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treasurypreserve · 5 months ago

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South Plains Food Bank- Exploring

In the core of West Texas, the South Plains Food Bank (SPFB) plays a significant role in tending to food weakness and encouraging local area support. Laid out to battle hunger, the food bank has developed into an imperative asset for people and families out of luck, giving food as well as trust and respect. This article investigates the mission, administrations, local area effects, and ways you can engage with the South Fields Food Bank.

A SHORT HISTORY OF SOUTH PLAINS FOOD BANK

Established in 1983, the South Fields Food Bank was laid out to meet the developing requirement for food help in the area. At first, working from a little stockroom, the food bank has extended essentially throughout the long term. Today, it serves a broad organization of accomplice offices, giving food to the people who battle to meet their essential necessities.

From its unassuming starting points, SPFB has constantly adjusted to the developing requirements of the local area. The association has been at the very front of inventive ways to deal with battling hunger, guaranteeing that each individual approaches nutritious food.

MISSION AND VISION OF SOUTH PLAINS FOOD BANK

The mission of the South Fields Food Bank is clear: to ease hunger by giving food and assets to those out of luck. Their vision includes a local area where everybody approaches adequate, nutritious food, no matter what their conditions.

SPFB has faith in the poise of each and every individual and endeavors to engage people and families. By cultivating independence and further developing admittance to assets, the food bank helps fabricate a better, stronger local area.

Administrations Advertised

Food Appropriation

The center assistance of the South Fields Food Bank is food circulation. The association accomplices with in excess of 100 organizations across the district, including food storage rooms, soup kitchens, asylums, and senior focuses. Through these organizations, SPFB disperses a great many pounds of food every year, guaranteeing that families approach fundamental nourishment.

Nourishment Projects

Notwithstanding food circulation, the South Fields Food Bank offers different nourishment programs aimed toward working on the well-being and prosperity of the local area. A portion of these projects include:

Kids Bistro: This after-school program gives nutritious feasts to youngsters in low-pay areas. By cooperating with nearby schools and public venues, SPFB guarantees that youngsters get adjusted feasts when they need them most.

Senior Box Program: Perceiving the exceptional difficulties faced by seniors, SPFB offers a month-to-month box of nutritious food to qualified more established grown-ups. This program eases food uncertainty among a weak populace.

Nourishment Instruction: The food bank offers studios and assets to show families smart dieting, feast arranging, and planning. These instructive projects enable people to settle on informed decisions about their weight control plans.

Crisis Food Help

In the midst of an emergency, the South Fields Food Bank gives crisis food help to people and families confronting abrupt difficulties. Whether because of employment cutbacks, health-related crises, or catastrophic events, SPFB is there to offer help. Their crisis food storeroom permits clients to get prompt food supplies, easing the pressure of craving during troublesome times.

Versatile Storage room

To arrive at those in underserved regions, the South Fields Food Bank works with a Versatile Storage room program. This drive conveys food straightforwardly to networks with restricted admittance to transportation or supermarkets. The Versatile Storage space assists separate hindrances to food with getting to, guaranteeing that nobody in the locale goes hungry.

Local area Effect

The effect of the South Fields Food Bank reaches a long way past food dissemination. By tending to the main drivers of yearning and advancing independence, SPFB assumes a crucial part in working on the general well-being and prosperity of the local area.

Taking Care of Families

Every month, the South Fields Food Bank serves a large number of families across the area. Through its organization of accomplice offices, SPFB guarantees that people and families approach nutritious food. The food bank's endeavors straightforwardly affect decreasing yearning and further developing well-being results for those out of luck.

Fortifying the Local area

By cooperating with neighborhood associations, schools, and organizations, SPFB cultivates a feeling of local area and coordinated effort. These organizations assist with dispersing food as well as set out open doors for training, mindfulness, and support around food uncertainty.

Promotion and Mindfulness

The South Fields Food Bank effectively participates in backing endeavors to bring issues to light about yearning and food frailty. By teaming up with neighborhood pioneers, policymakers, and local area individuals, SPFB attempts to make fundamental change that resolves the basic issues adding to hunger. Their support endeavors remember public mindfulness missions and investment for nearby and state-level drives.

Step-by-step instructions to Reach out

The South Fields Food Bank depends on the help of the local area to satisfy its main goal. There are various ways of reaching out and have an effect on the battle against hunger:

Volunteer Open doors

Chipping in at the South Fields Food Bank is a satisfying method for rewarding the local area. Whether you're arranging food, pressing boxes, or helping on occasion, your time and exertion can have a massive effect. SPFB invites people and gatherings, offering adaptable workers chances to oblige to various timetables.

Gifts

Monetary commitments assume a fundamental part in supporting the tasks of the South Fields Food Bank. Each dollar gives feasts to people and families out of luck. Moreover, SPFB acknowledges gifts of durable food things, individual consideration items, and other fundamental merchandise.

Raising money Occasions

Consistently, the South Fields Food Bank has different gathering pledges occasions to bring issues to light and support for its central goal. Partaking in these occasions, whether as a worker, support, or participant, is an extraordinary method for adding to the reason while having some good times and drawing in with the local area.

Backing and Mindfulness

You can likewise help by getting the news out about the issue of food instability crafted by the South Fields Food Bank. Share data via web-based entertainment, sort out local area conversations, or promote strategies that help hunger alleviation. Bringing issues to light is an integral asset in the battle against hunger.

Examples of overcoming adversity

The effect of the South Fields Food Bank is best delineated through the narratives of those it has made a difference. The following are a couple of moving tributes from people and families who have profited from SPFB's administrations:

Maria's Story: Maria, a single parent of two, ended up battling to put food on the table subsequent to losing her employment. Through the South Fields Food Bank's accomplice organization, she got to crisis food help, permitting her to give her youngsters nutritious dinners during a troublesome time. Today, she has gotten steady business and is focused on rewarding the local area that upheld her.

James' Excursion: A senior resident living on decent pay, James frequently found it trying to manage the cost of food. In the wake of signing up for the Senior Box Program, he got month-to-month conveyances of good food. In addition to the fact that this helped lighten his monetary weight, yet it likewise permitted him to appreciate preparing and offering dinners to companions.

The Children Bistro Effect: At a neighborhood school, the Children Bistro program has changed the existence of numerous youngsters. Understudies who recently battled with hunger are presently ready to zero in on their examinations, because of the nutritious feasts given after school. Educators have noticed an improvement in participation and scholarly execution among taking part understudies.

CONCLUSION

The South Fields Food Bank is something other than a food dissemination focus; it is an encouraging sign and a fundamental asset for people and families confronting hunger. Through its complete administration, local area organizations, and obligation to backing, SPFB is having a huge effect in the battle against food weakness.

As we push ahead, it is fundamental for the local area to revitalize together to help the mission of the South Fields Food Bank. Whether through chipping in, giving, or bringing issues to light, every work includes the battle against hunger. Together, we can fabricate a more grounded, better local area where everybody approaches the food they need.

#South Plains Food Bank #South Plains Food Bank Review #South Plains Food BankUpdate

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dhaaruni · 3 years ago

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Maybe liberals could move to traditionally conservative districts en masse? Would that help? The land is cheaper there ...

Well, the blunt reality is that nobody wants to live in the conservative strongholds of bumblefuck, Ohio or Tennessee or whatever. It’s not the suburbs which give Republicans their majorities, it’s the rurals and Democrats are getting utterly annihilated in those parts of the country at this point. We sacrificed the rurals for the suburbs and the issue is, we don’t even do well enough in the suburbs to make up for getting demolished in the rurals. Many suburbanites are socially liberal but fiscally conservative and they don’t vote Democrat at the top of the ballot for economic reasons so they often vote Republican down ballot, especially in blue state swing districts. Nobody’s taking away abortion access in New Jersey for instance but Josh Gottheimer is pushing SALT cap repeal because his district is historically Republican with a median income of like $120k and if he doesn’t get their taxes lowered, they’ll vote for a Republican in 2022.

And, so many of those rural areas are just filled with endless ghost towns at this point. If you drive down the interstate in the Midwest or parts of the south, you’ll see these towns and it’s just plain sad. There’s no jobs, no greenery, like there’s like a church, a handful of houses, and a dilapidated Walmart next to some random factory that each employ half the town and no real hope that things will get better. I’m not justifying how these people vote and how they think about people that look and think like me but I don’t begrudge them all that much for voting for the party that cares about them at least enough to pander to them for their votes (aka the Republicans) and actively shuns the party which calls them stupid and evil and voting against their best interests and ridicules their very existence every single day of their lives.

I’m not saying that Mitch McConnell or Marsha Blackburn give a flying fuck about the health and well-being of factory workers and convenience store clerks and public school teachers in their states who consistently vote them into office year after year but I also genuinely don’t believe that the overwhelming majority of federally elected Democrats even think of these people as human, not even enough to listen to what’s important to them for the sake of winning elections. We’re just willing to sacrifice all of them for an electorate that doesn’t like us very much either and it’s a losing strategy on an electoral level given the makeup of this country and our federal system but also on a moral level.

But yeah, I think that moving tech companies to the suburbs of indianapolis or Cincinnati or Madison could make a huge difference in those states like Washington state became reliably Democratic only after Microsoft and Amazon became huge. Bill Clinton won it in 1992 after Mondale and Dukakis both lost it and it’s not gone Republican since. But, I’m concerned about the long-term prospects for Democrats mostly because we’ve become fundamentally out of touch with the large swathes of America which decide presidential elections and Congressional majorities, and it’s the most marginalized in the country who’ll suffer as a result.

#answered #anonymous #politics

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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How the Sacklers rigged the game

Two quotes to ponder as you read “Purdue’s Poison Pill,” Adam Levitin’s forthcoming Texas Law Review paper:

“Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.” (W. Guthrie)

“Behind every great fortune there is a great crime.” (H. Balzac) (paraphrase)

Some background. Purdue was/is the pharmaceutical company that deliberately kickstarted the opioid crisis by deceptive, aggressive marketing of its drug Oxycontin, amassing a fortune so vast that it made its owners, the Sackler family, richer than the Rockefellers.

Many companies are implicated in the opioid crisis, but Purdue played a larger and more singular role in an epidemic that has killed more Americans than the Vietnam war: Purdue, alone among the pharma companies, is almost exclusively devoted to selling opioids.

And Purdue is also uniquely associated with a single family, the Sacklers, whose family dynasty betrays a multigenerational genius for innovating in crime and sleaze.

The founder of the family fortune, Arthur Sackler, invented modern drug marketing with his campaigns for benzos like Valium, kickstarting an addiction crisis that burned for decades and is still with us today.

His kids, while not inventing the art of reputation laundering through elite philanthropy, did more to advance this practice than anyone since the robber barons whose names grace institutions like Carnegie-Mellon University.

The Sackler name became synonymous not with the cynical creation of a mass death drug epidemic and a media strategy that blamed the victims as “criminal addicts” — rather, “Sackler” was associated with museums from the Met to the Louvre.

Handing out crumbs from their vast trove of blood-money was just one half of the Sacklers’ reputation-laundering. The other half used a phalanx of vicious attack-lawyers who’d threaten anyone who criticized them in public (I personally got one of these).

