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cookinguptales · 4 years

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I've a small query (if it doesn't float your boat, no worries!) I was interested in how you got into learning languages, what led you to it? I've become curious since learning a new language as an adult has only increased my awe of multilingual folk (additionally, I vaguely remember a post about a request in exchange for a donation to charity, and wondered if there were any you'd like a donation to)

First of all, good luck with the language learning! It’s not easy as an adult, but I do think it’s worth it, both in terms of cultural fluency and brain elasticity.

My answer to the language thing is actually extremely complicated, so I’ll be putting it under the cut. I’ll put the charity stuff above the cut so more people can see it.

— I’d just like to warn you, though, before I start, that I have been locked in this house for over a month with no respite and I HAVE A LOT OF WORDS AND FEELINGS IN ME SO THIS POST HAS SO MANY OF BOTH OF THOSE THINGS!!

anyway

There are so many charities that I want to donate to now that it honestly makes my head spin. Every time I look at a site like GoFundMe it kind of makes me want to cry. So a lot of donations I’ve made have been to like local businesses, restaurants, etc. who will close down without help. (Also a lot of local native groups, who are disproportionately suffering right now.) I’ve also been donating to various food banks — Philabundance, a Philly-centric charity that deals with food insecurity in general, is a good one. That was a regular of mine even before the outbreak. I’ve also donated to a lot of the local services in the small town where I’m in now, though you’ll need to PM me if you want the name of that. (It’s… very small.)

Off Their Plate is another great charity that’s been working with small restaurants (who can’t open for business) to get food to first responders. They’re partnered with World Central Kitchen, which is another fantastic charity that helps out during disasters. Plus well-known ones like Feeding America, No Kid Hungry (important while school is out and kids aren’t getting breakfast/lunch there), Direct Relief, etc.

(I uhhh may have overstrained my charity budget the past couple months. It’s odd how that adds to stress and relieves it at the same time.)

I tend to avoid religious charities, especially Salvation Army, because they’re occasionally discriminatory in how they distribute resources and we no longer have laws & oversight to make sure they don’t do shady shit. So I just avoid them in general now. I also avoid the American Red Cross because they’ve been known to misuse funds. Research is key!

I also worry about some of my regular charities, like Immigration Equality & Rainbow Railroad (helps LGBTQ people in dangerous countries immigrate to less dangerous ones), the Native American Rights Fund, various local abortion funds, RAICES (provides legal services to immigrants & refugees), the ACLU, Dysautonomia International, the Rainforest Action Network, etc… A lot of them are getting fewer donations than they’re used to because we’re in the middle of such life-shattering events.

If you are really interested in making a donation (please, please, please do) those are all good options. I also fully recommend looking up needy organizations, services, people, etc. in your own area. I try to donate to a healthy mixture of national/international organizations, local needs, and temporary issues du jour. (Disaster relief, bail funds for protesters, fighting new discriminatory laws, etc.) I would genuinely appreciate any donations, especially if you find a cause near and dear to your heart that I would never even hear about. Anything along these same lines, y’know? If you have anything you’d like me to do in return, just hmu.

I constantly stress about who to donate to — there are so many good organizations and so few dollars to give them — but at a certain point, every dollar to a cause you believe in counts. Every dollar you donate helps to make the world a little bit better for at least one person. That’s what I have to tell myself to calm myself down, haha. So even the smallest donation you make to any of these groups would mean a lot to me.

Anyway, onto the language stuff:

For me personally, I grew up bilingual. Deafness runs in my family, so I learned sign language from a very young age. Note: I say “sign language” rather than ASL. I learned sign language kind of organically, which ended up making a mess later in life. My parents mostly taught me, but so did my daycare (at a deaf school) and so did my babysitters and so did other family members, etc. The point is, not all of them used the same sign language. There was a wide mixture of ASL, SEE, and home signs and my current signing style is… problematic. lmao. My family all understands it (hey, they taught it to me) and I can have conversations with American sign language users, but I know they can’t love my signing lmao. I’ve considered sitting down and taking a legit ASL class for years, but there are so many classes I want to take… I don’t know.

After that, it largely became a case of taking languages whenever they were made available to me. I’ve always liked them. We moved around a lot when I was a preteen so I went to a lot of different schools. (4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade were all different schools.) It was rough at home and hard to make friends so I guess I threw myself into academics a lot. My sixth grade school was an odd one; it was a 6-8 grade school and you were supposed to take a crash course in three different languages in sixth grade so you could choose one and take it in 7th and 8th grade. I ended up taking Spanish, French, and German that year. I liked French best! But then we moved so it was kind of moot. (And I hated German, sorry Germans. My mouth doesn’t like the noises. It didn’t help that my teacher was weirdly sympathetic to Nazi-era Germany…? But I guess that’s another post.)

When we moved to Florida, you had to have special permission to take language classes in 7th grade. (FL doesn’t have great academics.) But since I’d already had some Spanish in NC, they let me take it! And then I moved schools again. This new school, my 8th grade school, I’d be in until I graduated 12th grade years later — but the employee turnover at that school was almost comedically bad? I took Spanish for like a year and a half there and had three different teachers. So at this point I’d had 5 different Spanish teachers, all from different countries (where they spoke slightly different Spanish!), all reteaching the same ideas over and over again because they didn’t know where the last teacher had left off. In the end, my last Spanish teacher sent me to the school library with some textbooks because he felt like I was very good at languages and he couldn’t adequately teach me in the environment he’d been thrown into. (My high school was very terrible. So he was right.)

SO I SWITCHED TO FRENCH. I took French for 3-4 years in high school (can’t remember when I started) but the same shit started happening. By the last year, my French teacher had the French I, II, III, and IV students IN THE SAME CLASS and she just put the advanced students in small groups and had us do independent study. Sigh… Around this same time, I started three other languages. At this point, I was getting kind of accustomed to self-study so I applied for a Latin class in the Florida Virtual School and took a year of that. I also spent a summer studying at the University of Chicago when I was 16-17 and learned Middle Egyptian then. (Yes, I was an ancient cultures nerd even back then.)

The Japanese has always been an odd case. Like I said, my 8-12 education was fairly terrible. They had this thing where they used a computer program to teach kids math and the teacher kind of taught along? When I transferred to the school in the middle of 8th grade, the teacher didn’t know what to do with me so he just plopped me in front of a computer and told me to do as much as I could. They started me in… Pre-Algebra, I think? Which I’d already taken in sixth grade. So I ended up getting through Pre-Algebra, Geometry, Algebra, and Algebra II, which… wasn’t in the teacher’s plans. I’d kind of finished several years of math in like a quarter. And then they didn’t have any more classes. So he just told me to like. Sit quietly and amuse myself for the last few months of school?? (Terrible, terrible school.) So I went to the library and found a book about Japanese and started teaching myself that. I really, really liked Japanese! Like it’s a language that just clicks really well with the way my brain works, I think. It’s very logical, I like the syllabary, etc. And I think growing up signing helped me with pictographic languages like Middle Egyptian and Japanese. My brain easily connects visual symbols with concepts.

When I went to college, the plan was honestly to learn more Egyptian and start translating, and I kept taking French to help me read old research in various ancient study fields. I ended up transferring out of the NELC major, though, due to some ethical problems… I guess that’s another post. Several years into my RELS/FOLK degree I went to my parents like. Look. I love learning this stuff but none of it’s useful. Remember how much I loved Japanese? Can I go back to learning that? I could translate that and that’s a legit skill. So I applied to a program through my school and studied in Japan for a while and ended up really doubling down on that language. Weird how I came back to it years later, but I guess it was always the one I loved best.

I have a mind that’s very pattern-based, so I guess I’ve always loved learning languages and the patterns behind them. (This may be why languages with a lot of rule exceptions, like French, irritate me.) They’re like puzzles that I’ve always enjoyed teasing out. Unfortunately, the way my education bounced around meant that I never got a good grounding in most of those languages, so I’ve largely lost them. I can still read French fairly well and my Japanese is good… My Spanish is like. Enough to get me around in the southern US. My German is abysmal. I remember very little Latin & Middle Egyptian. (It’s been over 10 years, I guess.)

So I guess what I feel the need to say to you is that if you don’t use it, you will lose it. I did well in all my language classes. They’ve always been fairly easy for me. Like. Straight As, no problem. I don’t say this to brag. I say it so you know that even for someone like me, whose brain is fairly well-wired for languages, it’s very, very difficult to retain languages when you’re not using them. If you’re not used to taking languages or you started late in life, it’s even harder. So even on the days you don’t want to practice! You gotta practice! Ganbare! Bon chance!

#replies #god these are so many words #sorry to everyone #shaymeson

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lunasaturnine · 4 years

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Vienna and cultural trauma

WOW so cool to sign into tumblr and see 99+ notifications, and think “oh a post got some attention,” but it’s actually just general attention!

My astro blog is ready for some action! Or maybe ppl are just bored bc of the quarantine. Either way, it would be cool to write.

I want to write about VIENNA.

I just took a course about somatic healing of trauma and it gave me a good overview of how trauma recovery works. Chapter 1 of trauma recovery is gathering resources. Chapter 2 is dipping or oscillating back into the memory, whether it’s a clear memory or just something held hidden in your body, with your new resources, and allowing circles to complete. Chapter 3 is being bigger bigger brighter in the world !!! (It’s a nice course, it’s on somatopia.com, it costs $40 if you have that to throw around, it’s like 2 hours of videos of a nice man talking in a soothing voice in intelligent language about healing from trauma)

Now I’m thinking about cultural trauma and Vienna. I have long felt that helping to heal the Hitler wound of Vienna is one of my soul’s major dharmic thrusts. So I googled “healing cultural trauma” and most resources out there talk about the trauma of the victim culture. That kind of trauma is totally different, because it recommends amplifying the traditions and greatnesses of the culture, and when you’re a cultural perpetrator of violence, amplifying the greatness of your culture is a trigger because cultural superiority is what lead your culture to be violent. But there are still a lot of resources with a lot of valuable information. I’ve only skimmed a couple things so far and it seems like one thing people emphasize in cultural healing is human connectedness.

The internet is a little hard to navigate on this topic, but I found an NYT editorial called “I loved my grandmother but she was a Nazi.” The author’s sweet grandma was literally a Nazi but she was a nice person who didn’t hate Jews. When the author talked to her about it, she would deflect. “He said a lot of things, I didn’t listen to them all” and “I was caught up in my own life” etc. The author says, that’s bullshit, there’s something she’s avoiding, and I can’t understand what it is or why she’s doing it, and I’m hesitant to say this because it might seem like I’m trying to forgive Naziism but I’m really just trying to understand who I look at when I look at my grandmother. It’s the most direct address of the West’s Nazi wound that I’ve found in my two and a half minutes of searching on google and I think it’s on the nose.

In the readmore are my more concrete thoughts on potential resources for Western/German/Viennese healing, and thoughts about what working through phase 2 would look like for a perpetrator culture.

Resources

On this reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/5nfqwp/my_grandmother_grew_up_in_nazi_germany/

there are some resources. First of all, 1. there are people from diverse backgrounds respective to WWII, coming together and talking as equals in the same kind of “room.” The descendants of the persecuted and the persecutors are together and they are not enemies. The knowledge, and SOMATIC FEELING EXPERIENCE, of that, can be a resource. I am typing over this brusquely and that’s Mercury magic for you and you should know that I just burst into sobs. That in just a couple of generations, the grandsons and daughters of enemies can be together and not hate each other and even love each other is an immense resource and can be leaned into at any point. There is a vast well of cultural relief available here. My tears are thankful, grateful tears, tears of relief. I am thinking of the parks in vienna that are holocaust memorial parks. I am thinking of that horrible statue out in front of the Albertina that is a memorial to cultural violence but at the same time, also represents the trapped soul of the Perpetrator culture, since we are all One. In the same way that a piece of music which opens with a terrifying chord represents both the terror experienced by the terrorized, and the menace of the terrorizer, AND THE FEELINGS IN THE terrorizer that caused them to generate this chord... off on a tangent, and I’m not sobbing anymore! That was crazy. I have a tendency to lock my feelings up, but being alone in this house and in this quarantine, I can open up locked wells of feeling like that.

That resource is IMMENSE, and it’s RIGHT in front of our faces all the time. I took a class on 20th century germany in undergrad, and the professor was a young guy with a Nazi grandfather, well I’m not sure if he was a Nazi but he was a German soldier, and he remarked on it. And I think at the time I thought “how lovely” but if you sit with that feeling, it’s deep as hell. And if you sit with it from the perspective of a penitent perpetrator, it’s REALLY FUCKING DEEP.

So that’s available. Im gonna post this real quick as a way of saving the draft but I have more ideas.

Okay. Continuing,

Resource 2 also from reddit post

The top respondent says his German POW uncle had a British GF. That’s similar to the first resource, but more immediate. I’m sure there are lots of stories like that. Intercultural experience that nullifies certain tensions

Resource 3 also from reddit post

The stories of people who did do the right thing... maybe. I dont know. I’ll get off this post soon but it’s interesting. Idk if this counts as a resource, it’s kind of a tangent, but the more I learn about karma and trans-life inheritance of it, the more it seems true that it really is better to die living in line with your beliefs than to live safely. Like the person in Pweuy’s post. That father died but his karma was pristine as far as this was concerned and perpetrator trauma did not cling to him.

ok jesus this is an interesting post... the girl skipping over the river of blood as it trickled out of the asylum... the hitler youth boy befriending a lamb and the nazis slaughtering it in front of him... the russian soldier who guarded the german girl because she reminded him of her daughter...

