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FBS Traders party Indonesia
On August 24, FBS team celebrated financial freedom and success at the Indonesian Traders Party with local traders and partners. The party was held in a drop dead gorgeous 5-star The Stones Hotel in Legian, Bali, hosting excited FBS traders and partners from all over Indonesia.
The event started with a welcome speech – company's leaders reminded the guests of the importance of dreaming big, since dreams tend to come true. And Bali Traders Party-2017 doubtlessly proved the thesis to the guests.
We welcomed to the stage FBS' most devoted partners and traders who shared their impressions of working with the best broker. Picturesque drum show was a great opening act for Indonesia's favorites: Rio Febrian, Rossa, and Bunga Citra Lestari!
Rio Febrian totally set the place on fire with his energy, gladly took pictures with the crowd and gave this party a great vibe. The guests couldn't stop singing along with Rossa, and Bunga Citra Lestari performance made our guests totally happy. Later, celebrity guests helped with announcing the winners of the raffle drawing, presenting hi-tech gadgets to 14 lucky folks. Rio Febrian, Rossa, and Bunga Citra Lestari greeted the winners with a final collaboration song, signed FBS flags and hopefully enjoyed the night as much as we did.
The main event was yet to come though – we raffled the keys to a brand-new Mazda Hoki! The winner, Mr. Karim Abidin, confessed that he came over with a clear goal - he wanted to win the car. And again, a big dream came true thanks to FBS! We will solemnly drive Mr. Abidin's new Mazda to his hometown of Makassar soon – stay tuned to see the details!
Thanks, Indonesia, you are such an inspiration! See you soon!
तत्काल खोलने


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A hypothesis:
Social cohesion is a result of citizens sharing a desire to believe something they all have a tiny private inkling might seem less true if they thought about it too much. They subconsciously know belief is easier when ubiquitously reinforced in social surroundings, and also that their beliefs are more enjoyable than the alternative. Thus they have a strong interest in religious behaviour in others and in their own feeling of unshakable commitment to those who practice it. So they encourage it with enthusiastic participation and try to ensconce themselves as much as necessary to feel safe from reality. If we found conclusive evidence of a god, everyone would be safe, and could get back to non-cohesion; it's the possibility that the sky is chockers with nothingness that gives everyone the incentive for solidarity.
To test hypothesis, compare cohesion across other groups with beliefs (religious or otherwise) of varying tenuousness and of varying importance to their believers.

subset: commoncrawl


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Gerasimov vows more non-military war against America
Russia's large-scale military buildup is being augmented by greater use of non-military warfare against the United States, the chief of the Russian general staff revealed last week.
Gen. Valery Gerasimov, author of Russia's use of "hybrid" warfare, announced the greater adoption of asymmetric warfare tools—cyber, space, and information weapons—in response to what he said are stepped up plans for information operations by the Pentagon. Continue reading


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When President Donald Trump slapped a stiff duty on 279 categories of Chinese goods last month, Don DiCostanzo was ready.
The CEO of Pedego Electric Bikes, based in Fountain Valley, had figured the new 25 percent tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese imports would cost him $1 million by the end of the year.
No small sum for a company whose $18.6 million in revenue last year mostly depended on three factories outside Shanghai.
So is DiCostanzo moving his manufacturing to the United States? Is he bringing back jobs and helping to slash the nation's trade deficit — Trump's oft-touted goals?
"Absolutely not — there's no way," said the effervescent 61-year-old entrepreneur who, as it happens, is a Trump supporter.
Next month Pedego, a leading electric bike seller with 140 branded stores in 33 states and hundreds of independent distributors, plans to open a new factory in tariff-free Vietnam. And it expects to raise the average price of its e-bikes by $300 — about 8 percent — to absorb the cost of adjusting its supply chain.
"Anyone who says they're making electric bikes in the U.S. is lying," DiCostanzo asserted. "The reality is not even a spoke is made in this country. … We wouldn't exist without a global supply chain."
A booming $17 billion global industry with a growing California presence, e-bikes offer a case study of the fallout from Trump's tense trade war with China. While high tariffs could help some American factories by making foreign products more expensive, they are already hurting many U.S. companies — from steel pipe manufacturers to solar panel installers, all of which depend on imports to make a profit.
RELATED: A look at U.S. tariffs in the past and where we are headed with China
Electric bikes — basically, bicycles with rechargeable motors attached — are expensive, ranging from about $1,000 for basic models to $10,000 for luxury versions. But they are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. bicycle market, thanks to an aging boomer population with leisure time for recreation and the need for an optional assist up challenging hills.
