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  1. #346
    Senior Monk Gio's Avatar
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    Question



    Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself


    "The platform is overrun with hate speech and disinformation.
    Does it actually want to solve the problem?"

    By Andrew Marantz
    October 12, 2020


    To listen/or read - Go Here
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    Quote Originally posted by giovonni View Post


    Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself


    "The platform is overrun with hate speech and disinformation.
    Does it actually want to solve the problem?"

    By Andrew Marantz
    October 12, 2020


    To listen/or read - Go Here
    Facebook has to be one of the worst things that happened to human kind, ever

    It's not used for nothing but growing ego, manipulating emotions, hurting people, and distributing lies and agendas

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  5. #348
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    Thinking

    What was once conceived as a innovated internet platform ...

    It is possible that Facebook, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and has more than three billion monthly users, is so big that its content can no longer be effectively moderated.
    Very likely, and perhaps most probably, it won't be allowed to continue (to expand and dominate) as a as a global communication entity platform ...

    Hence, an inevitable international regulatory corporate breakup.
    Presenting an alternative to the alternative community.

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  7. #349
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    Quote Originally posted by Malisa View Post
    Facebook has to be one of the worst things that happened to human kind, ever

    It's not used for nothing but growing ego, manipulating emotions, hurting people, and distributing lies and agendas
    I don't fully agree with your acessment, but i do appreciate you posting your comments.
    Presenting an alternative to the alternative community.

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    Question

    Fine-tuning the climate

    DW Documentary


    Engineers and scientists are trying to intervene in the Earth’s geochemical cycles. Because it appears efforts to cut CO2 won’t suffice to avoid irreversible climate change. But does geoengineering offer a real solution? Or is it just human hubris?

    Some scientists believe that we need to explore radical, and perhaps dangerous, technologies in order to be able to lower the earth’s temperature through geoengineering in the near future.

    Science journalist Ingolf Baur explores the feasibility and risks of leading geoengineering projects. His journey takes him to meet scientists in Switzerland, Iceland, the US and Peru. Along the way, he encounters two very different strategies: One is to fish climate-damaging CO2 from the atmosphere and sink it underground or in the deep sea. The other, and this is the far more controversial strategy, seeks to develop techniques that dim sunlight.

    Global warming is causing entire mountain ridges like the Moosfluh above Switzerland’s Aletsch Glacier to break off. Such dramatic changes could increase the pressure to try geoengineering.

    Its most prominent proponent is David Keith from Harvard University in the US. He’s devised experiments to to sound out the possibilities of "solar geoengineering." His idea is for fleets of aircraft to dump millions of tons of sulfur into the stratosphere every year, where it should reflect part of the incoming sunlight back into space. As audacious as this method seems, it’s actually no different to what happens during volcanic eruptions.

    Or could we still manage to get greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere again? In Iceland, a group of researchers is using a special process to filter carbon dioxide from the air and pump it 2,000 meters deep into basalt rock. The surprise: after a few months, the CO2 is already reacting chemically and turning to stone, which renders it harmless - permanently. The quantities are still far too small, but it shows that as controversial and risky as some geoengineering methods may be, in the end we may need technology to avert or at least mitigate the effects of climate collapse.
    Oct 14, 2020

    42:25 minutes


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    I prefer rock injection over sun dimming. It just can't be good, dimming the source of life.

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    I kind of like the idea. It can't hurt, plus it will give the chem trail people something to obsess over for another few decades and hopefully keep them housebound.

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    you funny, OG ... great sense of humor ...
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Thumbs Up

    A very compelling watch with some surprises ...

    Who Was The Real Christopher Columbus?
    | Secrets and Lies of Christopher Columbus | Timeline


    Was Christopher Columbus born in Genoa, Italy? Most definitely not, say an unlikely collection of experts from European royalty, DNA science, university scholars, even Columbus's own living family. This ground breaking documentary follows a trail of proof to show he might have been much more than we know.

    Oct 3, 2020

    1:11:40 minutes


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  19. #355
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    Thinking

    Fascinating ...

