I can get into the groove, it’s nothing for me to write for hours on end. Well, at least until someone walks into the space - or if a dog nudges me for pets.

So it made sense for me to try a standing desk. As a teen, I worked at a bakery, spending the whole shift on my feet. But while I can walk for miles without a complaint, standing in one spot has never been comfortable for me.

I was skeptical from Day One. So, my sweet hubby set me up with a workspace on the high counter in our kitchen as a test. If I liked it, it would make sense to buy a legit standup desk.

That was a hard “no.” Not only was it hard for me to get into any sort of creative flow, but my back, legs, and feet hurt. Productivity plummeted because I kept walking around instead of focusing on my work.

The Treadmill Desk

The standing desk debacle gave me an idea, though. If walking worked better than standing, maybe I could work on a treadmill at the gym. All I’d need is a desk surface that stretched between the arms of the treadmill. Sweet hubby had just the answer. He made me a lightweight but sturdy aluminum desk.

It looked like a guillotine. There were lots of questions. I felt a little weird. But once I set it up and set the treadmill to a pace of about 2 mph, I could work and walk at the same time. Sort of.

Actual writing was tough. It was hard to enter the flow state while also trying not to fall off the treadmill and break myself. I could do planning, project management, and invoicing. But it wasn’t ideal.

So, Back to the ALL33 Chair

I’d back burnered the hunt for a better office chair, and that’s when I started getting ads for this crazy contraption again. The list price is $800.

All I could think about was the “Will & Grace” episode where they run all over Manhattan chasing down a Herman Miller Aeron chair. (By the way, the only episode I ever saw.) Who pays that kind of money for an office chair? It just seemed extravagant and pretentious.

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But I had a bit of an internal debate. Then an awakening. That led to a transformation… and a purchase.

Good old blue chair... you've been a faithful friend.

Once You Go Mac...

Several years back, I switched from PC to Mac. I’d been replacing my PC laptops every couple of years. They’d get full - or full of malware. It was annoying. Plus, they were heavy, which kind of put the kibosh on the idea of “working from anywhere.” Macbook Pros ran about $1200 for a base model, easily three times more costly than the PC laptops I bought. But boy, was it worth it. The transition was easy. All my tech works together, making transferring from iphone to ipad to laptop a breeze.

Soon, the idea of getting an iMac desktop seemed like a good idea. A decade into my writing business, I finally had an office and a desk rather than working from the blue La-Z-Boy I’d commandeered back in 2005. (It’s seen much, much better days - but nobody’s got the heart to put it out by the curb.)

This upgrade set a precedent. As a work tool, it made perfect sense to get the best I could afford. The increase in productivity meant the computers more than paid for themselves in the first year.

Surely, the same would hold true for a good desk chair.

Still Practicing an Abundance Mindset

Throughout my early adult life, we were broke. I was married to a pastor who only hit his earnings stride a couple of years before we divorced. We’d scraped by until I started my writing business, which loosened our budget a little. But there were years when he was trying to launch a new venture and not making more than a hundred bucks a week or so. There were years we qualified for free school lunches. There was also a bankruptcy due to my failed go at real estate investing. After leaving my first marriage, things got even tighter. The IRS was also a constant companion, thanks to the turnaround year we’d had in 2011. (It took me nearly eight years to pay that tax bill, but I finally did it!)

Scraping by was the norm. I got pretty good at it, too.

But I knew better. There is no fixed amount of pie out there in the world. It’s not a zero-sum game where if I have a slice, that means someone goes without. Instead, for every slice I take, I can create a whole new pie to share with others. (Shoutout to T. Harv Eker whose book nudged a radical transformation in my mindset here.)

Investing in the best tools I could afford meant investing in my productivity. Could it be that my own health is one of the most crucial tools of all?

Life Or Death? Do I REALLY Need the Best Desk Chair?

I’d recently spent time with some folks experiencing significant mobility issues due to age and poor self-care. Watching them struggle to move well was hard. All I’d really seen was my parents, who are super-active and completely mobile. My dad, at 76, still goes to the gym about five days a week. He can do so many unassisted pull ups that he sometimes draws a crowd. THAT is the kind of mobility I want to enjoy until they put me in the ground.

This chair was more than a frivolous splurge. Mobility and self-care was more than a weak justification for overspending. If this ALL33 chair was all it was cracked up to be, it could be one of the best purchases ever.

So, I Did It

They’ve got a guarantee, which is such a smart marketing tactic. Knowing that either I’d love this chair or be able to send it back for a full refund made it a lot less risky.

They also had a little sale going on when I bought. (If I’d known someone who had one, I could have used their link to get a discount, too. Now I have a link like that - and you can use it to get $75 off if you want one.)

Shipping is included, so that’s good because it’s a pretty big box.

I came home from a work trip and saw the box out at the curb. That meant one thing: My sweet hubby had assembled it for me!

Here’s the Scoop (and the scoop is the seat!)

It looks great. Just a little different from a standard office chair, if you don’t look closely. But when you do look closer, you see that the sitting surface is different. It reminds me of a saddle. It articulates, shifting to support you no matter how you sit. The lumbar support is practically angelic. The back allows for rocking or just tipping backward. The arms fold up so you can scoot into your work surface without obstruction. The wheels are as smooth as a good Target cart. I got the cloth version instead of the leather or faux leather - mostly because I like my butt to stay where I plant it rather than sliding, which seems to be a thing with leather seats.

Initial Impressions

The first few days of working in the chair were blissful. I felt zero fatigue from sitting. For some reason, I also felt so much more energized that I got up more often to putter. Nice.

The next few days felt a little sore. Kind of like when you go to the gym after a hiatus. Even if you take it easy, your muscles gripe about having to work. That’s how it was. Mostly it was my tailbone and mid back complaining. They stopped kvetching within a day or two, accepting that this was the new normal for sitting.

Now, I Don’t Want to Leave Home… Ever!

I’m a homebody anyway. First, of course, there’s the fact that my sweet hubby is there! Also, got to acknowledge the dogs and other animals. This is my home.

The daily routines I’ve created are so soothing and energizing for me. The environment is just what I want. Days just flow as I do work I love and spend my non-working hours with my mate.

And that chair? I actually miss it when I’m working away from home. After all, it is by far the best desk chair my butt has ever sat upon.

Want to Try this Chair for Yourself? Here's a Promo Code for $50 Off ALL33 Chairs

If you have to sit, why not do it in a chair that will help you sit better, move better, stand better, and feel better? Use my special code VESTEDBEAUTY50 for an extra $50 off the chair you deserve!

#ALL33 desk chair #best desk chair

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gordonwilliamsweb · 5 years

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Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes

The Friday Breeze

Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes, who reads everything on health care to compile our daily Morning Briefing, offers the best and most provocative stories for the weekend.

Happy Friday the 13th! Which feels extra appropriate this week. One of the very few silver linings of our current situation is the 368% increase in social media pictures of people’s pets as they work from home. (Shoutout to Brianna Ehley, a health reporter at Politico, whose pup made me gasp out loud from cuteness overload.)

On to my best attempt to get you the most important and interesting news about the COVID-19 outbreak. This is one of those stories that’s changing by the minute, however, so I would highly recommend checking out KHN for our coverage and also signing up for the Morning Briefings to get a comprehensive look at what’s going on.

But here we go:

— As of this morning, the House was barreling toward a coronavirus deal after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (and the lawmakers she tapped to help her) spent yesterday working through partisan complaints together with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has been acting as the administration’s point person on the plan. But I’m still seeing rumblings about House Republicans not warming up to the legislation. If President Donald Trump doesn’t embrace the bill, it’s likely to get passed along partisan lines — not a good sign for it getting through the Senate. The president will discuss the coronavirus crisis at a 3 p.m. news conference.

— What’s in the legislation? Provisions include unemployment insurance to furloughed workers and hundreds of millions of dollars toward nutrition programs; an additional $500 million to help feed low-income pregnant women or mothers with young children who lose their jobs or are laid off because of the virus outbreak; $400 million to help local food banks meet increased demand; and free coronavirus testing for anyone who requires it, including uninsured people.

— One of the sticking points between the two parties has been paid sick leave. The issue has been thrust into the spotlight as public health experts and doctors say that workers should stay home if they have flu-like symptoms. But because the U.S. has no mandatory sick leave, some employees just can’t afford to do that.

The Friday Breeze

Want a roundup of the must-read stories this week chosen by KHN Newsletter Editor Brianna Labuskes? Sign up for The Friday Breeze today.

Please confirm your email address below:

— Trump is mulling an emergency declaration, which he has been hesitant to announce — despite his propensity of using presidential power in less urgent crises — because it would likely contradict the rosy messaging he’s put forth since the start of the outbreak.

— Meanwhile, the action that the president did take — instituting a travel ban — was panned by public health experts as a useless distraction. As one said, “This virus is everywhere.” The stock markets seemed to agree with that assessment following Trump’s Oval Office address as they tumbled more sharply than they had previously. It was the worst trading day since 1987, which, for those of us who were paying attention during the 2008 crash, is not exactly reassuring.

— Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had a grim reality check for Congress (and the administration) when he agreed that the worst is yet to come with the outbreak. He also criticized the government for not providing quick and easy testing, saying that the “failing” system “is not really geared to what we need right now.” “The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it — we’re not set up for that,” he said. “Do I think we should be? Yes. But we’re not.”

— On that note, there’s still a slew of anecdotes of people who have symptoms that match the coronavirus, have tested negative for the flu and yet still aren’t receiving tests. A startling graphic from Vox shows just how far behind other developed countries the U.S. is in testing. (Read that whole story for an in-depth look at everything that’s gone wrong, including how a shortage of chemicals used in the kits is hampering scientists’ efforts.)

— So, we know we don’t currently have an accurate snapshot of how many Americans are infected (because of above testing stumbles), but what’s the worst-case scenario in terms of outbreak totals? CDC experts have projected that between 160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected, while as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million could die. Also, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the U.S. could require hospitalization.

— Which leads to what experts say is the scariest part of the outbreak: Hospitals already stretched thin from a bad flu season and ever-increasing budget cuts are simply not equipped to handle the surge in patients we’re likely to see. There aren’t enough ventilators or ICU beds, and if the United States follows in Italy’s footsteps, health care providers might have to start making tough choices about who gets treated and who gets left behind.

— What can Americans do to help mitigate this? (Or “flatten the curve,” as the cool kids say.) Public health officials and experts are recommending social distancing when possible, which includes working from home and avoiding large social gatherings. Even if the total number of cases were to plateau, taking nationwide measures to slow down the speed of the outbreak could help keep hospitals from being overwhelmed (see above).

— A slew of closures, cancellations and post-postponements this week helped toward that end (and possibly helped drive home the seriousness of the threat). Those include, but are not limited to: basketball, soccer, hockey and baseball games; concerts; Disneyland; colleges (which mostly moved to online classes) and schools; Broadway; any gatherings over 250 people in some states; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian museums, including the National Zoo; St. Patrick’s Day parades across the country; and more. The unified message from private and government organizations alike: America, it’s time to shut down.

— Beyond the astronomical economic toll this crisis will take, some observers are also worried it’s going to deepen our loneliness crisis. As trivial as it might seem, chronic loneliness, especially in the elderly (the population most in danger of a critical reaction to the coronavirus), can produce severe negative health outcomes.

— Speaking of both closures and vulnerable populations, the U.S. Capitol put the kibosh on public tours following an announcement that a Senate staffer tested positive for the virus. Considering the demographics of Congress, and given how often lawmakers travel and interact with strangers, politicians are particularly susceptible to getting sick during this outbreak.

— In other news from the administration’s response: CMS denied states’ requests to use Medicaid funding more freely to help contain the outbreak. In previous emergencies, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 flu outbreak, both Republican and Democratic administrations loosened Medicaid rules to empower states to meet surging needs.

— And it turns out that a day-long email crash, traced to CMS, created a snafu for health officials right as the crisis was heating up.

— Oh, you might have noticed that we’ve started calling this thing a pandemic. That’s because WHO finally officially deemed it one, after weeks and weeks of hesitating to make that call. “We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

So, those are the bigger highlights you need to know. But here are some interesting and compelling stories that also appeared this week:

— What will it cost you if you get sick? Many insurers have waived testing fees, but they haven’t gone as far as to make promises about treatment costs.

— Trump and other Republicans continue to frame the coronavirus using racist and xenophobic language, despite public health experts saying that’s dangerous and irresponsible. Take a look at the history of the strategy.

— One area in which scientists are hoping the coronavirus mirrors the flu is that it tends to slow down in warmer months. But we simply do not know enough about the virus to say hot temperatures are its kryptonite — yet.

— A series of high-profile people (including Tom Hanks and the Canadian prime minister’s wife) have tested positive for the virus, driving home how seriously people should be taking the threat. As an aside on the Tom Hanks story, his case highlights how easy Australia has made it to get testing.

— The pandemic highlights how little authority WHO actually has. It has supposed to act as a global coordinator, but when no one is trying to work together, the organization’s efforts can fall flat.

— What happens to America’s spy operations in moments like this?

— A devastating tale of two health care providers in China shows just how cruelly random this virus can be.

— A look at the underlying conditions, including diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and more, that can often exacerbate the virus’s toll on the body. And an explainer on how the coronavirus actually infiltrates your cells.

— And immigration groups call on the government to release high-risk detainees from facilities where they’re worried the virus will spread like wildfire.

I think other things happened in the world, but I’ve already forgotten them. Remember, wash your hands, don’t create mask shortages for health care workers who actually need them, practice social distancing when you can to flatten the curve and realize that anxiety is inevitable, but you don’t let it have to consume you.

Please have a safe, healthy weekend. See you next week!

Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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stephenmccull · 5 years

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Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes

The Friday Breeze

Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes, who reads everything on health care to compile our daily Morning Briefing, offers the best and most provocative stories for the weekend.

But here we go:

The Friday Breeze

Want a roundup of the must-read stories this week chosen by KHN Newsletter Editor Brianna Labuskes? Sign up for The Friday Breeze today.

Please confirm your email address below:

— And it turns out that a day-long email crash, traced to CMS, created a snafu for health officials right as the crisis was heating up.

So, those are the bigger highlights you need to know. But here are some interesting and compelling stories that also appeared this week:

— What will it cost you if you get sick? Many insurers have waived testing fees, but they haven’t gone as far as to make promises about treatment costs.

— What happens to America’s spy operations in moments like this?

— A devastating tale of two health care providers in China shows just how cruelly random this virus can be.

— And immigration groups call on the government to release high-risk detainees from facilities where they’re worried the virus will spread like wildfire.

Please have a safe, healthy weekend. See you next week!

Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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totalconservative · 5 years

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New Post has been published on Total Conservative News

New Post has been published on http://totalconservative.com/report-british-warned-u-s-early-on-that-dossier-was-not-to-be-trusted/

Report: British Warned U.S. Early On That Dossier Was Not to Be Trusted

According to several witnesses who have spoken to Congress, the British national security adviser Mark Lyall Grant reached out to the incoming Trump team in January 2017 to warn them about the Christopher Steele dossier and its reliability. Having seen the news reports that the President-elect had been briefed on the dossier by Obama officials, Grant reportedly reached out to Michael Flynn and the rest of Trump’s national security team to tell them that Steele’s dossier was not all it was cracked up to be.

“Most significantly, then-British national security adviser Sir Mark Lyall Grant claimed in the memo, hand-delivered to incoming U.S. national security adviser Mike Flynn’s team, that the British government lacked confidence in the credibility of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s Russia collusion evidence, according to congressional investigators who interviewed witnesses familiar with the memo,” reports The Hill’s John Solomon.

“Congressional investigators have interviewed two U.S. officials who handled the memo, confirmed with the British government that a communique was sent, and alerted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to the information,” Solomon continues. “One witness confirmed to Congress that he was interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller about the memo.”

According to one former National Security Council official, the British were concerned that the incoming President would hold Britain responsible for the phony dossier, seeing as how it came from one of their former spies. Grant wanted to put the kibosh on that notion, since he was afraid it might sour relations between the UK and the new administration.

“The message was clear: the Brits were saying they may have done some stuff to assist the investigation that they now regretted after learning the whole thing was based on information from Steele,” the former official told Solomon. “They wanted Trump’s team to know they did not think Steele’s information was credible or reliable. They also wanted Trump to know whatever they had done, they did only at the Americans’ request and didn’t want it to get in the way of cooperating with the U.S.”

Not that we needed it at this point, but this is just one more piece of information that pushes us towards the inexorable conclusion: That the Obama intelligence agencies knew that the Steele dossier was nonsense all along. They knew what it was, they knew where it came from, and they knew who paid for it. And despite all of that, they used it to fool the FISA court into handing them a foreign surveillance warrant against an American citizen. They used it to build a case against Donald Trump.

Unacceptable, unethical, and possibly downright illegal.

The shoes are dropping fast now. Comey, Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, Strzok, and the rest of them had better watch out.

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shirtysleeves · 5 years

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From Musæum Clausum

BIBLIOTHECA ABSCONDITA

CONTAINING SOME REMARKABLE BOOKS, ANTIQUITIES, STATION & MOTION PICTURES & RARITIES OF SEVERAL KINDS, SCARCE OR NEVER SEEN BY ANY MAN, WO OR OTHERWISE, NOW LIVING

18. “Asexual Healing” (1981).