High tariffs could slow that growth. Ninety percent of the estimated 263,000 electric bicycles sold in the U.S. last year were made in China, with the remainder sourced from Taiwan and Vietnam. From crowd-funded entrepreneurs to established firms, virtually all the nation's roughly 300 e-bike companies are feeling the pain.
The impact in Southern California, with its balmy weather and fitness ethos, is especially stark. Some 40 e-bike companies are located in the Los Angeles region, the highest concentration in the nation, according to Ed Benjamin, chairman of the Florida-based Light Electric Vehicle Association.
"Bikes are the healthiest, most efficient form of transportation," said Michael Fishman, president of Pure Cycles, an 8-year old Burbank company that added e-bikes to its 10-model line last year. "And e-bikes are the way to get more people on bikes."
Sourcing from China, Pure Cycles has been selling 20,000 standard bikes a year, but in just 18 months, its two electric models have come to account for a quarter of its revenues. On Aug. 23, the day Trump's 25 percent tariff took effect, the company felt obliged to raise its e-bike price to $2,499 from $1,999.
"This is a huge bummer for consumers," Fishman said. "It will price people out of this great new category. E-bikes are never going to hit the mainstream with this tariff."
Nor will the tariffs boost American jobs "because no one manufactures bikes in the U.S.," he added. "We are getting quotes from Vietnam and Taiwan, but a manufacturing relationship is a huge part of business. China makes the highest quality bikes at the best price."
Benjamin calls electric bikes "the biggest transportation industry you never heard of. Every day, 260 million people ride electric bikes to work — 250 million of them in China," he said. In Europe, 10 million e-bikes are in operation. Just a million have been sold in the U.S., but he predicts that by 2030, they could account for half the bicycles in the world.
In Fountain Valley, DiCostanzo, dressed in an open-collar shirt, shorts, sneakers and an Apple watch, bounded through Pedego's warehouse showing off commuter bikes, beach cruisers, mountain bikes, even a tandem. "We came out with purple this year," he said. "And raspberry. One really hot color is greige — a blend of gray and beige."
He whipped out his cell phone to show a snapshot of Martha Stewart with the Pedego she just bought in Bar Harbor, Maine. A company catalog features a testimonial from Star Trek actor William Shatner whose extended family owns 16 Pedegos.
When the Trump administration proposed the tariffs in June, DiCostanzo quickly turbo-charged orders from his Chinese factories, doubling his inventory to 4,000 e-bikes, now stacked high to the ceiling in cardboard boxes. That will tide the company over until the Vietnam factory is fully operational.
Only three final containers, arriving from China through the Port of Long Beach in the days after Aug. 23, were slapped with duties: $150,000 worth.
In the warehouse, several assembly workers were busy unpacking the Chinese bikes which arrive with detached handlebars, front wheels and pedals.
"We fully assemble and test ride them after dialing in the brakes, shifters and properly inflating the tires," said DiCostanzo, who employs 42 at the Fountain Valley facility. "Our customers get choices of seats, tires, hand grips and options like front suspension forks. We make those changes at the time of final assembly."
The complexity of the supply chain for even a small company such as Pedego illustrates why tariffs aimed at China may fall short of their goal.
After designing and building prototypes of its bikes in Fountain Valley, Pedego tells its factories what kind of attributes it wants for 50-plus parts — rust-resistant chains, for instance. But the origin of those components can be murky.
"When people say 'manufactured in China, or Vietnam, or Taiwan,' you have to drill down," DiCostanzo said.
"Our tires are from Schwalbe, a German company, and they are stamped 'Made in Indonesia' but the rubber comes from Malaysia. Our brakes are from a Chicago company called SRAM, but they're made either in China or Taiwan.
"We can make a bike in Taiwan, and buy a motor from Shimano, a Japanese company. But its cells come from Panasonic, a Korean company, and are made in Singapore for a battery pack processed in China. And the batteries' lithium may have come from Brazil."
Given China's extensive bike parts infrastructure, built up over decades, a factory now exporting "Made in Vietnam" e-bikes to the U.S. could be still be sourcing most components from China.
"The trick is not to assemble in China," DiCostanzo said.
Still, with 5 percent of its sales in Europe and hopes of growing its European market, Pedego plans to obtain most of its future parts from outside China. That's because the European Union, which slapped hefty anti-dumping penalties on China this year, sets a 60 percent cap on Chinese parts.
As of now, the U.S. has not adopted a similar rule "but we plan to minimize the parts made in China in case that changes," DiCostanzo said.
The threat of stiffer European duties was what spurred Pedego to begin looking for a Vietnam factory to handle its European exports even before U.S. tariffs were proposed. "But we weren't planning to accelerate the process," DiCostanzo said. "We hoped we could fight it."