    Meet the Crazy Rich
    Russians who grew up
    in London


    From Ascot to Annabel’s, Henley to Harrods, they are the new generation of Russian-born, UK raised ‘little tsars’ adding their unique brand of glitz to British high society. As the Russian Report is published and relations with the Kremlin turn cold, Tatler returns to an interview from the December 2018 issue, when Francesca Carington met the Moscovite millennials studying, partying and playing ‘mafia’ in Mayfair

    By Francesca Carington
    22 Jul 2020




    "Unlike the British upper classes, whose reign was last interrupted in 1066, there are no old, rich Russian families. Lenin and friends took care of that. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a group of savvy (though not always savoury) business magnates found themselves in possession of enormous riches. They looked west, to the world’s financial capital – and London’s politicians welcomed them and their wallets with open arms. Tony Blair attended the opera in St Petersburg as Putin’s guest in 2000, and things got even sweeter in 2008, with the introduction of the Tier 1 investor visa (or ‘golden visa’), allowing successful applicants to reside in the UK in exchange for an investment of £1 million (now £2 million) in government bonds. What happened next – or at least the accepted version of it – is familiar to every Londoner: Russians bought swathes of property in Knightsbridge, football clubs and yachts, they shopped on Sloane Street with their bodyguards, bombed through Chelsea in blacked-out Range Rovers; they were flashy, gauche and worst of all, nouveau.

    But what of their children? Born after the fall of the USSR and brought up in Britain’s boarding schools, the second generation of rich Russians has come of age. Where the parents may have been seen as parvenus, the progeny are unambiguously accepted as mainstays of high society – they decorate the pages of Bystanders both British and Russian, they’re regulars at Henley, Ascot and Annabel’s. And with them, we are witnessing the assimilation of another layer in the puff pastry of the British upper crust.

    But just when it was all going so well, 2018 saw Anglo-Russian relations grow frosty, to say the least. The poisoning in Salisbury of former spy Sergei Skripal and attempts by the British government to curtail Kremlin influence in the UK have brought London’s rich Russians into sharper focus. There was the introduction of unexplained wealth orders, which proved a problem for one Harrods-loving Azerbaijani (Zamira Hajiyeva, who blew £16 million at the store despite her husband’s official salary between 2001 and 2008 being £54,000) and now a Home Office review on golden visas may be the undoing of still more. Are the Russians deserting us? In June, Roman Abramovich withdrew his British visa renewal application – and it is thought that problems with visas led to the cancellation of this winter’s Russian Debutante Ball, an event that attracts daughters of the super-rich to Grosvenor House hotel in flouncing white dresses and tiaras. What are we to make of it all? And what of the bright young Russians with roots in two conflicting countries stuck in the middle?

    As a social set, they are glamorous, wealthy, hard-working and curiously discreet. A British upbringing means that they are cultural chameleons, fixtures of both the British season and its exclusive Russian counterpart: a shimmering world of mega-weddings and costume balls glimpsed only by the rest of us in Russian Tatler – or out-of-focus images on the Mail Online. A scroll through Instagram shows Anglo-Russians at louche parties in Moscow one week and genteel days out at Goodwood the next. And there they are on private planes, making peace signs outside the Kremlin, shooting in Gloucestershire, or with their Chanel handbags and sunglasses on rooftop pools overlooking the London skyline.

    And so it falls to Tatler to investigate, tracking down a sample of young rich Russians at the heart of the London scene. They may revel in online ostentation but on meeting this group in real life, it becomes quickly apparent that, in person, they’re more low-key than you’d expect. Flashiness is (almost) frowned upon. After all, new money needs to be seen to demonstrate its very existence, but old money has nothing to prove. These Russians are somewhere in-between the two – they’ve graduated from the kind of wealth embodied by a glittery red Ferrari parked outside Harrods with multiple parking tickets on its windscreen, but haven’t quite made it to the bracket of owning half a county or reusing cling film, as is customary among Britain’s oldest families."


    Anna Milyavskaya

    "The first Russian I meet is Anna Milyavskaya (pictured above), 22, the daughter of an actress and a businessman. (When I ask what business, she seems reluctant to clarify: ‘I can’t really say.’) Anna is extremely pretty, with long, straight hair, glossed lips and dressed from baseball cap to Balenciaga trainers in black athleisure. The only pop of colour is her azure Hermès bag. We meet at one of her favourite cafés in Mayfair, where she lives, which caters to an international crowd: on one side of us, Russians talk Fashion Week, while a group of Indian girls on the other eavesdrop on our conversation.