While it is more or less widely known that in the interval between his separation from Janis Hunter in 1979 and his death in 1984, Marvin Gaye was almost monastically chaste, practically nobody knows the extent to which he had adopted chastity as a modus vivendi by the beginning of this interval, let alone the extent to which this selfsame MV was seminal (an admittedly inapt but no-less-admittedly infungible adjective) to the composition of his chart-topping quasi-swansong “Sexual Healing.” The history of this seminality reads as follows: within weeks if not days if not hours if not minutes of his last-ever meeting with Hunter, Gaye happened to be vouchsafed a viewing of Chaka Khan’s promotional video for “I’m Every Woman” and was immediately struck (or stricken) by this video’s simultaneous presentation of four fully mobile clones of Ms. Khan—and struck (or stricken) by that presentation not, as might be expected, in appreciation of it qua electronic Kunststück, qua virtually guaranteed elicitor of an ejaculation of Wonderful what we can do nowadays! but rather in appreciation of it qua presumptive first-bringer-to-mind of the potential gratuitousness of sexual coition to biological reproduction. Chaka can do it on her own, he is reported to have murmured in presumptive émerveillement whilst spectating on this video; she don’t (sic) (sic) need a man to help her. This viewing was the genesis of a hymn to parthenogenesis, “Asexual Healing,” which Gaye categorically envisaged being released in tandem with a promotional video essentially identical mutatis mutandis to the one for “I’m Every Woman.” But alas!: the Havana-puffing fatwigs at Columbia (the record label, not the U.S. state-capital or U.S. federal district) put their collective foot down on this envisagement. The videodisc [for so music videos were then quasi-universally called, incredibly appalling though this may sound to present-day LaserDisc gourmandizers and Martha Quinn-stalkers alike], quoth these foot-downputters, is the most-prestigious music-presentation genre of the immediate future; we can’t have our flagship male soul-cum-R&B artist releasing an instantiation of this genre that simply echoes what Chaka Khan has already done, that in visual terms effectively merely proclaims ‘I’m every man’ in an erotic, non-Hofmannsthalian sense. Whereupon Gaye is reported to have consternatedly cried: Shia, Neroni! I already done (sic) (sic) recorded the whole damn song. Do you fatwigs really expect me to toss the whole damn thing in the skip (sic) (sic) and book the Fellas [“the Fellas” being Gaye’s priceless nickname for his powdered coke-powered team of session musicians] for a whole ’nother weekend? Faute de mieux, the fatwigs expected him to do just that, and entirely on his own dime. But ever-resourceful and ever-adept at the most minute minutiae of electronic studio w****dry, not to mention acoustic English prosody, Gaye quickly concluded that via a deletion of the unaccented a from each occurrence of asexual in the main vocal track, the song could be salvaged in its entirety, admittedly to the utterly fatal detriment of its potentially What’s Going On-eclipsingly revolutionary denunciation of the entire world-governing coitional dispensation. But Gaye, being at heart and bottom more of a Stoic than a stoichiometrist, took a philosophical attitude to the entire artistic debacle. When they finally let me both make the video I want to make and restore that unaccented ‘a’, he mused, the true message of the song will be all the more devastating for having been so vociferously heralded by its antithesis. Sadly, on April Fools’ Day, 1984, Marvin Gaye, Sr. put paid to all hopes for the making of that video, and consequently “Asexual Healing” has finished up being the last thing in the world its composer ever wished it to become –viz., the ultimate hookup track.

19. “(Don’t Fear) the Umlaut” (1976).

Blue Öyster Cult recorded this track for both inclusion in or on their album Agents of Fortune and release as that album’s first single. Reportedly, the principal impetus to or catalyst of its composition was lead guitarist Donald Bruce “Buck” Dharma’s annoyance at thousands of queries and complaints from fans, critics, and compositors alike regarding the band’s surmounting of the second vocable in its name with an umlaut that admittedly flouted English orthographical conventions to no apparent phonological purpose, inasmuch as not a single BÖC-member had ever been heard by an interviewer to pronounce that second vocable as anything other than an exact phonological copy of the famous upmarket first pronunciation thereof in the Gershwin brothers’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” let alone as even the vaguest approximation of the Franco-German œ, to which it, the umlauted o, was and ever had been appropriated by default. (Impetus-aut-catalyst-wise the remonstrations of compositors in particular must not be discounted, inasmuch as back in those footy days of pre-desktop publishing, the acquisition of the so-called supplemental Eurotrash grid comprising the first tier of diacritically enhanced cast-lead forms could set the purchaser back several thousands of those days’ dollars, an imponderably large sum for all but the largest metropolitan newspapers [and hence {perhaps damningly?} well beyond the reach of such college rags as the Stony Brook Statesman, whose concert-review page had undoubtedly contributed a good meganewton or so to the initial rocket-boost of publicity that had thrust the ’Cult {not to be confused with the transpondial and as-of-then-not-yet existent cult-ensemble The Cult} into the Billboard-bathing limelight]. What I meantersay here is that vis-à-vis the compositors’ particular case, Dharma may very well have been reacting defensively—i.e., in preemptive disavowal of all remorse at any financial hardship he may have occasioned the poor sods.) Perhaps not quite needless to say, the audio-rushes of this song were not favorably received by the Havana-puffing fatwigs at Columbia (yes, the same record label referenced in the preceding entry in this catalogue and presumably presided over by an executive team of H-PFs exactly three-fifths identical to the one that were [sic] destined to put the kibosh on the tune-video referenced therein [the three-fifths figure is extrapolated from data presented in that now-classic 1996 analysis of the actuary actualities of corporate boardrooms The Silver Ceiling by the eminent Anglophone sociologist of undetermined national passportship, Brad Macpherson Caputo]): dreading to the depths of their hobnailed jackboots a backlash from Anglophone consumers of virtually every shape, nationality, and stripe [for this was, after all, a mere 31 years after the conclusion of the so-called Second World War, when every umlauted vowel was instantly evocative of Nazi Germany and hence resuscitative of potentially lethal cardiac-arrest-or cerebral hemorrhage-inducing memories] those selfsame fatwigs reportedly required each and every such transcript to be ingested by a goat that was to be cast immediately thereupon into the core of a nuclear reactor lest some intelligible trace of the lyrics survive in its excreta. This requirement having been completely efficaciously fulfilled, no complete transcript of the lyrics of the song survives, but a Tonemaster C-60 cassette comprising the otherwise worthless so-called session diary of Seth Meyers (no, not that or the Seth Meyers [at least I think not that Seth Meyers, but who the heck can be arsed to check]), the Agents of Fortune sessions’ coffee-gopher, affords us the following tantalizing glimpse of but a few of the presumably umpteen-trillion glories contained in the Liedertext of “Don’t Fear the Umlaut”: Nietzsche and Strindberg / Are united in eternity / Ninety million people every day / Like the Germans both East and West / Not to mention the Swedish / (Albeit not the Danish) / All use the umlaut / We can be like them. Inasmuch as here in contrast to the otherwise consubstantial case of “Sexual Healing,” the crux of the fatwigs’ beef hinged on the lyrics of the song, and especially on a portion of those lyrics that contained an accented syllable, any circumvention of the fatwigs’ fiat by studio w******y was absolutely out of the question, and even if it had not been, the band were [sic] then so inured to being led about by the nose-ring by their producer, David Lucas (so Bob Sedule, music critic of the abovementioned Statesman), himself a notorious fat- wig chattel, that they would not have lifted a finger, let alone fingered a lift, in demurral at the fiat. And so Dharma dutifully penned what he only-decades-afterwards, and only after much Jello-shot-fueled plying, described as a “dull-as-dishwater knock-off of a Black Sabbath death ode,” an ode to whose poetic and prosodic niceties he reportedly (i.e., via the reportage of the above Jello shot-plyer, who must remain anonymous) devoted so little attention that he managed to Bic or Biro “the f**king execrable scrap of doggerel” out in its entirety with his left foot onto a discarded square of toilet paper while employing his right-cum-writing (albeit cum-non-onanizing) hand exclusively in a game of darts, a game in which he solidly won via a hat-trick of bull’s eyes despite reportedly (i.e., via the reportage of the abovementioned Mr. Sedule) being the worst darts player west of East Hampton-cum-east of Westport. In the light of all o’ the above, it will readily and correctly be inferred that the notorious once-per-beat cowbell-clunking of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” was also part of the soundscape of “Don’t Fear the Umlaut”; and in the light thereof it will perhaps at least be queried whether the notorious prominence of the cowbell vis-à-vis the first song enjoyed some rationale in “Don’t Fear the Umlaut” that it lost in being recast as “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The answer to this query is an unqualified if ultimately disappointingly prosaic Yes. You see, the abovementioned David Lucas, having enjoyed a holiday in the prevailingly Germanophone Bavarian-cum-Swiss-cum-Austrian Alps, and almost exactly contemporaneously purchased and listened to Karajan’s recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, concluded that there was something inalienably Alpine and consequently umlautine about the cowbell and thereupon insisted upon that instrument’s accentuation in the instrumental mix. And as they say the rest is [far too abominable a(n) SOA to be denoted by mere farting noises].