The August duties on Chinese-made e-bikes and 278 other categories of goods from tractors to plastic tubes to speedometers, followed earlier Trump administration tariff rounds on steel and aluminum, and on $34 billion of other Chinese goods, prompting tit-for-tat tariffs by China on U.S. exports.
How were e-bikes chosen for the $16 billion round in August? The U.S. Trade Representative's office has offered no specifics. Its news release states all the tariffs resulted from an "exhaustive" investigation and a "response to China's unfair trade practices related to the forced transfer of American technology and intellectual property."
On July 23, DiCostanzo had traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify before a U.S. Trade Representative panel, along with an attorney from Trek Bicycle Corp., a large Wisconsin importer. They each had five minutes to make their case.
DiCostanzo found the agency panelists to be confused. "They asked me, 'Aren't you afraid of the Chinese stealing intellectual property?' My response was: 'Absolutely not.' They said 'Why not?' I said, 'Because we don't have any!'"
"So they turned to the guy next to me, and he said, 'I'm not aware of a single patent on electric bikes.' If they were targeting items for intellectual property, they picked the wrong people.'"
Trump vigorously defends the tariff offensive, announcing that the next round of duties will target $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, amounting to about half of Chinese imports. As it happens, those products include standard bicycles, too.
"Tariffs will make our country much richer than it is today," Trump tweeted Aug. 4. "Only fools would disagree. We are using them to negotiate fair trade deals and, if countries are still unwilling to negotiate, they will pay us vast sums of money in the form of Tariffs."
The following day he added, "Tariffs are working big time. Every country on earth wants to take wealth out of the U.S., always to our detriment. I say, as they come, Tax them. If they don't want to be taxed, let them make or build the product in the U.S."
E-bike companies say they would like nothing better than to manufacture in the U.S. But, said DiCostanzo, "Even if we could make them here, our $3,000 bike would probably cost $10,000.
"For instance," he added, "we'd have to spend millions of dollars just on a paint booth to absorb contaminants. Why do you think Apple, a U.S. company, makes its phones in China? China doesn't have the same compliance rules."
Moreover, DiCostanzo's Chinese factory workers earn about $3 an hour, he said, and in Vietnam, the wages are even lower.
Wouldn't consumers be more likely to buy an e-bike labeled "Made in the USA?"
"That's been tested a gazillion times," he replied. "In the end, it's their pocketbook that matters. Go to Costco, Target, Walmart — almost everything they sell, other than food, comes from China."
DiCostanzo voted for Trump and still supports him. "I'm not saying I like him personally," he added. "But I've always maintained that business people should be in Washington, not career politicians who don't really understand business."
And how has that worked out for the e-bike business?
Tariffs are being applied "indiscriminately," DiCostanzo acknowledged, adding that he worries "if we had an all-out trade war with China right now, almost every retailer in this country would see a lot of their business dry up.
"You would walk down the aisles and everything would cost twice the price as before. People could lose their jobs. It could spiral into a depression."
Still, he said, "The jury is still out" on the administration's overall trade policy. "The president's trade experts want to flush out the inequalities in the tariff system worldwide. So they have drawn a line in the sand. China should honor our laws and our intellectual property."
Tariffs should be applied gradually, he suggested, adding, "The administration hasn't tariffed everything."


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The Accidental Porn PusherPosted: May 31, 2015 Filed under: Creativity, Erotic, Feminism, Sexuality, Woman, writing | Tags: Audre Lorde, Sexual Abuse, The uses of the erotic 69 Comments
The other day I printed out a list of search words that people have used, landing them on my blog. Aside from the expected—find my sensuality, stories of women, big round belly, female breast stories, what happened to Barbie's Skipper—some other interesting terms come up, including:
- Filipino girls for pleasure
- Her face as she climaxes
- Girl pleasures herself with her tummy out
- Beautiful lady pushing beer bottle in vagina
Based on these terms I suspect that there are people searching for pornography who are finding Stories from the Belly instead.
This isn't the first time my work has been mistaken on the surface for pornography. Several years ago I wrote a chapbook of poetry and prose that I gave to family and friends. When I asked an uncle what he thought of my work, he said, "I didn't finish it because I don't read porn."
Porn? I thought. Could he and I be talking about the same chapbook?
The collection had come out of a writing class in which we were told to put together what we'd written into self-published form. As someone who suffered from writer's block for years, I was thrilled to have generated anything at all.