    Anna says she has felt anti-Russian sentiment in London. She was with her mother in Mayfair, withdrawing money. ‘It was winter and I was wearing a chinchilla coat. There was a guy behind me – he was Indian or something – I was talking in Russian and he started swearing at me, “You f**king Russian bitch in your fake jacket, move away, everyone hates you in this country, no one wants you here, you’re immigrants, go back to your country.” And my mum turns around and says, “You, too!”’ She laughs, but the experience clearly left her shaken – not least because the man assumed her chinchilla coat was fake. ‘How can you judge a person like that?’ she asks. ‘It doesn’t matter what language you speak, you just have to respect people.’

    Anna was brought up in Rublyovka, a self-contained enclave outside of Moscow, where ‘famous, wealthy and well-known families’ live in vast houses. Its most famous resident is Vladimir Putin. ‘I always felt like [its name] comes from the word roubles, which is like money,’ says Anna – and those who live there have plenty of it. ‘I guess for some people I may be a bit spoiled,’ she says, her accent a Moscow-Cali mash-up. ‘My parents never went over the top with me and they wouldn’t let me do some stuff, because they wanted me to experience, like, life.’"


    Anna Milyavskaya

    "When she was 14, Anna announced to her family that she wanted to go to boarding school in England. ‘I was feeling a bit trapped and I wanted to experience something more myself. I didn’t want everything to be given to me on a plate,’ she says. So she traded the mega-mansions of Rublyovka for the Palladian delights of Buckinghamshire’s Stowe. It took her some time to adjust to dorms, shared bathrooms, chapel every day and ‘small, small wardrobes. I had so many clothes that at first I panicked.’ Her English wasn’t great either, but improved as she made English friends. Once she felt she had mastered the language, she started to befriend fellow Anglo-Russians.

    ‘There is a Russian community. When I lived in Belgravia, every second person was Russian. Sometimes you’d be like, “Am I in Moscow or am I in London?”’ Her mother adores London and is often here, and has her own set of Russian friends, whose children all know each other. When Anna first started university, she was really into the Russian scene, which seems to make the most of its stereotypes by, among other things, organising games of ‘mafia’. ‘I love playing mafia,’ she says. (Not, alas, the organised crime ring, but a sophisticated version of wink murder.)

    Other things Anna loves include: Regent’s Park, countries where you get a spiritual experience, ceviche, Selfridges, Louboutin slippers, and, most of all, ‘I love, love, love parties where you need to have a dress code.’ All of which give a fleeting impression of her life in London, where she’s doing a Masters in international business at Regent’s College (where she also did her BA, in media and communications).

    Nights out are almost exclusively local to her – this means Cirque Le Soir, Toy Room and sometimes Tramp. Anna worries that Cirque is over with her crowd now – she used to go there so much it was like ‘a second home’. But recently, things have changed. ‘At some point all my Russian classmates were in London. So I had a lot of fun. But a lot of them left. They graduated and took on the family business. That’s usually how it works,’ she says sadly."

    Indeed, for some Russians it seems that Britain is the perfect place to attend a good school, meet the right people, and then return home. Philipp Gazmanov is one such example. He was sent to boarding school at New Hall School, then Hurtwood House and moved back to Moscow two years ago, aged 19, to start his own business. He comes to London whenever he can, though. He FaceTimes me from Grozny in Chechnya, where he’s attending the 200th anniversary commemoration of the city. He’s clean-cut and handsome, with perky hair and very good skin, which I’m able to admire as his phone’s angle leaves me looking slightly up at his chin. His father is Oleg Gazmanov, a famous pop singer in Russia, but Phil is refreshingly unentitled. ‘I’m not really the type of guy who had everything when he was young and then is saying, “Oh, because I was famous I didn’t have my personal space,”’ he says, in excellent English with a strong Russian accent. ‘I think it’s very hypocritical to say that.’"


    Phillipp Gazmanov

    "Schools in Russia are very good, he says, but his parents chose to send him to the UK, where ‘education has its own brand’. Indeed, all the Russians I speak to allude to the prestige of British public schools. Phil speaks about school in business terms: ‘It’s like this market of people where you have to position yourself as an individual.’ After school he studied art at Central Saint Martins, but left three months into his degree when he got funding for his company, which he describes as ‘Uber for trucks’.

    Still, he misses London. ‘What I like is that there are secret clubs and societies, restaurants where only certain people can go.’ I press him for names, but he demurs, saying, ‘There is a reason they stay secret.’ Some of his London friends have country houses, and he’s discreet about what they get up to there, too. Lots of good parties? He smiles, taps his finger to his nose and says, ‘No.’