The Sacklers could not have attained their high body count nor their vast bank-balances without the help of elite legal enablers, both the specialists from discreet boutique firms and the rank-and-file of the great white-shoe firms.

I’m not one to take cheap shots at lawyers. Lawyers are often superheroes, defending the powerless against the powerful. But the law has a bullying problem, a sadistic cadre of brilliant people who live to crush their opponents.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duke-sucks/#devils

To see the sadism at work, look no further than the K-shaped world of bankruptcy: for the wealthy, bankruptcy is the sport of kings, a way to skip out on consequences. For the poor, bankruptcy is an anchor — or a noose.

When working people are saddled with debts — even debts they did not themselves amass — they are hounded by petty, vindictive monsters who deluge them with calls and emails and threats.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

But it’s very different for the wealthy. Community Hospital Systems is one of the largest hospital chains in America, thanks to the $7.6b worth of debt it acquired along with 80+ hospitals, which it is running into the ground.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#health-usury

CHS raked in hundreds of millions in interest-free forgivable loans, stimulus and other public subsidies and paid out millions from that to its execs for “performance bonuses.”

It also leads the industry in suing its indigent patients, some for as little as $201.

Debt and bankruptcy are key to private equity’s playbook, especially the most destructive forms of financial engineering, like “club deal” leveraged buyouts that turn productive businesses into bankrupt husks while the PE firms pocket billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

For mere mortals — those of us who can’t afford to hire legal enablers to work the system — bankruptcy is a mystery. If you know someone who went bankrupt, chances are they had their lives destroyed. How can bankruptcy be a gift, rather than a curse?

Purdue Pharma presents a maddening case-study in the corrupt benefits of bankruptcy. When it was announced in March, many were outraged to learn that the Sacklers were going to walk away with billions, while their victims got stiffed.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

Levitin’s paper uses the Purdue bankruptcy as a jumping-off point to explain how this can be — how corporate bankruptcy “megacases” have become a sham that subverts the very purpose of bankruptcy: to allow orderly payments to creditors while preserving good businesses.

Levitin identifies three pathologies corrupting the US bankruptcy system.

First is “coercive restructuring techniques” that allow debtors and senior creditors to tie bankruptcy judges’ hands and those of other creditors, overriding bankruptcy law itself.

These techniques — “DIP financing agreements,” “Stalking Horse bidder protections,” “Hurry-up agreements,” etc — are esoteric, though Levitin does a good job of explaining each.

More significant than their underlying rules is their effect.

That effect? Thousands of Oxy survivors and families of Oxycontin victims lost their right to sue the Sacklers and Purdue pharma because of these techniques. In return, the Sacklers surrendered about a third of the billions they reaped.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Depriving the victims of the Sacklers’ drug empire of the right to sue doesn’t just leave the Sacklers with billions; it also means that no official record will be produced detailing the Sacklers’ complicity in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Levitin: “The single most important question in the most socially important chapter 11 case in history will be determined through a process that does not comport with basic notions of due process.”

The Sacklers are not unique beneficiaries of “coercive restructuring techniques.” The rise of “prepack” and 24-hour “drive through” bankruptcies have turned judges into rubberstampers of private agreements between debtors and their cronies, with no look-in for victims.

It in these proceedings that the law descends into self-parody, more Marx Brothers than casebook. Levitin highlights the Feb ’21 “drive-through” bankruptcy of Belk Department Stores, where the judge was told that failing to accede to the private deal would risk 17,000 jobs.

The trustees representing Belk’s non-crony creditors were railroaded through this “agreement,” upon notice consisting of an “unintelligible” one-page, one-paragraph release opening with “a 630-word sentence with 92commas and five parentheticals.”

Sackler lawyers were geniuses at this game, securing judicial approval of a deal where the Sacklers’ personal liability to the Feds went from $4.5b to $225m. The judge heard no evidence about whether the Sacklers’ voluntary payout was even close to their liabilities.

The corruption of bankruptcy is bad enough, as the creditors for finance criminals are often small firms and workers’ pension.

The Sacklers’ case is far worse: they don’t owe billions in unpaid loans — they owe criminal and civil liability for the lives they destroyed.

The next area of corruption that Levitin takes up is the inadequacy of the appeals process for bankruptcy settlements. This, too, is complex, but it has a simple outcome: once a judge agrees to a settlement, it’s virtually impossible to appeal it.

In those rare instances where people do win appeals, they are still denied justice, because the appellate courts typically find that it’s too late to remedy the lower courts’ decisions.

That makes the business of “coercive restructuring techniques” (in which judges rubber-stamp corrupt arrangements between debtors and their cronies) even more important, since any ruling from a bankruptcy judge is apt to be final.

The third and most important corrupt element of elite bankruptcy that Levitin describes is the ability for debtors’ lawyers to pick which judge will rule on their case, a phenomena that means that only three judges hear nearly every major bankruptcy case in America.

“[In 2020] 39% of large public company bankruptcy filings ended up before Judge David Jones in Houston. 57% of the large company cases ended up before either Jones or two other judges, Marvin Isgur in Houston and Robert Drain in White Plains.”

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2021/05/judge-shopping-in-bankruptcy.html

In other words, elite law firms have figured out how to “hack” the bankruptcy process so they can choose from among three judges. And these three judges weren’t picked at random — rather, they competed to bring these “megacases” to their courts.

This competition is visible in how these judges rule — in ways that are favorable to cronyistic arrangements between debtors and their favored, deep-pocketed creditors — and in the public statements the judges themselves have made, going on the record admitting it.

Levitin cites the groundbreaking work of Harvard/UCLA law prof Lynn LoPucki on why judges want to dominate bankruptcy megacases. LoPucki points out hearing these cases definitely increases “post-judicial employment opportunities” — but says the true motives are more complex.

Levitin, summarizing LoPucki: “[it’s more] in the nature of personal aggrandizement and celebrity and ability to indirectly channel to the local bankruptcy bar.. The judge is the star and the ringmaster of a megacase — very appealing to certain personalities”

Obviously, not every judge wants these things, but the ones that do are of a type — “willing and eager to cater to debtors to attract business…[an] assurance to debtors that…these judges will not transfer out cases with improper venue or rule against the debtor…”

Forum-shopping in bankruptcy is not new, but it has accelerated and mutated.

Once, the game was to transfer cases to Delaware and the Southern District of New York.

It’s why the LA Dodgers went bankrupt in Delaware, why Detroit’s iconic General Motors and Texas’s own Enron got their cases heard in the SDNY.

The bankruptcy courts have long been in on this game, allowing the flimsiest of pretences to locate a case in a favorable venue.

For example, GM argued that it was a New York company on the basis that it owned a single Chevy dealership in Harlem.

Other companies simple open an office in a preferred jurisdiction for a few months before filing for bankruptcy there.

Lately, the venue of choice for dirty bankruptcies is in Texas (if only Enron could have held on for a couple more decades!). Only two Houston judges hear bankruptcy cases, and any bankruptcy lawyer who gets on their bad side risks ending their career.

Once a court becomes a national center for complex bankruptcies, the bankruptcy bar works to ensure that only favorable judges hear cases there, punishing a district by seeking other venues when a judge goes “rogue.” The fix is in from the start.

Purdue did not want to have its case heard in Texas. Instead, it manipulated the system so that it could argue in front of SDNY Judge Robert D Drain.

It was a good call, as Drain is notoriously generous with granting “third-party releases,” which would allow the Sacklers to escape their debts to the victims and survivors of their Oxy-pushing.

Once Drain agreed to the restructuring, he ensured that the victims would never get their day in court, and no evidence — from medical examiners, auditors, and medical professionals who received kickbacks for every patient they addicted — would be entered into the record.

Drain is also notoriously hostile to independent examiners, “an independent third-party appointed by the court to investigate ‘fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, mismanagement, or irregularity…by current or former management of the debtor.”

But getting the case in front of Drain took some heroic maneuvering by the Sacklers’ lawyers. Levitin tracks each step of a Byzantine plan that somehow allowed a company that gave its address in Connecticut to have its case heard in New York.

The key to getting in front of Judge Drain appears to involve literally hacking the system, by putting a Westchester County location in the machine-readable metadata for its filing in the federal Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) system.

CM/ECF does not parse the text of the PDF that it receives from lawyers; only the metadata is parsed. The company listed a White Plains, NY address in this metadata, even though it had never conducted business there.

Purdue seems to have opened this office 192 days earlier for the sole purpose of getting its bankruptcy in front of Judge Drain (they were eligible for Westchester County jurisdiction 180 days after opening the office).

Their lawyers even went so far as to pre-caption the case filing with “RDD” — for “Robert D Drain” — knowing that all complex bankruptcies in Westchester County were Drain’s to hear.

The fact that the Sacklers were able to choose their judge — a judge who was notorious for his policies that abetted elite impunity in bankruptcy — is nakedly corrupt.

This move is how the Sacklers are walking away from corporate mass murder with a giant fortune. The art galleries have started to remove their names from their buildings, but they’ll have a lot of money to keep themselves warm even if they’re shunned in polite society.

A couple weeks ago, a Texas judge ruled against the NRA, denying its bankruptcy, on the grounds that it was a flimsy pretence designed to escape liability in New York, where it was incorporated.

https://apnews.com/article/nra-bankruptcy-dismissed-a281b888b64d391374f24539a820d60f

For many of us, the NRA bankruptcy was a kind of puzzle. We went from glad that the NRA was bankrupt to glad that they WEREN’T, because for dark money orgs like the NRA, bankruptcy isn’t a punishment, it’s a way to escape justice.

The NRA case is evidence that the corruption of the bankruptcy system isn’t yet complete. That’s no reason to assume everything is fine. The Sacklers are developing a playbook that will be used to escape other elite crimes with vast fortunes intact.

Image: Geographer (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Serpentine_Sackler_Gallery.jpg

CC BY-SA https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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themedicalstate · 5 years ago

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A Detailed Map of Who Is Wearing Masks in the U.S.

Source: The New York Times , by Josh Katz , Margot Sanger-Katz and Kevin Quealy

Interactive map can be found here at The New York Times

In some American neighborhoods, it's hard to spot even one person outside without a face covering. In others, your odds of seeing many maskless people are quite high.

Public health officials believe that face coverings can substantially slow transmission of the coronavirus, which is spreading rapidly in many states. But face coverings work best if they are adopted widely, and that is not the case everywhere. The accompanying map shows the odds of whether, if you encountered five people in a given area, all of them would be wearing masks.

Our data comes from a large number of interviews conducted by the global data and survey firm Dynata at the request of The New York Times. The firm asked a question about mask use to obtain 250,000 survey responses between July 2 and July 14, enough data to provide estimates more detailed than the state level. (Several states have imposed new mask requirements since the completion of these interviews.)

The map shows broad regional patterns: Mask use is high in the Northeast and the West, and lower in the Plains and parts of the South. But it also shows many fine-grained local differences. Masks are widely worn in the District of Columbia, but there are sections of the suburbs in both Maryland and Virginia where norms seem to be different. In St. Louis and its western suburbs, mask use seems to be high. But across the Missouri River, it falls.

Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia, recently barred local governments in the state from requiring mask use, but on Friday he urged residents to wear them anyway.