My poems and short essays covered a range of topics—from a poem fantasizing about life as the real Laura Ingalls Wilder to one about how I always tried to be whatever the man in my life needed instead of just being myself. There are also references throughout alluding to sexual and sensual experiences. But did that instantly qualify my work as porn?
"Are you sure that you are referring to my chapbook?" I said.
"Yes." He replied. "There is no way I will read the whole thing. It goes against my values."
His response devastated me. Could my work be that offensive? And how could I be making porn and not even know it? I don't even like pornography because of how it objectifies women and turns sex into exaggerated acts of performance.
If my uncle was right, then surely the world would be a better place without me as a writer pushing that type of material out into the planet.
That night, I went online and got on Merriam Webster.com to look up the word:
Pornography "noun por·nog·ra·phy \-fē\: movies, pictures, magazines, etc., that show or describe naked people or sex in a very open and direct way in order to cause sexual excitement.
Is that what I had done? I went through every page of my chapbook looking for explicit descriptions of sex or naked people but couldn't find any. Granted, in one poem there is a line about how I kissed a different boy every day my freshman year in college. In another poem, I write about having sex with a lover under a mango tree (although—full disclosure—that never happened. I just liked the imagery that the words evoked).
But were sentences like that enough to cause sexual excitement in anyone? And even if they did—was that my fault? And what would be wrong with that anyways? And If I were to ever describe a sexual experience in detail, would that automatically make it pornographic?
My uncle's reaction to my work played on my fears that my writing was not fit for public consumption. I worried that he was right and I lacked the barometer for knowing the difference between the appropriate and the profane. I even considered placing an X-rated label on the cover of my chapbook as a warning.
In The Uses of the Erotic, feminist and author Audre Lorde wrote about how people often mistake the erotic for the pornographic: "The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation." When in reality, she explained, the erotic is "the assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives."
For me, that first chapbook was the re-accessing of my creative force that I'd stopped up for so long. One of the reasons that I had subconsciously blocked myself as a writer was because I was so afraid that if I did write from my depths, one particular story would come rising to the surface, forcing me to deal with its truth—and that is exactly what happened. It was the story about how I was sexually abused when I was a child. And so began the process of me taking back my voice, my creativity, my body, and my sexuality as my own as I exorcised what was not mine—in reclamation of my feminine erotic nature.
Years later, I have a stronger sense of what my work is and what it is not. But that isn't to say that I sometimes still don't get paranoid and worry.
When I first launched this blog, knowing some of the topics I was dying to tackle, the old fears came up. For about five minutes, I literally marked my site as X-rated to warn unsuspecting people away from its contents—and then I decided to do as Lorde suggested and stop misnaming the erotic. No more using it to shame women, including me.
Still, with all the confusion that exists between the erotic and the pornographic, I shouldn't be surprised that when some people go searching for porn they wind up here. What must the reader searching for "girls allow snake to pass through the vagina" think about my posts? Or the reader wanting to see "boyfriend shrinks and goes into girlfriend's womb." I wonder.
Imagining the startled, WTF expression on their faces makes me smile.
69 Comments on "The Accidental Porn Pusher"
Well, I'm certain you're only telling the tip of the iceberg of weird landings on your blog. What's creepier are stalkers…in blogosphere.
Speaking of erotic vs. porn, I found out a few months ago my oldest niece is a romance writer. In fact, 1 of the novels verges on soft porn or eroticism.
There's a long story about this transformation…. anyway.


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Trash and Soul (Pablo Reinoso) / PennyDog (Kerry Wilkinson)
Let one man's trash become your treasure. Paris-based Pablo Reinoso (originally from Argentina) is the designer behind Trash and Soul, where everyday garbage is gold. The trashbags and lemon peels above will run you €580-€1,180 (~US$850-$1,700); view more styles on his site.
Bonus link: for another dose of citrus, check out PennyDog, where England's Kerry Wilkinson offers lemons, limes and oranges encased in resin.
Even more jewellery:
- PetitPlat (France) - miniature food
- Parsprototo (Germany) - pearls on circles
- Susan Lenart Kazmer (Ohio) - mixed media


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Bourignon, Antoinette
Bourignon, Antoinette äNtwänĕt´ bo͞orēnyôN´ [key], 1616–80, Flemish Christian mystic, adherent of quietism. In 1636 she fled from home to avoid a marriage urged by her father, spent a short time in a convent, and was in charge (1653–62) of an orphanage. Believing herself divinely directed to restore the pure spirit of the Gospel, she gathered (1667) at Amsterdam a fanatical following. Moving from place to place, she took her printing press with her and disseminated her quietistic teachings. According to her alleged revelations, religion was a matter of internal emotion, not of faith and practice. Her mystical ideas found particular favor in Scotland, where Bourignianism was declared a heresy (1711) and candidates for the ministry were required to renounce it before ordination. Her autobiography was translated into English as The Light of the World (1696).