20. The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). Not to be confused with a certain film of the same name shot on the same location in the same year by the same production crew with the same cast. The scene is the eponymous Village in ca. 1950. Lex (Mickey Rourke) is a struggling garret-dwelling poet who obdurately insists on composing exclusively in metrically unimpeachable heroic couplets as if it were still ca. 1699. Dick (Eric Roberts), an unmistakable if corporeally unlikely stand-in for Allen Ginsberg (although he reportedly gained 96 pounds and had 98 percent of his head hair transferred to his face for the role, the results of this exercise in De Niro-esque hyperMethodism are ultimately unconvincing), is an unstruggling ground floor-dwelling poet who prosodically (not to mention extra-prosidically) lets everything hang out to resounding critical and financial success. The all-too-memorable climax of the film centers on Lex’s disruption of Dick’s reading of his epoch-making narrative-cum-epic poem Ouch! at the GV Brentano’s, as follows: “Though as self-styled King you may rob and pillage / I’m the only proper Pope of Greenwich Village” (to which Roberts all-too-deflatingly retorts: “Yes, you are indeed the only Pope of Greenwich Village, inasmuch as you are the Village’s only avowed imitator of Alexander Pope. But what of that? Can I get on with my reading?” and Rourke counter-retorts in abashed Pindaric non-numbers, “Yes, by all means. / Please do continue.”). Geraldine Page garnered a second best supporting actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Djuna Barnes, the Queen of Patchin Place, in a grand total of thirty seconds of screen time spent haggling mutually unintelligibly over the price of a shorty of Southern Comfort with a Basque liquor-store proprietor, portrayed by an impeccably vocal-coached Bill Macy (not to be confused with William H. Macy, then still a struggling garret-dwelling stage actor). Although the film postdates the nascence of so-called rap or hip-hop by a full half-decade, it has been name-checked, as they say, at least once by every so-called rap or hip-hop so-called artist who has since emerged into provincial, let alone national or international, prominence, owing to its implicit promulgation of metrical monotony and copularly sequestered rhyme as prosodic norms. For example, in 1993 the self-styled Dr. D** ejaculatively opined, That bitch, what’s his name, played by what’shisgoddamnmuddahfuckin’name—brother o’ that bitchess Hotlips Julia [here he is obviously confusing Roberts’s performance with Rourke’s]—the one that played that high-class ho opposite Richard Gere back in nineteen-naughty-ought…well, anyway, never mind that goddam bitch’s name: the point is, I done learnt everything I know about rhyme-hemorrhaging from that muddafuckin bitch, from the way he hemorrhaged rhymes in that movie from way back in the first Reagan administration…Shiah…what’s it called? etc. The circle of influence came full circle in the most appalling fashion in 2015 with the unkenneling of the unspeakable hip-hop pseudo-musical Hamilton, wherein brutalized sub-sub-sub-approximations of heroic couplets were placed in the mouth of a near-contemporary of Alexander Pope whom the latter presumably would have smothered in his crib like the Heraclean serpent (had chronology permitted) on account of his manifestly Whiggish political orientation.

#Alexander Pope #Musaeum Clausum #The Pope of Greenwich Village #blue oyster cult #Marvin Gaye #Chaka Khan #Pastiches #more cowbell #Sir Thomas Browne #Djuna Barnes #Allen Ginsberg

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futurelivinginspiration · 6 years

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Where Tiny Houses and Big Dreams Grow

A tech entrepreneur and his friends make a weekend community in the woods.

BARRYVILLE, N.Y. — Five years ago, Zach Klein, a successful tech entrepreneur then in his late 20s, was living in New York City but dreaming of the wilderness. A former Eagle scout, partner atCollegeHumor, and founder of Vimeo, the elegant online video platform, he was in between ventures, teaching entrepreneurship at the School of Visual Arts and spinning cycles, as he put it, while looking for land to buy — a lot of land — upon which he hoped to spend time building things and reconnecting to the scouting skills of his childhood.

Most urgently, he hoped he could persuade his friends to come along for the ride.

Mr. Klein got lucky in Sullivan County, N.Y., where he found 50 acres of forest with an understory of ferns and mossy boulders, lightly accessorized with a rough-hewed, one-room shack free from plumbing and electricity and a separate sleeping porch perched on a steep hill overlooking a rushing stream called Beaver Brook.

The property belonged to Scott Newkirk, a New York designer, and much of its appeal lay in Mr. Newkirk’s aesthetic: His shack and porch were lovely enough to have been featured in New York magazine. After 10 years there, Mr. Newkirk was ready to move on, and for about $280,000, Mr. Klein had found his utopia.

Beaver Brook, as he named it, inhabits a nexus of themes: a millennial’s version of the Adirondack camps of the robber barons, the back-to-the-land movements and intentional communities of the 1950s and ’60s, and a combination folk school/artists’ residency.

While hedge funders tend to express themselves in ever-bigger shingled simulacrums of early 20th century waterfront estates, those in the tech world who’ve enjoyed similar success may be more interested in experience, community and relationships, as Lane Becker, a founder of digital start-ups and the author of “Get Lucky,” a tech business primer on serendipity, pointed out.

“To the extent they want to spend their money, it’s on stuff like that,” he said. Mr. Becker and his wife, Courtney Skott, a furniture maker, were in Denver last weekend for a wedding, staying with a couple — a start-up entrepreneur and a television producer — who had rehabbed a Masonic Lodge. “They Airbnb some of the rooms out,” Mr. Becker said, “less because they need the money but because they’d like to get know different people. That’s sort of the model of what Zach’s doing. Some might see a sort of hipster-twee affectation, but I think there’s a more genuine impulse at work.”

Mr. Klein’s inspirations are familiar: the writings of Stewart Brand, the ’60s era eco guru and editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue; and John Seymour, the author of “The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it, ” along with the architectural ideals of Christopher Alexander. Other touchstones included a maple sugar shanty he once visited as a child, a community of Hobbitlike tiny houses called Trout Gulch built by some tech friends in Santa Cruz, Calif., and a yurt village built by a family in the Adirondacks.

But his pitch was pretty simple, said Courtney Klein, a digital strategist and entrepreneur, who married Mr. Klein at Beaver Brook in 2012. “It was, ‘Let’s get a piece of land and we could bring all our friends together and have a good time.’ ”

And so it began. In August 2010, the couple hosted a weekend of “bonfires, contemplation and wood chopping,” among other activities. They cooked stew in the shack, now called Scott’s Cabin, for Mr. Newkirk, and which Mr. Newkirk had outfitted with a propane stove, and washed up by hauling five-gallon containers from the brook.

Some guests bunked in the shack and sleeping porch; others pitched tents among the ferns. The experience was the model for what would be a kind of weekend commune, an experiment in episodic off-the-grid-living with a core of eight friends that has grown to about 20, including five children (Nell Klein arrived just over a year ago. )

There was Brian Jacobs, a sound designer and composer and Mr. Klein’s former roommate in New York City. He had been a junior Maine guide and his proficiency with an ax served the group well. There was Jace Cooke, a founder of the tech start-up Giphy, and other young creatives — animators, app designers, musicians and filmmakers.

Mr. Jacobs brought Grace Kapin, who worked in fashion, one weekend; having survived that, they are now married and building a cabin there. Before long, everyone became handy with chain saws and other power tools; they brought in more experienced builders to oversee large projects and teach the group carpentry skills.

There were rookie mistakes. An early project, a barrel-shaped tub, floated away one spring when the snow melted and the brook rose. Composting drew bears. (Ms. Kapin named their ursine visitors: Alan Ginzbear, Stephen Colbear, Marion Beary.)

The group made art on their camping weekends, including a winsomeshort film about building a stool from an oak tree, and took enticing photographs that looked like they had been art-directed by the editors of Kinfolk magazine. Since 2009, Mr. Klein had been collecting images of sheds, shacks, cabins and huts into a Tumblr blog he called, cunningly, Cabin Porn, and he also posted Beaver Brook’s embellishments, captured in those photographs, there.

When the blog, an enchanting rabbit hole of tiny handmade houses, quickly went viral, his private utopia became public record, and book publishers came courting, seeing in Cabin Porn the architectural equivalent of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York. The result, “Cabin Porn: Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere,” is out this week from Little, Brown.

Three years ago, Mr. Klein began inviting artisans like Tom Bonamici, a product designer with an expertise in woodworking and timber framing, to hold annual weeklong workshops at Beaver Brook for paying students to learn building skills. Mr. Klein, whose latest endeavor is DIY, an online “maker” site for children, is keenly interested in turning Beaver Brook into both a folk school and an artists’ residency.

After his first workshop, and at Mr. Klein’s urging, Mr. Bonamici, a gentle Oregonian with a passion for traditional Japanese timber framing, became a Beaver Brook resident.

Like all utopias, this one changed as it grew. It was three years ago that the Bunkhouse was built, on a piece of land across the brook with road frontage, electricity and a well. Camping in Scott’s Cabin or in tents strewn about the hill had lost its luster, Mr. Klein said, “People got slower and slower about volunteering to do the dishes on cold nights.” And without power, Beaver Brook’s season was contained to the warmer months.