Okay. Before I go on, I want to clarify that I am not specifically talking about people who held Nazi beliefs in their core. There is a special type of perpetrator injury that is specific to that kind of thing, true villains and terrorists. I’m talking more about “ordinary Germans” who didn’t think very hard and got swept along, moderate supporters to moderate resisters. As a culture, they were moved by the tides into Naziism. They have culpability, but not the exact same kind of culpability as perpetrator people. The culture moved to perpetrate these crimes, and they were a part of that culture. That’s the specific kind of wound I’m interested in healing. There is a poster on that page whose grandma really loved Hitler...

Ok! I spent a lot of my energy in that page, now its 10PM and I still have veggies to prepare. I need energy for this next thing I was going to talk about.

Resource 4 - this one specific coffee shop

I’m putting *s in its name because I like this blog anonymous. P*****n is a coffee shop in Vienna that is the only happy place I went. There were places that were ok... and fine... maybe pleasant... but this place was American levels of happy. Waiters danced around and were actually relaxed and happy. P*****n’s theme is intergenerational communication. It hires grandmothers to work behind the counter, and make pies, and you’re supposed to buy a slice of their pie and talk to them a bit. And then the waiters are young, and they communicate with the Omas. And the Omas are maybe not old enough to have been Nazis but their parents were.

They also include a bit in all their menus about intergenerational dialogue and wondering what more they can do and how they can be more of a space for it.

I had MANY genuinely pleasant little experiences there... and I think that little space that some person with a vision made, is a blossoming flowerpot with lots of healing energy where true dialogue could happen. So that could be a resource too. The happiness of that place. In fact, these conversations could happen there.

But I wouldn’t want to break the space. The course I just took talked about titration, which is just accessing a TINY part of the traumatic memory, so you don’t get overwhelmed. This is a very icy fucked up conversation for a lot of people. My Viennese friend told me to talk more quietly about it than I was. Actually I did talk about it there with some people! The German girl was surprised that I thought Vienna had a wound. So was the Irish girl actually. For other people it’s really evident. My Viennese friend. D**n. Rf: “it’s ALL I feel when I am there.” ME. God that conversation was sooo gentle and sweet and light. The Irish girl was wondering if she should move to Vienna or stay in Barcelona, and the three of us talked about Vienna nd it was SOOOOO LOVELY, holy BALLS.

But even if we don’t hold conversations there exactly, that could be a really good place for conversation to start. I could reach out to the people who run the shop to ask them about it. And then maybe conversations could happen in other places (don’t want to spoil the sweetness of the shop).

Resource 5 - personal as I investigate maybe not really a resource - but yes maybe it is a resource: Grounded, comfortable people who are Viennese, and who understand the goals and also understand the sensitivities of Viennese people more than I do;

Resource 6 - people who are experts at cultural healing in victim cultures

Resource 7 - fostering dialogue between those two parties, also me.

Again I’m really playing fast and loose with the idea of resources. Maybe. We’re starting to move into phase 2, also, because with this dialogue, I want to open up some scripts for how to TITRATE sensitively.

phase 2

For instance, notice that I didn’t say something like “Remembering Vienna’s amazing heritage of incredible music that has the power to redeem and heal equal to and more accessibly than religions.” I think it’s true that Viennese music is a major healing resource (BEETHOVENSCHUBERTMOZARSKLTBSLJRTHBLEWSKJNS:OFDFD), but since it is bound up in Viennese identity, that notion is complex. Also, it’s not only that Viennese identity is nasty because it’s nazi and therefore that gives Schubert etc a dark tint, but also, the grand things that Vienna has contributed to western culture are now a part of Vienna’s current wound of degradation, cheapification, and humiliation by TOURISM. although I will say that I think Resource 8 should be MY OWN deep internalization of the healing power of Viennese music. Posting again to save...

...not only does that music help me be healed, but it also helps me understand healing process in the specific language of the culture i’m interested in

okay. Phase 2.

A picture of what I think sorta needs to happen

I think Omas that say “It was just a lot of talk, we ignored it” and “I was busy in my life”... I think what needs to happen for a perp culture is for them to actually own their part in the villainy, to claim it and stand in it and feel the pain, and say “I’m SORRY, this was HORRIBLE, I AM SORRY.” THIS WILL ALLOW THEM TO BECOME NEW!!!!!!!

That’s a v different healing process from like native american healing etc.

I really think somatic approach is a better road in than cognitive because, god, imagine cognizing all of this HORRIBLE SIN bit by bit knowing your culture perpetrated it and not having anyone to blame it on. Jesus.

How might the process of getting there look?

This is vague especially now that I don’t have that burst of energy. Conversations...

Here’s a question. After resource gathering.

“Knowing that bells rang for Hitler in Vienna, how does it feel to be Viennese?” IN YOUR BODY?

Damn THAT’S GOOD! THAT’S THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION. How does it feel to be Viennese? The goal is for it to feel OK.

Um, speaking specifically about Wiener trauma and their welcoming of Hitler, a few years ago, I read this in some guidebook, Vienna’s government acknowledged that they welcomed Hitler and that they were wrong, and investigating that is important for my mission. It’s cool because 1. it’s a Big Ol Step and 2. it lays groundwork for all of this.

Step 3 is really beautiful to think about. In the course I took, it’s where the instructor got out of his soothing calm neutral demeanor and started speaking passionately and bursting with smiles.

In addition to being able to be more firmly grounded in their own individual and cultural identities...

Okay, so, I’m drawn to this because I’m drawn to it, punkt. That’s all. But also, and I think I’m really late on the uptake here, I think I was due in Vienna many years ago, I think that whatever work I do in Vienna is helpful for the echoes of Naziism in today’s world, such as Trumpism (which does not...exactly... have the same kinds of premises but uses a lot of the same kinds of mecahnisms) and actual brazen nationalism, white supremicism, and far right movements. Hitler is a LOUD and REVERBERANT figure in our history for this kind of energy, and if we can do healing surrounding him, re-discovering resilience in the moderates, helping them go through the emotional journey they need to go through, they will be a beautiful resonant horn call from the past, a solid core of NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that will strengthen the culture of the entire FUCKING world.

Music will be a part of it.

I have always loved Vienna, and I can’t really analyze it. I love it like a girlfriend. I know she’s problematic. And she can be really really horrible.

The wound is deep. The horribleness, the life negating quality not only of the FUCKING WRETCHED SHOP CLERKS, but also of the WAY -- THINGS -- HAPPEN, of the overall weird ass SPIRIT in Vienna, is... God DAMN WHY do I like that city so much? It’s bizarre. It’s very pervasive. I don’t enjoy experiencing it, I don’t think it’s attractive, I don’t like it. I love Vienna THROUGH that wound. I REALLY LOVE Vienna. That’s one of the clearest things that I know in my heart. I love Vienna... and that’s the whole story. It’s one of the easiest things for me to say.

Lots of people love a city. We do it for reasons. I think our hearts are drawn where they are drawn because we are attracted to healing the specific karmas of places. The karma of my hometown is mainly racial, with native american underneath. The coffee shop that is equivalent to P*****n serves often as a place of racial conversation and healing. It is actually pretty amazing. And once there was a white supremacist with a gun there and he stood up on a table and let people see his gun. He didn’t yell or anything. But that vital thing happened there in that coffee shop.

Excuse me I also love coffee shops and Vienna is the land of coffee shops.

Okay. I love Vienna! I literally love Vienna, with my heart. I love Vienna.

One last thing. I’m saving then editing...

The postscript: A major resource, and it kinda sidesteps some things, is language. It will be much better if German is spoken in these conversations. When I went to Vienna last, I didn’t prepare my German because when I went to Vienna first, everyone spoke English and it was simply easier to speak English all the time, so I figured I wouldn’t try to give the illusion and disappoint. But lo... the native people really, really resent it if you don’t even try to speak German. They actually seem to experience it as an injury. It is wild, if you’re not expecting it.

ALL OVER VIENNA I saw the Graffiti stamp/brand, “Tourism is terrorism.”

When I was in the airport and the cute customs dudes asked me the purpose of my visit, I said “TOURISM” and they laughed. That was fun. But it was a lie. I was a pilgrim. I... know I was a tourist, technically. But I felt such hatred for the tourists standing like apes in front of the Schubert statue in the Stadtpark. Their wretched selfie smiles plastered on top of the emptiness of their experience. My purpose in Vienna had nothing in common with theirs. And I claim that I didn’t do a lot of the tourist things - not many museums or concerts or whatever.

One of my more pleasant memories was going into a used book shop and asking about a book in the window, a German-language edition of the tao te ching from 1923 (a very strange time). I asked in English. The clerk was confused and asked if I spoke German, and I answered in German that I spoke some German, but was learning, and knew the TTC very well, and that it’s simply usually easier to speak in English. I might have used imperfect German, but I felt dignified and natural doing it.

Ok, not only the German language, but the quiet Viennese demeanor of Scorpiness. Scorpscorpscorpscorp. Quiet, observant, emotional, and responsive to gentle tenderness and consideration, and traumatized by brashness.

Both the spoken language, and the language of the demeanor, I think are somatic approaches that sidestep cognitive...things and make the culture feel unconsciously accepted and open.

On my first trip I learned howwwwww AMERICAN I was, and then on my second trip I opened myself up to my inner Wiener and was quiet and scorpy, and I felt warmth emerge from the people and city in response. It felt really right, and it felt like i was honoring...her, and it felt um sort of romantic. ha

#Vienna #Wien

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jackshithere · 5 years

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Long interview with Paul (October 26 , 2005)

Some particular zingers:

beurgueur: do you think you'll be on stage again when you'll be 60? (like rolling stones for example...) Paul: Hopefully somebody will die first. Then we won't have to worry about that.

Synthema: Do you still feel that being in Rammstein is almost like being in a six-way marriage? Does the band still function as a tight a unit or have things drifted apart? Paul: Yeah. Paul: We're still together. Knock on wood. We've been together for 10 years and now that we've gone through our crisis, we feel better than ever. Paul: We've got money, success, beautiful women and all the rest. Paul: Things can only get worse.

luna: First "Snow White" now "Rose Red". Do the members of Rammstein have a fondness for fairytales? Paul: Who doesn't?

MafiUndomiel: how did you and Richard decided who was going to be lead and who rythm guitars? Paul: Good question. Paul: We're both stubborn. Paul: It's a fight every time but we're still doing alright up to now. Paul: Actually, the winner is supposed to be the one who plays the best solo.

source

Full interview under the cut

atomrt: how do you chose the sounds for each song because all of them fit perfectly?

Paul: Thanks a lot! Sometimes that works out well, sometimes not so well.

maria: Your album covers have always sparked a lot of controversy. Which cover is your favourite and why? Paul: The cover for Sehnsucht was the most dramatic in my opinion.

Benzramm: What was coming out of the fake penis during the live act "Bück Dich"? Paul: That was water with Ouzo to make it milky.

Beurgueur: Good evening, Have you ever thought to write a metal-opera based on rammstein’ story? Paul: Hopefully not. We have enough theater elements already.

MafiUndomiel: I was at River Plate Stadium in Argentina, 1999, when you toured with KISS. You did almost surpassed KISS music and show with your impact, and many people was really impressed. I still remember the silence during Du Hast, as Till was singing the refrain. What do you remember of Argentina, of this show? Paul: Yeah, that was unbelievable. It's a shame that we can't play in South America this time. Flake was seriously ill.

MafiUndomiel: Did Till write Te Quiero Puta on his own, or had some kind of external help? I know it's not very complicated, nor elaborated in the lyrics, but it's not easy to put two or three sentences together if you don't know the language... believe me! I'm still trying with German! Paul: He had some help from his girlfriend and from Flake's friend from Chile. Paul: But Till can already speak Spanish so well that he only had a few questions about grammar.

monkeyman: What type of gear do you use when recording in the studio? Paul: This would take two hours to list. Too much for now. Sorry.

Hugo: Why did you choose almost the same cover for the japanese version of Reise, Reise and Rosenrot? Paul: Because we thought it would be a shame to use the cover only for the Japanese edition.

MafiUndomiel: There are many bands that edited DVD and VHS with the footage they got when they recorded their albums, the creative process and all that stuff. Since many R+ fans are really interested in knowing "Rammstein's kitchen", have you considered releasing something of that kind? Paul: I filmed some of the footage during Reise, Reise and it will come out sometime on a DVD as bonus material.

blastedop: What happened to Live DVD? It was delayed? Paul: Yeah a little bit, but we're going to try to do it this year.

MafiUndomiel: I wanted to know how did you put your setlists together when you go to a country you've never been... you mix old and new material, or you prefer to show your new material above all, and play only the "classics"? Paul: We play a mix of both old and new.

Jenna: As you are possibly the most successful band from Germany (singing in German) that you are expected to represent German music and culture to the rest of the world? Paul: It was never our plan to play all over the world. Paul: Sometimes we wonder ourselves how this all happened.

beurgueur: what american film director would you enjoy to make a ckip with Paul: Tarantino.

Benzramm: Did you ever get hurt when you were working with fire on the live acts ? Paul: Sometimes.

aeon: One Rammstein member said you had a movie project with Werner Herzog. Do you think this project will be carried out and would you like to act in something different from Rammstein videos ? Paul: It's been awhile with WErner herzog. Maybe it will work out, there's still a plan to do it.