See A. R. Macewen, Antoinette Bourignon, Quietist (1910).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Protestant Christianity: Biographies


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I loved this article that I read on Facebook so thought I would share.Even if you don't have a recent high school graduate, there are some great life lessons!
I can never remember if the word "commencement" means beginning or ending. My knee jerk reaction is to think that it means ending, though my writer's mind quickly corrects it.
That's probably because graduation ceremonies are called Commencement, and I think of graduation day as an ending — leaving the known behind: a good reputation, dear friends at a stone's throw, families whose refrigerators and bikes and kitchen tables are yours for the sharing… the dismantling of decorated walls soon to betray you for guests, or someone else with new photo collages, new tapestries, new blue ribbons. I have never been good at leaving the familiar, and I usually mark it with a little hidden graffiti — Laura Munson lived here, and the dates.
But it's not my turn this upcoming Commencement. It's my daughter's. Now it's she who is dismantling her room, coming down to the end of her check list, five more days of school to go, graduation invitations in the mail, college deposit in, orientation dates in stone. There is a new timber in her voice; something dire. "Mom, can you do something with my Breyer horse collection?"
"Can't you just leave them on your shelf?" I ask, vignettes reeling by of mock horse races on the lawn and barnyard feedings with tiny plastic apples, and that one coveted palomino paint that became real one Christmas.
"I need room for my stuff."
"What stuff?"
I'm not sure whose job this is. Please Lord, not mine.
I look into her eyes. And I see…it's my job. Some things are just too hard.
Suddenly, I feel a desperate need to give advice in fast forward. "Have I taught you how to make hospital corners? And to never leave a wet towel on a bed? Or leave a glass directly on wood?"
"I know. Respect the wood. You've told me." She's tolerating my Mom-ness much more than usual lately. She's in the bittersweet of Commencement while I am bursting into tears in pathetic public places, like at the bank drive thru, catching myself in the video screen looking miserable. Will her roommate know that when she needs a hug but is too shy to ask, she makes tea? Will she know that she likes to sing in harmony and that all those eye-ball rolls don't really mean anything? Will she know that she acts street-tough sometimes, but is deeply sensitive and if she's playing the ukulele along with Jack Johnson, something pretty rough probably happened at school that day?
"Mom, why are you crying?" she says, bringing me back to the grim task of packing up her happy childhood.
"I'm sorry. I'm just going to miss you."
Last week was when it really hit. I was doing laundry and I heard from her room in that new dire timber, "How do stamps work?"
"Stamps? Like postage stamps?"
"Yeah." This from a 4.0 student.
I went into her room. She was sitting on her bed addressing graduation party invitations. "Really? You can program a computer, but you don't know how stamps work???"
"My generation doesn't really use them."
I was sure she was playing a joke on me. Stamps? But she wasn't. She really had no clue that you use the same stamp for a local letter that you do for one that goes all the way to New York City.
Geez — what other glaring omissions have there been in my mothering? I've tried so hard to fill in every blank, taking every single second possible as a teaching moment. "Maybe I should write you a survival handbook for college and beyond. Would that be helpful?"
"I know all the basic stuff. But yeah…maybe the extra stuff."
I wracked my brain, taking inventory. The extra stuff. If stamps are "extra" this could get ugly! I decided to do it room by room, compartmentalizing life in cross-section, like the dollhouse we spent hours decorating and playing in.
I started with How to boil water, tell if pasta is ready, smell a gas leak, turn off the water main…but suddenly it turned into a different kind of "extra."
• If you're having a bad day, leave the dishes. But do soak them, or you'll really be in a bad mood when you get around to cleaning them.
• If you're having a really bad day, don't adhere to the utensil slots. Just chuck 'em all in and let them fall where they may. Actually, if it's a really bad day, just leave the dishes alone. They can wait.
• No matter what kind of mood you're in, make yourself a nice meal, especially if you're lonely.
• Always eat some fruit in the morning and some veggies at some point in the day. Keep bananas, carrots, apples, and potatoes around. They do the trick when you're not feeling inspired.
• Keep a granola bar in your purse. (Tip: Use only small purses–lest you end up with a Mary Poppins carpet bag, coat rack and all. Read Nora Ephron's essay on women's purses.)
• Splurge on really good jam and really good bread.
• Always have a flower or a piece of greenery in a vase on your kitchen windowsill. It really helps.