    Churchill famously said Russia was ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’, and if Phil is prone to the odd opacity, he embraces British mores enthusiastically. He enjoys rugby – ‘a gentleman’s sport, a high society sport’ – and shooting clays, at which he is ‘very good’. This blends curiously with his other passions: mixed martial arts, wrestling, jujitsu and shooting machine guns, which he’s about to do in Grozny. This performative manliness seems stereotypically Russian (one thinks of Putin’s action-man PR shots), but his other great hobby is drawing, which, he points out with a shrug, ‘is not very manly.’

    Phil might come back to England often, but for some Russians there is a sense of nervousness about visiting the UK, world-famous though its *cathedral spires may be. When I ask *Anastasia Malakhova whether tensions between the Kremlin and Westminster have given her cause for concern, she replies, ‘People talk about it a lot in Russia. One of my friends asked me whether she should come to London on holiday and she was afraid about the tension.’ And what of the visa situation? ‘I think it’s fine. If you’re not on a Kremlin list, it’s fine,’ she laughs.

    Anastasia’s family moved from Moscow to London when she was 14, and she went to Harrodian, she tells me over £3 cups of tea in a café at Somerset House. She is 21, has honey-coloured hair, a soft accent and is dressed in black jeans and a leather jacket. She’s in her final year studying mathematics, finance and management at King’s and plans to do a Masters, then work in investment banking (According to her parents’ assistant, who set up our meeting, she’s something of a maths whizz and has won several prizes, though Anastasia is modestly vague about that.)

    She’s less of a fixture on the Russian social scene than the others – partly due to the intensity of her degree. Most of her friends from Moscow are in London, and most are as assimilated as her: ‘I think they became quite British in a way as well, because we’ve been living here so long that for us it doesn’t matter who we socialise with.’ She likes to hang out with other Europeans, too, but there is one occasion when socialising as a Russian set is unavoidable – during the summer. Along with most fashionable Russians, Anastasia’s family go to the Tuscan seaside town of Forte dei Marmi every year. Two other Russians I speak to (cousins Sasha Ignatiev, 21, and Vladimir Ignatyev, 19 – their families opted for different surname spellings of the Cyrillic) are regulars, too. They note that there are only a couple of nightclubs there, so when you go you know everyone."

    Other stops on the Russian summer safari include the three Ms – Marbella, Monaco and Mykonos – plus Saint Tropez and Ibiza. (In the winter, it’s skiing in St Moritz, Gstaad and Courchevel.) I ask if people really tend to go to the same places: ‘One hundred per cent,’ says Sasha. ‘Even if I don’t plan a holiday with my friends, I know that they’ll be there,’ says Anna.

    Sasha and Vlad discuss the holiday habits of their compatriots sitting on the sunny terrace at the Queen’s Club, where Sasha, who is a member, suggested we meet. Vlad, currently in his first year of a law degree at Royal Holloway, recently launched a streetwear line called Six of London, though today he’s dressed in an overcoat and a pink shirt, smoking – appropriately – Black Russians. Sasha is in his final year at King’s, where he’s studying French and management. Smiley and slightly wolfish-looking, he wears slim jeans and a D&G shirt with blue cuffs. He vapes surreptitiously. Sasha is, in fact, half-British – his father married an English woman and moved to the UK, where Sasha was born and raised. ‘My father really likes English things,’ says Sasha, who puts on a Russian accent each time he imitates him. ‘He loves Ascot. That’s probably his favourite thing, even though it’s so English.’ The family lives in South Kensington and Sasha’s upbringing was very traditional, meaning boarding school at seven and exeats at their country house in Kent – which Sasha’s father later demolished and transformed into a Russian dacha, complete with sauna, ice-cold plunge pool, bearskins and taxidermied reindeer heads. ‘I guess even if you move to different places, you still want to bring your heritage with you,’ says Vlad.

    Their fathers, who are brothers, are ‘big businessmen’, working in tourism. (Except for Phil, everyone I speak to says their father is a businessman, but most are vague about what that business entails.) The brothers shrewdly capitalised on new travel opportunities between Russia and Britain in the early Nineties and their business acumen has clearly rubbed off on their sons: ‘We’ll probably end up being businessmen, too,’ says Vlad.