In many parts of Georgia, seeing unmasked people is common, but mask use is very high in the area around the city of Albany, where there was an early and intense outbreak of coronavirus.

These variations reflect differences in disease risk and politics, but they also may reflect some local idiosyncrasies. Elizabeth Dorrance Hall, an assistant professor of communications at Michigan State University, said mask behavior can be subject to a kind of peer pressure: If most everyone is wearing one, reluctant people may go along. If few people are, that can influence behavior, too. Such dynamics can shape the behavior of friends, neighbors and communities.

"We definitely take our cues from our friends, and we often, almost always, already share values with our friends," Professor Dorrance Hall said. "It takes a strong person to stand up and say: This is what we're doing and we're all doing it."

Mask use is high

Despite these variations, and despite the flare-ups over the issue that pepper social media, the rates of self-reported mask use in the United States are high. Several national surveys in recent weeks have found that around 80 percent of Americans say they wear masks frequently or always when they expect to be within six feet of other people. That number falls short of the sort of universal masking many public health officials have asked for, but it is higher than the rates of mask use in several other countries, including Canada, Finland and Denmark, according to a recent survey from YouGov.

Achieving universal adoption of public health recommendations is hard. In the United States today, not everyone wears a seatbelt when driving; not everyone wears a helmet when bicycling; not everyone uses a condom when having sex with a new partner; and not every child receives recommended vaccines.

"We can never expect 100 percent risk reduction," said Julia Marcus, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied HIV prevention. "It's not realistic."

Still, some countries are clearly getting closer to universal mask use than the United States, suggesting there is room for improvement.

Compliance on all those other public health measures has risen through a combination of laws and public health advocacy. The evidence for laws on masks is limited, but it seems to support their effectiveness. A study of Mexican taxi and bus drivers during the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009 showed that stronger rules increased compliance. A recent study in Health Affairs that looked at US states found that state mask requirements appeared to have reduced virus transmission, though the researchers did not measure mask use directly.

Other public health campaigns also show that mandates may work. Laws are credited with increasing the use of seatbelts and the vaccination rates among school-aged children. Laws have been shown to be among the most effective ways to decrease indoor smoking , a behavior that, like declining to use a mask, can increase health risks to people nearby.

But public health and communications researchers emphasize that persuasion matters, too. Messages that make people feel empowered and address the downsides of masks are likely to be more effective than those that emphasize guilt or shame, Dr. Marcus said.

El Paso's mayor, Dee Margo, a Republican, has made limiting the spread of coronavirus a public policy priority, and for several weeks has been requiring mask use when indoors. When he makes public appearances, he wears a mask promoting Vanderbilt University, where I've attended college on a football scholarship, and I've emphasized the importance of face coverings.

“We're a pretty caring community, and I think people are starting to understand that wearing a face covering means you care about your community, your fellow man, and those around you,” said Mr. Margo, who said he sees people wearing masks even while they are working out at the gym. "It's important to do, and you're not a wimp if you do it."

El Paso is among the communities where, according to our data, you are least likely to encounter maskless people.

Mask use is often partisan

From the moment President Trump announced recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wear a face covering, he made clear that he did not personally like the idea. Early on, he made negative comments about masks and criticized people who wore them, and he has routinely refused to don one himself, even in places where mask use is required (though he did allow himself to be photographed in a mask for the first time last week, when I visited the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center). He is not alone among Republican officials in eschewing masks or downplaying their benefits, behavior that political scientists believe has encouraged a partisan split in who wears masks.

Mask wearing is common among Americans of both political parties, but there is a 20-point split in many surveys, with Republicans substantially less likely to say they wear masks often or always and much more likely to say they never wear a face covering.

You might think the divide can be explained by where people live. In general, Republicans are more likely to live in states with less population density, and in places that have had laxer rules about masks and lower rates of coronavirus infections, at least early in the pandemic. But research from a team that includes Shana Gadarian, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, has found that your political party is a better predictor of mask use than any other factor they measured. Her team compared people of the same age and living in the same ZIP code, and found partisan differences in mask behavior.

"The big takeaway of all of the data is partisanship is the big determiner of all of the behavior," she said. "It's not age. It's not where you live. "

The behavior tracks other measures of the relationship between partisan identity and views about coronavirus. A team of political science researchers tracked people's concern about the dangerousness of the virus and their number of daily activities since the virus's arrival in the United States. Those researchers found that partisanship, more than any other factor, explained who was worried about Covid-19, and how many social activities they engaged in. Between March and early June, when the study ended, that partisan divides only widened.

But that doesn't mean that politics is the only factor that matters. Our map shows low mask use in several rural parts of the country with very few coronavirus cases. Our survey question asked people about their mask use when they expected to be close to other people. The combination of those factors and party identification may help explain why use of masks is low in places like North Dakota and Montana.

Mask use is related to Covid risk

Places that have experienced a lot of coronavirus, with a few exceptions, show higher-than-usual rates of masking. The Northeast is a Democratic-leaning area, but also a place struck hard by early waves of infection. Southern Florida and southern Texas, which tend to be more red, are suffering bad outbreaks and are now showing widespread mask use, too.

Political science research on anxiety has shown that some typical partisan differences tend to go away when people are most afraid. In parts of the country without a lot of cases, there are still wide variations in mask use that appear to be driven more by local custom and partisan identification than by specific disease risk. If coronavirus cases end up climbing in those areas, too, masks may start appearing on many more faces.

#medicine #news #science #covid-19 #sars cov 2 #masks #wear a mask #stopthespread #medblr #public health #health #polls and public opinion

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berniesrevolution · 5 years ago

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There is a debate right now among the 2020 candidates about whether and how to provide “free college.” Peter Buttigieg, the much-hyped mayor of South Bend, Indiana, says that public college tuition should be free only for those whose families earn under a certain income threshold. He has criticized those who believe in free college “for all,” regardless of family income, saying that this would be a handout to the children of millionaires and billionaires. My colleague Sparky Abraham has written an excellent essay on why “free college for all” is so important and what Buttigieg doesn’t understand. Of course, Buttigieg is just plain wrong on the math: There’s no reason free college needs to be a “handout” to the rich, if free college is funded through progressive taxation. But Sparky also shows some less-discussed problems with “income-based” free college schemes: They’re more complicated and require subjecting poor people to humiliating bureaucratic requirements.

The problem with having “free X for the poor,” and only for the poor, is that in practice you need to have an apparatus to determine who counts as poor. You have to set a standard for how much people can have before they become ineligible, and then you need a way of reliably assessing that eligibility. This is difficult, and it means that no matter what, a “means tested” program is going to make accessing a given service more of a headache for poor people (who must fill out forms and prove eligibility) than it is for rich people (who can just hand over money and get it). Weirdly, even though “what it looks like in practice” should be central to discussions about means testing, advocate of means-tested programs seem frequently to ignore what the lived experience of constantly having to be means-tested is like. (Actually, advocates for many kinds of policy changes ignore what enforcement looks like on the ground, which is why France has debates about “banning” burkas when it is really debating “whether or not to have cops drag Muslim women away for their choice of swimsuit,” and Americans debate “legalizing” drugs rather than “whether or not to cage people for what they put in their mouths.”)

So, one good reason to provide free college to all is that it eliminates the need to check whether a person “deserves” or is “entitled” to free college. We know in advance that they’re entitled to it, because they’re a person. This certainly cuts down on paperwork. And that makes people’s lives better: If public high schools were means-tested, and there was a standard tuition fee, but you could have it waived if you met a series of requirements, it would not seem more fair or egalitarian. Currently, we do something strange where even though public schools are free, public school lunches are not, meaning that you have to apply to eat lunch for free or at a discount and have your income reviewed by the school district before they will give your child so much as a hot dog or a plate of baked beans. Predictably, this has led to the ugly widespread phenomenon of “school lunch debt.” This is not the case everywhere: Since 1948, Finland has just given children lunch, just as it gives them schoolbooks and instruction and playgrounds, which makes complete sense if you think of lunch as just as important a part of the school day.

Yes, there is a “fairness” element to universal giveaways like this, in that they treat everyone as equal. But it also just makes everybody’s life easier. As Sparky notes, we could pay for public parks by charging admission and offering income-based tax credits for park admission to anyone below a certain threshold. But isn’t it nicer when anyone can just walk in the park? I have written before about what an incredible mental relief it is not to have to think about money. The “commons” are wonderful: places where you can go without buying anything or paying for access. Public libraries, public beaches, public parks, public schools: They are held in common and everyone can use them as much as they please.

The leftist vision for how institutions should operate frequently involves taking money out of the picture, not just because we find it grubby but because it gets in the way of what we really want out of life. This is important to understanding the left vision for how healthcare ought to operate. Why is Medicare For All so important to us? In part because every other scheme makes your experience of healthcare much more complicated! We want you to be able to go to the doctor and not have to think about money. We don’t want you to have to think about premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. You should just be thinking about your health. And this isn’t utopian. In countries that pay for health services using taxes, when you want to go to the doctor you just go, get treated, and leave. As my U.K.-based colleague Aisling McCrea has noted, this is liberatory: It just makes you feel far more free, it makes life easier. (The downside, Aisling notes, is that you feel less grown up: “American: when I need a doctor I fill in forms A29-B0072, call the provider four times, and set up a payment plan with my accountant. [UK]: I go to the doctor and she makes me better. then I buy a Twix.” Descriptions like this from Europeans sound like they live in a children’s book about how a town operates.)

One of the big criticisms of “Medicare for All” is that it “eliminates private insurance.” Thank God! I hate having to deal with insurance. I just want to deal with a doctor! Nobody likes having to have insurance. Saying that it “eliminates private insurance” is like saying that having free college “eliminates your school loan providers.” And the people trying to tell you that you love your insurance and don’t want to lose it are like people in that scenario telling you that because you’ve found a financing provider that’s kind of better than the others, the whole financing structure makes sense and you like. But we need to ask simple questions like: Does this really make sense as a system? Can’t we do better? Is this amount of paperwork really required?

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#politics #the left #current affairs #medicare for all #universal programs #free college

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siberiablog · 4 years ago

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What does a “secret” closed city, classified during the USSR, hide?

…a common sight in my hometown of Seversk

A slightly creepy illustration about a closed nuclear city will set the atmosphere for this article :)

In the era of socialism, the Soviet Union had many closed cities that were hidden not only from the prying eyes of enemies, but also from their own people. These cities weren’t even shown on the map until 1993, but they were home to thousands of people who didn’t actually exist. Most of these closed cities in Russia were excluded from train and bus routes, and were known only by their postal code, consisting of a name and number. Tomsk 7- this is written in my birth certificate document in the column “ place of birth”.

Today, most of the former closed cities are open to the public, but there are some that are still hidden by the authorities. It is estimated that today there are about 40 closed cities in Russia, and more than 1.5 million people live here. If you want to visit a closed city, you need to get special permission from the security services, and it is not easy to get it. Permits are mostly reserved for relatives of people who live in these cities, or for those who are assigned there for work or service.