Rammsteinizied: Dear Paul: What is your favorite live performance effect? (like the flamethrowes in Feuer frei or the bow in DRSG)

Paul: The nose flame throwers that we use in Feuer frei!

MafiUndomiel: Which was your first guitar? Do you still own it? Paul: It was a Telecaster copy. A cheap one. I gave away my first guitars at an auction for a good cause. No idea whether it worked out.

Straya: This has been in my mind for a while now, and I must ask. From the sample songs on the official site, it seems Rosenrot might be your 'hardest/loudest' albums, the songs seem 'hard', in a way, like Ich Will, Feuer Frei, and Mein Teil; what do you think of this? Paul: I don't think so. There are fewer sequences so the guitars come out better.

Jenna: Do you think your videos help to stop you taking yourselves too seriously? Paul: We've always taken ourselves less seriously than many people think. our best friends know this. Paul: At the moment, we don't feel like making any humouress videos.

whiskeypapa: When writing a song, how many/what kinds of revisions does the song go through before finally making it onto an album? Paul: Some songs make it out directly as we conceived them. With other songs, we make 20 versions and they still don't make it.

Noora: HI! I'm a fashion and design student from Finland and I was wondering about your stage costumes...How much do you participate in the designing and making of the outfits that you use on your tours? I understand that every album has its own look. Do you first design the outline of the look as a band and hen consult a designer and maker? Thanx and welcome back to Finland! :) Paul: Most ideas come directly from the band. For the last outfit, we had the idea to combine Bavarian folkloric outfits with industrial. Paul: Because Bavarian folklore is not very cool and we like to mix things that you're not supposed to.

Beurgueur: Have you ever thought in what your life would be now if rammstein never was created? Paul: No. We don't think that way.

minx: It’s been stated in several interviews that the band has two pyromaniacs in the group, but is there anyone who is not so fond of fire? Paul: Everybody in the band has a different specialty. Paul: Each of us is really equally important. Paul: It doesn'T matter what each does, it could be better when two are on vacation during preparation and actually help us to make a good video this way.

Badeend: Who thinks of the titles of the cd's? Is it some kind of democraty or is it 1 man that decides? Paul: We make the decision as a group but it's not really a democracy. More like a board of directors.

Biz: How have older industrial bands (such as Laibach or KMFDM) influenced you? Paul: A lot. Paul: Also Ministry.

minx: What is the oily black/brown liquid that you are all covered with on stage? Is it a fire retardant liquid? Paul: No. Paul: That's a secret.

minx: Why did you wear a paper bag over your head at the concert in Tallin, last November? Paul: I wanted to display an Iraqi prisoner. Paul: There's a photo of a guy behind barbed wire and he's holding his son but he has a bag on his head. Paul: That photo really had an impact on me.

aeon: Why do you only do signing sessions in London and Paris? Why not in other big cities f Europe or even Germany? Or is anything planned? Paul: Actually we've only planned for Paris. London snuck in at the last minute. Paul: I don't know any more signing sessions details right now.

Badeend: Did you take gitar lessons or did you teach it on your self? Paul: Self-taught.

minx: I am going to be at the signing in London on Sunday. Do you enjoy doing those types of promotional events or are they just ‘hard work’? Paul: Sometimes it's a lot of fun but other times it can be exhausting.

Synthema: It could be said that the "Rosenrot" photos are quite a departure image-wise from what one would expect from the band. Was this something that was decided by the band for a particular reason, or is this the sort of decision that is out of your hands? Does your management or record label have much control over how you present yourselves, or is that left to you? Paul: We don't like to repeat ourselves. Paul: Usually the band always has the last word on these amtters. But wer'e not always interested in all of the details.

Badeend: What is the new instrument you used in the song Te Quiero Puta? Paul: Trumpet.

beurgueur: do you think you'll be on stage again when you'll be 60? (like rolling stones for example...) Paul: Hopefully somebody will die first. Then we won't have to worry about that.

minx: Do you do you all do own make-up for the shows? Paul: Yes.

OK-River: Will Rammstein play again "Bück Dich" in a concert, or it is something of the past? Paul: I wouldn't say no.

blastedop: Rosenrot is so diferent from Reise Reise. How is this possible if these songs are from Reise Reise recording season? Paul: I don't think so. Listen to the whole album.

Benzramm: Are you a sort of scared when flake is going with his boat in the public ? Paul: No. Paul: But it was always Oli last year.

whiskeypapa: Which of your songs invokes the most emotion from you? Paul: Seemann.

MsBehaviour: Greetings from Finland and good evening! My question is, you have been playing together as a band for quite a many years now, and there is a big difference in the sound of Herzeleid and the sound of Reise Reise. Does this "evolution" come naturally to you, or do you make conscious decisions as to where to direct your sound? How do you feel about the change? Paul: There are some of us who want to stay the same. Paul: There's some of us who want to always change. Paul: These parties fight each other and the result is a new album or a black eye.

MafiUndomiel: Have you heard a cover version of Keine Lust made by a Russian guy called Miguel? What did you think about it? Paul: Not yet, unfortunately.

Badeend: Do you have a private jet or do you have to rent a plane? Paul: When the record company pays, we fly Business. When we have to pay, it'S Tourist class. Sometimes, when the connections are difficult, we rent a litlle jet.

luna: First "Snow White" now "Rose Red". Do the members of Rammstein have a fondness for fairytales? Paul: Who doesn't?

Synthema: Do you still enjoy performing live after all these years, or is it more of a chore now? Paul: If we didn't like it, we wouldn't have been around so long.

Benzramm: Is there a double meaning in the songtexts of your songs ? Paul: Yeah. But the subtleties and double-meanings get lost in translation.

Badeend: What is your favorite song or cd? Paul: Kill Bill 1.

DRS2G: Is "Hilf Mir" inspired by a Heinrich Hoffmann's tale?! Paul: Yes.

Synthema: Have you ever felt that the success of Rammstein has been a negative thing for you in your personal life? That it makes it difficult to decide who to trust and who not to? Paul: It is difficult to stay normal despite money and success. Paul: We fight this on a daily battle but we usually win.

Beurgueur: from a viewer: what guitar do you use for your c tuning, and what guitar does richard use for this? Paul: I play a Gibson Les Paul and Richard plays ESP guitars.

Benzramm: Did you really go to the mountains for the videoclip "Ohne Dich"? Paul: Yes. The was the funnest video of them all. Paul: The thin air up there was difficult. Paul: I'm impressed by mountain climbers who go even higher. Paul: It was difficult for our crew and us.

MafiUndomiel: how did you and richard decided who was going to be lead and who rythm guitars? Paul: Good question. Paul: We're both stubborn. Paul: It's a fight every time but we're still doing alright up to now. Paul: Actually, the winner is supposed to be the one who plays the best solo.

Badeend: Do you still have to take guitar lessons to play better? Paul: No.

blastedop: Do you visit fansites? How about a Top 10 Fansites in the official page? Paul: From time to time.

Badeend: Why did you pick just that girl for the Texas vocal in Stirb nich vor Mir? Paul: It was our producer's idea.

MafiUndomiel: Paul, is there any country that you´d like to visit or going on tour, and you haven´t yet? Why? Paul: Yes, we would love to go to Turkey, Mongolia, Iraq. We know we've got lots of fans there.

Jenna: Which current musicians (Not youselves, I'm sorry) do you think are creating the best work at the moment? Paul: System of a Down, Muse, Snoop Doggy Dog, Eminem, Slip Knot, etc.

Rammsteinizied: Dear Paul, How do you feel about us fans? Paul: It's an honour.

DRS2G: Will "Rosenrot" be the 2nd single from your new album?! Paul: Yes.

Straya: I'm wondering how this question has not come up yet... but, plenty of people are asking if you guys will tour in America and Canada. I don't mean for this to be one of those annoying questions. But, has anything be talked about? Paul: I'm certain that we'll tour North and South America with our next album.

rammsteinuk: I read in a recent interview that there were some arguments within the band during the production of 'Mutter'. Have there been any more strong disagreements like this since? Paul: Thankfully not. There's always stress when six stubborn people meet, but nothing serious.

minx: Most influential musician on yourself? Paul: Laibach, Ministry, Metallica, Nirvana.

blastedop: Did you like Benzin video? Schneider didnt. Paul: I don't think it's that bad. Paul: We've had three really good videos in a row, so it's hard to keep the standards so high. Paul: I'm glad that there's some variation, next time we'll improve.

whiskeypapa: First, Reise Reise saw a "country moment" with Los, and now Rosenrot has Te Quiero Puta. If you could make a fusion of Rammstein and any other world music (for fun), what would it be? Paul: Yes, I interested in all combinations of things that don't fit together.

Biz: Are there any downsides to being famous? Paul: We're famous but we can still buy groceries in Berlin without bodyguards. Paul: We've got nothing to complain about. Paul: Our band is famous around the world but we still have normal lives, thank God.

minty: Paul are you looking forward to the world cup next year? who will win? Paul: Yes. It doesn'T look good for Germany right now. Paul: I hope that a miracle happens.

aeon: Do you hope your music will still be appreciated in many years from now or it doesn't matter to you ? Paul: I think that we're relatively timeless. Paul: But that'S probably what every band thinks and two years later nobody cares ...

DRS2G: Was it good to be directed by Jonas Akerlund?! Paul: Yes, he's just a cool guy.

Ashr: I really liked Keine Lust video, whose was the idea that you were fat? Paul: It was Schneider's idea. Paul: Inside the suits it was really hot. Paul: Thankfully, the warehouse was really cold. Paul: The whole crew had to freeze but we sweated like pigs. Paul: The fat make-up took around 4 hours. Paul: But it was still a lot of fun. Paul: Most of all, when we had to piss. Paul: But I won't tell any more details on that.

sipp: would you ever consider to bring another musicians on stage during concerts like a trumpet player or so,I really love trumpets maybe because I'm married to that kind of musician unfurnetly he really hates you but I really love your songs and the sound Paul: Six is more than enough. Paul: If you ever see us with backing singers, bongo players and horn section, please shoot me!

Tomix: Is it real the blood of Till in Live Aus Berlin ?? Paul: Sometimes he hits his head so hard with the mic that he bleeds. Paul: Thanks a lot I'm going home now. Paul: See you in five years. Paul: Just joking, we'll be back.

#Rammstein #quote #article #Rammstein glossary #These tags are stupid #Paul Landers #interview

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buggie-hagen · 4 years

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Sermon for Reformation Sunday (10/27/19)

Primary Text | John 8:31-36

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Dear People of God,

Today is Reformation Sunday. It is a time to pause and reflect on what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Part of our institutional history is connected to the various state churches in Europe—such as Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Part of our commemoration of Reformation today is with brats and beer—come from the German ethnic heritage. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with celebrating where we come from—no matter what your ethnic heritage may be. However, a problem does come up when we blur the lines between ethnic heritage and theological heritage. Lutheranism is not strictly-speaking a German, Swedish, or Finnish thing. This can be shown by the fact Lutherans now make up at least 75.5 million Christians in 99 different countries. This might come as a surprise, but the largest Lutheran church body in the world right now is in Africa and named the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus (Mekane Yesus, a name that simply means “Place of Jesus”) with its 8.3 million members—as compared to our 3.4 million members in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. If it is not cultural ties that make someone a Lutheran Christian, what is? We get a clue in the name Lutheran itself. In the book, Book of Harmony, we learn Martin Luther’s original name was “Martin Ludher.” In the time shortly after he posted the 95 Theses, in 1517, he started signing his name in Greek as Martinus Eleutherius—which is how we eventually get his name shortened and passed on as Martin Luther. The name Luther, and by extension Lutheran, comes from a Greek word which means “freed person” or “liberated one.” So when you think of yourself as Lutherans you can think of yourselves as people who are made free.

This is relevant because the word Lutheran shares a common Greek root with our reading from the Gospel of John today where Jesus teaches us about freedom, where he says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” It is the truth, that is, the word, that makes us free. Specifically, Jesus means the word of the radical good news, that in him we are made free from sin, are made children and heirs of God, and that in Christ we have forgiveness, salvation, and are reconciled to God the Father—entirely out of God’s all-gracious heart. As is usual, there were those who resisted Jesus’ word. They said, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will be made free’?” They believed by virtue of their birth status, meaning their ethnic heritage, they were free and had nothing to worry about. As usual, Jesus tells things like it is in teaching, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” The truth is, our ethnic heritage, our deeds, our feelings, all our abilities cannot and do not save us. We all our rot-gut sinners from birth. No one is exempt from this judgment—for we all are sinners who do sinful things. The language of slavery Jesus uses here teaches us that we are utterly stuck and cannot save ourselves—as long as we are a slave there is no permanent place for us. There is no place we can call home and be safe. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And the wages of sin is death.

If this sounds harsh it’s because it is harsh. And it must be. Without knowing how dire our bad situation is, we could never come to appreciate how good the good news is. As Jesus proclaims, “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” God’s word of good news to us is that we are justified by grace. This means God’s heart is oriented to us in compassion and love so much so that has chosen to forgive our sins, to reconcile us to himself, on the basis of his mercy alone. God’s word of good news to us is received by faith alone. Meaning that God is the one who causes us to trust in him, and when God makes a promise we have what God promises. And God does this solely through the work of Christ—him crucified on the cross and risen again—to bring us new life. And finally, the new covenant, the gospel, is that God chooses to not remember our sins or hold them against us, as the prophet Jeremiah declares. When it comes to being made free, it’s not about what we can do to satisfy God, but about what God does of his own choosing—to save us from ourselves.