• If you see evidence of mice, set traps immediately. This probably will not apply to 99% of the places you'll live, (we live in Montana), so take it metaphorically: See s*** for what it is and get rid of the source before it gets out of control.
• If you use To Do lists, get rid of the word "goal" and replace it with "possibility." You'll be nicer to yourself that way.
• If you find yourself writing down something that you've already done on a To Do list, just so you can cross it off, you might want to stop making To Do lists.
• Allow yourself to grocery shop without a list, but not when you are hungry. You might surprise yourself by what ends up in your grocery cart–like rhubarb or radishes or kale or pistachios!
• Always smell fish before you buy it. If it smells like fish, it's no good. Also, look into its eyes. They should be clear. This also applies to boyfriends.
• To cut goat cheese, use dental floss. (Unflavored! Duh. Don't roll your eyes.)
• To make Deviled Eggs, put boiled eggs into cold water/ice bath. When cool, cut in half, shell ON, with sharp knife, then scoop egg out with spoon. Magic!
• Learn how to make homemade chicken broth. (Ask your mother)
Living room:
• Splurge on nice candles. Light them for yourself daily. Light the not-nice ones for guests. Not the other way around.
• Lie on the couch and do other things than watch TV. Like read a book or listen to classical music.
• Watch old movies. You know…back when people used stamps, and women dressed for travel. There's a lot to learn from the "olden days."
• Limit TV.
• Listen to NPR. Especially opera on NPR. Pretty much everything you need to know about life is in operas.
• Make sure to have musical instruments and keep them within eye-range so you'll actually play them. Guitars and pianos welcome group jam sessions.
• Always have a drum somewhere for that person who claims they "aren't musical."
• Have board games and cards in a drawer or on a shelf. Play them. Especially Scrabble, backgammon, gin rummy, Farkle, and Scattagories.
• Have guide books and binoculars. It's good to know your birds and flowers and other critters. Even in the city, there are hawks.
• Have nice hand towels and nice soap in your powder room. Your guests should feel special.
• Use your powder room. You should feel special too!
• Always have an extra roll of toilet paper in each bathroom.
• And a plunger. (Replace plungers every-so-often, unless you are the type to wash and disinfect toilet plungers. Dirty secret: I'm not. That's what the second flush is for.)
• Don't forget to wash the toilet flusher handle when you wash your toilets. They are dearly overlooked. (Try not to think about that too much in hotel rooms.)
• Put nice art in your bathrooms. And magazines. You can learn a lot about a person from their bathroom.
• Supply room spray.
Don't be a slob. Pick up your clothes. If they're not dirty, put them somewhere to wear again during the week, like in a hamper in your closet. NOT on a chair. And definitely NOT on your treadmill. Like your mother. Who then forgets she has a treadmill.
• Wash your sheets at least once a month.
• Splurge on nice sheets and feather pillows.
• If the person/people with whom you are sharing your room snore, make sure you have earplugs by your bed.
• Supply your nightstand with books that you want to read when you grow up: a book of poetry, a spiritual text of some sort, a classic novel, something on the best-seller list that is not written by a celebrity.
• If you eat breakfast in bed, use a tray. Crumbs are worse than bed-bugs in some cases, especially if you've listened to your mother and splurged on good bread.
• Eat breakfast in bed, but not lunch or dinner. That means you're depressed.
• Do not let your dog sleep with you. Or your babies. They need a bed of their own, and so do you.
• Sleep in every-so-often. Like till eleven. This will get harder and harder the older you get.
• You're on your own on this one, but do get nice hangers if possible.
• Oh, and do accept that your "skinny" clothes are probably a thing of the past if you haven't been able to fit into them for a few years…
Virginia Woolf was right — you need a room of your own, even it's in an eave, or a closet under a stairway, or (if you're lucky enough) a whole studio over your garage, or an unoccupied bedroom, or a renovated garden shed. Claim space for yourself!
• Don't allow people to come and go without knocking.
• If you have children, always have an available chair in it for them. It's important to have your own space, but it's also important that they know that your work does not take away your motherhood.
• This one is really really important: Whatever it is that you do in that office, whether it's a vocation or avocation, make sure it's something you love. NOT something that you are necessarily good at. If you happen to be good at what you love, then that's a bonus, but not a rule!
• Have a communal outdoor space that feels like a room in your house, but isn't exactly…like: A screened porch, fire escape, hammock, hot tub, front stoop, garden or terrace. It doesn't have to be big. Just a place where you sit at least once every few days and dream a little.
A few extra extras:
• Write handwritten notes on nice stationary to people you love. That's where the stamp comes in…
• Try not to kill bugs. If they're inside, put a mason jar over them and take them outside. They do elegant things like lick the wax off the peony buds so that they can bloom. (I'm sure there's a metaphor in there.) (Mice are a different story. If you've had one die in the walls, you'll know what I mean.)