Yet there is some nostalgia for the time “before,” when there was no cellphone coverage, Wi-Fi or hot water. This year’s Beaver Brook workshop project was timber framing, the foundation for an outdoor kitchen the residents hope will bring some of the action back to the Arcadian side of the brook. Six students paid $500 for Mr. Bonamici’s tutelage; the fee covered a week’s worth of chef-cooked meals and groceries (Mr. Klein and Ms. Klein paid for materials and Mr. Bonamici’s stipend).

On the last night of the workshop, students and residents ate by candlelight among the sturdy framework they’d built. “It was like old times,” Mr. Klein said.

The Bunkhouse, Mr. Klein said, was also bait for a plan he was hatching to draw Ms. Klein, Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Kapin into full-time residency at Beaver Brook. The four discussed buying a local market, perhaps putting a bar in its basement until Ms. Klein put the kibosh on the plan.

While Beaver Brook, she said, “did snowball pretty quickly from something that had more meaning than a weekend house,” it was not her life plan to settle permanently in rural Sullivan County.

“Courtney was the voice of reason,” Ms. Kapin said.

The Kleins have since moved to San Francisco, where DIY is based. Ms. Klein and Ms. Kapin, who still lives in Brooklyn, are partners inStorq, a line of maternity clothes that Ms. Klein founded.

Mr. Klein and Ms. Klein are Beaver Brook’s owners, and they pay taxes and insurance on the properties. Beaver Brook residents are divided by their dues into two categories: Bunkers pay $150 a month for a guaranteed bed in the Bunkhouse. Campers pay $75 a month for a spot across the brook.

Bedrooms at the Bunkhouse, an airy open-plan house designed around the frame of a 19th-century barn, are first come first served. It’s the most practical system, Mr. Klein said.

Last year, 100 people, give or take, spent at least one night in the house. Over Labor Day, he and Ms. Klein and Nell were sleeping in a first-floor bedroom that has been outfitted with a crib, one of three separate bedrooms.

Most of the sleeping options are communal: In an open loft space upstairs, there are two double beds; the Bunkroom, which is also upstairs, has eight futons on its wide-planked yellow pine floor. It’s Mr. Klein’s favorite place to sleep. “I love being up here with eight snoring buddies,” he said.

As for projects, there is one simple rule, Mr. Klein said: “As long as the thing you want to do doesn’t cause irreversible change, just go for it.” Idan Cohen, an amateur chef, organized the building of a cob oven one work weekend this summer. As it happens, Ms. Kapin’s and Mr. Jacobs’s stunning wedge of a cabin, dubbed Clydeshead for their dog, Clyde, was Mr. Klein’s idea.

“It’s his special skill to talk people into doing something ambitious,” Ms. Kapin said. (Given Mr. Klein’s hope to anchor his friends more permanently to Beaver Brook, one suspects in this instance a deeper motive.)

With a budget of $10,000, Mr. Jacobs’s and Ms. Kapin’s original vision of a cube tucked into the hill receded pretty quickly. “Once we talked to people who knew what they were doing,” Mr. Jacobs said, “we realized we’d have to build a retaining wall, there’d be backhoes involved...”

Mr. Jacobs’s brother, Mike, is an architect, and he designed a refined 350-foot rectangle cantilevered out over the hill that uses the surrounding trees as supports. That particular innovation depends on treehouse technology, an anchor bolt known as a Garnier Limb. (Michael Garnier, an Oregon based treehouse builder — and treehouse dweller — is sometimes known as the father of the modern treehouse movement.)

There are Beaver Brook rituals, like the annual talent show, held New Year’s Eve in the Bunkhouse. Newbies earn a nickname after their third night on the property, and following a requisite post-sauna plunge in the brook after dark. (Mr. Klein’s is Zubaz, for the virulently patterned pants that he and other Buffalo Bills fans like to wear. Ms. Kapin’s is Guns, for the Linda Hamilton-like biceps she developed building her cabin.)

On work weekends, newcomers might be assigned grunt work chores like path maintenance. “It is much, much harder than you’d imagine,” Ms. Kapin said with a slight shudder.

There’s an email chain, for planning projects and working out domestic issues. Laundry has been particularly thorny. With so many beds and no assigned rooms, the residents were struggling until it was suggested they bring their own sheets and towels. One resident offered to cross-stitch everyone’s names on their linens.

Beekeeping has been broached as a project for next summer (Mr. Klein has a hankering for mead). In August, Mr. Klein sent around a Beaver Brook logo he and Mr. Cooke designed as a book stamp for their growing Bunkhouse library.

Unlike the vicious, trollish tenor of, say, the internal communiqués of Manhattan co-ops, Beaver Brook residents write with civility and a regular refrain of “awesome!”

“I think this is an important step,” Mr. Klein wrote, weighing in on the recent laundry discussion, “towards delegating the responsibilities for making BB work, creating a more camp-like culture, and raising the bar of participation to be more intentional. Cheers or jeers?”

Back home in San Francisco, the email chain is Mr. Klein’s primary online community, as he pines for his East Coast retreat.

Sunday nights are rough, he added. “It’s when everyone is driving back to the city from Beaver Brook,” he said, “and I get a flurry of photos of the meals they’ve made, or of building the cob oven, and I feel on some level I’m missing out on the life I made.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/fashion/the-cabin-porn-commune.html

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arlingtonpark · 7 years

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The Story of L’Affaire Russe Part 5

Part V. The Veselnitskaya Revelations to the Confession of George Papadopoulos/ “No, Mom, I’m not being stupid, I’m being postmodern!”

On July 8th, 2017, the biggest bomb shell yet was dropped.

On that day, the New York Times reported that on June 6th, 2016, Trump’s son, Trump Jr., along with Manafort and Kushner, had met in Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with connections to the Russian government.

This was highly suspect and shady looking and Trump Jr. released a statement maintaining that the meeting pertained to the adoption of Russian children, that the meeting was brokered by a friend, and that he asked Manafort and Kushner to “stop by.”

However, the next day the Times issued a follow up report showing that the meeting was pitched to Trump Jr. specifically as a way to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton, this taking place in the Summer of 2016.

Trump Jr. issued a new statement denying that Manafort and Kushner attended the meeting and knew nothing about what it was about, and in regards to the meeting itself, that nothing meaningful ever came of it. He further maintains that he agreed to have the meeting to obtain information that would be useful to his father’s campaign and that Trump knew nothing of it.

That same day, the WaPo reported that the friend of Trump Jr. who brokered the meeting was Rob Goldstone, the doofus manager of Russian pop star Emin Agalarov. E. Agalarov is the son of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire Russian realtor and Trump business associate who co-sponsored the 2013 Miss Universe Pageant, which was held in Moscow.

Note that Agalarov the Elder is mentioned in the Steele Dossier as knowing the details of Trump’s alleged Pee Tape related escapades.

The Times gained this information through an email chain that was leaked to them by an anonymous source. However, there are at least four suspects: Trump Jr. himself (as unlikely as it is), Manafort, Kushner, and Goldstone. These are the four people who are confirmed to have had access to the email chain and would have had a copy of it.

On July 11th, the Times published the email chain in full. But Trump Jr., having been informed of the impending publication ahead of time as a courtesy, posted the entire god damn thing online himself.

To be clear: the email chain in question CONFIRMS that the Trump campaign at least attempted to collude with the Russian government in order to gain an advantage in the 2016 election and Donald Trump Jr., that dumbass, post it TO HIS TWITTER ACCOUNT.

The email chain not only confirms that the NYT’s report was accurate, but that they actually left some important details out.

Goldstone did indeed broker the meeting, but it also shows that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Goldstone was actually acting as a secondhand intermediary: what happened was that the Crown Prosecutor of Russia (presumably he is referring to the Yury Chaika, whose actual title is Prosecutor General of Russia), who is Russia’s chief law enforcement officer, met with Aras Agalarov and told him that he had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Agalarov sent word of this to his son, Emin, who in turn forwarded this information to Goldstone, who emailed Trump Jr. about it.

Chaika is an officer of the Russian government and Trump Jr. was told that the information about Hillary Clinton would come courtesy of him. He said yes.

And to top it off, as if it weren’t clear enough that Trump Jr. was soliciting information from a foreign government, Goldstone flat out told him in the email that “this is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

The email chain also confirms that Veselnitskaya was a Russian government attorney.

And oh yeah, that thing Trump Jr. said about Manafort and Kushner not knowing about what the meeting was about? The email shows that the whole chain was forwarded to them, meaning they were in on it the whole time too.

Trump Jr.’s reputation was basically destroyed.

And it would only further be destroyed in the subsequent days.

Up to this point it was known that four people were attending the meeting. Trump Jr. maintained that those were the only people there.

And then it came out that there were at least four additional people there.