    Vlad, who is completely Russian, lived in Moscow, where his parents still have a home, until he was 13, then was sent to boarding school in England, following in Sasha’s footsteps at Wellesley and then King’s Canterbury. Six of London began as a hobby in his final year and he opened a pop-up shop in Fitzrovia the summer after graduating. ‘The casual look is really popular,’ he says. ‘And to me that was really interesting because now streetwear can be as cool as wearing an incredibly expensive designer piece.’

    While it’s perfectly cool to not spend big money in the Russian crowd, it hasn’t gone completely out of style. A friend of Vlad’s once threw down £11,000 in one night, and when he and Sasha go out with their Russian friends, they rarely stray from Mayfair. Their usual circuit is similar to Anna’s (Sasha knows her and notes that she’s very pretty): Sumosan Twiga, Mnky Hse, Tape, Charlie, Toy Roof (the exclusive shisha bar – young Arabs and Russians are equally into shisha these days), Scandal, ‘which used to be Project. It’s weird because it’s all the same places, but they do them up and everyone’s like, “Oh, it’s a new club, let’s go spend my money!”’ jokes Sasha. One such ‘new’ club is, of course, Annabel’s. ‘You wouldn’t want to go anywhere else,’ says Sasha. ‘You’ve got food, drinks, the rooftop. The interior is beautiful, beautiful women, great service, central…’ Vlad cuts in: ‘Are you done?’

    Both Sasha and Vlad differentiate their Russian friends from their British ones. ‘Russians prefer rap music, songs that we know. My English crowd prefer techno,’ says Vlad. So a night out with his school friends would more likely see him in South London (where they might spot Anastasia, who likes EDM). He and Sasha are as fluent in the ways of the public-school Peckham set as the super-rich Russians. ‘I have two sets of friends,’ says Sasha. ‘You can’t mix them. They just don’t.’ Why? ‘The British would find the Russians very rude,’ he laughs. Sasha and Vlad are, like all the Russians I speak to, incredibly well-mannered, so his comment comes as a surprise. However, in her book Rich Russians, Elisabeth Schimpfössl devotes a whole section to ‘Being Difficult as a Marker of Superiority’. Make of that what you will.

    Sasha and Vlad haven’t noticed people treating them differently, aside from ‘the classic mafia joke,’ says Sasha. ‘And every third Uber I get into they’re like, “Ah, Vladimir, like Putin!”’ adds Vlad. He grows serious though: ‘It’s a lot easier for us to see both sides, whereas people you have in power both here and in Russia have older views, post-Cold War views. That’s what’s so difficult to negotiate. Because I don’t think there are enough people that actually have the experience on both sides.’ He believes British-educated Russians like him are in a unique position to salvage relations between the two countries. ‘We have Russian heritage and we’re integrated into English society. So we can connect the bridge in the future, maybe.’

    Which brings us to the other surprising feature of this generation of Russians – how very self-aware they are. Vlad, Sasha, Anastasia, Phil and Anna are all conscious that their experiences are not those of every Russian – or British – person. ‘Not everyone is filthy rich,’ says Anna of the other Russians she knows. ‘Some people are so humble, some of them worked really hard and already earned their own money, which I really respect.’ What’s more, as Vlad says, ‘we are different from our parents. We’re more integrated.’ Unmistakably part of the British upper classes and absolved of the need to scale the social ladder by conspicuously throwing money around, this new generation are able to acknowledge just how fortunate they are. ‘Occasionally, sure, you have some assholes’, says Vlad. ‘But otherwise most of us are just regular people.’"

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    For those who are intrigued by this article might
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    The High Society Russian expats who
    might be angered by The Russia Report
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  21. #356
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    ay chihuahua!
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    Question

    Aside from warfare, think of all the potential usages ...

    "One need not destroy his enemy, one need only his willingness to engage."
    The Mysterious World Of Psychological Warfare
    | Secrets Of War | Timeline


    Psychological warfare has taken many forms since its initial widespread usage in WW1. In this episode, we look at how the tactical use of truth and misinformation has swayed the tide of battle over the years.
    Nov 1, 2020

    51:26 minutes


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    The Grim, Depression-Era
    Origins of Dance Marathons

    The common fundraising events known as
    walkathons started as an exploitative
    entertainment craze.


    by Katie Thornton



    Couples at dance marathon in Washington, DC, in 1924.

