Is Mass Tourism Ruining Vacations As We Know Them?

 Source:

Holiday.

Many people look forward to it all year, as a chance to get away from the stress of everyday life and let loose in a new place. But what if that new place is over capacity?

That's the problem facing many hotspots around the world lately, from Bali to Barcelona to Mt. Everest to Machu Pichu. These destinations are grappling with overtourism - when the presence of too many people in one area diminishes quality of life for both locals and visitors.

 Mass tourism is set to be the new normal, due to more affordable airfare and the rise of the global middle class. Residents in popular hotspots have been protesting overtourism over the past few years.

Governments are responding by imposing tourism taxes, limiting access to popular destinations through ticketing systems and even closing sites to give them a chance to recover. Should limits be set on global tourism?

America Has Passed a Point of No Return by Andrew J. Bacevich

SOURCE: TOMDISPATCH

[Editorial note: This remnant of a manuscript, discovered in a vault near the coastal town of Walpole, Massachusetts, appears to have been part of a larger project, probably envisioned as an interpretive history of the United States since the year 2000. Only a single chapter, probably written near the midpoint of the twenty-first century, has survived. Whether the remainder of the manuscript has been lost or the author abandoned it before its completion is unknown.] 


                                                       Chapter 1

Shaun King: Racism is an Impeachable Offense

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What does it mean for the President of the United States to make explicitly racist statements in public? Can an explicitly biased person “faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States?” In this episode, Shaun King breaks down why explicit bias is illegal in this country. The President of the United States has broken those laws this week. Are you wondering what can be done about it?

Poet's Nook:"Vincent" by Don McLean

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Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

12 Years to Save the Planet? Make That 18 Months by Matt McGrath

Do you remember the good old days when we had "12 years to save the planet"?

Now it seems, there's a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.

Ilhan Omar: It Is Not Enough to Condemn Trump’s Racism

SOURCE: New York Times



Throughout history, demagogues have used state power to target minority communities and political enemies, often culminating in state violence. Today, we face that threat in our own country, where the president of the United States is using the influence of our highest office to mount racist attacks on communities across the land. In recent weeks, he has lashed out unprompted against four freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and me, from Minnesota.

The Rise of Corporate Nations by Lorenzo Marsili

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"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today … The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business."

The famous monologue from the film Network delivered by actor Ned Beatty in 1976 reflected growing anxiety at the time that corporate power could eventually overturn democracy. Today, what was feared 40 years ago is becoming a reality. Corporations have become the nations of the world and they increasingly act as such.

Musings

Anti-Racist Historian: Attacks on Rep. Omar Rooted in Belief “America Is for White People”

Existing While Black

   
Existing While Black

Musings

                                Freely download "The Masnavi" here

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson's Fight for Equality

Full Documentary

Source: HBO

 In the last half-century, America has become the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, authorized the execution of hundreds of condemned prisoners and continued to struggle to recover from a long history of racial injustice. For more than three decades, Alabama public interest attorney Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has advocated on behalf of the poor, the incarcerated and the condemned, seeking to eradicate racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. An intimate portrait of this remarkable man, True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s FIght for Equality follows his struggle to create greater fairness in the system and shows how racial injustice emerged, evolved and continues to threaten the country, challenging viewers to confront it.


Told primarily in his own words, True Justice shares Bryan Stevenson’s experience with a criminal justice system that, he asserts, “treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” The burden of facing this system is explored in candid interviews with associates, close family members and clients.


This feature documentary focuses on Stevenson’s life and career – particularly his indictment of the U.S. criminal justice system for its role in codifying modern systemic racism – and tracks the intertwined histories of slavery, lynching, segregation and mass incarceration. Highlighting watershed moments involving cases and clients, True Justice offers a rare glimpse into the human struggle that is required when the poor and people of color are wrongly condemned or unfairly sentenced, and explores the personal toll it has taken on Stevenson and his colleagues.

The film also documents the monumental opening one year ago, on April 26, 2018, of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and its National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the country’s only lynching memorial, which is dedicated to the more than 4,400 African American victims of lynching. These sites are part of the EJI’s nationwide effort to engage in a truth and reconciliation process around this country’s legacy of Native American genocide, slavery, lynching and racial segregation. As part of the campaign, Stevenson and the EJI are also working with communities to recognize lynching victims by collecting soil from lynching sites and erecting historical markers.


True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s FIght for Equality reveals a history that can’t be forgotten in the pursuit of genuine justice.

Fear Grips the Powerful

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Mike Papantonio and Trial Magazines Editor Farron Cousins break down the latest indictment of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who is being charged with sex trafficking of girls as young as 14. Much controversy has erupted over the ‘sweetheart deal’ he was given years ago, brokered by recently resigned Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, but this latest arrest is sending shockwaves across the political landscape by proving Epstein’s financial clout does not in fact put him above the law. What does this mean for prominent figures that have proven ties with Epstein, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump?