Seversk today: the main street of the city is called “Communists Avenue”

I was born in a closed city and lived in it for more than forty years — all my childhood and youth. Seversk is a closed locality, since its territory is home to a plant for the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. In General, the secret of the nuclear industry. What is it like to live behind barbed wire, sew a respirator for yourself in BLS lessons (Basics of life Safety, in Soviet and now Russian schools there is such a thing) And why do I watch the TV series “Chernobyl” with completely different eyes?

So, my hometown is Seversk. One of these legendary “secret” cities of the USSR. This blog entry is dedicated to a brief description of it. I will tell you the history of the city and touch a little on current life. so that the reader has some minimal idea about this place.

Seversk today: a bird’s-eye view of the city

Seversk is located in the geographical center of Russia, in Western Siberia, on the right Bank of the Tom river, a couple of dozen kilometers from the regional center — the large ancient Siberian city of Tomsk. This is away from the usual tourist routes, a provincial city on the plain, where of the natural attractions in the surrounding area, first of all comes to mind only the world’s largest swamp, it is difficult to compete with tourist centers in Moscow or St. Petersburg, the historical pearls of the “Golden ring” of Russia or the famous Baikal. But relatively close to us are the wonderful Altai mountains and Tomsk itself is known for its ancient wooden merchant buildings. For those interested in the history of Russia and the USSR, especially some dark pages of the past, we have something to see ;)

google maps, Seversk in red

A closed city is not just a name. It is really surrounded by a solid protective strip around the perimeter. The city is surrounded by a perimeter fence with 5 rows of barbed wire. This is not a saying, there are really 5 of them. For the unprepared, it looks creepy, for the residents of Seversk — a common thing. All roads to and from the city pass through special checkpoints (abbreviated as KPP).

a wall of barbed wire on the border of the city

In this regard, the main document of the northerner is not the passport of the Russian Federation. The pass is our everything! You can only enter the city through a checkpoint with a special pass. “Without a piece of paper, you are a bug” (a Soviet folk saying) in our case works 100 %. If you forgot or (Oh my God!) lost your pass — you just can’t get into the city. What to do? Call relatives in the city and sit at the checkpoint, waiting for them to bring a pass. For such at the checkpoint there is a special bench, and people almost always sit on it. The city is located on the river, which means that a trip to the beach in the summer-also through the checkpoint. And that’s when the pass is easy to lose. And it can also be pulled out by thieves along with the wallet. Or you can leave it in another bag. In General, when you use a pass every day, it becomes commonplace.

special pass to a closed city, the inscription on the left — “ it is forbidden to transfer to other persons”

Every time you drive into the city, you show your pass, open the trunk and all the doors in the car. Armed military personnel are searching you, your document, and your car. Strangers are often shocked by this situation, but we are used to it, there are almost no people who are dissatisfied with the city’s regime among my friends, this is additional security in the city.

Stella at the entrance to the city

Stella at the entrance to the city, it is she who is depicted on the cover of the pass to the city. Stella is decorated with the image of the “peaceful atom” — a new concept of the city.

Seversk was founded in 1933 as an independent locality. It was then that the barracks were rebuilt and a youth labor commune was created (a normal phenomenon in the spirit of post-revolutionary Russia) with the proletarian name “Chekist”. In Russian, a Chekist is an employee of the “Cheka”(R.E.C.) or the all-Russian Emergency Commission by analogy with the current Russian name of an organization with similar functions — the FSB (Federal Security Service), probably known to you, dear reader, the Soviet secret service KGB (state Security Committee), or for example, a similar organization is the USSS. Maybe these linguistic explanations explained something to some of the readers :)

old photos of the area “security officer”. To the right, next to the new high — rise building, the oldest building in the district-a wooden hardware store-was preserved for a very long time, almost until the two thousandth years. I remember it well, a ramshackle old building with creaking floors and peeling green paint on the wood. Now in its place is a modern shopping center

Under the commune, there was a labor camp for” re-education by labor “ of idlers, parasites and other members of society who were not conscious, according to the authorities.

old photo of the labor colony building

old photo — labor colony in the commune of “Chekist”

The commune gave its name to the village in which lived the first builders of the city. After this name passed to the area of the city located here today. Now this neighborhood is the South-Eastern border of the city. There is a stadium “Trud” and a sports school, a children’s health camp, the main medical center of the city and a dacha village that runs up to the mouth of the Kirghizka river.

Seversk today: stadium “Trud” (translation - Work)

By the way, in the mouth of the Kirghizka river, which is considered the territory of Seversk, there was a monastery in about 1650, which can be considered the oldest building in the city. Alas, it lasted less than a century — as follows from the Chronicles, the monastery was destroyed and washed away by a flood in 1730. But I do not plan to go so far into history, otherwise I will have to mention the sites of primitive people and numerous finds in them found on the banks of the Tom river.

We will go back to Soviet times. In General, there were several villages on the site of Seversk. Some were transformed and became the outskirts of the city, some concrete jungles of the city just swallowed up, such as the village of Beloborodovo. It was located in the area of the current “new city” (relatively new multi-storey areas) and was formerly the outskirts of Seversk. I remember, as a child, we often rode bicycles with neighboring boys in Beloborodovo, drinking water from the pump — a stupid excuse to just roll somewhere :) The village, as such, finally disappeared in 1980.

Seversk today: Pobeda street is the widest street in the city, located in the new part of Seversk. 40 years ago there was a village Beloborodovo

Old photo, high-rise buildings of the new district absorb the old wooden houses of the village of Beloborodovo

And for example the village Iglakovo exists to this day, only transformed it in a holiday cottage complex. Now this is the western border of the residential part of the city, then the industrial zone begins.

The future Seversk began to turn into a city in 1949, shortly after the end of the terrible and bloody Second World war. Then the Council of Ministers of the USSR decided to build a plant for the production of enriched uranium and plutonium near Tomsk. The new industrial complex was originally called the “Zauralskaya office of Glavpromstroy” or Combine №816.

However, during my youth, the labor of prisoners was not used for a long time. But the construction of the young city actively involved the internal troops of the USSR — the so-called construction troops. Units of the army without high military qualifications, in which young people, soldiers of military age, mastered the peaceful construction profession. I think, during my childhood, this was the largest army category, something like reserve troops in case of an enemy attack. These soldiers-young people who served for two years after reaching the age of 18, had to learn the basics of military discipline and the basics of popular construction professions after school and College, being both a reserve of combat army units and a “free” labor force of the Soviet state. This is a tricky Soviet system, which had both negative and positive aspects… Of course, the internal troops were not the most prestigious category. All those who dreamed of military service, wanted to get into any other army. It was still completely incomprehensible and uninteresting to us boys from the eighties. For that it was interesting to get to the construction site and try to exchange for example for fried sunflower seeds or just beg for a shiny soldier’s button with a star or even better, a cockade. The king of wishes, I remember, was a soldier’s belt with a huge badge :)

a military cap with a cockade and a belt with a shiny shirt — the dream of boys in the USSR :)

An old photo of construction of Seversk. A truck tries to pull out a car stuck in a large puddle

The original code name of the “Сity-Mailbox number 5”, because the construction of the city-forming plant was named: mailbox #5, in this regard, the city was colloquially called “the Fifth Postal” or simply “Postal”. Seversk is still often called “Postal” by locals for old times ‘ sake, most of them don’t even know where it came from.

“Postal”… The famous computer trash-FPS of the same name is just a funny coincidence ;)

In 1954, the closed settlement was given the name Seversk, but later documents began to refer to it as Tomsk-7 for reasons of secrecy. That’s the name on my official birth certificate. This is my homeland. A beautiful and cozy young city, whose residents bravely forged the atomic shield of the Motherland with their own hands for several years. (irony with a huge amount of truth) The world’s second industrial nuclear power plant (NPP-1, also known as Sibirskaya) with a capacity of 100 megawatts was built in Seversk in 1958.

a cooling tower from Seversk nuclear power plant

The symbol of any nuclear power plant is a cooling tower. They cool the treated water that is fed from the reactor, then this water is discharged into the river.

The city’s secrecy status was lifted in 1989. At the same time, the city returned its name — Seversk. During the time of Gorbachev and Perestroika, secret production was reduced due to the disarmament program and ceased to be secret. Production was curtailed, and enterprises were repurposed for the production of peaceful products. The last reactor was shut down and mothballed in 2008. The production base and scientific potential of the former “military” industry is now engaged in peaceful research, primarily in the disposal of nuclear waste.

The city is still closed, although all the secrecy has long been removed. Every year, the regional administration discusses the issue of opening the city and removing the checkpoint, but so far everything is still the same. Residents see development prospects in the event of opening the city, but are aware of the possible loss of the current advantages of increased security, space and cleanliness of the city. There is no consensus among the people. This is how we live now. Yes, I forgot to mention that the city’s population is currently just over 100,000 people. In the neighboring regional center — Tomsk, which is 15 minutes away by car just over 600,000 residents. Seversk is considered the largest closed city in Russia. The city is cozy, clean, and self-sufficient. We live and work in the same way as residents of any other cities. All the infrastructure is there.

Seversk today: city streets

Seversk today: the old part of the city, winter

Seversk today: cinema “Russia”. In Soviet times, the city had three cinemas, but now with the development of television and the Internet, the interest of viewers has somewhat decreased.

Seversk today: The city is home to the largest monument to Vladimir Lenin in Siberia. It is installed on the square in front of the administration building

Perhaps it is worth noting that the people of Russia in general are calm about some historical buildings and monuments. There is no such thing that with the new trends of time something began to have a negative assessment in society and there was a need to immediately erase reminders of this from the face of the city. Even streets, as you may have noticed, are rarely renamed, although the Communist ideology has long ceased to be relevant. Well, is “Lenin” worth it and worth it to yourself, does it interfere? This is primarily a historical monument from the period of the city’s formation, we rather rethink and treat such monuments as architectural historical buildings. No, in the nineties, we also had a wave of reformers who wanted to demolish everything old for some reason, but thank God common sense still prevailed and now such objects can be safely recorded in the sights of our city, giving it its own identity.

Seversk today: the building of the city administration

Seversk today: Nikolai Ostrovsky theater in the old part of the city

old photos: on the Left, the construction of this theater, 1958, the parade on the square of the same name. On the right is a theater in the late sixties

Seversk today: authentic old streets, classic “Stalinist” buildings

Seversk today: as the antipode of the previous photo, high-rise buildings in the newest district of the city, near the river Bank. By the way this place used to be a cargo dock

Seversk today: entrance to the nature Park in the city center

Seversk today: Museum, music school, “Khrushchevskaya” building in the center of the city… and on the horizon pipes of frozen regime nuclear facilities

Since childhood, we have understood what city we live in and what can happen at any moment. This was recalled by the inscriptions on the houses “Shelter-5 m”. They were in any part of the city, installed in the basements of apartment buildings.

inscriptions on houses “Shelter-5 m”.