We are heirs of the Lutheran Reformation. It is not an occasion for us to esteem ourselves as better people than Catholics and all other Christians. It is a time to be thankful that God has addressed us with the radical good news of freedom in Christ. Free to worship God without fear. Free to have hope when all the world tells us to not have hope. Free to be just as God created us to be. Free to look all our problems in the eyes and say, “God has broken your shackles, and I am no longer obligated to your schemes to break me down.” Free to let go of our own idols we cling so tightly to, and to cling tightly to Christ. (pause) Martin Luther never wanted there to be a Lutheran Church. He’d rather we call ourselves Christian, or evangelical—evangelical, not in the sense of the American political landscape, but in the biblical landscape—meaning “centered in the good news.” When we commemorate the Reformation, it is not pointing to ourselves and imagining how amazing we our—because we’re not. No, the Reformation is an opportunity to point away from ourselves and to point to the Christ. He’s the one who sets the world free and will make all things as they should be. Christ is the one who takes away your slavery status and gives you a new status—a child of God. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. And, that’s a promise God makes for you, and keeps for you. Thanks be to God.

#Reformation #Reformation Sunday #Lutheran #ELCA #sermon #keypreaching

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vividfragments · 5 years

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21 Questions!

I was going to take a break from this website but @surrealistwaltz tagged me for this 21 questions quiz, thank you!! This is gonna take me back to those 2005 Myspace days, these are fun.

Nicknames: My names Philip so a lot of family and even a few coworkers call me Philly which is nice, it's comforting and endearing. Also one of my friends mom called me Philomena and another friends Dad would call me Philbert which made me laugh. Also probably some bad ones lol.

Zodiac: I don't really put a lot of stock in zodiac signs but I'm a Leo

Height: I'm 6 feet or 1.82 (omg) meters tall.

Amount of sleep: I dunno what this is asking but I got like 4 hours last night?

Last movie I saw: I just recently watched deadman, its one of my favorites. It's kinda like an artsy, psychadellic, like, I dont wanna say western because that genre has an lot of tropes and cliches that this movie doesn't really have but it's set when industrialzation was starting to spread towards the west, more specifically to the film, the Pacific northwest of the US. It's a good movie to watch on a rainy, chilly night.

Last thing I googled: what 6 feet is in meters ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I suck at math.

Favorite musician: I'm taking this question as favorite single musician and I have lots but the first 2 that come to my head are Chopin and Klaus Flouride (one of my fav bassists)

Song stuck in my head: literally Voices Carry by 'Til Tuesday. I was in the market today and it was playing and I was singing it to myself, then I noticed a lot of people were doing the same and they were all different age groups and genders, it was cute. Damn that song is catchy... ~oooooooooh shush...

Other blogs: This is my only blog!

Do I get asks: Lol I actually haven't had an ask yet. Wish I did though, I can be fun sometimes.

Blogs following: I like following lots of different stuff. This is a place I like, try to expose myself to art, music, and other things that put my heart in a nice place. It can backfire sometimes though, whether its something that puts me into feelings or seeing people being stupid in comments or you know, the fact racist blogs can exist on here. I'm happy I made this though, it's been more positive than negative for sure.

Lucky numbers: 4, 33, and 44

What I'm wearing: I'm wearing some sort of cardigan like sweater that doesnt open up or have buttons and its burgundy (my fav color) with black jeans and socks tbh. Also my glasses.

Dream trip: Prague would be interesting, theres a lot of cool art and architecture there. I'm not religious or anything but I feel like visiting St. Peter's Square would be really surreal and kind of creepy? Going to a place like Australia or what @surrealistwaltz said, Greenland would be neat. I feel like those places could make you feel as though you're on a completely different planet.

Dream Job: I wanna teach history! Preferably high school, then if I cant stand how kids act I'll work my way up to the collegiate level. I wanna teach history because looking back at what we learn in schools here in America is watered down, especially when it comes to the bad that Americans have done and the negative impact its had on groups of parole and honestly, bug chunks of the globe.I believe there needs to be at least on teacher in a students k-12 scholastic career who calls out the borderline history revisonment that is being taught to kids so wrecklessly. The United States definitely needs to do what they do in Germany when it comes to teaching about atrocities committed in the past. Whomever is on the winning side of history should NOT MATTER. If theres a group of people that has been suppressed or continues to be suppressed, there needs to be at least ONE person who introduces the brutal hard truth of what happened. Here in the states you get the "I didn't participate in slavery or the genocide of Native Americans, it's not something I need to hear in detail" and it literally pisses me off, it misses the whole point of education. This fires me up, sorry.....

Favorite food: literally any type of pasta or noodles. It doesnt matter if it's in soup, if its Italian, Chinese, Japanese, vietnamese, if it has noodles and doesn't have meat then I'm so happy to just demolish whatever is in front of me. Also chips and salsa is refreshing and satisfying. I'm half Mexican so any type of Mexican food that doesn't use anything from animals is always a go to. My fav fruits are cherries, tangerines, and pears. My favorite veggies are asparagus, green beans, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. I can make some v good Brussels sprouts.

Languages: ehh I speak pretty bad Spanish but the foundation is there so when I decide to take it back up when I go to a university, I should be able to learn a lot easier than I did in high school. If not because I have foundation and basic understanding of the language then its because I actually WANT to learn it as opposed to when I was a teenager. German would be really cool too because if I teach and I get upset I can just yell in German and people would think I'm actually insane and hopefully would cut out whatever nonsense they were doing.

Play any instruments: I play Bass off and on. I first got my bass when I was 12, I would just mess around until I was like 14, then I taught myself how to read bass tabs so if there was a song I really liked, I could look up the tablatures and teach myself how to play it and still do that. I wish I would've taken lessons though.

Favorite songs: I have a lot but I'll give a top 5 that I listen to regularly and/or have a special connection with:

Joe Lies by the Bouncing souls

Happy When it Rains by The Jesus and Mary Chain

Bad by U2

When You Sleep by My Bloody Valentine

Oh me, Oh my by Streetlight Manifesto

*bonus guilty pleasure* The One by Backstreet Boys

Random Fact: I can pop my knuckles by just clinching my fist tightly? Also I'm really into ceramics so if I have some clay, kiln, and some glaze I can make stuff on a pottery wheel or hand build it. Mmmmmm also I'm like, really into quoting spongebob. It's kind of gotten out of hand. Also I'm using this question to give a shoutout to my dog, ABBY I LOVE YOU!! I love my dog, she's a ham.

Describe your aesthetic: ...Artsy and rebellious dad... who's cool with you smoking weed as long as you keep your grades up.....

THAT WAS FUN AND MADE ME GENUINELY HAPPY THANK YOU FOR TAGGING ME!!!!

Since I brought up Myspace I'm not tagging anyone, we're doing this the 2005 way. If you follow me and are bored or wanna talk PLEASE do this, I wanna read your answers :)

#fun #21 questions #do this #why are quizzes so much fun

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techcrunchappcom · 3 years

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/trumps-america-first-presidency-all-but-ended-us-global-leadership-the-world-was-outgrowing-it-anyway/

Trump's America First presidency all but ended US global leadership. The world was outgrowing it anyway

But the global instruments Trump deserted haven’t crumbled, nor is the world crashing and burning with its long-time leader in the back seat. Strongman leaders may be emboldened, but they aren’t going entirely unchallenged. And old US allies have not fallen straight into the arms of China, as many analysts fear.

Instead, the world is adapting these agreements, it’s reshaping its institutions and, as for China, most countries are finding ways to balance their relations with Beijing as both a friend and foe.

This shift has been a long time coming. While US grand strategists who believe American world leadership is exceptional argue it could go on in its role indefinitely, most international relations experts agree that all unipolar models must come to an eventual end, as other powers rise and challenge its primacy.

After assuming the role of leader following World War II, the US proved its dominance with its victory in the Cold War, a consolidation of power that experts described as a “unipolar moment.” That moment has lasted 30 years.

There have been clear signs over the past two decades, however, that Americans are tiring of taking on this role, while much of the world, equally, is cooling on the US as its hegemon, and is eager to step into its shoes.

Germany, for example, is pitching itself as a global health leader. Even before the pandemic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel had put global health on the agenda at G20 meetings for the first time as the Trump administration showed signs of retreat from international cooperation. Germany has boosted funding for health research and development, and was even able to treat patients from neighboring countries for Covid-19 early in the European outbreak, so well-resourced were its hospitals at a time of crisis.

As the US attempted to lead reforms of the World Health Organization — despite its decision to abandon it — Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron proposed their own an alternative plan, after rejecting Washington’s, as Reuters reported.

Germany has pledged an extra 200 million euros ($234.1 million) to the WHO this year, making for a total of 500 million euros, to help plug the gap left by the US, traditionally the organization’s biggest donor. It’s not the only one. The UK announced last month it would boost its WHO funding by 30% over the next four years, which would make it the biggest donor, should the US follow through with its withdrawal.

China, under international pressure to resource the global response, has also pledged additional funding, as has France, Finland and Ireland, among others. It’s unclear whether they will be able to make up for the US’ shortfall in the years to come, but it’s at least a good start.

Merkel — often described as the world’s “anti-Trump” — said in May she wanted the European Union to take on more global responsibility for the pandemic and for the bloc to harness a more powerful voice overall on the values of “democracy, freedom and the protection of human dignity,” describing cooperation with the US as “more difficult that we’d like.”

Making comments in a speech ahead of Germany assuming the six-month presidency of the European Union, Merkel said she saw her country’s presidency as an opportunity to be an “anchor of stability” in the world that could shape change and assume responsibility for global peace and security.

“Itself a project between individual states, the European Union is inherently a supporter of rules‑based multilateral cooperation. This is truer than ever in the crisis,” Merkel said.

Macron too tried to pitch himself as the next leader of the free world in the earlier days of Trump’s presidency. His campaign lost steam, but he still often plays the democratic defender in the room where the US is missing, having confronted Russia’s Vladimir Putin on his country’s role in the Syrian conflict and on the deterioration of gay rights in Russia, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the murder of his critic, Jamal Khashoggi, at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

While EU leaders’ will to replace American leadership is strong, the lack of progress in the areas Macron has tried to address are a sobering reminder of the limited power the world has to uphold democratic values without the United States at the helm.

Putin had his wrist slapped, but the abuse of gay Russians continues, and Russia and its firepower has all but won the war for Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. Bin Salman has been forced to keep a lower profile, but Macron’s confrontation has done little to threaten his position of power.

The European Union is also losing its battle with the rise of autocracy in some of its eastern states, like Hungary and Poland, or countering Russian influence in that part of their bloc.

But they continue to try and their own alliances are strengthening. Take the E3. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson should be Merkel’s and Macron’s worst enemy, as tense Brexit trade talks crash out ahead of the UK’s December 31 withdrawal from the EU. Remarkably, the three are still chummy on topics other than Brexit.

The E3’s whole raison d’etre has been to counter US foreign policy, coming together informally during the Iraq war and to engage Iran on nuclear proliferation where the US wouldn’t. But it has become tighter knit in the Trump era — the trio have openly opposed US sanctions on Iran and increasingly cooperate in areas like Beijing’s territorial expansionism in the South China Sea and the Syrian conflict as the US shows less interest in those security challenges.

Members of the trans-Atlantic defense alliance, NATO, have also had to adapt to a less present US. The alliance has had plans to boost funding since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, an audacious move that the Obama administration did little about. Trump’s aggressive criticism of member nations contributing below their commitments of 2% of GDP applied further pressure on several members to pay their share.

A long time coming

There may be no easy replacement for US leadership, but Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, points out that Washington hasn’t achieved many of its recent international security objectives, either. “Asia, the Middle East, Africa, in many parts, disorder continues to a great extent,” he said.

The list of US failures in international security is long. The US hasn’t been able to build legitimate states in Iraq and Afghanistan, as it sought to. Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to peace deal. Both Iran and North Korea have developed nuclear weapons. The US hasn’t prevented Russia from exerting influence in Eastern Europe. It hasn’t convinced China to end its military aggressions in Asia. These were all true before Trump’s rise.

Lucas said that the Trump presidency hasn’t really been the turning point in this shift. President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was the “critical moment.”

“A lot of countries were discomforted, to say the least. They felt the war wasn’t justified — countries like France, Germany, Australia — that a unipolar America with the UK tagging along wasn’t working, especially when Iraq turned so horribly wrong, with so many people dying, and the instability that continues. So, the notion that the US leads and everyone follows was shot,” Lucas said.

Some experts say China is the only real contender here, and that a bipolar world in which the US and China compete is inevitable. Like in the Cold War, other countries will be forced to choose sides.

China too is finding areas in which to assert its growing power on the world stage with an increasingly absent US. At the UN General Assembly in September, Chinese President Xi called for the world to “join hands to uphold the values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom shared by all of us.” In contrast, Trump devoted much of his speech to attacking China over its handling of the coronavirus, playing to his supporter base at home ahead of the November election.

Xi’s comments need to be taken with a grain of salt — Beijing has also taken elements of Trump’s presidency as an opportunity to vindicate its own heavy-handedness at home, in Hong Kong, for example, with its draconian national security law. But Xi does have a genuine appetite to be welcomed as a world leader, a role that will require him to conform somewhat to the rules-based order.

In the same speech in September, Xi made a pledge for China to become carbon neutral by 2060, an ambitious goal that has been met with both excitement and skepticism. Critics point out that China “off-shores” its carbon emissions, largely through its multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which includes development projects across more than 120 countries.