Dissecting The Legacy Of Colonization

This speech was given at an event which marked a starting point for the African Diaspora Nation to launch a one-stop clearing house to expand educational and economic opportunity exchange between Africa and Black America. During the launch, Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the Permanent Representative of the African Union Representational Mission to the United States of America offered a masterful history lesson breaking down how Africa was divided into tiny little countries during the Berlin Conference of 1884 and how the nations of Africa are still being adversely impacted. Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao also dissected "the pact for the continuation of colonization."

PLUNDER: THE CRIME OF OUR TIME

When this documentary came out 10 years ago, I was not surprised by the content as I had read many books & articles describing the pillage, but visually, I was taken aback. This film is still highly relevant today as this pillage has gotten much worse since the election of Donald Trump.


Weep...then ruminate..,,.then resist by any means necessary!

Neoliberalism - An Idea Swallowing The World

What has forty years of neoliberal economics done to us and our political landscape?

The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness

 

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Michael Hudson discusses his seminal work of 1972, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the US exploits foreign economies through IMF and World bank debt. In it we learn:  difference between the IMF and World Bank; how the World Bank was dysfunctional from the outset; loans made in foreign currency only; policy to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export plantation crops; US food and monetary imperialism; U.S. agricultural protectionism built into the postwar global system; promotion of dependency on the US as food supplier; food blackmail; perpetration of world poverty preferred; no encouragement of land reform; privatization of the public domain; America aided, not foreign economies; exploitation of mineral deposits; bribery; foreign nations politically controlled at the top; veto power for US only.

Musings

  

See: Dandelion Salad

Mad Magazine’s Demise is Part of the Ending of a World by David Von Drehle

Source: WP

The demise of Mad magazine is hardly a surprise. Times are tricky for print publications in general — all the more so for a title targeted with exquisite precision at middle-school boys. They are Nature’s neglected travelers, parked on an apron while the girls they used to know go racing down the evolutionary runway and take flight into the wild blue of adulthood.

Because life has, for the moment, scorned them, they return the favor, and for a couple of generations, Mad was both a tutor and a tool of their anarchy. Its cartooned pages confirmed their suspicions that parents are hypocrites, that heroes have clay feet, that popular culture is a ripoff and that a guy might as well laugh at existence because existence is already laughing at him. “What, me worry?” asked mascot Alfred E. Neuman, eternally hapless, perpetually 13.

Musings

What Is Patriotism?

What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace, the place of childhood's recollections and hopes, dreams and aspirations? Is it the place where, in childlike naivete, we would watch the passing clouds, and wonder why we, too, could not float so swiftly? The place where we would count the milliard glittering stars, terror-stricken lest each one "an eye should be," piercing the very depths of our little souls? Is it the place where we would listen to the music of the birds and long to have wings to fly, even as they, to distant lands? Or is it the place where we would sit on Mother's knee, enraptured by tales of great deeds and conquests? In short, is it love for the spot, every inch representing dear and precious recollections of a happy, joyous and playful childhood?

July 4th Anthem of the Dispossessed

  

Defending the Right of Radical Dissent Is the Highest Expression of Patriotism by John Nichols

Donald Trump imagines July 4 as a time for tanks, flyovers and military parading. For myself, I tend toward the view expressed by George Washington in the farewell address he delivered at the close of his presidency. Americans, he counseled, would do well to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”

Washington’s warning “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism” was a good one. A straitjacketed liberty, which imagines patriotism to be expressed only  in the most cautious and predictable forms, is antithetical to the American experiment. The most enlightened initiators of that experiment proudly recalled their revolt against the constraints of monarchy and colonial authority. And the best of their number,  Tom Paine, recognized the necessity of a maintaining the revolutionary “Spirit of ’76” that would expand the notion of liberty far beyond what was understood by the more cautious, compromised and conflicted of the founders.

Poet's Nook: "Spiri-Chant" by Ursula Rucker

 



This know also:
That in the last days
Perilous times shall come
For men shall be lovers of their own selves
Covetous
Boasters
Proud
Blasphemers
Disobedient to parents
Unthankful
Unholy
Without natural affection
Truce breakers
False accusers
Incontinent
Fierce
Despisers of those who are good
Traitors
Petty
High-minded
Lovers of Pleasures more than Lovers of God
Having a form of godliness
but denying the Power thereof
From such turn away
For of this sort are they which creep into houses
& lead captive silly women laden with sins
led away with diverse lusts
Ever learning & never able to come to the knowledge

Of the Truth


 ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ~*~*~*~*~**~*~*~~*~*~*

 (This hypnotic piece was taken from Ursula Rucker's 2006 album, "Ma At Mama". Accompanying Ursula on this piece is Gary Smalls, a highly & downright funky Native American (Cheyenne) guitarist/vocalist).