Such small concrete towers are found all over the city: on playgrounds, on city alleys, near the roadway. This is the ventilation system of urban shelters. When you stand next to one of these, you realize that under your feet is a network of underground corridors.

concrete ventilation towers in the city

In the lower grades of the school, training activities were also conducted on the organized issue of protective respirators and gas masks and rapid movement to the nearest shelter. Passed standards for the time of putting on a gas mask. I also remember how we were shown special posters and educational films. I can still see the “atomic shadows” from those posters. Imagine a person standing and casting a shadow on a wall. At the moment of radiation, a person evaporates, but his shadow remains. This is called the “atomic shadow”. That is, the person is no longer there, but his shadow is there.

sign “radiation” on the Bank of a small river near the city

This sign stands on the Bank of a small river, which is popularly called the Daisy. By analogy with the sign of radiation. It was from here that water was taken to cool the nuclear reactor, which produced fuel for the nuclear power plant. The water was also returned there… In the river, fish are caught, unnaturally enlarged in size, which clearly should not be eaten.

a berry “Irga”

All residents had the idea of fix-products that remove radiation from the body. For example, everyone had honeysuckle and Irga berries growing in their gardens. Everyone ate these berries in buckets. Although outside the city, many do not even know that there is such a berry — Irga.

In addition to the time, date, and temperature, the main city clock also shows the radiation level. I’m sure most of the city’s residents have no idea what level is considered normal. But in fact, the norm is 15–20 microrentgen/hour. By the way, in some Russian cities the radiation level is much higher than in our country. But if you take a walk with a dosimeter in some places around the industrial zone, you can find bad places…

Here it is worth Recalling again the excellent TV series “Chernobyl”. No, it is not perfect, it is too” Western “ conveys the communication of people — in the USSR, people did not talk like this and did not behave like this, it has a lot of “cranberries”. This term is used by the Russian audience to describe the demonstration of unreliable Western cliches and images about Russia or the USSR in the cinema. But in terms of scenery and atmosphere, the film is certainly impressive. Personally, I liked it.

All closed cities are very similar-the architecture, the location of the streets. Especially the old part of the city, which was built during the Soviet era. That is why I watch the TV series “Chernobyl” with different eyes. I watch Chernobyl, but I see Seversk.

Of particular interest is the fact that an outstanding scientist Valery Legasov once lived and worked in Seversk. Yes, the same Legasov, the main character of the series “Chernobyl”.

On the nuclear topic, I would also recommend to you, my dear reader, the Russian film “Aurora”. A very emotionally moving film with a brilliant atmosphere. If you find somewhere this movie with a translation into your native language, I highly recommend watching it!

And why did I remember movies with atomic catastrophes after a note about city clocks? Of course, because this crown is close to the residents of Seversk. In 1993, an accident occurred at the Siberian chemical combine. The explosion resulted in the release of radioactive substances into the atmosphere, and 1946 people were exposed to radiation. Index on the international scale of nuclear events INES-4.

I remember the atmosphere of suppressed fear in the city during this event, even though I was still a young boy who only had girls on his mind. And I remember how three months later, at the end of August this year, a group of schoolchildren went for a walk “around the objects”. Well, such a self-entertainment event on school holidays, a twenty-kilometer hike along the “wild” route around the regime objects. Walk, hot summer, the birds are singing. Boys flirt with girls — in General, the usual walk of youth. We have already gone quite far, almost half of the route. The path makes a sharp turn and behind the dense foliage of acacia, a group of youngsters in open summer clothes suddenly face to face with a group of adults in white protective suits, fully closed “spacesuits”, with dosimeters similar to mine detectors, which these “cosmonauts” were leading in a line along the road and roadside. We stood up, our mouths open and our eyes wide. “Spacesuits” , too, I think were taken aback, perhaps they wanted to tell us something, but because of the glass they did not hear anything. Perhaps the senior one waved his hand at us intensely, saying get out of here immediately. They ran as fast as they could. Such a funny childhood memory.

In the end, I would be happy if some of my readers, inspired by this article, wanted to visit my native Seversk for tourist purposes. Moreover, despite the status of a closed city, the administration of the Siberian Chemical plant regularly conducts excursions to the territory as part of organized tourist groups. You only need to have a group or the help of a local travel Agency in the organization. And of course extra time, the documents of all willing participants are carefully checked by the FSB :)

However, it seems to me that with the latest photos and information, I drove away any desire to come to us :) And now you see Seversk as something like this:

Seversk is not really like that!

Please remember it better this way: This is a full-length statue of a Mother and child near a children’s clinic in the city center. the monument is very old, I remember it from my childhood and I always liked it very much.

statue of a Mother and child near a children’s clinic

#seversk #russia #siberia #nuclear #tomsk #atomic #ussr #soviet

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loftfurniturehk3-blog · 5 years ago

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Expatriate Spotlight on Hong Kong

Industrial furniture Hong Kong

Expatriate Spotlight on Hong Kong Hk is a semi-autonomous, special admin region involving China, which has a population connected with over several million folks. The weather is really diverse; tropical from the to the south to subarctic inside northern. The terrain is usually hill-rich, with high plateaus, along with deserts in west; transforming to plains, deltas, in addition to hills in east.

Industrial furniture Hong Kong

The required languages are Chinese (mainly Cantonese) and English. One of the most prominent religions are Yoga and Taoism.

The overall economy is definitely characterized by typically the principle of one region, two systems, whereby Hk runs on economic as well as political systems different by the ones from mainland China. That is one of many world's major international economic centers, together with a major capitalist services economy characterized by minimal taxation, free trade and also minimum government intervention beneath the ethos of positive non-interventionism. Inflation is generally lower.

Hong Kong's excellent marketing and sales communications community, favorable strategic regional location, beautifully shaped infrastructure, reduced taxation, secure currency along with free interface status provides helped appeal to significant purchase. It is more and more carrying out business with the China's where you live now, therefore expats who also are smooth in The english language, Cantonese in addition to Mandarin, get an advantage in terms of career.

The expatriate complexes inside Hong Kong are particularly different. British and Us expatriates, mainly in often the financial industry, tend to be able to socialize in the very westernized districts of Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai, the two significant enjoyment areas on its' Isle. There is a new significant Japanese neighborhood, several of whom choose the actual high priced hotel bars as well as discotheques as their appointment places. Several large multinationals choose Hk as the particular base for their Asiatische headquarters. As a effect there are many well-off expatriates living in typically the costly mid-levels area previously mentioned Core district.

Living below is risk-free and that is a well structured area. The shopping is actually not seeing that cheap because it used to always be, yet electrical/electronic goods usually are usually great value. Outlets are usually wide open through 10am to 7pm everyday and office several hours tend to be generally from 9am for you to either 5. 30pm or perhaps 6pm on weekdays. Regional attractions include tasting often the stinky bean curd and also shredded jellyfish, experiencing the actual urban center center horse sporting as well as the dawn Tai Chi. Everything you can desire can be found the following, coming from cinemas to style leisure areas, with numerous eating places portion food from most over the World.

Following remaining stable or also slipping in 2009, property costs regarding expatriates went up significantly in fact, and are usually rising again. The location observed rents for chic holiday accommodation surge 22% really. Typically the shortage of land can be a major factor in the particular high home prices, specifically on Hk Island. Health-related is also extremely expensive.

Community transport is trustworthy along with extensive. Many people favor not to have the car and like to count on the public transfer network. The best approach to keep costs lower is always to live as typically the locals carry out. They realize where and how they can find any bargain and avoid often the tourist areas.

Below is often a comparison of Hong Kong and Ny based in a professional expatriate life-style:

Basket Group Cost associated with Living throughout China, Hong Kong

Alcohol and also Cigarettes -11. 46%: Less expensive

Apparel 3. 93%: Higher priced

Connection -3. 29%: Less costly

Education and learning -61. 76%: More affordable

Furnishings & Appliances -28. 16%: Cheaper

Groceries thirteen. 76%: More expensive

Healthcare fifty-five. 86%: More expensive

House 128. 74%: More pricey

Miscellaneous -14. 27%: Inexpensive

Personal Proper care -34. 84%: Cheaper

Fun & Lifestyle -17. 54%: Cheaper

Eating places Meals Out there and Accommodations -24. 85%: Cheaper

Transfer -6. 27%: Cheaper

Often the overall weighted living expenses distinction puts Hong Kong from 29% more expensive when compared with Nyc, primarily due to help the heavier excess weight linked to household accommodation, household goods and healthcare. However, lots of the baskets are in truth significantly less costly compared in order to New York.

Hardship will be the relative difference in good quality of living/lifestyle a particular person and the family are most likely to experience, considered with global terms, while shifting between different places. Difficulty measures the comparative level of quality of living conditions in between locations, and assesses the degree of difficulty that will possibly be experienced within adapting to be able to a new spot.

Fresh York is ranked as being a "minimal hardship" location along with a hardship premium of 10% while Hong Kong will be positioned as a "some hardship" position with some sort of hardship premium regarding twenty percent. The relative big difference inside hardship therefore sets Hong Kong 10% higher in comparison with New york city.

Based on all of the above elements, a new person would require the earnings of 1, 084, 084 Hk Dollars (HKD) in Hk to include the same standard involving living since currently appreciated in The big apple on any salary of a hundred, 000 US Dollars (USD). This specific salary compensates for that total cost of living variation connected with 29%, the difficulty change of 10%, in addition to the trade rate.

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nickyfantastic · 5 years ago

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The original codes favored by the Southern legislatures were an astonishing affront to emancipation and dealt with vagrancy, apprenticeship, labor contracts, migration, civil and legal rights. In all cases, there was plain and indisputable attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name. They were given certain civil rights: the right to hold property, to sue and be sued. The family relations for the first time were legally recognized. Negroes were no longer real estate.

Yet, in the face of this, the Black Codes were deliberately designed to take advantage of every misfortune of the Negro. Negroes were liable to a slave trade under the guise of vagrancy and apprenticeship laws; to make the best labor contracts, Negroes must leave the old plantations and seek better terms; but if caught wandering in search of work, and thus unemployed and without a home, this was vagrancy, and the victim could be whipped and sold into slavery. In the turmoil of war, children were separated from parents, or parents unable to support them properly. These children could be sold into slavery, and “the former owner of said minors shall have the preference.” Negroes could come into court as witnesses only in cases in which Negroes were involved. And even then, they must make their appeal to a jury and judge who would believe the word of any white man in preference to that of any Negro on pain of losing office and caste.The Negro’s access to the land was hindered and limited; his right to work was curtailed; his right of self-defense was taken away, when his right to bear arms was stopped; and his employment was virtually reduced to contract labor with penal servitude as a punishment for leaving his job. And in all cases, the judges of the Negro’s guilt or innocence, rights and obligations were men who believed firmly, for the most part, that he had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

...

[Du Bois proceeds to examine specific legislation in many different states regulating black labor in detail. I reproduce here only a couple examples.]

Mississippi provided that

“every freedman, free Negro, and mulatto shall on the second Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and annually thereafter, have a lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof… . from the Mayor… or from a member of the board of police… which licenses may be revoked for cause at any time by the authority granting the same.”