But Beijing is looking at ways to make these development endeavors more sustainable, and Xi’s announcement at least shows that China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, is willing to lead and engage with the world on this crucial issue, where the US, the second-largest emitter, is not.

Shaun Breslin, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, disagrees that the long-term future is necessarily a bipolar one where countries must choose sides between a competing China and US. Instead, he thinks the transition from a unipolar world will be “messy” and more likely give way to clusters of power.

“My problem with poles is we’re trying to use language from a different era and wedge the current era on that linguistic basis. What I think we’ll see is looser constellations of power and interests dependent on specific issue areas,” he said.

The world will see countries continuing to engage China in areas like trade and technology, but not necessarily replacing Washington with Beijing on issues like security or moral leadership. In many ways, that shift has already happened.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden is among those who believe the US should continue to lead. Though he has promised to rejoin institutions like the WHO and the Paris climate accord should he win on Tuesday, he won’t be able to reverse every foreign policy decision Trump has made.

For instance, it will be difficult for Biden to invest the troops and weapons needed to regain the influence the US once had in Syria. He may also find the US’ former Kurdish allies unwilling to work with him, having for years fought alongside the US to defeat ISIS, only to be abandoned last year as Trump gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the green light to invade their territory in a quick phone call.

Biden’s comments during a debate last week on North Korea also suggest he may have no policy that differs from Obama’s, which did little to deter the pariah state.

Regardless of who wins the vote, the US’ role in the world has changed profoundly. Returning to where it was four years ago won’t be easy. Returning to its post-Cold War primacy is near impossible.

#america #ended #first #global #leadership #presidency #trump #World

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Trump, Putin and Bolsonaro find their populist playbooks are no match for coronavirus

Much to their frustration, the macho leaders of these countries are finding the virus immune to their playbooks. Intimidation, fear-mongering and propaganda just aren’t working. Being guided by science, communicating transparently and long-term planning are proving the sharper tools.

Trump, Bolsonaro and Putin all initially downplayed the risk of the coronavirus, experts say, even as they watched it overwhelm nations like Italy. Now, they are scrambling to appear in control, as the virus keeps transmitting and killing, exposing their weaknesses.

Keep calm and carry on

The denial of the coronavirus as a threat by the presidents in the US and Brazil inevitably led to foot-dragging in their governments. The consequences are serious — models are now emerging that show how swift action can save lives. A Columbia University model, for example, shows that if the US had imposed social distancing one week before authorities called for it, 36,000 lives could have been saved. The US’ death toll is now more than 100,000.

Like Bolsonaro, Trump continually dismissed the virus as similar to the flu, and repeatedly assured Americans that things were “under control” in the early months of the year. When it became clear they weren’t, Trump still signaled that everything would be OK.

“This was unexpected. … And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away,” he said on March 10, as the number of US cases approached 1,000.

While the US imposed some travel restrictions early, beginning with banning flights to and from China from February 2, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only issued its first social distancing guidance on March 15. Just six weeks later, the country surpassed 1 million infections.“Downplaying the virus was in defiance of all the evidence that we had from China, and then European nations, about what the effects could be. It unquestionably contributed to a weaker public health response. It has been left to local leaders to pick up the slack,” William Hanage, an epidemiologist from Harvard University, told CNN.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro not only implied that the virus would never be able to hurt him, he made similar claims about Brazilians in general.

“Brazilians should be studied, we don’t catch anything. You see people jumping in sewage, diving in it and nothing happens to them,” Bolsonaro said on March 26, as the number of cases in his country approached 3,000.

While Brazil took some early action, banning travelers from several affected countries and closing land borders, Bolsonaro has never supported closing businesses and schools and his government never issued any clear guidelines for states on how to implement social distancing.

In fact, the President has repeatedly undermined local leaders’ restrictions, even joining regular anti-lockdown rallies, often without a mask, shaking hands with people and hugging children.

“In terms of the response, he continues to deny the importance of the virus, he insists on still dismissing it — there has been no change in tone over time,” said Francisca Costa Reis, a doctoral researcher focusing on Brazil at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies in Brussels.

“At least the President of the US now recognizes this is some sort of an issue or a problem. I don’t think Bolsonaro has really responded at all.”

And like Trump, Bolsonaro’s lax attitude toward the virus has caused rifts and chaos within his government. In April, he fired his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, one of Brazil’s biggest proponents of social distancing. A second health minister, Nelson Teich, recently quit, after criticizing Bolsonaro’s decree ordering beauty salons and gyms to reopen.

The President has since appointed a military general with no background in medicine or public health, Eduardo Pazuello, as an interim health minister to lead the response.

‘Everything is under control’

The story is a little different in Russia. The government there wasn’t particularly slow to act. It closed its border with China on January 30, the day before even reporting its first two infections, and announced its lockdown measures when it had was reporting less than 700 infections.

But there were mistakes. Russia missed a number of infections coming into the country from Italy and other parts of western Europe, and it has failed to stop its hospitals from becoming hotbeds for the virus. Poor messaging has also undone some of the gains from early interventions.

In the early stages of Russia’s outbreak, Putin told his people the situation was “under control,” and back then, it seemed it was. Russia enjoyed the whole month of February without reporting a single new infection, although questions have been raised over whether the country was dismissing some coronavirus cases as pneumonia. It wasn’t until March 2 that its two cases officially became three.

Putin’s language has been more measured than Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s. He regularly calls for caution, he describes the virus as a real threat, and he doesn’t deny the scientific facts of the virus. But he has stuck to his old tactics, which are beginning to backfire.

In late March, he visited a newly built hospital to respond to the virus, wearing a yellow hazmat suit, in a typically Putinesque PR stunt that was supposed to show an unruffled leader touring part of a well-operating health system.

But the visit gave Russians little confidence. He was also photographed without his hazmat suit off, shaking hands with the hospital’s head doctor, who later tested positive for the virus. It only raised speculation that the President had been infected, and that he was self-isolating, as he gave weekly addresses via videoconference from his home.

It’s a suggestion the Kremlin has vehemently denied, with one spokesperson having to reportedly tell journalists that no, Putin was not hiding “in some bunker.” Either way, the whole affair ran counter to the strongman image Putin likes to project.

Putin’s visit also sat at odds with reports that soon followed of the dire situation in Russia’s hospitals. Many are overcrowded, and their staff are overworked and lack protective equipment. A viral video of nurses hooked up to drips in a hospital storage room in the city of Derbent in early May was a sign of just how bad things had become.

A patchwork problem

Many of Putin’s problems are of his own making. Russia was expected to vote in a referendum that could have cemented Putin’s power until 2036, and some of his decisions appear to be aimed at securing victory in that poll, observers say.

The vote has been postponed by the virus, a change that has taken some of the wind out of Putin’s sails.

But the vote is still on the horizon, and the President appears to be trying to distance himself from the crisis in the meantime, delegating the enforcement and easing of lockdowns to local leaders.

There are good arguments for devolving powers to the regions, but amid the successes have been failures. Putin announced extra money for frontline medical staff, for example, but it simply hasn’t reached everyone who were supposed to receive it.

He has tried to put a positive spin on his addresses to the nation, in late March announcing a week of “paid holiday,” choosing not to use words like “restrictions” or “lockdown.” But that too has backfired.

Russians in Moscow were seen soon after having barbecues in parks, there was a rush to book holidays and many people headed out of the cities to their summer homes — all activities that only helped the virus spread further across the country.

This paid holiday —which in practice was a “lockdown”— was extended several times. Putin called for an end to it on May 12, and Moscow plans to ease restrictions further on Monday. But the timing seems a bit back to front. When restrictions were imposed, case numbers were rising by around 1,000 infections a day. They are now rising by about 10,000 daily and Russians are being told to get back to work.

“By delegating the crisis response to lower levels, and not being clear in his own messaging, Putin did leave people to devise their own solutions in ways they felt responded to what Putin probably wanted. That kind of experimentation can be good, but is also meant there were a lot of mistakes made,” said Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“In some areas, there is endemic corruption and dysfunction. You could have known they were going to drop the ball. Investment wasn’t going to get where it needed to get.”

The same kind of patchwork response is playing out in the US and Brazil, and while it makes sense for different states to deal with their outbreaks differently, governors have at times pleaded for help with resources, like tests and protective equipment, in a situation that begs for some centralized leadership.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, has shown that even where states or regions hold power, strong federal leadership can bring about a well-coordinated response. Her decisions have been made largely with the input of state leaders, and as a result, many measures, such as mandatory mask wearing, have been enforced by all states, and clear guidelines on lifting lockdowns are being widely adhered to.

The invincible ‘strongman’

While Germany’s response to the virus has been heavily based on science, Trump and Bolsonaro continue to deny it.

Just as Bolsonaro continues to show up at rallies, or as Putin shook hands with the head doctor at a hospital treating coronavirus patients, Trump has repeatedly refused to wear a mask in public. For many weeks at the start of the outbreak, he too said he would continue to shake hands, against expert health advice.

Both Trump and Bolsonaro have touted the drug hydroxychloroquine, despite no significant scientific evidence it is effective in preventing or treating the virus. Some trials have shown the drug to be harmful in people with heart disease. Trump even announced in earlier this month that he was taking it, though he has since stopped, saying he had finished a two-week course.

In Brazil, that attitude could have graver consequences. Bolsonaro has had his health ministry include hydroxychloroquine in its guidelines for hospitals to use as a treatment in mild coronavirus cases.

This shirking of scientific advice speaks to a misguided sense of invincibility often seen in autocratic leaders, according to the University of Amsterdam’s Alessandro Nai, who has co-authored a study on the personality traits of strongmen.

“Strongmen tend to couple high confidence in themselves with impulsivity, with a disregard for the consequences of their actions. This seems to set up a persona of the ‘invincible and fearless leader’ that can solve issues by sheer willpower,” he said.

Leaders in parts of the world who are succeeding through this crisis are showing that the answer is far more complex than that.

All data on cases and deaths are from Johns Hopkins University.

CNN’s Mary Ilyushina and Nathan Hodge reported from Moscow, Taylor Barnes reported from Atlanta and Maegan Vazquez reported from Washington, D.C. Visuals by CNN’s Gabrielle Smith.

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footloose-travel · 7 years

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Into the Eastern Block

While in Finland we received an email from Mike that we had an appointment with Herr David to pick up our Residency Visa cards, and it had to be done in person. Said we’d be there, then went to Google Maps to realize that in entailed 18 hours of driving and we had a week. We normally limit ourselves to 2 or 3 hours of driving per day at a leisurely pace so this was a change. We drove 5 hours/day for 3 days and straight to the drop zone to jump for the weekend. People on the drop zone were happy to see us and it’s nice to feel welcome. Picking up the cards was uneventful on Monday and it felt great to have that bureaucratic challenge behind us. My next, and hopefully last bureaucratic challenge is getting a German driver’s license since I can only drive on my US license in the EU for 6 months. The German system is tough and fortunately I only have to take the written test, not the road test, and lucky for me the test is available in English. Mike said he would probably not pass the test today. There are driving schools but I’m trying to find online resources to study from. There is a 9 hour mandatory first aid course and an eye test, both are no brainers but squares I must fill. Charlotte is thrilled that she doesn’t need to endure this additional “root canal”. I already know more about German traffic laws and signs than most Americans know about their own laws, and I still have more studying to do. Rather than sit in Germany for all of this we decided to travel into Poland and up through the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Our first stop was to Berlin and the famous Potsdam just 20 miles outside the city. Potsdam is noted for palaces and gardens where many kings lived. The town is beautiful and well maintained in typical German fashion. The gardens and palaces were opulent and reflected a time past. As usual we brought the good weather with us and had some clouds, pleasant temperatures, and a passing sprinkle. The next 2 days we wandered around Berlin itself. It is a modern city with more tourists, and cities in general and touristy places are not our first choice of places to be. On the second day we made a point of going to the Stone Brewpub, a company out of San Diego, California. We had an excellent dinner there and great beer, but had some issues finding our way back to the campground after a few buses and trains. Luckily we caught the last bus and arrived at our “home” at midnight. Berlin is only an hour drive from the Polish border so off we went to a new country for both of us. Spent a day in Gdansk, a town noted for amber jewelry due to local amber deposits. By chance it was on the last day of an annual festival and we’re told it’s one of the largest in Europe. There were lots of street vendors that initially we assumed it was always like this for the tourists, before learning of the festival. We visited the “Amber Museum” and saw some incredible works of art created with amber. Late in the day we stopped for a beer and enjoyed a lovely craft beer while listening to Queen on their high end sound system. It is impressive how often we hear American/English language music as we travel around the world. In SE Asia we often heard Hotel California by the Eagles, sometimes from live bands who didn’t speak English, just sang it phonetically. This music tradition continued at our first stop in Lithuania, the city of Druskininkai. While wandering through this beautiful small city we came upon a dancing fountain whose movement was accompanied by “Beat It” by Michael Jackson. We enjoyed the show and then laughed about the musical choice. We’ve made several observations about the Eastern Block countries, and assume this is a residual effect of their Soviet dominated past. It’s been 26 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. In some places we still see the stark, utilitarian looking buildings completely lacking any atheistic traits. In other places we see they’ve been dressed up with some paint, etc., and then there’s the post Soviet buildings. Although the infrastructure looks like an economy that’s doing well the people, in general, do not smile. We look them in the eye and smile and get the great stone face back. We assume this is a cultural carryover from the communist regime. Travel does give us a different perspective on the world and helps us appreciate that our home culture, with it’s numerous faults, has so many positive factors to offer. For all the photos see John and Charlotte’s flickr sites. Just click on either of our names.