Those four were: Goldstone, who publicly noted his presence at Trump Tower on the day of the meeting on his f#%@ing Facebook page; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist; Ike Kaveladze, a representative of the Agalarovs; and a translator.

Trump’s lawyer asserted that Trump had nothing to do with Trump Jr.’s misleading statements.

He did.

At this point it’s obvious that the fuzz was closing in on Trump. As if the revelations regarding the Veselnitskaya meeting weren’t bad enough, it was soon learned that Mueller was looking in to Trump financial dealings unrelated to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Remember, Mueller’s mandate is to investigate Russia’s interference in the election and any crimes uncovered in the course of that investigation.

Rosenstein backed up Mueller, saying his actions were within his mandate.

But that didn’t stop people from fearing that Trump would take the ultimate plunge: removing Mueller as special counsel.

Mueller is an officer of the executive branch and Trump is the head of the executive branch and because of that, Trump does have the authority to fire Mueller if he truly wants to.

There are safeguards in place, but they’re rather flimsy. Only Rod Rosenstein can fire Mueller and even then, only for good cause. Trump however, is Rosenstein’s boss and could order Rosenstein to remove Mueller. Rosenstein could resign rather than fulfill Trump’s order, or simply refuse to comply, in which case Trump can fire Rosenstein. In that case, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand would take over. She would face the same set of choices as Rosenstein: fire Mueller, resign, or be fired. If she chooses the latter two options, then the next person in the DOJ’s chain of command would take over and they would face the same set of options. This would continue until Trump finally came to someone who would fire Mueller.

Or, because this rule only exists as an internal DOJ guideline, Trump could simply issue an executive order rescinding that guideline and then fire Mueller himself.

Doing so, however, would be political suicide. Even Republicans are adamant that if Trump fires Mueller then “there will be hell to pay” in the words of Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

But Trump, it would seem, had discovered an alternate way to interfere in the investigation.

For all his faults and to his credit, Jeff Sessions has largely abided by his recusal from matters relating to the Russia probe.

Trump doesn’t like this.

He believes that Sessions’ job is to serve him and cover for him. Seemingly because of this, Trump began attacking and deriding his own Attorney General.

It is known that Trump, in spite of the meme involving him firing people, doesn’t actually like to fire people. He just can’t seem to bring himself to do so, at least to their face. Note that Jim Comey was fired in a non-face-to-face way. Because of this, the general consensus is that Trump is trying to run Sessions out of town; to make his job as AG so miserable that he quits.

The President’s appointee to be Attorney General must receive approval by the Senate. But they’re allowed by the Constitution to make unilateral appointments if the position falls vacant while the Senate is adjourned. This so-called recess appointment would last until the Senate’s next meeting.

The idea is that by getting the recused Sessions to resign his office, Trump can then recess appoint some stooge to replace him. That person could then interfere in the Russia investigation on his behalf.

Whether or not this really was Trump’s plan, the Senate quickly put the kibosh on it. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is charged with vetting Presidential appointees to law enforcement related positions, said that if the AG position became vacant, then Trump could expect to see a replacement in as soon as six months. In other words, stop trying to push Sessions out.

The Senate also agreed to hold pro forma sessions to derail any attempt by Trump to recess appoint a Sessions replacement. Pro forma sessions occur when the Senate (or the House of Representatives) is in session only as a formality. Thus, the President cannot make recess appointments. (Republicans used this same tactic to obstruct attempts by Obama to make recess appointments; now they were doing it to their own President!)

I’d like to take a moment to spotlight an aspect of the Sessions imbroglio that is representative of a wider theme in the L’Affaire Russe scandal. That is, how many unlikely twists and turns there are to it. There have been many unforeseen happenings with regard to this saga. The firing of Comey. The Veselnitskaya meeting revelations. The Devin Nunes subplot. All of it completely out of nowhere. Jeff Sessions is hated by Democrats for his fervent racism and the damage he’s doing as Attorney General. Yet because he has stood by his recusal, as far as the Russia probe is concerned he is an ally! The sight of Democrats demanding that Sessions not resign and remain at his post was so bizarre.

In August of 2017 word got out that Mueller had impaneled a grand jury to aid in his investigation. This signaled an escalation of the investigation since grand juries are used by prosecutors to obtain warrants and issue subpoenas.

Subpoenas, say, for documents relating to the Veselnitskaya meeting that Trump Jr. took. We learned that Mueller had obtained those as well.

We also learned that US intelligence had intercepted conversations between suspected Russian operatives discussing talks they had with Paul Manafort about information that could be used against Hillary Clinton.

The above three tidbits of information was reported to the public in rapid succession all over the course of an hour.

The White House’s official response to the grand jury news was also very bizarre. It was just the article initially reporting on it copy and pasted on to the official White House letterhead.

Things continued to escalate when Mueller raided Paul Manafort’s home for documents even though Manafort had supposedly already turned over relevant documents to Mueller.

The general consensus is that Mueller is playing hardball. His strategy, apparently, is to engage in a shock and awe campaign to scare other Trump associates in to “flipping” on Trump and cooperating with the investigation. Another key aspect of Mueller’s apparent strategy: trying to flip Manafort himself by nailing him on other charges so he’ll turn on Trump in exchange for amnesty. It’s been reported that Mueller is looking in to criminal conduct by Manafort and possibly Flynn too.

It was later reported that Mueller, in a way that is clearly pursuant to the above, is working with New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. This is very shrewd on Mueller’s part. There’s always the possibility that Trump may shield his accomplices by pardoning them, but the President can only issue pardons for federal crimes. Working with Schneiderman signals that Mueller is trying to nail them on state level crimes which Trump can’t pardon them for.

Rather tellingly, the National Enquirer, yes the supermarket dishrag, has started publishing noted anti-Manafort articles. The National Enquirer is owned by a personal friend of Trump’s.

It is also known that Rinat Akhmenshin, who participated in the Veselnitskaya meeting with Trump Jr. has testified before Mueller’s grand jury.

Around this point the story of GOP operative Peter Smith was uncovered. Smith was a GOP operative with years of work for the party. Indeed, he was in his eighties by the time the 2016 election came around, yet he was still doing work for the GOP.

Around mid-summer 2016, Matt Tait, a cybersecurity expert who had gained notoriety for offering public analysis of the DNC email hacks on his Twitter account, was contacted by Smith. Smith claimed that he was contacted by someone on the dark web who was in possession of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s email server. Smith was intent on obtaining Clinton’s hacked emails and exposing them for the world to see, but wanted Tait to authenticate the emails held by his unknown dark web contact as genuinely being from Clinton’s email server. Tait did not go through on Smith’s proposition and did not speak to him again.

Smith, it is apparent, had connections to the upper echelons of the Trump campaign. For example, according to Tait, Smith knew that Michael Flynn was to become the National Security Advisor in the event that Trump won the election.

It is, however, unknown if Smith was acting independently or on behalf of the Trump campaign. Smith did imply, though, that Flynn was involved in his attempts to find Clinton’s hacked emails and we now know that Mueller is investigating that possibility.

Ultimately, there are two possibilities here: that Smith’s dark web contact was just a scam artist looking to defraud Smith of his money for fake emails, or, more sinisterly, an agent of the Russian government looking to pass on the hacked Clinton emails to people who would use them to Russia’s benefit.

I believe that we now know why Trump had such a servile and bootlicking attitude towards Putin during the campaign. It has been reported that Trump associates, and childhood friends, Michael Cohen and Felix Sater were trying to negotiate the construction of a Trump Tower Moscow during the election campaign. This, it would seem, explains why Trump spoke so approvingly of Putin during the campaign.

It’s been reported that Manafort had a warrant for his surveillance at various points during the campaign. What happened is that the Feds had Manafort under surveillance for reasons to do with his work for foreign agents known to be allied with Russia. To be clear, the fact that we even know about this is actually very bad.

We know about this because a FISA warrant leaked to the press. This is a grave violation of Manafort’s rights as a US citizen and should not be applauded.

After some time outside the public light due to a number of natural disasters (and one botched response to a natural disaster) the scandal roared back to prominence.

A bombshell was leaked on Friday night on October 27th: Mueller had secured the first indictment of the Trump-Russia Scandal. This leak could only have come from the Rod Rosenstein’s office, making this a very troublesome leak.

Who exactly was under indictment was to be announced on Monday...

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 6

#trump #russia #2016 #politics #l'affaire russe

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johnboothus · 3 years

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Back on the Ale Trail: Will Beer Tourism Rebound After the Pandemic?

This month, we’re heading outdoors with the best drinks for the backyard, beach, and beyond. In Take It Outside, we’re exploring our favorite local spots and far-flung destinations that make summer the ultimate season for elevated drinking.