Louisiana passed an elaborate law in 1865, to “regulate labor contracts for agricultural pursuits...” The law required all agricultural laborers to make labor contracts for the next year within the first ten days of January, the contracts to be in writing, to be with heads of families, to embrace the labor of all the members, and to be “binding on all minors thereof.” Each laborer, after choosing his employer,

“shall not be allowed to leave his place of employment until the fulfillment of his contract, unless by consent of his employer, or on account of harsh treatment, or breach of contract on the part of the employer; and if they do so leave, without cause or permission, they shall forfeit all wages earned to the time of abandonment… .In case of sickness of the laborer, wages for the time lost shall be deducted, and where the sickness is feigned for purposes of idleness, . . . and also should refusal to work be continued beyond three days, the offender shall be reported to a justice of the peace, and shall be forced to labor on roads, levees, and other public works, without pay, until the offender consents to return to his labor… .When in health, the laborer shall work ten hours during the day in summer, and nine hours during the day in winter, unless otherwise stipulated in the labor contract; he shall obey all proper orders of his employer or his agent; take proper care of his work mules, horses, oxen, stock; also of all agricultural implements; and employers shall have the right to make a reasonable deduction from the laborer’s wages for injuries done to animals or agricultural implements committed to his care, or for bad or negligent work. Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty and leaving home without permission, will be deemed disobedience… . For any disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed on the offender. For all lost time from work hours, unless in case of sickness, the laborer shall be fined twenty-five cents per hour. For all absence from home without leave, the laborer will be fined at the rate of two dollars per day. Laborers will not be required to labor on the Sabbath except to take the necessary care of stock and other property on plantations and do the necessary cooking and household duties, unless by special contract. For all thefts of the laborers from the employer of agricultural products, hogs, sheep, poultry or any other property of the employer, or willful destruction of property or injury, the laborer shall pay the employer double the amount of the value of the property stolen, destroyed or injured, one half to be paid to the employer, and the other half to be placed in the general fund provided for in this section. No live stock shall be allowed to laborers without the permission of the employer. Laborers shall not receive visitors during work hours. All difficulties arising between the employers and laborers, under this section, shall be settled, and all fines be imposed, by the former; if not satisfactory to the laborers, an appeal may be had to the nearest justice of the peace and two freeholders, citizens, one of said citizens to be selected by the employer and the other by the laborer; and all fines imposed and collected under this section shall be deducted from the wages due, and shall be placed in a common fund, to be divided among the other laborers employed on the plantation at the time when their full wages fall due, except as provided for above.”

Similar detailed regulations of work were in the South Carolina law. Elaborate provision was made for contracting colored “servants” to white “masters.” Their masters were given the right to whip “moderately” servants under eighteen. Others were to be whipped on authority of judicial officers. These officers were given authority to return runaway servants to their masters. The servants, on the other hand, were given certain rights. Their wages and period of service must be specified in writing, and they were protected against “unreasonable” tasks, Sunday and night work, unauthorized attacks on their persons, and inadequate food.

Contracting Negroes were to be known as “servants” and contractors as “masters.” Wages were to be fixed by the judge, unless stipulated. Negroes of ten years of age or more without a parent living in the district might make a valid contract for a year or less. Failure to make written contracts was a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $5 to $50; farm labor to be from sunrise to sunset, with intervals for meals; servants to rise at dawn, to be careful of master’s property and answerable for property lost or injured. Lost time was to be deducted from wages. Food and clothes might be deducted. Servants were to be quiet and orderly and to go to bed at reasonable hours. No night work or outdoor work in bad weather was to be asked, except in cases of necessity, visitors not allowed without the master’s consent. Servants leaving employment without good reason must forfeit wages. Masters might discharge servants for disobedience, drunkenness, disease, absence, etc. Enticing away the services of a servant was punishable by a fine of $20 to $100. A master could command a servant to aid him in defense of his own person, family or property. House servants at all hours of the day and night, and at all days of the week, “must answer promptly all calls and execute all lawful orders.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

#web du bois #bria #passages

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captainsquality · 2 years ago

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heyoo i live in northeast kansas and also lived in small towns in kentucky and pennsylvania when I was fairly young.

Now, my hometown is the state's capital city. It's somewhere roughly in the 'mid-size' range as far as towns go, and is a half hour drive away from one of the biggest cities in the state, and an hour away from Kansas City on the border of here and missouri.

This northeastern portion of Kansas isn't plains yet, and much of the great plains, contrary to some belief, isn't level flatland- which I can attest, as my family drove across the entire state to hike in colorado every summer when I was a child and our financial situation was better.

That aside, this corner is one of the more densely populated areas of the state.

Even then, though, there's still a lot of farmland peppered throughout, even within some cities. The neighborhood my parents and I just moved to is near a highway, several major streets, some schools and parks and we have several restaurants and two grocery stores within a five minute drive. The highway gives us relatively easy access to the south side of town where most medical facilities are, as well as the homes of all our family in town(all my mom's younger siblings and my older brother and his wife).

Here on the north side of town, across the river, things quickly move from the more bustling business district across the bridge to less and less populated as you go.

I've been all over this region of the state for all kinds of things in my life and I need you guys from the coast or from more heavily urban areas to understand that even here, in my hometown, which has a lot of good facilities and restaurants, schools, etc, the population distribution varies pretty widely.

Our neighborhood isn't far from many of the things we need, but that is largely in part because we have reasonably working vehicles to get to those places. Even if public transport infrastructure were fucking FANTASTIC here, it wouldn't be a consistently accessible option for any of the three of us.

This is because all three of us are disabled. Mom, in particular, is partially wheelchair bound because after getting longhaul covid in spring of 2020 she's got a weakened heart and respiratory system and chronic fatigue syndrome.

dad and I both have chronic pain and illness issues, though that physical aspect is much more severe for him.

My problems are largely mental health. depression, anxiety and ADHD, all diagnosed before I was even in fifth grade. VERY severe PTSD. More than likely I am autistic as well, but I'm too old to get a Clinical Diagnosis. And finally, riding on the tail of that PTSD, I am clinically diagnosed with moderate level agoraphobia.

If I drive out of town, toward the big college city half an hour away where the skate shop and noodle restaurant I really love are, I pass through two or three VERY VERY small towns on the way. Places that are barely a blip, a couple of miles with a reduced speed limit. A couple of gas stations, etc.

And of course there's also a LOT of farmland. A lot of farmland and a lot of brushland and creeks and streams.

And, of course, houses. In various sizes and conditions, speckled and dotted about, real far away from each other. Real far away from even the nearest cell tower.

Anyway all this is me talking way too much to affirm that truly it is a horrible, stupidass idea to think we should eliminate/abandon cars completely.

It doesn't just leave rural folks hanging out to dry, it fails to account for the situations of partially functional but still disabled people, for whom public transit isn't always doable- even if it's affordable.

We need much, much less dependency on cars, but that shouldn't mean 'BURN IT ALL'.

What it means, for now, is that we just need to invest in additional options. Public transport, infrastructure, that sort of thing- those should be highly prioritized, obviously!

But remember this is a very large country, and the layout and infrastructure and what is most realistic, most accessible, most ideal, is going to look very different depending on the area, and also on the individual needs of the people who live there. saying 'get rid of all cars' is dismissive and reductive.

The other thread on this was started by chuds so I'm gonna reboot it myself: it's really sad that people don't understand the Midwest is where food gets grown and we're supposed to grow a lot more of it.

Suggesting people just move to the cities is astonishingly clueless and would only make the situation worse. Some Americans have truly no idea what it's like out there, tiny communities separated by hour long drives if you even have transport, millions of people really are just abandoned and left behind by what we consider progress and have no way out.

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sexypinkon · 6 years ago

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The Governor’s Attic

Geoffrey MacLean tracks down a hoard of valuable 19th-century Caribbean paintings in an English country house

By Geoffrey MacLean

George Francis Robert Harris, the third Lord Harris, arrived in Port of Spain in 1846. He was a popular and impartial administrator who rescued Trinidad’s economy after the crash of the sugar industry and the abolition of slavery. Under his administration a system of labour indentureship was formalised through immigration from India, China and Madeira, setting the stage for Trinidad’s present cultural diversity.

Between 1848 and 1854, when Harris left Trinidad, there were marked improvements in virtually all aspects of life in Trinidad: the economy, education, government administration, public utilities. Lord Harris’s marriage in 1850 to a Trinidadian, Sarah Cummins, at Trinity Cathedral in Port of Spain, provided an unprecedented social spectacle, and endeared the Governor further to the population.

Two years after Lord Harris’s arrival, Michel Cazabon, Trinidad’s great 19th-century artist, returned to Port of Spain from Paris, intent on making his living by painting. Though from very different social backgrounds, Harris and Cazabon had much in common and became close friends. Both had been educated in England and both had lived in France, Harris in the south for his health, Cazabon in Paris as an art student.

During Harris’s term of office, Cazabon prepared two volumes of lithographic prints, Views of Trinidad 1851 and Album of Trinidad 1857. They depicted many scenes of historic interest and natural beauty: The Governor’s Residence, St Ann’s; The Cottage, Mount Tanana; The Reservoir at Maraval; Caledonia and Craig Islands; Maracas Waterfall.

Caledonia and Craig Islands by Cazabon

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The lithographs and sketches prepared by the artist for The Illustrated London News showed Cazabon’s constant attendance on the Governor to record official functions and social excursions. Harris is seen straddling the root of a huge tree in the hunting party in Cedar Point, Mount Tamana, the artist seated with his sketch pad behind him. The wedding party on its way to the honeymoon cottage on Craig Island, as seen in Caledonia and Craig Islands, is that of Lord Harris and his new bride, daughter of George Cummins, the Archdeacon of Trinidad.

After the publication of my book on Cazabon in 1986 (Cazabon: An Illustrated Biography; Aquarela Galleries, Trinidad), I was still fascinated by the relationship between Lord Harris and Cazabon. I felt that the Governor would not have left the colony without taking with him mementos in the form of paintings by his friend, which would form an important record of Trinidad’s history. Initial enquiries proved fruitless – there are several Lord Harrises in Britain, and no indication which of them might be descended from Trinidad’s Governor. But I discussed the possibilities with another Cazabon enthusiast, Brian Tonkinson, who was able to trace the Harris family to Belmont, near Faversham in Kent.

Belmont House, deep in the English countryside, is as far removed from the hustle and bustle of Port of Spain as one can imagine. This stately home is owned by the present Lord Harris, the sixth in succession, a successful and charming farmer. At that time, the house was looked after by the Lodge-keeper, Mr Hacking, who, when asked about the possibility of paintings by Cazabon, remembered some sketches in an album in the library relating to Trinidad – and several oil paintings stored in the attic, believed also to date from that period.

Early in 1991 I visited Belmont. Since our first contact, the estate had become the responsibility of a Trust under the chairmanship of Lord Harris. As the art collection was described and catalogued, its historic importance became clear. The “album in the library” contained a series of watercolours by Michel Cazabon, about 35 of the most important visual references to 19th-century Trinidad in existence. The oil paintings in the attic also turned out to be fine examples of Cazabon’s art.

Sunrise near Port of Spain by Cazabon

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Among the watercolours there were images of creole women, views of the Port of Spain docks, the districts of Corbeaux Town and Carenage, sea views from Gasparee island and of Craig and Caledonia Islands, the island ferry, and studies taken at sunrise and sunset, the most charming of which was as contemporary as the scene today — a young boy flying a kite on the Port of Spain Savannah at sunset, and a spectacular panorama of the Savannah from Cotton Hill. These glimpses from a different era underlined the long and important tradition of the Savannah as the social and recreational centre of Trinidad’s capital.