#Europe #Adventure travel #Eastern Block #Poland #Germany #Berlin #Potsdam #Amber #Amber Museum #residency visa #Lithuania #Latvia #Estonia #Michael Jackson #Beat it #Eagles #Hotel California #Gdansk #Stone Brewing Company

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offtheisland · 7 years

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So You Want to Be a CBYX-er?

Hallo!

Since the last post, much has happened: there were a lot of end-of-the-school-year things to get done, I had my senior prom (which was so much fun), and I graduated! I’m officially done with high school! Well, American high school.

↑ That’s me in the extremely flattering cap and gown.

It is strange to think that these “all-important” four years of my life are finished. I’m very happy to be done, don’t get me wrong–it was a lot of hard work getting into college and CBYX–but there are some bittersweet feelings as well. I’ve made so many amazing friends and tried so many new things that I’ve learned to love, and now it is all over, and all of us are heading our separate ways. It is inevitable that we will lose some of the close contact we’ve had with each other the past four years: we simply will not be able to see each other all the time anymore, and that is a huge factor in terms of how close one’s relationship is with another. This I know, but what I do not yet know is what “separate ways” means. My hope is that we stay in contact as best as possible (social media is pretty amazing that way) and each make a conscious effort to get together when we’re all back “on the Island”, or you know, wherever.

Anyway.

Since summer vacations are in full swing, my very flawed expert judgement decided that it was an ideal time to make a post about the CBYX application process (which involves lots of writing, forms, and other stressful things we try to escape from during summer) for future wannabe CBYX-ers.

Disclaimer: If you are not interested in applying for the CBYX scholarship, you can stop reading now. This is going to be a long post about things that are in no way relevant to you. Additionally, if you are interested in applying to CBYX, know that I applied through AFS in the Northeast region, so if you are going through another organization, this could all be different for you.

Now, where to begin? It all started for me with the CBYX website, which is linked multiple places on the desktop version of this webpage and will also now be linked here.

After reading the website and deciding that I wanted to apply, the next step was actually filling out the application. This was all done online through a portal that I set up after providing my email address. The application process was very long: my best advice is to get started as soon as the application comes out, which is early fall. My initial application (before I was selected as a semifinalist) was due December 12th, so I had a little over two months to send it in. I sent it in around a week before the due date so if there were any problems, there was time to fix them. Could I have done it in less time? Probably, if that was all I had concentrated on, but I had college applications, all of my schoolwork, and cross country practice every day after school simultaneously. So it took me a while.

Below is a list of all the information I needed to complete my application, including when I was selected as a semifinalist. (I can’t remember which parts were required for the initial application, sorry!) I filled out a good part of this information on forms that were provided on the portal.

your basic information, along with that of your immediate family

a photo of you (I used my senior portrait)

a report of all of the high school classes you have taken and your final grades in each, along with an official signed/stamped copy of your transcript (ask your guidance counselor)

a signed statement from your guidance counselor saying you meet the minimum GPA requirement

a list of all the activities you have participated in during your high school career as well as any awards you have received (just like on college applications, there is limited space in this section!)

medical information form signed by your physician that clears you to go abroad and a form stating all of the immunizations you’ve had

a media release form that asks if AFS/CBYX is allowed to contact a local newspaper if you are selected

a survey asking you about dietary restrictions and your preferences for your home environment (do you want siblings, pets, non-smoking, etc.)

a signed agreement from you and your parents saying that you will abide by all of the rules while abroad

a scan of your passport

a form stating that you agree to accept whatever credit your American school will give you for German schoolwork upon your return (this really did not apply to me, since I was a senior)

recommendation letters from two of your teachers: these are SUPER important! Make sure that you give them the information about how to submit their recommendations as early as possible, and I would also advise emailing AFS after your teachers tell you they submitted their recommendations, because there is no way to check if they went through or not otherwise. Pick teachers you know well and who will be honest when writing about you, even if they might not have been your favorite (or you, theirs). If it seems like I’m really overdoing it on how important these recommendations are, I’m not. They are SO important! Treat them with care.

a letter to your host family: This is basically your first impression to your host family, and we all know how important those are! My advice is to use relatively simple language and to try and show different aspects of your life in the US. I talked about my family, my friends and what we like to do, what I do in school and during my down time, and what I am looking forward to in Germany. Also, be sure to thank them for welcoming you into their home!

six short essays: these could be no more than 250 words. My questions were as follows, but there can be variation from year to year.

Choose one of the activities you listed in the "Activities, Awards, and Interests" section of the application and describe your participation in depth. What difference has it made in your life and in the lives of others?

In the 21st Century, the United States is home to many different types of family structures. Please describe your immediate family, noting its unique or traditional elements. How do you contribute to your family's dynamics?

What would you like to share with your German host school peers about the United States? Imagine that you only have time to share three things about the United States. What would they be, and why? Be specific.

Describe a non-academic conflict that you've encountered with friends or family in the past two years. Please explain specifically how you dealt with this challenge.

It is natural for exchange students to feel homesick during a year away from friends, family, and school activities. Reflect for a moment on what it will be like to live as a member of a family in Germany. What problems or challenges other than language might you expect to encounter and how might you deal with them?

What appeals to you and your personality about the CBYX program? Tell us why you would like to be a part of the scholarship and how you will contribute to its mission.

After submitting my initial application, I was notified via email that I was a semifinalist, which I was so happy about! As a semifinalist, I had to go into New York City for the day for an information session, interview, and group activity.

There were about eight applicants and their parents (some brought both, some brought one) in the room with a CBYX alumna who answered questions and spoke about her experience while one by one the applicants were called in for their interviews. The interview was truthfully not that bad, but it definitely helped that I had done an interview in school for National Honor Society as well as multiple college interviews by that point. I was in a room with three women, who asked questions that mostly revolved around sticky situations that could arise and how you would handle them. There was also a chance for me to ask questions during the interview.

After everyone had gone in for their interview, we had a group task/activity. All of the applicants were asked to collaborate to build a tower out of materials like plastic cups, paper, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, tape, etc. Points were awarded to the group for height, stability, and decoration. We had fifteen minutes to build the tower, and the catch was that we weren’t allowed to speak English while building it! We mainly got by on gestures and motions, and it worked out pretty well. After we finished, they asked us about how this experience could be a metaphor for experiences we might have in Germany, and that was the conclusion of the day.

Whew! That’s pretty much everything I can think of to write about the application process! If you have any questions, shoot me a message here, I’d be happy to help you with your application!

Thanks for reading! Tschüss!

#predeparture #CBYX

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nickireadstfc · 7 years

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The Foxhole Court, Chapter 2 - Twinyards!

In which we reveal Exy’s origin story, my namesake appears, Andrew has some Serious Issues™ and the Twinyards pull off the oldest twin trick in the book of twin tricks, however their punny name totally redeems them.

Sounds good? Then it’s time for Nicki to read The Foxhole Court.

Not gonna lie – I’ve been dying to read on since the last chapter. God, I just wanna sit down and burn through the entire book in two days. No. Patience, Nicki.

We start off the second chapter with yet another new character – Aaron Minyard, who is an all-black unfriendly fucker like his twin, minus the murder tendencies.

“Neil,” Aaron said in lieu of hello, and he pointed. “Baggage claim.”

“Just this.” Neil tapped the strap of the duffel bag hanging off his shoulder. The bag was small enough to be a carry-on and large enough to carry everything Neil owned.

What the fuck, this is the saddest thing I’ve read all day.

Aaron proves to be exactly the same shade of Extra and Dramatic as everyone else so far as he doesn’t give a flying hoot about lung cancer, polite conversation, or basic traffic regulations.

“It’s too nice of a car to wreck,” [Neil] said pointedly.

“Don’t be so afraid to die,” Aaron said as the car kept gliding across the four-lane road to an exit ramp. “If you are, you have no place on our court.”

Literally chill out, Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way.

Neil, unbothered by the waves of Extra currently rolling around, takes this car ride as an opportunity to talk about his favourite subject: Kevin.

“Kevin stays on campus?” he asked.

“Where the court is, Kevin is. He can’t exist without it,” Aaron said derisively.

What a nerd. I love it.

However, Kevin’s immense nerd-love for Exy is actually explained shortly after and answers my most burning question from last chapter: WHAT THE FUCK IS EXY IT MAKES NO SENSE SPORTS DON’T GET FAMOUS THAT FAST BLA BLA BLA.

Shut up, past!me. Nora Sakavic is gonna learn you a thing.

Kevin’s mother Kayleigh Day and Riko’s uncle Tetsuji Moriyama created the sport roughly thirty years ago while Kayleigh was studying abroad in Fukui, Japan. What started as an experiment spread from their campus to local street teams, then across the ocean to the rest of the world. Kayleigh brought it home with her to Ireland after completing her degree and the United Stated picked it up soon after.

OKAY. First of all, thirty years is a long time and it’s fully plausible for a sport to develop this kind of following and news’ coverage in that time. For example, snowboarding was only developed in the late 70s/early 80s, yet today it’s even a Olympic discipline.

(Also, my comparison with competitive cheerleading from last chapter might have been unfair. Cheer counts as a minority sport in the US as well, yet fangirl/boy-level stalking is fully possible with American teams. Soz.)

Second of all, KEVIN AND RIKO’S PARENTS INVENTED EXY??? WHAT?!?!?

I’d be an arrogant son of a bitch too if that had happened to me. Holy fucking what.

Riko and Kevin were the face of the Ravens. To many, they were considered the future of Exy. (…) Except Kevin Day signed with the Foxes in March – not as a coach, but as a striker.

[fergie’s ‘london bridge’ voice] OH SHIT.

His fans went from feeling heartbroken to feeling betrayed. Palmetto State hat borne the brunt of that rage since. The university and stadium had been vandalized upwards of a dozen times and there’d been numerous fights on campus. It would only get worse when the season started and people saw Kevin wearing the Foxes’ colours.

Fictional Sports World gets Actual Sports World’s obsessive fan violence spot on.

Also, I feel sorry for the students going to Palmetto State Uni who don’t give a fuck about Exy. Like, can y’all crazy sportsballheads stop vandalizing our campus like some people are trying to get an education here thank you. It’s like going to Hogwarts and just trying to live a chill regular life. Not happening.

As they arrive at Wymack’s house, a much-needed ray of sunshine appears: Nicky Hemmick.

Nicholas Hemmick was the only one who looked genuinely happy to see Neil. (…) “I’m Nicky.” Nicky gave Neil’s hand another hard squeeze before letting go. “Andrew and Aaron’s cousin, backliner extraordinaire.”

(…) “By blood?”

Nicky laughed. “Don’t look it, right?”

I would like to point out that this is the first time a character genuinely laughs in this entire book. And we’re on page 22.

What a guy. I’m honoured to be his namesake (with minor spelling differences). Please don’t turn out to be an aggressive fuckwit as well please.

Some predictions on Nicky’s character:

- his kink is bein’ friendly and havin’ a good time

- drama kid

- g l i t t e r

- super open abt his sexuality, just loves love, essentially pansexual

- can fuck u up but does it nicely because he wants to support you and help you grow as a person

- would die for his friends (and dogs)

- essentially my headcanon courfeyrac from les mis okay shut up

Ahem. Moving on.

“You have a nice car for someone who thinks he’s poor,” Neil said. (…)

“Aaron’s mother bought it for us with her life insurance money,” Andrew explained.

Okay but - Aaron’s mother? What? Surely Aaron’s mother is Andrew’s mother as well if they’re twins?

I don’t believe this is lazy writing. What is going on there.

“It’s not the world that’s cruel,” Neil said. “It’s the people in it.”

I don’t even want to know how many fangirls use this as their blog headline/Facebook status/moodboard caption/wrist tattoo.

[Neil] was too busy staring at Aaron’s pants pockets. They were much too flat to be hiding a pack of cigarettes, but Neil had seen Aaron put the pack away before crossing the street at the airport.

Are you telling me Neil is too busy staring at Aaron’s ass (which is actually Andrew’s ass, spoiler alert) to notice when to walk into Wymack’s apartment because that might be the best thing that’s happened so far.

(Unless we’re talking about front pockets, in which case, nevermind).

And then this happens:

“What was that all about?“

Neil’s blood turned to slush. It wasn’t the words that got him but the language Nicky used. German was Neil’s second language thanks to three years spent living in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

GERMANY! The mothercountry! Land of beer, sausage, and superfluously-stocked hardware stores!

Now the only thing I can imagine is Aaron and Andrew as coldmirror’s Torsten und Torben. I’m not even sorry.

“Team’s still split fifty-fifty on whether or not [Coach Wymack and Abby] are boning. Andrew refuses to vote, which means you’re the tiebreaker. Let us know ASAP. I’ve got money riding on it.”

To no one’s surprise, Nicky is Ultimate Shipping King. I love him more by the minute.

However, these short moments of glee are immediately overridden because this happens:

Too late, Neil remembered Nicky’s exasperated accusion in the living room: “What the hell did you say to him, Andrew?” Neil had assumed Nicky was referring to their first meeting in Millport, but Nicky had been talking about the car ride from the airport. It wasn’t Aaron who picked Neil up from the airport after all.

WHAAAAAT.

I mean… this is the oldest twin trick in the book, really. What is this, the Parent Trap?

No kidding, I’d pay to see the Twinyards with ginger pigtails dressed in early 20s fashion.