• Practice Yes and Possibility instead of No and Not Possible. Positive begets positive and negative begets negative. You don't want the latter.
• Have fun, for crying out loud! Life is beautiful and heartbreaking any way you slice it so you might as well enjoy the ride!
• There is no such thing as cool.
• Judge not.
• Don't mistake a full schedule for a full life. If you find yourself saying, "There's never a dull moment," you should probably make it a goal to have at least one "dull moment" every day.
• Take walks. (especially in the rain)
• Sing.
• Dance.
• Read poetry.
• Have dogs.
• Grow a garden.
• Travel.
• Create the sacred wherever you are.
• Be kind to old people and remember they know a lot more than you do. Ask them to tell you their stories.
• Know that there are saints everywhere. Look for them. They're often where you least expect it.
• Call your mother. Texting is a challenge since she can never find her reading glasses. Plus, she likes to hear your voice. It reminds her of lying in bed with you when you were little, reading books, singing, praying, watching the moon, dreaming. And she loves you no matter what, which is hard to find.
written by :Laura Munson for Huffington Post


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A recent article in the Economist comments on the globalisation of art and how art fairs accelerate the transnational exposure of artists, something that could become necessary for artists if they want to attract the attention of serious collectors and art investors. Importantly, it also identifies the current international art fair hot spots. Read on for our summary of this article.
Globalisation of the art market
Globalisation is one of the most important phenomenon in the history of recent art. Contemporary art needs the potential of a global market and thus enters the art fair. Biennials and landmark exhibitions help to initiate global change in the art scene. International art fairs spread belief in contemporary art through the help of banks and royalty, from Deutsche Bank to local rulers in the Middle East.
In addition, the article quotes Marc Spiegler and Annette Schönholzer, co-directors of Art Basel, as saying that private collections are becoming increasingly international. Collectors start by acquiring art from their own nation and eventually acquire internationally. In many countries contemporary art has become an economic project involving collectors, dealers and huge cultural districts with museums and art fairs.
For an art fair to be properly diverse, careful curation is essential. For good international fairs, this not only means that attending galleries show talented artists, but also that they show artists that live in the country the gallery is located in. As quoted in The Economist,
As Lucy Mitchell-Innes of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, a New York gallery, warns: 'It's a problem if four or five booths have the same artist's work. A good international fair wants Chinese galleries to bring talented Chinese artists, not another Antony Gormley.'
International art fair hot spots
The locational hierarchy of art fairs differs from that in the auction market. For art auctions, the three most prominent cities are New York, London and Hong Kong, in that order. When talking about art fairs, Basel would come first, but what follows this lead is unclear: Miami or London, New York or Paris?
Even more notable are the art fairs currently sprouting up in Asian countries. These are creating alternate markets for art and challenging Western leadership. Adding to the hierarchical ladder are two newcomers: Hong Kong's ART HK (Hong Kong International Art Fair) and Abu Dhabi Art, operating from the Middle East.
What art fairs mean for artists and their art
In general, art fairs can accelerate the transnational exposure of all artists represented. Art Basel is unrivalled in this category and it may be because it has always defined itself as international. The frenzied demand for new art peaked with the creation of smaller art fairs. Some of them work as satellites to the major European events, the biennials, art festivals and fairs such as Basel. These budding fairs cater to lesser known, emerging artists.
Within the art market, that an artist is "international" has become a selling point. Consequently, the local artist has become almost insignificant, while those called "national" are damned with faint praise.
Art fairs, with their aggregation of art dealers forming a one-stop shoppers' marketplace for art, attract high-spending collectors, generate greater sales and have to some extent replaced galleries with their increasing drawing power. Still the globalisation of the art is not just about money. There are a growing number of non-profit biennials that are developing along with the market structures. As quoted in The Economist,
Massimiliano Gioni, a curator based in Milan and New York, who is overseeing the Gwangju Biennial, which opens in South Korea in September, recalls that the avant-garde was 'built on a transnational community of kindred spirits,' adding, 'sometimes I long for that.'
This is an Art Radar summary of "Global frameworks – Art-fair musical chairs", first published in The Economist.