Boy with Kite, Queen's Park Savannah, Port of Spain by Cazabon

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The oil paintings were just as interesting, and showed how important Cazabon had been in recording the life and status of the Governor. Several were on a scale not seen before in Cazabon’s work: one of them, the largest I have seen by Cazabon, shows a view of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill, with the Governor in a top-hat surveying the city with his guide. Two other paintings were of the Lodge on Mount Tamana where the Governor and his party stayed on their hunting expeditions, an exterior view showing the simple thatched building and an interior with some of the day’s catch of wild birds and quenk, the wild pigs that roam Trinidad’s forests.

The Wedding of Lord Harris at Trinity Church, Port of Spain (sepia watercolour 1850, 290 x 380 mm) ............................................................................................................................

Trinity Cathedral, where the Governor married his Trinidad bride, was beautifully rendered in two sepia watercolour sketches. My favourite was a dramatic view of the Northern Range from Tamana, looking over a thickly forested central plain, the foreground punctuated by a brightly plumed bird in flight, watched by its mate resting on the branch of a nearby tree.

View from Carenage, Port of Spain by Cazabon

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Although the prime exhibit at Belmont is a collection of clocks, the passion of the fifth Lord Harris, the Trust has used the new Cazabons to formalise a display of Trinidad’s great painter. After restoration, mounted and framed, the paintings look magnificent.

Cazabon’s renderings are not romantic. He did not glamourise life or landscape. In recording the unvarnished truth, he left us a clear picture of Trinidad at a vital stage of development. Today’s society was just being formed; the effects of slavery and its collapse were being felt in a bankrupt economy and a new social order. The population was volatile, wary of officialdom, and eager to demonstrate both against injustice (Harris faced rioters in person as they objected to the shaving of the heads of civil offenders) and for proper public utilities, especially a regular water supply.

Yet it can be seen how much Governor Harris enjoyed Trinidad: its natural beauty, its wildlife, its handsome people and its architecture. His friendship with Cazabon was remarkable, given the two men’s different social and ethnic backgrounds. Cazabon attended many of the events in the Governor’s life not just as a recorder of history but as a participant: his renderings of the Governor’s marriage in Trinity Cathedral are extraordinary in the way they capture the excitement of the crowd and the sense of occasion.

At Belmont, the paintings, all dating from 1850 to 1854, now hang where the third Lord Harris originally placed them: in the Blue Bedroom, the Blue Dressing Room and the South Bedroom. Any student of Trinidad’s social or artistic history, indeed anyone with a nostalgia for the Caribbean’s past, should see them.

The guidebook states: “Here, and in the next two rooms, is displayed the unique collection of watercolours of Trinidad by Michel Jean Cazabon (1813-1888), an artist of French ‘free coloured’ origin born in Trinidad. He was educated in England at St Edmund’s, Ware (a Catholic school), and trained as an artist in France. He exhibited at the Louvre every year from 1842 until 1847, and returned to Trinidad in 1848. The paintings at Belmont were commissioned by the third Lord Harris while he was Governor of Trinidad in the middle of the 19th century.”

The Governor's Attic | Caribbean Beat Magazine

#Sexypink/Caribbean Beat Magazine archives #Sexypink/Michel Jean Cazabon #Sexypink/Governor Harris/History/Art History of Trinidad and Tobago

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architectnews · 4 years ago

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Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts & Sciences

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock Building Texas

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences

Lubbock Architecture: Texan Development, USA, design by Diamond Schmitt Architects

23 Feb 2021

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Texas

Location: Texas, USA

Design: Diamond Schmitt Architects

The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, Texas, USA

Photos: Casey Dunn

New State-of-the-Art Performing Arts Venue in the Heart of Cultural District Creates Permanent Home for the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Lubbock, and Touring Productions

Lubbock, TX, February 23, 2021 — The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, a new state-of-the-art performance venue in Lubbock, Texas, recently inaugurated its landmark building with a series of socially-distanced, limited capacity performances. Designed by Diamond Schmitt in association with Parkhill and MWM Architects of Lubbock, built by Lee Lewis Construction, and developed by Garfield Public/Private LLC, The Buddy Holly Hall is now open to patrons and will formally celebrate its opening this summer. It is West Texas’ largest dedicated performance venue–bringing the city’s vibrant performing arts community including the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Lubbock, and the Lubbock Independent School District, along with a variety of professional touring productions, under one roof.

The new 218,000-square-foot Hall, which was developed to serve the community’s needs, anchors Lubbock’s Art and Culture District and holds a multitude of performances and programs in the grand 2,297-seat Helen DeVitt Jones Theater, the more intimate 415-person Crickets Theater, and other flexible spaces for rehearsal and performance, as well as a restaurant, two multi-purpose rooms and an outdoor covered amphitheater.

“We are thrilled to finally begin welcoming audiences into The Buddy Holly Hall and to give the people of Lubbock and the region the state-of-the-art facilities our incredible performers deserve,” said Tim Collins, Chairman of the Board of the Lubbock Entertainment and Performing Arts Association which founded and operates the Hall. “Diamond Schmitt deeply understood our community’s dream to create a performing arts campus that promotes entertainment for our region, while also serving as an arts education hub and a cornerstone for downtown revitalization. The result is a beautiful, world-class space unlike anything in our area that will bring our community together and create a new destination for the arts in Lubbock. We can’t wait to celebrate this momentous occasion with a grand opening this summer, when it’s safer for everyone to gather together in person.”

Diamond Schmitt’s sophisticated design of the $158 million Hall was selected in 2014 following a competitive process. Their modern design is inspired by the colors and shapes of the landscape of West Texas, including the prismatic and layered rock formations of Texas canyons. The layout of the interior spaces will accommodate the Hall’s wide-ranging performance line-up–from hosting ballet, symphony, school, opera, pop and country performances to Broadway productions to statewide band and choir competitions. Targeting LEED Silver, the building’s façades meticulously balance various approaches to creating shade to counter the South Plains Region of Texas’ extreme temperature fluctuations. A long overhang, angled concrete fins, and deep-set ribbon windows all act as architectural drapery to cool the building and filter light without obstructing the views of the wide vistas surrounding the Hall.

Dissolving the threshold between indoors and outdoors, the Hall’s use of glass at ground-level entrances creates an inviting and seamless transition for visitors entering and exiting the Hall. Inside, the building moves from spacious public lobbies to more liminal spaces leading to several intimate studios and The Buddy Holly Hall’s two signature theaters, which were designed, in collaboration with partners Jaffe Holden Acoustics and Schuler Shook Theatre Planners, to ensure premier acoustics and optimal theater capabilities no matter the type of performance or sound level. Both theaters achieve pure and crystalline sound on par with the world’s leading performance halls through extensive acoustic modeling and precisely placed acoustical banners which enhance the clarity, consistency, and constancy of tone in the halls. Additionally, the seating in the Helen DeVitt Jones Theater can be reconfigured to accommodate the hall’s vast range of programming. The orchestra seating section can be set for traditional raked fixed-chair seating or for popular flat-floor general admission.

“Just as the idea for The Buddy Holly Hall grew from the Lubbock community, our modern design for the building is inspired by the region’s physical and cultural landscape,” said Matthew Lella, Principal at Diamond Schmitt. “We designed a building that is both open and outward looking and yet simultaneously invites the public to engage with all the activity happening inside. Responding to the unique challenges of the site–from the intense Texas heat to its location in a flood plain–we have created a signature new space for the performing arts with world-class facilities that embody the spirit of the performers who will be gracing its stages.”

The Hall is named for Lubbock native Buddy Holly, who sparked a cultural revolution in the 1950s with his music, songwriting, and big framed glasses. A signature feature of the Hall’s Christine DeVitt Main Lobby is its iconic guitar wall depicting Holly playing a Stratocaster. Designed by Texas artist Brad Oldham, the site-specific sculpture weaves together 9,000 aluminum brushed bronze guitar picks in an array of sizes to create an image of the Hall’s namesake.

The Buddy Holly Hall is privately funded, owned, and operated by the Lubbock Entertainment and Performing Arts Association (LEPAA), with 100% of all contributions directly funding construction of the project. Its initial feasibility study was conducted by Webb Management. Ongoing operations and event management will be facilitated through ASM Global. Innovative partnerships with local arts organizations, public schools and universities, and private corporations will allow The Buddy Holly Hall to be financially self-sustaining upon opening.

More information about upcoming programs and current health and safety protocols at The Buddy Holly Hall is available on their website at www.buddyhollyhall.com.

About The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences is a regional, multi-purpose performing arts center dedicated to enriching the lives of those who live in Lubbock, the South Plains area, and beyond through the presentation of the highest quality local, national and international entertainment and arts education. The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences (The Buddy Holly Hall) is owned by the Lubbock Entertainment and Performing Arts Association (LEPAA) and is operated and managed by ASM Global. Please visit www.buddyhollyhall.com for information and updates about shows, concerts, events and more.

About Diamond Schmitt Diamond Schmitt is a global architecture firm that designs transformative, purpose-driven, and highly sustainable buildings across sectors. Delivering innovative architecture that empowers people, communities, and organizations to harness change for the greater public good, Diamond Schmitt employs a collaborative research process to create bold designs renowned for their exceptional performance and meticulous craftsmanship.

The architectural firm has designed some of the world’s most iconic performance spaces in the world of music–including Mariinsky Theatre’s Mariinsky II in St. Petersburg, La Maison Symphonique de Montréal, and The National Arts Centre in Ottawa–all known for their flawless acoustics, versatility of space, and striking design. With offices in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary, Diamond Schmitt is currently leading the design for New York Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. For more information please visit: www.dsai.ca.

About ASM Global ASM Global was formed in October 2019 from the merger of AEG Facilities, the global innovator in live entertainment venues, and SMG, the gold standard in event management. ASM Global is a venue management powerhouse that spans five continents, 14 countries and more than 300 of the world’s most prestigious arenas, stadiums, convention and exhibit centers, and performing arts venues.

As the world’s most trusted venue manager, ASM Global provides venue strategy and management, sales, marketing, event booking and programming, construction and design consulting, and pre-opening services. Among the venues in our portfolio are landmark facilities such as McCormick Place & Soldier Field in Chicago, the Los Angeles Convention Center, Tele2 Arena in Stockholm, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans and the Shenzhen World Exhibition and Conference Centre in Shenzhen, China. ASM Global also offers food and beverage operations through its concessions and catering companies.

About Garfield Public/Private LLC Garfield Public/Private LLC is a national development services provider focusing exclusively on public and public/private developments, including performing arts centers. The company uses innovative and cost-effective financing solutions tailored to the requirements of its clients.

Garfield employs a “turnkey” delivery method that minimizes client risk and administrative burden, maximizes transparency and accountability, and enables “fast track” delivery of high quality facilities months or even years ahead of when otherwise thought possible. Garfield Public/Private and its executives have developed more than 20 million square feet of all property types nationally and abroad and have financed more than $7 billion in debt and equity. Its performing arts development experience also includes the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC) in Durham, NC and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, UT. For more information, please visit https://ift.tt/3aKS0hP.