Also, Twinyards!! How did I not see that before!! Thank you, fandom, for finding the punniest names for everything ever.

(If you’re wondering whether I’m still laughing over this name as I type this: I am.)

Apparently, Andrew has some serious anger management issues and enough court-regulated drugs in his system to kill a small child, effectively making him a hardcore drug addict against his will.

WHAAAAAAAAAAT. No, seriously, WHAT.

The angst just does not stop, you guys.

Also, Wymack is back!

#dicksoutforwymack

Neil looked down at the key in his palm, at the security Wymack so easily and unquestioningly gave him. Maybe Neil wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, and amybe he’d spend the next couple weeks waking up every time Wymack snored a little too loud, but maybe Neil really was okay here for now.

Oh don’t mind me I’m just crying in the corner whilst stabbing myself with my own materialized emotions.

What. A. Dude.

On a last note: How sexual was the elevator scene. I can’t even quote anything or I’d need to just slap the entire thing here because dear god, the gay is not even subtle at all.

Neil couldn’t anticipate Kevin. (…) But Andrew was just a psychotic midget, and Neil had grown up around violence. Handling him would be easy.

Two things:

1. 20 bucks says it’s not gonna be fucking easy ho boy

2. Maybe chill on the m word, my dude.

Ughhhh. Is it Sunday already?

#the foxhole court #tfc #the raven king #the kings men #nora sakavic #nicki reads tfc #dicksoutforwymack #edit: edited the parts where I used the m word as I realized it was Not Fucking Okay

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silverhands-etcetera · 5 years

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Walking After Midnight.

I am so dehydrated. I took pretty good care of myself for the first three days of the tour. Water, exercise, etc. Things fell off on that first Sunday -what happened then? oh yeah, let’s blame France..

Switzerland was all sunny skies and parasailers as we split from Interlaken. In a couple hours we were back in France, and in a heavy rain out on the highway. We got a tray of sandwiches from the gig, so we avoided paying Switzerland prices for lunch, and headed back into the land of the Euro, -specifically, France again. on the way to Saarbruken, Germany.

Bottles of water inside the van & torrents of rain outside. It’s all grey and we’ve got PJ Harvey setting the audio moods, it’s working perfectly. I know that all of us in the band don’t meet in the middle on every kind of music. When we crossed into France the first time, coming from Germany, Aimee & I were in the front seat, she was driving (3rd position) and we were cranking out the Scorpions as a last shout out to Germany. In fact, we were listening to “Blackout” at the moment we crossed the border. I love the Scorpions. I’m not certain that everybody (or anybody) who was in the back seat at the time can even stand them.

We listen to a lot more music in this van than most band vans I have been in. Tastes vary, but I think everybody in here is gonna be cool as long as nobody plays the Eagles. There’s a world of stuff out there that I don’t know well, or know about at all. I don’t even have much music on my phone & I rely on these guys to curate the playlist for the long drives. I don’t take the time to listen to music on my own anymore, it’s a thing I need to change in my life. I count on time with my friends to keep music flowing into my ears.

—

By the time the roads straightened out & the mountains were down to reasonable levels, the sun was poking through the clouds. We were back in Germany -basically in Saarbrucken and it was early afternoon. The town is just minutes across the French border, and we were booked to play an Irish pub. Showtime wasn’t until 10 pm, and we were rolling in at 3:30. Idle hands..

The road into our part of town had us passing by a little platz with a Woolworth, a pharmacy, a bratwurst stand & a couple other odd stores. Streets extended out in every direction from the square, with retail possibilities on every corner, and then some. The town had a lot to offer, it seemed.

We checked into a bnb just up the street from the platz, and were hit by a deafening odor of sweet rot as we cleared the threshold of the building, that followed us up the stairs to our top floor room, but mercifully did not permeate our dwelling space. Every trip up & down the stairs was an exercise in lung capacity, as we all held our breath for the whole duration of the space between our apartment door & the street.

The lodging itself was lovely, modern & clean. But talk within the band centered around speculation over what the source of the odor in the hallway was. Best we can tell, it was a pile of garbage/dead things, or spoiled kimchee. Jokes about stinky things are the best. Basic humor that you can loop back around to with every new turn in a conversation.

—

Sherri & Aimee & I set out walking down to the little platz that we passed on the way in. I saw a Woolworth’s down there (I know, right?) and I wanted to look for a belt. I thought I could do without one on this trip, but my new jeans were a little contrary to this. Aimee saved me early on in the trip by offering me the one that she brought with her, and I was making it do. But everyone’s gotta keep their own pants up, so I needed to find my own. I wouldn’t wanna make my bad planning be responsible for somebody else’s saggy britches, we need to all look our tip-top, rock & roll best every day on this trip.

The Woolworth’s was a bust for good belts for me, but Sherri did find a cool backpack, and we kept on moving down the street. Lots of wonderful looking bakeries & candy shops all around the square, but no groceries visible to us. Down one of the side streets was a €1 store, and there was a rack of nylon strap belts right at the door. Nothing to write home about, but I reckon it’ll keep the gravity off of my pants until I get home, and the sign on the rack said it was only €1. I picked a grey one & took it to the cashier, who rang it up and gave me a number that was definitely not 1, or 1 plus tax. We had a very short talk in two languages where she tried to explain to me why it was so, and I tried to tell her I wasn’t gonna be buying the belt.

We went back out to the street, where the proprietor of the next shop had a rack of clothing out on the sidewalk, and a beautiful grey/brown Labrador was lounging unperturbed on a long bench. It was a second hand store, and most of the stuff on the rack was just random women’s clothing, but hanging on the end was an old black leather belt, with a simple chrome buckle. It might be just a large child’s belt, and it has been modified with extra holes to extend its grasp a few inches from its original design, but it fit me perfectly on the center hole. I told the shopkeeper that I would buy the belt if I could take a picture with her dog, and she more than happily obliged. I got to make a new friend. She was a quiet & noble dog who left me with a kiss on my ear as I snapped the photo.

With my new-found trouser security, we carried on down the street to see what else the town had for us. Plenty of bars, and a few closed restaurants, still more bakeries. We’d passed a vegetable shop on the way, & we decided to head back to round up some healthy fixings to take back to the apartment. An older couple were working the counter together, where we made our requests deli-style, through bits of English & French answered to us in German by the sweet woman who was gathering and carefully selecting every potato or onion as though her livelihood depended on our return business. We managed to pull together all the components for a supper & a breakfast, paid our order and asked her where we could buy some beer.

“ah, bier!” she said, and waved us outside. Pointing back to the square she said “to the Voolvorth, in the basement”

The Woolworth’s was actually just the street level of a larger shopping center, an entrance to the side put us on an escalator (descender?) going down to a discount grocery store. We were just looking for something to drink with supper, and our bargain sniffing tendencies sought out the cheapest Pilsner in the stack, which was on a special sale. I selected two or three bottles, and then reconsidered. This is a pretty good deal, we should get more. As I was mulling this over, Aimee spoke up & asked “should we just get a whole case?” (Case=20 one-liter bottles) Of course, she was right to ask this, and wise in making such a suggestion.

A little quick math & conversion told me that we were looking at a transaction of roughly five gallons of beer for about seven dollars. At these prices we would be foolish not to spend the money we saved on a bottle of their finest $6 whiskey.

Nothing to see here, just three smallish americans carrying 20 liters of beer about seven blocks up to their rental flat for supper.

—

Saarbrucken is actually a bigger town than it appeared to be on our little walk around the square. GPS directions in the van put us out on a highway for several kilometers and dropped us in a totally different town square with a completely different feel. This place was bustling, Lots of high fashion shopping and bars that were leaning closer to the nightclub side of things than the local taverns we saw earlier.

We’re at Old Murphy’s, an Irish Pub, -which apparently any country can have. They share a pedestrian square with several other bars, and there’s no way to get a car within two blocks of the place. Michael pulled into the taxi lane & put on the flashers while the rest of us started hauling gear into and across the cobblestones, past the shops and their window dressings with ten foot tall models in their underwear staring us in the eye like vacant, capitalist Mona Lisas, and the early drunks reveling among the tables & chairs all across the square. The ground was still damp from rain, but the evening was warm. The carrying was fine, but rolling the big amp cases across the uneven stones had to be done frustratingly slowly. It’s all good though, the lengths it takes to get to and from the gig are what I feel like I get paid for. Once we go on, I’m just happy to be there.

The stage was in the basement, in a little cavern of a room with arched ceilings and stucco walls. PA speakers were already hung and a SUPER basic powered mixer was set up. Aimee had to move & stack a row of full beer kegs to build herself a bunker to set the drums up in, and once she was settled in, the only access or egress was made by climbing over the kit. We tucked Michael’s amp halfway under the ride cymbal, put the bass amp on the floor under the crash, and set Sherri’s amp on top of it, so I had a full stack of amps to lean against.

The staff was all hip, edgy-looking young dudes, with the right tattoos, and they set us up with a round of beers. After the first set, the younger looking one with the bun in his hair, told us that they’d never had a band as “huge” as us there before. I’m not sure if he meant huge measured in size, or in decibels, but he really loved us, so we took the compliment and he took the tip jar around the room to get us some extra cash.

People filed in and out of the packed basement all night, but the first three tables stayed glued to their seats watching the show. I reckon we were pretty loud for that space, even filled with bodies and chatter, as it was almost the entire evening. But I was enjoying opening up the songs a little, and I loved the proximity to the drums. I could feel a little concussion of air pushing onto me every time Aimee hit the rack tom. Sherri’s amp was actually shaking me as we played. The music was a physical experience. It was another marathon set, all the way to 1 am, and the boys at the bar kept the pints of Guinness coming.

—

We broke down the gear and Sherri sold a few records to the folks at the front tables. I never got their story -were they already fans? did they find the show by accident?

We rolled all the amps & gear out in about five trips, and came back to do one last check. I asked one of the bartenders if they could spare us a pitcher of ice, and he was kind of perplexed and asked my why. I told him we had a bottle of bad whiskey back at the house, and he gave me a solid nod.

I waited by myself with the last armload of gear until the bartender came back with our ice, in a plastic grocery bag, full to the top and tied off. Then off I went, some random american, carrying the shittiest functional hi-hat stand on the planet, & a rented yamaha drum throne over his left shoulder, with a bag full of ice in the other hand, walking alone across a square in Saarbrucken to his waiting friends.

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antispryt · 5 years

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Plan Check: Modern American Cuisine

Новая Запись была опубликована на https://antispryt.ru/plan-check-modern-american-cuisine/

Plan Check: Modern American Cuisine

What’s possible in a week? If you dedicated seven days to the achievement of one goal, how ambitious could you make this goal? These were the questions that the multilingual friends Katy and Sara posed themselves when they determined to learn English in one week, to prove that it can be done and anyone can do it with the right methods.

They would attempt to liberate themselves from the distractions and responsibilities of modern-day life in order to cram eight hours of study time and I was observing some of the world’s most capable language learners at work.

The language learning expert: Sara

The friends set themselves the challenge of learning a language in a week in order to stretch themselves, and then it was a question of choosing which language to learn. English presented itself as a natural option; there are nigh on 300,000 English speakers in Germany’s capital, and the areas are dotted with stores adorned with signs in English.

«Truly understanding one’s environment requires one to first understand English»

The first operational step in the friends learning process was to decorate the entire apartment with sticky notes. This had an almost ceremonial touch to it as the friends delved into dictionaries and proceeded to label everything with its corresponding English name.

Within the space of about an hour it was impossible to carry out any menial task, be it making a coffee or flicking off a light switch, without first being presented with at least three different words related to this action.

Sara learning in the park

The importance of the other twin’s presence became immediately apparent as Katy and Sara delegated responsibilities for rooms to decorate with sticky notes. This simple task was augmented by continuous little tests that they would spring on one another, and the fact that they split up their day slightly differently and studied different topics meant that each twin became a source of knowledge for the other.

The most extraordinary moment came towards the end of the week!

The friends simply switched their everyday conversations to English, asking one another if they wanted tea or coffee, were ready to cook dinner or when they were going to leave the house.

Katy and Sara had numerous micro-challenges throughout the week. On the first day they were visited by a English friend who greeted them in English and complimented them on how quickly they’d picked up their first words and phrases.

They then learned the names of fruits and the numbers from one to a billion so that they could visit the English market (although they refrained from purchasing nine hundred thousand kumquats). Displaying their haul after their first functional exchange in English, they beamed with pride and a palpable sense of accomplishment before marching back home to study further.

Katy playing audio lessons

On our second visit to the brother’s apartment 24 hours into the week, we found them sampling dozens of different kinds of English snacks.

Like kids staring at the backs of cereal packs before heading to school, the nutritional information and various special offers and competitions on the packaging were analysed during snack breaks.

There was no moment of complete removal from the language learning process during the eight hours that the friends had allotted to it.

They were constantly using their existing knowledge to support the ever-growing knowledge of English, this being the root of their success.

«you will likely come across words that share common origins with your native tongue»

The friends spent a lot of time engrossed in books or on their computers and apps, flicking and swiping their way through exercises eagerly, but at other times they were to be found searching busily for English radio stations and write-ups of English football games on the web.

There is no definitive method to learn a language fluently

All too often, people enter their weekly language class to converse with their teacher, but then barely have any contact with other speakers and that’s not enough.

The old saying that we can solve problems more effectively when we sleep on it may be especially true if the problem we’re trying to solve is learning a new language.