When I reach Chris O’Leary, he’s on his way from New York City to Spokane, Wash., to take a beer trip with a pal he hasn’t seen since the before times. “I’m literally on a plane right now,” he texts. It’s hardly a surprise. Since 2011, O’Leary, a marketing executive who publishes the New York-focused beer blog Brew York, has visited 2,267 craft breweries around the world. Averaging between 250 and 350 breweries per year, O’Leary is one of the most well-traveled beer tourists in the world, and I’d called him to get his take on the post-pandemic future of ale trails, brew tours, and general beer-related travel as hopefully vaccinated Americans re-embrace their wanderlust this summer and beyond.

“[Breweries] are as busy now, if not busier, than I’ve ever seen them,” he says on a phone interview from SeaTac’s baggage claim. “People are just ready to get back out there.” If O’Leary is right, and beer tourism is coming back strong in a post-pandemic world, it’ll be good news for the breweries, travel companies, and other hospitality companies that rely on beer-focused travelers to spend cash in their communities. But everything has changed since we all went into lockdown last year, and the craft beer business was hardly exempt. As the country reopens and cooped-up Americans eagerly book long-delayed vacations, will breweries be on the itinerary?

‘Beer tourists spend quite a bit of money’

Before we look to the future, a brief jaunt through the recent past. As American craft beer’s volume growth has slowed in a more mature, crowded market over the past half-decade, beer tourism — a broad term typically defined as leisure travel primarily motivated by visiting breweries, beer festivals, and so forth — has mostly held steady. “What we saw prior to the pandemic, is that … beer tourism has been on the rise for quite a number of years,” says Neil Reid, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toledo and the author of several papers on beer tourism.

Data from the Brewers Association, the industry’s largest trade association, roughly tracks with that. According to an annual survey conducted among craft beer drinkers, from 2015 through 2019 the percentage of respondents who said they’d visited at least one brewery while traveling rose steadily each year, from 45 percent to 53 percent. (Among weekly drinkers, those figures were higher.) Bart Watson, the BA’s chief economist, says that “experiential [beer] tourism is growing more in line with at-the-brewery sales” as opposed to overall craft beer sales volume. “Prior to 2020, [those] were still growing very, very strongly.”

Speaking of sales: The reason Watson and other industry observers pay attention to drinkers’ interest in beer tourism is because traditionally there’s big money to be made luring visitors to breweries. While there’s no comprehensive national study showing how much cash beer tourists spend each year, regional reviews indicate it can be substantial. In 2019, an independent analysis commissioned by the tourism board in Grand Rapids, Mich., found that beer tourists generated an economic impact of $38.5 million to the surrounding county — $23.9 million in money they spent on beers, restaurant meals, hotel rooms, and the like, plus another $14.6 million indirectly recirculated through the local economy.

“Beer tourists spend quite a bit of money,” Dr. Cristina Benton, director of market and industry analysis at Anderson Economic Group and the study’s author, told me in a recent phone interview. In examining the spending habits of beer-focused Grand Rapids visitors, Benton and her colleague Sara Bowers found that beer tourists spent an average of $1,060 per party per trip compared to $959 spent on average by other groups.

Reid, who shared a study from the Sonoma County Economic Development Board that found Russian River Brewing Company’s 2019 Pliny the Younger release generated a $4.16 million economic impact on its own, points out that in addition to being potentially powerful revenue drivers, beer tourism programs tend to be fairly low-effort and low-cost for those tourism boards that elect to create them. “It’s an extra webpage, it’s an extra couple brochures. … I think the cost of promotion is pretty small, and return on investment can be pretty high,” she said, especially when factoring in all the ancillary businesses that benefit from beer tourist spending. “There’s a lot of winners when you can attract those folks.”

Uneven impact

Of course, starting in spring 2020, those folks went into quarantine, and many brewery taprooms were forced to close for long stretches due to state restrictions on indoor service, concerns for staff safety, and the demands of new business models. Some took the opportunity to retool and expand existing outdoor setups, or build new ones. But on the whole, on-premise brewery sales decreased in 2020 compared to the year prior; the Brewers Association tracked a 25 percent dent in Q3 2020 figures alone. Beer festivals, another traditional draw for beer-thirsty travelers, were effectively kiboshed, cutting breweries off from a vital way to expand their customer bases.

All this worked out predictably poorly for event promoters, and for companies that focus on conventional, destination-based beer tourism. “Our company, like the travel industry in general, was devastated by the pandemic,” says Allan Wright, president and founder of Zephyr United, a Montana company that offers guided beer, wine, and culinary travel packages through its Taste Vacations division. (Another arm of the company also hosts a beer tourism conference, though the pandemic put it on hiatus both this year and last.) “Last year we canceled 21 out of 24 vacations on our schedule,” Wright says.

Covid-19 did destination-based beer tourism firms like Wright’s no favors. But contrary to what you might have expected, the BA’s data shows that brewery visits actually held steady, and may even have increased from 2019 to 2020. Watson cautions to take those figures with a grain of salt to account for respondents mischaracterizing their visits for to-go beers during the pandemic with more conventional beer tourism. But here, too, beer tourism infrastructure helped out, as many state guilds, regional tourism boards, and ale trail promoters shifted from pitching their constituent breweries as travel destinations to encouraging drinkers to patronize their retail operations.

“People came to pick up carry-out [orders] and support as many local breweries as possible,” says Patrick Fannin, the head brewer at Dreaming Creek Brewery in Richmond, Ky. The brewery, which had only been open for a year prior to the pandemic, is a stop on the Brewgrass Trail, a 20-brewery network in the greater Lexington area organized by Kentucky’s Department of Tourism. “The trail was a kind of [customers’] guide of which ones to go to,” Fannin surmises.

In eastern Pennsylvania, the Visit Bucks County tourism board used its social media handles to encourage visits to the 27 breweries on its ale trail from followers within driving distance. “The Bucks County Ale Trail was actively promoted during the pandemic, primarily over social media, as many of the breweries still sold beer to-go,” says Paul Bencivengo, the president and chief operating officer of Visit Bucks County.

This makes sense when you consider the nature of most beer tourism in the U.S. While marquee beer destinations like Denver, Asheville, and San Diego are strong enough draws to entice drinkers to make cross-country pilgrimages, says Reid, most beer tourists typically hail from within 150 miles or so of the breweries they’re visiting. “It’s basically a weekend trip,” he says.

Driving revenue

As Watson points out, local drinkers skipping the supermarket for the taproom to-go window isn’t beer tourism, certainly not in the sense that Reid and his colleagues define it. But there’s some evidence that actual beer tourism did persist during the pandemic. With U.S. air travel dropping as much as 60 percent in 2020, dedicated beer tourists itching for an approximated taproom experience took to the road instead. To wit: Brew York’s O’Leary estimates he still managed to visit about 220 breweries in 2020, just a slight deviation from his norm, mostly by car travel. “Most of it was road trips. … A lot of my planning was around where Covid-19 [case] numbers were the lowest,” he says.

For Harvest Hosts, a travel firm that rents RVs to members looking to camp at one of the 2,500+ breweries, wineries, and farms that the company has contracted with across the company, that tendency was a boon for business. “We have seen a massive increase (over 400 percent) in RVers visiting breweries since the pandemic started,” Joel Holland, the company’s CEO, says via email. Harvest Hosts counts 338 breweries in its hosting network; in 2020, Holland says, its customers spent more than $25 million at all the businesses that participate in its program.

The combined effect of increased local emphasis, new outdoor spaces, and a shift to road travel may have softened the pandemic’s impact on American beer tourism last year. “I think beer tourism held up better than we would have expected, and is probably poised to rebound,” says Watson. “These numbers suggest that the fundamental demand [for beer tourism] didn’t really go anywhere.”

A post-pandemic bounceback?

As vaccinations continue to rise across the country, the factors do seem favorable for beer tourism to return to something like its pre-pandemic benchmarks. For one thing, Americans are itching to travel. In a June 2021 survey, Destination Analysts, a travel market research firm, found that over 77 percent of Americans plan to travel for leisure in the next three months or so, and 90 percent of those trips will be overnighters. Harvest Hosts’ own survey, conducted at the top of the year, shows similar appetite, with 60 percent of respondents saying they’ll travel more than in 2019. Holland says the firm is seeing customers extend the lengths of their trips as restrictions lift, and that Americans’ slow return to international travel “bodes very well for road travel to wonderful small town breweries.” The company projects that its RV-mobilized travelers will spend upwards of $40 million at their host locations in 2021.

Wright, at Zephyr United, hoped the bounceback would lift destination-based beer tourism that requires air travel. So far, so good: “We not only are back to where we were before, we are well ahead of our numbers from 2019,” he says.

From his vantage point at the BA, Watson sees only a few potential headwinds for beer tourism. For one thing, it’s experience-driven hospitality, he points out, a discipline that may be tough for more production-oriented breweries to master. “People don’t go [to breweries] necessarily just to look at the shiny tanks, they go for the knowledge, for learning, for the experience … and that can be replicated in other beverage alcohol arenas,” he says. On that note, with craft distilleries across the country lobbying for expanded privileges to do tastings and on-site sales, and vineyards already very sophisticated on those counts, beverage-loving tourists have more options than ever at which to spend their travel dollars. Craft beer drinkers, Watson emphasizes, are nothing if not “omni-biborous”: that is, they like drinking craft beer, but like drinking everything else, too.