Previously on e-architect:

Apr 20, 2017

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences in Texas

Location: Texas, USA

Design: Diamond Schmitt Architects

Groundbreaking for Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock, TX

GROUND BREAK FOR BUDDY HOLLY HALL OF PERFORMING ARTS & SCIENCES

Toronto – The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences broke ground today in Lubbock, Texas, setting a milestone for this major arts project in the hometown of the iconic 1950s pop legend Buddy Holly.

Images: Diamond Schmitt Architects

The center features the 2,200-seat Helen DeVitt Jones Theater; a 425-seat studio theater; a grand hall; a bistro; and the 22,000-square-foot home to Ballet Lubbock with five dance studios. The Christine DeVitt Lobby will be a gathering point and community asset.

“The aim for Lubbock is to create a performing arts centre as good acoustically, as welcoming to the public, and as attractive to performers to be among the best halls in North America,” said Jack Diamond, Principal, with Toronto-based Diamond Schmitt Architects.

The Lubbock Entertainment and Performing Arts Association (LEPAA) is developing the privately funded, $155-million project, which will also provide access to the Lubbock Independent School District as a learning centre. “Buddy Holly Hall will be a beacon for progress and downtown revitalization for Lubbock and the South Plains,” said Tim Collins, LEPAA’s chairman. “The venue is a hub that brings together people of all ages to experience world-class art in a world-class facility.”

The multi-purpose nature of the venue will allow for a wide range of activity, from opera, Broadway shows and symphonic music, to rock concerts, conferences and social events. “To achieve this versatility, the floor of the auditorium can have raked seating or be flat for a standing audience, either below or in line with the stage,” said Matthew Lella, Principal, Diamond Schmitt.

The central volume of the structure conceals the fly tower and is framed by a roofline of swooping planes with cascading columns that establish a strong visual identity and create a welcoming entrance. A replica of a 200-foot telecommunications tower will be installed on the site as a light sculpture, forming a beacon for the performing arts center.

Diamond Schmitt is working with development team partners Garﬁeld Public/Private, LLC, Parkhill, Smith, & Cooper, MWM Architects, Hugo Reed & Associates, Jaffe Holden Acoustics, Schuler Shook, and Lee Lewis Construction. The 218,000-square-foot performing arts campus is on track to open in 2020.

To view a 3-minute video on the design, please click here: Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock

Diamond Schmitt Architects (www.dsai.ca) has designed many acclaimed concert halls, opera houses and theatres worldwide, including the New Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, La Maison Symphonique in Montreal, The Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Among current projects are the design for David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City and the transformation of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

May 2, 2016

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences in Lubbock

Texas, USA

Design: Diamond Schmitt Architects

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences in Lubbock

Construction has started on this concert hall building dedicated to American musician Buddy Holly.

The rock-and-roll musician shot to fame with tracks including Peggy Sue and That’ll Be the Day, before he was killed in a plane crash in 1959, aged 23.

Inspired by and in the spirit of Lubbock, West Texas, and the South Plains, Buddy Holly Hall will feature a 2,200-seat main theatre, an additional 400-seat theatre, a 5,000-square-foot multi-purpose room and a 22,000-square-foot Dance Centre.

A dynamic light sculpture will animate an adjacent 200-foot-high telecommunications tower and be a marker for the new performing arts centre as well as a symbol of renewal for Lubbock that will be visible from a great distance.

The building is designed as a tribute to the artist, and to fit into its setting on the Llano Estacado desert plains.

The multi-purpose nature of the venue will allow for a wide range of activity, from opera, Broadway shows and symphonic music, to rock concerts, conferences and social events. In addition to local performing arts groups and touring shows, the facility will house Ballet Lubbock with its own rehearsal and performance space and provide access to the Lubbock Independent School District as a learning centre.

May 2, 2016

Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, Lubbock

DESIGN DETAILS REVEALED FOR THE BUDDY HOLLY HALL OF PERFORMING ARTS AND SCIENCES

May 2, 2016, TORONTO – Design details from Diamond Schmitt Architects have been released for The Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences. The arts complex will be built in Lubbock, Texas, birthplace of the legendary 1950s pop star whose brief career influenced generations of musicians and fans.

“The aim for Lubbock is to create a performing arts center as good acoustically, as welcoming to the public, and as attractive to performers to be among the best halls in North America,” said Jack Diamond, Principal, with Toronto-based Diamond Schmitt Architects.

“Our goal is to have this venue feel great for all types of performers and audiences – whether they are in jeans and hats or ball gowns,” said Matthew Lella, Principal, Diamond Schmitt. To achieve this versatility, the floor of the main auditorium can have raked seating or be flat for a standing audience, either below or in line with the stage. The hall will have top-tier natural acoustics for a large symphony orchestra as well as cutting-edge amplified sound for touring bands and shows.

Ample public space in the lobby with its feature helical stair and amenities including a bistro café will make Buddy Holly Hall a community living room active throughout the day in addition to evening performances. The central volume of the structure conceals the fly tower and is framed by a roofline of swooping planes with cascading columns that establish a strong visual identity and create a welcoming entrance.

The Lubbock Entertainment and Performing Arts Association (LEPAA), which is developing the project, is well on its way to achieving its $146-million fundraising target, having raised $81-million to date. The facility will be fully funded through private donations. “Buddy Holly Hall will be a beacon for progress and downtown revitalization for Lubbock and the South Plains,” said Tim Collins. LEPAA’s chairman. “The venue is a hub that brings together people of all ages to experience world-class art in a world-class facility.”

vimeo

Introducing Buddy Holly Hall from Michelle Stephens on Vimeo.

Diamond Schmitt is working with development team partners Garfield Public/Private, LLC, Parkhill, Smith, & Cooper, MWM Architects, Hugo Reed & Associates, Jaffe Holden Acoustics, Schuler Shook, and Lee Lewis Construction. Construction is set to commence later this year with a projected opening in 2019.

Diamond Schmitt Architects (www.dsai.ca) has designed many acclaimed concert halls, opera houses and theatres worldwide: Among these are the New Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, La Maison Symphonique in Montreal, The Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. The firm recently won an international design competition to reimagine Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall in New York City. An extensive portfolio also includes academic buildings, libraries, sports facilities, research laboratories, hospitals, residential and commercial buildings.

Images: Diamond Schmitt Architects

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Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences

Location: Lubbock, Texas, USA

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districofcolumbiaprelawland-blog · 4 years ago

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Religion And State Police Power In The Era Of Coronavirus

By David B. Arnold, American University Class of 2021

September 10, 2020

The effects of the coronavirus in constitutional law have been immense, as many state social distancing mandates seem to go against the plain language of the Constitution on their face. After all, if we have the freedom of religion and freedom of assembly, and the state governments are bound to respect these freedoms just like the federal government, why do we have to worship on Zoom and why can’t we gather in public? The ability of governors to limit these constitutional rights during an emergency seems counterintuitive to many Americans, so let us explore where this constitutional concept comes from, using two recent lawsuits as context.

Supreme Court Challenges

The two cases that centered on Freedom of Religion were brought by churches in Nevada and California against the restrictions on public gatherings in those states due to COVID-19. The case in Nevada was brought in May by the Calvary Chapel of Dayton Valley. The lawsuit was filed against Directive 21 of Nevada’s reopening plan [1], which among other things requires public places of worship have a maximum of 50 congregants present for in-person worship.

The church was denied a temporary injunction of the Directive at the district level, and the request for an injunction was also denied at the federal appellate court for the Ninth Circuit [2]. The appeal to the Supreme Court was not granted, but what exactly the freedom of religion covers is a controversial position, and three of the (generally) conservative Justices, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Gorsuch wanted to make their voices heard on the denial of the petition.

In an explosive dissent, Justice Alito opined “That Nevada would discriminate in favor of the powerful gaming industry and its employees may not come as a surprise, but this Court’s willingness to allow such discrimination is disappointing”[3]. This is a reference to the fact that casinos may open at fifty percent occupancy, yet places of worship may only have fifty persons [4]. It is easy to imagine a situation in which a casino has a capacity of a thousand, allowing them in five-hundred people, ten times as many as a church. This is an interesting case study in how governors are attempting to both offset the economic costs of the pandemic and weigh religious liberties against the manifest public health catastrophe.

In the California case, South Bay Pentecostal Church v Newsom, the named church sued the governor of California on the basis that a restriction on all public building of occupancy at 25% capacity was infringing on the same aforementioned liberties of assembly and religion [5]. For the court, Justice Roberts offered something like the “valid secular purpose test”, in part justifying denying the church injunctive relief because all such public places were under these restrictions[6].

His concurrence to denying relief lays out a philosophy wherein, broadly, the response to emergencies is at the discretion of political officials in highly volatile situations, and when“ they undertaketo act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,” their latitude “must be especially broad.” Marshall v. United States, 414 U. S. 417, 427 (1974)” [7] Justice Kavanaugh was not satisfied with this logic, as the California order seems to him to exclude many secular establishments (though one could reason that several of the examples he mentions in dissent are vital services, like pharmacies) [8].

Injunctive Relief

Readers will notice these concurrences and dissents are not about the cases themselves, but about whether the orders in Nevada and California can be enjoined. A preliminary injunction is when the court steps in to prevent an action that is allegedly causing harm before the trial so the plaintiff is not suffering from it the entire time the case is being argued [9]. For instance, in this case Justice Kavanaugh argued that for South Bay Pentecostal, being limited in congregation size on Pentecost was a harm worthy of injunctive relief[10], though as we have seen the Court more broadly did not agree.

These bans, and their success in court thus far, raise interesting questions about emergency power.While emergency power is generally thought of as a national security issue, there are precedents for limiting civil liberties during a pandemic.

Where does this power originate

Chief Justice Roberts in his concurrence cites the case Jacobson v Massachusetts [11]. This was a case in which the Court decided to uphold Massachusetts’s laws punishing those who shirk epidemic measures, in this case a Lutheran minister who refused compulsory, free vaccination.He was fined five dollars. The reasoning in Justice John Harlan’s opinion was that the states have an internal police power that they did not relinquish when signing the Constitution, and can use that to better public safety if it does not affect the people of other states[12]. The conclusion of these cases are that governors, for now, seem to have limited power to limit liberties, even if it may trouble the religious scruples of people like Minister Jacobson or the two churches who sued their governors, if the directive is narrowly tailored to meet the threat.

________________________________________________________________

1. State of Nevada Executive, DECLARATION OF EMERGENCY DIRECTIVE 021 - PHASE TWO REOPENING PLAN§11 (2020)

2. Emergency Application for Injunction Pending Appellate Review, App. No. 20A____(2020)

3. Alito J. Dissenting,Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v Sisolak On Application for Injunctive Relief, 591 U.S. ____ (2020), 2

4. Ibid.

5. Robert C. J. Concurring, South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom on Application for Injunctive Relief, 590 U.S.____ (2020),2

6. Ibid. 2

7. Ibid. 1

8. Ibid. 2

9. “Injunction.” Wex, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/injunction

10. Kavanaugh J. Dissenting,South Bay Pentecostal Church v. Newsom On Application for Injunctive Relief, 590 U.S.____ (2020), 1

11. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 12 (1905)

12. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)

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