    "Callum DeVillier, a hairdresser from Lanesboro, Minnesota, designed his own headstone before his death in 1973. His head-turning epitaph contains his greatest accomplishment, engraved for posterity. “DeVillier,” the red granite marker reads. “World Champion Marathon Dancer. 3780 Continuous Hours.”

    How—and perhaps more importantly, why—did the son of small-town candy shop owners spend nearly half of 1932 on a Massachusetts dance floor? He was trying to set a record, but the events weren’t all for fun. In the thick of the Great Depression, the perverse entertainment racket of America’s dance marathon craze was, to some, a survival strategy. Because dancing in a marathon didn’t just mean the possibility of a cash prize. It meant being fed and sheltered for the duration of the contest.

    The craze began in the relatively prosperous 1920s, a time of stable industrial jobs and postwar optimism, when new thrills enticed city dwellers on every corner. There were vaudeville theaters, roller coasters, and dance halls, where men and women alike boogied with abandon to big band music.

    According to New York University drama scholar Carol Martin, author of Theatre of the Real and Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s, the onset of the modern Olympic Games a few decades earlier also meant that people at the time were obsessed with world records. Nonsensical feats of strength and “endurance contests”—from flagpole sitting to cross-country footraces—emerged as a popular entertainment option. In 1923, New York dance instructor and dance-a-thon patient-zero Alma Cummings exhausted an assortment of male partners as she waltzed around an Upper Manhattan ballroom for 27 hours straight. Her stunt was a tantalizing alchemy of the era’s fascinations, a test of the limits of both the human body and the nation’s new, liberalized sexuality. Within three weeks, her record was broken at least nine times across the country—from Baltimore to Cleveland to Houston. The age of the dance marathon jumped into full swing."


    Dancer Alma Cummins, who helped start the dance

    "Enterprising promoters were quick to capitalize. If the industrial boom of the 1920s created a population of working urbanites hungry for entertainment, it also left rural Americans in increasingly dire circumstances, desperate and bored. For many, entertaining was a welcome diversion, especially if participating could mean a chance to save the farm.

    Promoters took what started as a fun, voyeuristic, 1920s curiosity and turned it into a cottage industry for a country that was careening into hard times. They offered cash prizes that could be larger than a farmer’s yearly income, and formalized a system of live music (during peak hours, with phonograph records at other times), admission fees, and rules that kept marathons profitable for much longer than Cummings’s 27 hours. For a man like DeVillier, fame and fortune were only remote possibilities, but attention was guaranteed. Dance marathons were a thrilling alternative to the doldrums of country life."


    Contestants sleep on cots at a dance marathon, while many look on, ca. 1934.

    "Contest pamphlets spelled out the rules of the individual marathons, but a few things became pretty standard. Dancers at least had to be in motion to remain in the contest. They were typically given 15 minutes of rest each hour, during which nurses rubbed their feet and provided medical attention. Food was provided many times daily, and tasks such as eating, bathing, shaving, and reading the paper could be done while dancing. Dancers could often be seen dozing off while their partners held them up to keep their knees from hitting the ground (which would result in disqualification). The scene was heavily regulated and monitored, with some promoters accompanying dancers on brief outdoor walks for a breath of fresh air before returning for more dancing. Promoters even planted professional dancers among the contestants. The windfall came from the spectators, returning night after night, cash in hand, to follow the action.

    When the stock market crashed in October 1929, the economic misery of rural America spread to the cities. Dance marathons exploded. They had a large pool of willing, desperate contestants, and they made everyone else feel a little better about themselves. According to Martin, the spectacles gave hard-up onlookers the rare opportunity to feel superior, which fueled the popularity of the contests as the Depression bore on. “For some audiences, seeing others who were worse off was a balm to their own precarious circumstances,” Martin says. The conditions may have been rough and pitiful for the dancers, but the alternative—boredom, hunger, homelessness—was worse."


    Marathon dance champions Vonnie Kuchinski and Callum deVillier.