Related Topics: art fairs, international artists, market watch – globalisation
Related Posts:
- Antonia Carver named Art Dubai director, lends Middle Eastern art insight to fair – July 2010 – a summary of media reports from the time of Carver's appointment
- Is globalisation of the art market slowing down? The Economist reports – June 2010 – discusses the dominance of American artists at Christie's New York's recent sales
- World's top collectors and art professionals attend ART HK: a testament to fair's growing importance – June 2010 – names the collectors in attendance
- Art industry elite meet at inaugural Abu Dhabi Art Fair – December 2009 – a brief overview of the event with images, mentions segregation of new and established galleries
- Art in storage, at fairs and sales – is it getting harder to insure? – October 2009 – this article explains why this may be the case
Subscribe to Art Radar Asia for more on prominent trends in the contemporary art market


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CookBook - Using Manipulators With Only Some Fields
If your template should only edit part of an object because some fields are not to be changed by the user, you can use the following view-function-template to do the job. It just populates those fields that are left out of the template and the form and fills in their values from known content. Especially it overwrites fields in the new_data with known values so that users can't just fake POST requests to populate left-out fields.
The code is stolen from my gallery project - there you have a picturefolder that has a path and a slug that point to the filesystem and a user_id that denotes the owner (actually it's a ForeignKey to the auth.users model). So users should never be able to change the owner or change the filesystem path (otherwise they might be able to fetch files from security relevant parts of the filesystem). The following code prevents changing those fields by overwriting them in the POST data with data from the original object. That way even faked POST requests won't get access to those attributes.
Note: see also this discussion for a different approach using an undocumented Django feature.
def update_folder(request, folder): # this just resolves a object from it's slug - you will most definitely # need to change this to your own model try: f = picturefolders.get_object(slug__exact=folder) except picturefolders.PicturefolderDoesNotExist: raise Http404 # now just fetch a standard change manipulator for that object manipulator = picturefolders.ChangeManipulator(f.id) if request.POST: new_data = request.POST.copy() # here I am filling in fields from the fetched object # to make sure that the user can't pass in security relevant # data. Make sure that you turn your values into strings, # as that's expected by the later html2python call. new_data['path'] = f.path new_data['slug'] = f.slug new_data['user'] = str(f.user_id) # the rest of this is pretty standard as we now have a # fully populated POST data dict errors = manipulator.get_validation_errors(new_data) if not errors: manipulator.do_html2python(new_data) manipulator.save(new_data) return HttpResponseRedirect(request.path) else: new_data = f.__dict__ errors = {} form = formfields.FormWrapper(manipulator, new_data, errors) t = template_loader.get_template('picturefolder_form') c = Context(request, { 'form': form, 'folder': f, }) return HttpResponse(t.render(c), mimetype='text/html; charset=utf-8') else: raise Http404


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The UNC Policy Manual
Adopted 02/13/04
This policy applies to all staff in the Office of the President whose positions are covered by Policy 300.1.1 of the Policy Manual of the Board of Governors, and is consistent with Policy 300.1.6. This policy applies to both voluntary and involuntary relinquishment of administrative positions.
1. Retreat to a faculty position. An administrator, who holds a faculty appointment at a University of North Carolina campus, may assume or return to that appointment with all the rights and responsibilities of faculty in the home department, unless a proceeding is initiated to discharge or demote the administrator from the faculty position. Conditions of the retreat to such a position will be governed by the policy in place on the campus.
2. Reappointment of an administrator to a different position. An administrator leaving a position that is categorized as "at will" has no claim to that position; however, there may be circumstances in which assignment to another administrative position or appointment to less than a full-time position would be beneficial for both the institution and the employee. In these cases, the new salary should be appropriate to the assignment. If the President proposes to pay the administrator his or her full current salary after moving the administrator to a position that would normally be lower paying, or if paid leave is to be granted, the agreement with the administrator must be approved by the Board of Governors. This Policy does not supersede any notice or severance pay required by Board of Governors' policy.
3. Separation from the University. In some cases, it may be in the best interests to negotiate a severance agreement with an administrator. UNC policy addresses timely notice for termination of Senior Administrative and Academic Officers hired pursuant to Policy 300.1.1, I.B. In accordance with the University of North Carolina Policy 300.1.1, III.B, in certain circumstances these employees are entitled to notice of the discontinuation of their employment with full pay up to 90 days or severance pay, depending on their length of service. The President may, at his or her discretion, determine that the circumstances justify continuing full pay for employees subject to Policy 300.1.1.I.A for up to 90 days. Any agreement that results in a longer period of compensation must be approved by the Board of Governors.
4. Retirement. Nothing in this Policy shall prevent an administrator from retiring or an administrator who holds a faculty appointment from participating in phased retirement consistent with existing University of North Carolina policies.
5. Agreements. All agreements made pursuant to this policy must be in writing and signed by both the employee and the President.
6. Effective Date. The effective date of this policy is February 13, 2004.