Motivated Katy out to the library

Researchers from two Swiss universities wanted to know if they could enhance the learning of words from a foreign language by exposing people to the words during non-rapid eye movement sleep the deep, dreamless sleep period that most of us experience during the first few hours of the night.

To find out, they gathered two groups of study participants, all of whom were native German speakers, and gave them a series of Dutch-to-German word pairs to learn at 10 pm. One group was then instructed to get some sleep, while the other group was kept awake.For the next few hours both groups listened to an audio playback of the word pairs they’d already been exposed to and some they hadn’t yet heard.

The researchers then re-gathered both groups at 2 am and gave them a test of the Dutch words to uncover any differences in learning. And indeed there was a difference:

«The group that listened to the words during sleep did better at recalling the words they’d heard»

The simple yet potent trick the researchers employed is known as verbal cueing, and this isn’t the first claim made for its success while sleeping. But what makes this study different is that it puts a finer point on the conditions necessary for this trick to actually work namely, it only works when we’ve already been exposed to the verbal cues before we sleep.

The researchers added a techie dimension by conducting electroencephalographic (EEG)recordings of the sleeping participants brains to track neural electrical activity during the learning period.

They found that learning the foreign words overlapped with the appearance of theta brain waves, an intriguing result since theta is the brain wave state often associated with heightened learning while awake (usually we’re in either the high-frequency, high-alertness alpha or beta states while awake, but it’s thought possible to induce theta state slower in frequency than alpha and beta through concentration techniques).

Добавляйтесь в наш tumblr @antispryt и следите за новыми полезными постами. Вы также можете подписаться на наши рассылки новостей сайта, вступайте в наши группы и добавляйтесь в друзья в социальных сетях. #antispryt #антиспрут #новости #новостироссии #новоститимашевска #новостивтимашевске #сми #редакциягазеты #тимашевск #мойтимашевск #городароссии #россия #нашастрана #онф

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cathrynstreich · 5 years

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The Path to Global Diversity

LeadingRE’s Culturally-Inclusive Approach to Business, Abroad and at Home

Editor’s Note: This is the cover story in the April issue of RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine. Subscribe today.

Simply having a presence in countries around the globe doesn’t necessarily mean you embrace cultural diversity. Truly understanding cultural diversity goes much deeper than that.

“When you have members in more than 75 countries encompassing so many different cultures, there’s a real art to doing business,” says Paul Boomsma, president and CEO of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World® (LeadingRE). “Global opportunities involve dealing with someone who is not like you, and that’s what embracing diversity is all about—not just understanding your differences, but celebrating them, and helping people realize their dream of homeownership. If we don’t do this well, we won’t be successful.”

Clearly, LeadingRE is very successful at doing just that. The organization facilitated introductions into more than 100 countries over the last year, and, as members continue to strengthen relationships with network colleagues, the frequency of these introductions is expected to rise.

“There is a very high level of trust, which is essential when you are referring clients internationally,” explains LeadingRE member Berry Everitt, Group CEO of Chas Everitt International Property Group in Johannesburg, South Africa. “The LeadingRE events enable us to interact personally, learn about one another’s countries and real estate markets, and build friendships as well as business relationships. This further facilitates our mutual success in an increasingly global marketplace.”

LeadingRE’s 2018 Global Symposium was held in Barcelona, Spain at the Hotel Arts. Members from among the network’s more than 75 countries came together to connect, learn and celebrate accomplishments. (Credit: AJ Canaria of PlanOmatic)

But for LeadingRE, cultural awareness is not just about doing deals across borders; it’s about a commitment to doing business in a way that recognizes—and encompasses—diversity, no matter where you are in the world, including right here in the U.S.

To that end, LeadingRE makes sure cultural diversity is not just a principle that sits atop the organization, but a pulse that beats throughout the entire network. Through a series of events and training, the organization makes cultural awareness and sensitivity part of its DNA.

LeadingRE President & CEO Paul Boomsma leads an exchange on the trends impacting the industry at the network’s 2019 conference with (L to R) LeadingRE Chief Economist Dr. Marci Rossell; Mike Pappas, The Keyes Company; Carol Bulman, Jack Conway & Co.; Chris Dietz, LeadingRE; Lennox Scott, John L. Scott Real Estate; and (not pictured) Steve Harney, Keeping Current Matters.

“We host ‘The World of Real Estate’ series at our global events to introduce people to the real estate practices of other countries and cultures,” says LeadingRE EVP of Global Operations Chris Dietz. “We have our cross-border introduction service to make those personal connections and help our people understand the nuances of this type of business. We also offer courses through Institute, our 24/7 online learning platform. And, our recent general session speaker at our annual conference was Professor Erin Meyer, author of ‘The Culture Map,’ whose presentation focused on the importance of cultural sensitivity.”

LeadingRE’s luxury home marketing division, Luxury Portfolio International®, extends this education with an emphasis on high-net worth individuals around the world. A recent whitepaper, “Luxury Real Estate: What Matters Most to Today’s Global Elite,” revealed differences—and commonalities—among affluent consumers in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. According to Luxury Portfolio President Stephanie Anton, “being able to offer deep, research-based insights into the global, affluent consumer helps our members deepen their relationships and better serve their customers.”

This widespread investment in varied and consistent cultural diversity education is a proven factor in the success of LeadingRE’s members. As Dima Lorenz, managing director of Ark Properties in Shanghai, says, “There is no question that most of our markets are becoming more global, and with a well-documented increase of non-local buyers in almost all key international markets, a certain amount of cultural sensitivity is a foundation for moving forward.”

And, while LeadingRE’s global diversity training prepares members to do business around the world, it also helps American members embrace diversity at home.

Brokerage leaders from around the world recently gathered at LeadingRE’s Conference Week in Las Vegas (L to R): Jeremy Hurst, IRG Intl. Realty Group, British West Indies; Dima Lorenz, Ark Properties, Shanghai, China; Benedetta Viganò, Giorgio Viganò Real Estate, Milan Italy; Chris Dietz, LeadingRE; Berry Everitt, Chas Everitt Intl. Property Group, Johannesburg, South Africa; Frank Morrice Arias, Servmor Realty, Panama City, Panama (Credit: AJ Canaria of PlanOmatic)

“When you open your mind, you start to see how many global cultures exist right here in the U.S.,” explains Boomsma, concerned that many real estate professionals overlook the impact and the opportunities. “Currently, 350 different languages are spoken in the United States, and 22 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home,” he explains. “There are more non-English speaking people in New York City than there are in London. The bottom line is that diversity of all kinds is around us wherever we are, and we all need to pay attention to it.”

For Boomsma and the team at LeadingRE, cultural diversity is not just another bullet point in their value proposition…it’s fundamentally who they are. “It’s a key part of what we do,” he says. “We’re introducing someone, somewhere in the world every few minutes, so we see the amount of movement happening globally. We’re open-minded and ready to embrace someone everywhere in the world at all times.”

Ambassadors of Global DiversityCarrying out the mission to embrace global diversity is LeadingRE’s network of 565 brokers located on six continents. Each day, they’re looking beyond borders to build business and, more importantly, lifelong relationships. Here, five members from various corners of the globe share how diversity has led their business, their markets and their mindsets toward important growth.

Having grown up in his family’s real estate business, Berry Everitt officially joined Chas Everitt International in 1990 and bought the firm from his father, Charles, in 1997. What started as a relatively small, family-owned company in Johannesburg has grown into the fourth-largest real estate company in South Africa, with what Everitt describes as “154 points of presence across the country” and about 1,300 agents.

According to Everitt, his company thrives in one of the most culturally-rich areas of the globe.

“Known as the ‘Rainbow Nation,’ South Africa really is one of the most diverse, cosmopolitan countries in the world, a melting pot that continues to surprise outsiders with its high level of acceptance and tolerance for different languages, ethnicities, cultures and beliefs—and to attract more immigrants as its democracy matures,” says Everitt.

Embracing cultural diversity will be critical for real estate firms to succeed today and into the future, says Everitt. “Investors everywhere seek the best returns,” he explains. “However, the investors bring their own perspectives, with likes, dislikes and beliefs that are grounded in their own experiences and environments. Thus, it is vital for real estate companies to have the intercontinental cultural savvy—or access to local experts in an organization like LeadingRE—to make their offering compelling to widely diverse investors in different locales.”

Dima Lorenz started Ark Properties in Shanghai in 2005 with his business partner and now wife, Kate.

When it comes to doing business in a global environment, Dima and Kate Lorenz embody the very definition of cultural diversity. “I myself am a German passport holder, born in Hong Kong to a Russian emigrant family, but grew up in Germany and was educated in the UK. My wife comes from a British expatriate family, but had her entire upbringing abroad, in Africa and the Middle East. We now live in Hong Kong and commute between Hong Kong and Shanghai. This set-up alone is grounds for enough cultural confusion,” laughs Lorenz.

However, it has given the Lorenzes an intimate understanding of the importance of embracing global diversity. “We are dealing with clients from the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia and putting them together with Chinese landlords on any given day,” he explains. “My wife is a certified cross-cultural trainer and executive coach. We conduct sessions and workshops regularly for our team to make sure they have the right skills—or just general awareness to deal with clients from various backgrounds.”

And despite their personal backgrounds and accumulated expertise in cultural diversity, the Lorenzes describe joining LeadingRE as an “eye-opener.”

“Having access to privately-owned leading brokerages that share the same passion for their clients and local communities has given us the opportunity to really understand the cultural norms displayed in other real estate markets,” explains Lorenz.

Founded in 1960, Giorgio Viganò Real Estate is headed by 29-year real estate veteran Benedetta Viganò.

The company enjoys a healthy, active market in Milan. According to Viganò, since the 2015 EXPO—a universal, six-month exposition—Milan has become the point of reference for residential and commercial real estate investments.

Being prepared to do business in a global environment is critical to Viganò’s success, she explains. “Italy has signed the Reciprocity Act; therefore, almost anyone can buy here, if an Italian can buy in their countries,” she explains. “Opportunities are many, and surely, the most important (factor) is word-of-mouth. If you sell a property to a foreign buyer, he or she will certainly refer your company to their friends and clients because they know you are an expert, and they trust you because you respect their culture.”

The importance of embracing global diversity—and the role that LeadingRE plays—cannot be underestimated, says Viganò. “Clients who want to move to other countries need to be understood and respected. It is always scary to buy where you are a foreign citizen, as it might take years before you are able to embrace another culture. Our long history with LeadingRE has helped us to know the cultural differences of other countries, and the relationships we have built allow us to introduce our clients to people we know personally.”

Thriving in the ever-growing Philippines real estate market, Pinnacle Real Estate Consulting Services, Inc. is led by Michael Mabutol, with 18 years in the real estate business. With two offices, 150 full-time employees and more than 800 co-brokers across the nation, Mabutol helps the firm navigate important market trends, such as co-working spaces, income-generating properties and township projects.

According to Mabutol, “the Philippine market has been continuously diversifying. A few years ago, service offices and co-working spaces were virtually unheard of, but now, there are more than 150 players in this space. The retail market is equally buoyant despite heavy competition from the e-commerce industry. The government has cleared some roadblocks for the implementation of REITs, which will provide local and foreign investors more options to park their capital.”

Michael Mabutol shares insights with fellow members during LeadingRE’s Global Symposium. (Credit: AJ Canaria of PlanOmatic)

All of this is leading to an increasingly global landscape. “We’re living in a global market,” explains Mabutol. “Opportunities are coming from different parts of the world. Borders are also becoming increasingly porous, enabling much-needed capital to cross borders more efficiently. For instance, the ASEAN region is slowly integrating into a single market, and companies that embrace diversity and are well-equipped to work with other nationalities will find success in every market they venture into.”

This is where LeadingRE is an invaluable asset, allowing Mabutol to learn from fellow members and share information and best practices. “Being part of LeadingRE has opened doors for us and enabled us to tap into other markets.”

Frank Morrice Arias has been the broker/owner of Panama’s Servmor Realty since 2001. Servmor has been the largest firm in MLS production for Panama since 2012.

With an overstock of inventory in the mid- to high-residential market, Morrice currently finds himself in a buyer’s market. However, he expects an improvement in Latin American economies to help absorb excess inventory in the years ahead. “Panama’s GDP has grown over 5 percent in recent years, and 2019 is forecasting a 6.3 percent increase in GDP, so our general fundamentals are okay,” he explains.

According to Morrice, one of the main challenges for firms outside of the U.S. is a “lack of adequate policies to regulate the industry, develop new agents and implement an MLS, which has an impact on the level of professionalism. We started an MLS in 2012, which has been a catalyst to increase the level of transparency and professionalism in our industry, but it is a culture change. We expect it will take several more years for it to be the norm.”

In the meantime, Morrice is able to take advantage of different opportunities and educate himself on how to increase business through his involvement with LeadingRE. “I do believe real estate is local, but being able to have access to relationships and understanding the global marketplace through our affiliation with LeadingRE has lots of value. It is critical for undeveloped markets like ours to learn from more developed markets like the U.S. so we can establish strategies on how we can be better and create more value for our customers.”

A World of Possibility Ultimately, LeadingRE’s roadmap is focused on driving opportunities to its members worldwide and providing systems, connections and education to support their success—including the insights that come from being part of a truly global organization.

“We are uniquely positioned to benefit from the diversity that comes from having members in all corners of the world,” says Boomsma. “Whether working with a client from another country or within your own diverse community, tapping into what we can learn from one another is incredibly powerful.”

For more information, please visit www.leadingre.com.

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at [email protected].

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