    "DeVillier had been making a name for himself in Minnesota’s dance marathon circuit even before the economic crisis spread nationwide. One 1928 marathon pamphlet noted that he “knocked the folks stiff at Brainerd (Minnesota) when he wobbled about the floor for 443 hours.” But desperate times called for more desperate dancing. Unemployed in 1932, DeVillier recruited his landlord’s daughter Vonnie Kuchinski to travel with him to the Boston suburb of Somerville for what turned out to be a historic event. (Boston proper could not host the contest, since the mayor had banned marathon dancing eight years earlier, after 27-year-old Homer Morehouse collapsed and died after an event.) In a theater-turned-dance-hall, DeVillier and Kuchinski performed a combination of glorified walking and intense bouts of spirited dancing every day, around the clock, from December until June. Rest time was cut from 15 minutes to three minutes per hour for the last two weeks of the contest. The unthinkably long marathon was a popular attraction, and late-night traffic from out-of-town spectators led local politicians to ban dance marathons—before the contest even ended. The final 52 hours of the marathon were danced nonstop. It’s not clear how long other competitors lasted, but on June 3, 1933, DeVillier and Kuchinski took home the $1,000 prize.

    This prize money—and perhaps the glory of the record—seemed to satisfy DeVillier, as he doesn’t appear to have danced in any more contests. The partners were even briefly married, perhaps riding the high of the victory. But by that time, dance marathons were already beginning to fall out of favor. Fewer and fewer people could spare the entrance fee. As the novelty wore off, the prosperity and relative liberalism of the 1920s had given way to the austerity and moralizing of the Depression. Dancing was considered a corrupting influence by some, and lawmakers across the country moved to ban the events. Promoters tried taming the contests by calling them “walkathons” (an appellation that endures today) and pursued wholesome sponsorships, but the practice was more or less gone as World War II approached. “[W]ith another World War looming … industry had revived and people were going back to work,” writes Martin. “Who had time to sit around for hours watching people move in a circle on a dance floor?”


    Frank Micholowsky holds his exhausted sister and dance partner, Marie Micholowsky, after a marathon dance competition.

    "In 1957, after a divorce, a second marriage, and stints working as a dance instructor, construction worker, and bartender, DeVillier opened a hair salon in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. His accomplishment was probably little-known, as dance marathons remained largely out of public consciousness until 1969, when the movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? chronicled the fad. Four years later, students at Penn State University held a “clean” version of a dance marathon: a contest capped at 30 hours that raised $2,000 for children with disabilities. By the 1990s, dance marathons and walkathons had become accepted as a common form of fundraiser.

    DeVillier didn’t live to see the legacy of dance/walk marathon redeemed, and he barely got to see his accomplishment recognized. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? attributed the record he helped set to other dancers, so he wrote to the Guinness Book of World Records, which acknowledged his win shortly before his death in 1973. Even so, DeVillier used his headstone to make sure that no one forgot his 3,780-hour feat of weary staggering. (Kuchinski’s grave, in nearby New Brighton, makes no mention of it.) Since the 1970s, Guinness has revised their guidelines to define marathon dancing as being completely nonstop, which expunged the pair from their annals. That leaves the tombstone as the only testament to the record-breaking performance."

    Source/reference page



    ***

    They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
    Official Trailer #1 - (1969)


    3:05 minutes


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    Daisy Chain: Can a Cornish town adapt
    to survive another lockdown?


    The Guardian

    When the remote town of St Just, Cornwall, was locked down in March, the small community worried that its economy wouldn't survive. But one town councillor, Daisy Gibbs, rallied an army of volunteers to form 'the Daisy chain', an informal support network to ensure every household in the district had support. Inspired by her imagination and resilience, filmmaker Sky Neal followed the Daisy Chain for seven months, as local businesses adapted and the community pulled together to realise a more sustainable future. However, as a second wave of restrictions threatens, the town has to dig deep to find the resilience they need to ensure their future. Can they re-invent their local economy to survive and thrive beyond Covid?

    Nov 2, 2020

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    The Suicide Tourist: Our Right To Die Together
    (Euthanasia Documentary) | Real Stories



    Craig Ewert, a 59-year-old American with motor-neurone disease, is determined not to live through his steady deterioration until what he fears may be a horrific ‘natural’ death. Should George and Betty Coumbias be allowed to die together at a time of their choosing? For a year, Oscar-winning director John Zaritsky had exclusive access to Dignitas and its clients. The Suicide Tourist will take the audience on a journey they could only have imagined, and won’t forget.

    The controversy over a person’s right to die at a time and place of their own choosing has become focused on the Swiss organization Dignitas. Dignitas in Zurich is the only place where a person seeking an assisted suicide can legally be helped to die, no matter where they are from – or what their state of health.
    Nov 7, 2020

    52:06 minutes


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