Still, those are not insurmountable challenges, and though Watson cautions that beer tourism may not bounce back all at once, he speculates its return may come with a welcome post-pandemic “wildcard” for breweries. “A whole bunch of breweries developed new ways of selling beer … with more to-go and delivery” options, he says. That hard-won pandemic expertise may enable breweries to leverage direct-to-consumer sales (in states where that’s legal) to maintain relationships with beer tourists who visit, vineyard-style. “I think it opens up new potential, you know when bigger markets have that, to increase beer tourism, and more importantly the follow-up sales from those visits,” Watson muses.

That remains to be seen, but more certain, for now, is that beer tourism is coming back in some capacity. As he grabs his suitcase in Seattle, I ask Chris O’Leary what advice he has to offer to anyone looking to begin their own march to 2,267 brewery visits this summer. “Look for the hidden gem beer towns,” he replies. “The big [beer tourism] destinations are probably going to be even busier than normal.”

The article Back on the Ale Trail: Will Beer Tourism Rebound After the Pandemic? appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/post-pandemic-beer-tourism/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/back-on-the-ale-trail-will-beer-tourism-rebound-after-the-pandemic

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crazy4tank · 4 years

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I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

New Post has been published on https://funnypics365.com/2021/01/02/i-aint-one-to-gossip-but/

I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Original Post: http://ishouldbelaughing.blogspot.com/2020/12/i-aint-one-to-gossip-but_26.html

“This is Justice Tricia A. Bigelow. She was fucking my husband Tom Girardi and he was paying her Saks bill and paying for her plastic surgery.”

Damn, Tom; he was set to pay Erika’s Saks bill and for her plastic surgery. And Erika posted screenshots of their texts between one another:

“Tonight was fantastic. Really. But it would be a whole lot better if I were fucking you.”

“Miss you babe. Makeup sex?”

And there’s a text where Tricia asks Tom to pay Dr. David Matlock for her plastic surgery or she’ll “ask my new boyfriend to pay if it’s a problem. He’s got big dough.”

But most odd of all is that, for some reason, Erika then posted a video of her face superimposed over Daenerys from Game Of Thrones and the internet dragged her:

“Should you be making these videos right now?”

“Baby what is you doin.”

“You should probably stop posting for a while. It’s kind of shocking that no one has advised you to at this point.”

“This whole thing is…. embarrassing. Can we get Olivia Pope?”

I’m not sure where Erika goes after all this but judging from Tricia’s threat to Tom, maybe she should look up Tricia’s old boyfriend because he’s “got big dough”.

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“I don’t understand why I grew up without a father, and now that I have found you, you don’t want to see me.”

“You are the father.”

In 2005, Nicole Coste ALLEGED that Albert left her with child, too, and while he again denied that ALLEGATION, the truth came out:

“You are the father.”

Sure looks like Albert likes to spread his DNA around.

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It must be a slow gossip week when Connie Chung makes the cut, but here we are. It seems that Chung is dishing the dirt about lots of people, from Dan Rather to Barbara Walters to Hugh Grant.

Chung says Rather, was what she called “Texas nice” to her face but not so much behind her back, saying Rather has been described as being a person who “has very sharp elbows” as in:

“Maybe, if I turned my back, you know, I felt like I might be in a scene of Psycho in the shower.”

And she also had to stand down when it came to Bryant Gumbel, or men at all:

Um, Connie? Stop talking. But she doesn’t … she was asked if Gumbel—with whom Chung sometimes co-hosted “Today” as a sub for Jane Pauley—suffered from the condition, she replied:

“I would say so. I’d be sitting beside him, but I was invisible.”

Sounds like Connie thought very highly of herself while most others did not. Also sounds like she was being interviewed by Maury for the one show a year he does that isn’t about DNA tests.

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restoreamericanglory · 8 years

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New Post has been published on Restore American Glory

New Post has been published on http://www.restoreamericanglory.com/breaking-news/ford-joins-the-trump-party-cancels-mexico-factory/

Ford Joins the Trump Party, Cancels Mexico Factory

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

Ford Motor Company announced this week that they were canceling plans to build a new plant in Mexico and would instead invest in a Michigan assembly factory. The move comes after President-elect Donald Trump singled Ford out on the campaign trail, criticizing them for moving their manufacturing operations out of the United States.

The auto giant will put the kibosh on a $1.6 billion plant they’d planned to build south of the border and invest $700 million in the Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Michigan. The move is expected to create 700 new American jobs.

In an interview with Neil Cavuto, Ford CEO Mark Fields said that Trump’s policies played a role in their decision.

“We’re doing this decision based on what’s right for our business,” Fields said. “As we think about the investments here in Michigan, as you can imagine, Neil, we look at a lot of factors as we make those. One of the factors that we’re looking at is a more positive U.S. manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the pro-growth policies he said he’s going to pursue. And so this is a vote of confidence.”

Trump himself tweeted a link to the story on Wednesday, casting it as a sign of things to come. “Instead of driving jobs and wealth away, AMERICA will become the world’s great magnet for INNOVATION & JOB CREATION,” he wrote.

Inevitably, the left will attempt to downplay Trump’s role in bringing the jobs back, just as they did with Carrier and Sprint. Trump could have a success like this every day for the next four years, and the liberal media would never give him credit for any of them. Or, if they do, they’ll dismiss it as meaningless in the overall scheme of the economy – a show, meant solely for the rubes.

Part of it is just reflex; if there’s an opportunity to criticize Trump or belittle him, the biased press can’t resist the bait.

But part of it is because the left knows what Trump is trying to do here, and they’re going to try everything in their power to keep it from working. First, it’s a thousand jobs here. Then, it’s another 700 over there. Perhaps these accomplishments are “meaningless” for American job growth as a whole, but what if they set a trend? What if companies see Carrier and Ford and Sprint benefiting from all of this patriotic publicity?

Once these companies start to view these moves as a powerful form of advertising, the ball could really start rolling. We could see a true American manufacturing renaissance and Trump wouldn’t have to impose a single new tariff.

Should that happen, Democrats can kiss their 2020 chances goodbye. A booming economy is the last thing they want. That makes their motives anti-American.

Of course, anyone who understands the left should not be surprised.

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totalconservative · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Total Conservative News

New Post has been published on http://totalconservative.com/trump-makes-right-call-syria-media-bashes-giving-putin/

Trump Makes Right Call on Syria, Media Bashes Him for Giving in to Putin

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There are a lot of irritating things about the media’s obsession with the BIG QUESTION – Did the Trump campaign collude with the Russian government? – but one of the most irritating is how it colors everything the president does with respect to foreign policy. Donald Trump was not elected on a charade of being just like every other Republican in the primaries. He was forthright and honest about where he disagreed with the status quo, and that included his oft-repeated desire to put an end to our relentless excursions into the Middle East. That would – naturally and inescapably – include a desire to get the U.S. out of the civil war in Syria, apart from our interests in decimating ISIS.

At no point did President Trump and his immediate allies in the administration give false signals about this intention, apart from the missile strike against the Assad regime earlier this year. But that strike was a clear one-off, meant to send a simple message to both Assad and Putin. We’re not pursuing regime change, the message said, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stand back and watch this kind of atrocity take place without retaliation. It was the right move at the right time, even if many Trump supporters feared that it could drag the U.S. deeper into the conflict.

Those fears proved to be groundless, of course, and now Trump is making it even clearer that he wants to extract the U.S. from the Syrian debacle. According to U.S. officials, Trump is putting the kibosh on a CIA program that arms and trains – cough, cough – “moderate” Syrian rebels who are aiming to bring down the Assad regime. The program, employed by President Obama in 2013 when the U.S. was still hopeful about once again playing the “let’s dethrone an awful dictator and see what kind of Islamist trash takes his place” game, became little more than a waste of money once Russia inserted itself into the conflict.

The Obama administration made a whole host of blunders during the Arab Spring, but their involvement in the Syrian civil war was by far the most costly. If President Trump is making headway towards getting us as far away from this debacle as possible, it can only be for the good. Yes, we have to keep an eye on Iran and its spreading influence, but we can do that without spending another trillion dollars on a Middle Eastern war with an uncertain and unpredictable outcome.

But of course, the media, desperate to make Trump look like a puppet of the Kremlin, is quick to remind everyone that this “is what Putin wants.” Well, so? Is it incumbent on the president to run every piece of foreign policy through the “Will Putin like it or not?” test? Why should Donald Trump feel handcuffed to an Obama-era blunder just because the New York Times won’t stop with their hysterical coverage of the 2016 election? It defies any and all logic.

This move was a long time coming, and it was the correct choice. If Putin is pleased, the Democrat-run media will just have to live with that fact.

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