A new collection of Lurex Tube Body Suit by MusicLegs®.

Opaque tube mini dress in glittering golden lurex.

Talk about a well-oiled machine…

Measuring marijuana intoxication in drivers has become more confusing since adult-use marijuana was legalized in Arizona…

Singer-songwriter Quinn XCII is ready to serve three musical meals to the guests at Dusk…

USDA surveys show more than 92% of horses headed to slaughter are fit enough to lead a productive life…

Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living."

"Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be," Le Guin says in Arwen Curry's new documentary, The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.[1,2,3,4] Le Guin spoke in defense of science fiction and fantasy, which were and often still are maligned or outright ignored by critics. But her statement admits another, deeper necessity: We must be trained to imagine. But imagine what? ... A feminist and a critic of capitalism, Le Guin must have known that progress was as much a necessity as it was an uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly what will happen when they set out to do what no one else has ever done. Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living. She did not just believe that a society free of consumerism and incarceration, like Shevek's homeworld, could exist; she explored how that society could be built and understood the process would be hard work, and probably on some level disappointing. The future is not a static thing; to its architects, it is always in motion, always mid-creation, never realized. Le Guin's utopianism perhaps explains why her characters exhibit a certain adaptability, as did Le Guin herself. In her work, she mostly eschewed great battles; a reader of her work should not expect to find a clash at Helm's Deep. A Le Guin character may be at war with his basest self, but the health of the body politic can be at stake at the same time. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai only completes his mission to bring Winter into the Ekumen after he overcomes his own prejudicial beliefs about the people who live there. Le Guin found herself embroiled in a similar struggle, which she recounts to Curry. As acclaimed as The Left Hand of Darkness became, feminists criticized it because, while Le Guin's alien race changed genders, in their default state they used male pronouns. Genly is male, too. "At first I felt a little bit defensive," she told Curry. "But as I thought about it, I began to see that my critics were right." There's a quiet radicalism about her admission.

Yuval Noah Harari & Natalie Portman - "Yuval Noah Harari sits down with the award-winning actress, director, and Harvard graduate Natalie Portman to discuss his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century."[5]

0:57 The myth factory 2:22 The role of fictions 4:38 Fictions and co-operation ...

Balance of power: The Economic Consequences of the Peace at 100 - "Ann Pettifor finds astonishing contemporary resonance in John Maynard Keynes's critique of globalization and inequity."[6]

In December 1919, John Maynard Keynes published a blistering attack on the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June that year. The treaty's terms helped to end the First World War. Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace[(fre)eBook] revealed how they would also pave the way to the Second... This is a bold, eloquent work unafraid of the long view. It contributed to the economic stability of the mid-twentieth century. And in a world still grappling with the socio-economic and environmental costs of globalization, Keynes's critiques — not least of the era's international financial system, the gold standard — remain powerfully germane.[7] Keynes censures the disregard of world leaders for the "starving and disintegrating" people of war-torn Europe. "The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety," he wrote. Keynes, however, was concerned for Europe's future. His book's significance lies in his revolutionary plan for financing recovery not just in Europe, but across the world. Keynes called for a new international economic order to replace the gold standard, which had held from the 1870s until the start of the war. That system had led to a form of globalization that benefited the wealthy, but impoverished the majority and ultimately destabilized both the financial and political systems... For a book published 100 years ago, the contemporary resonance is unsettling. Keynes writes: "England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her ... But Europe is solid with herself." In another passage, he notes that the "principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of society". And in an era innocent of Amazon and containerized shipping, Keynes wrote that wealthy Londoners could order by telephone "the various products of the whole earth" and expect "their early delivery" to their doorstep. The globalized pre-First World War economy was the template for the modern one. Driven as it was by the international financial sector, the consequences of this economic system were predictable: rising inequality, economic instability, political volatility and war. Thus, a bankrupt Germany and its allies (the Central Powers) — all heavily indebted sovereign governments — were to endure increasingly frequent economic crises after 1919. Their creditors, the victorious Allied Powers, made no effort towards a sound and just resolution of these crises.[8,9,10]

Now's the time to spread the wealth, says Thomas Piketty - "His premise is that inequality is a political choice. It's something societies opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw history as class struggle, Piketty sees it as a battle of ideologies."[11]

Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. That allows the rich to fall asleep in their town houses while the homeless freeze outside. In his overambitious history of inequality from ancient India to today's US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time: "Rich people deserve their wealth." "It will trickle down." "They give it back through philanthropy." "Property is liberty." "The poor are undeserving." "Once you start redistributing wealth, you won't know where to stop and there'll be chaos" — a favourite argument after the French Revolution. "Communism failed." "The money will go to black people" — an argument that, Piketty says, explains why inequality remains highest in countries with historic racial divides such as Brazil, South Africa and the US. Another common justification, which he doesn't mention, is "High taxes are punitive" — as if the main issue were the supposed psychology behind redistribution rather than its actual effects. All these justifications add up to what he calls the "sacralisation of property". But today, he writes, the "propriétariste and meritocratic narrative" is getting fragile. There's a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation. Moreover, notes Piketty, the wealthy are overwhelmingly male and their lifestyles tend to be particularly environmentally damaging. Donald Trump — a climate-change-denying sexist heir who got elected president without releasing his tax returns — embodies the problem... Centre-right parties across the west have taken up populism because their low-tax, small-state story wasn't selling any more. Rightwing populism speaks to today's anti-elitist, anti-meritocratic mood. However, it deliberately refocuses debate from property to what Piketty calls "the frontier" (and others would call borders). That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas. We're now at a juncture much like around 1900, when extreme inequality helped launch social democratic and communist parties.

Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle - "Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism)."[12,13,14,15,16,17]

• In Our Time, The Rapture - "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that believers will vanish from the world, touching on religious entrepreneurialism, William Miller, dispensational modernism, premillennialism, and other such eschatological battiness."
• Medieval cannibal babies - "How a collective of intellectuals can engage in the production of unlikely stories to protect a cherished theory."
• Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why? - "'Not religious' has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right."[18,19]

Zadie Smith: Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction - "I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God."[20] We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin - "Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one."[21]

"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,"[pdf] an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear's phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn't even make sense. "Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food." Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it's not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it's also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you're trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining. Le Guin's carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it's also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we've come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: "Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD." This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her "in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before." The stick, sword, or spear, designed for "bashing and killing," alienated her from history so much that she felt she "was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all." The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn't, at first glance, very exciting. "It is hard to tell", writes Le Guin, "a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats..." As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren't very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they're so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders? ... We will not "beat" climate change, nor is "nature" our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves "become part of the killer story," writes Le Guin, "we may get finished along with it." All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.[22]

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow Has Arrived - "A thought-provoking excursion into the futures we would and would not want to live in."[23]

Whether you agree with it or not, Spokane's rental registry is law…

The work of Oscar-nominated writer-director Mike Mills (20th Century Women, Beginners) has always been grounded in an inescapable sense of empathy — for the world, the people who live in it, and the characters he crafts a film around…

Though a sign on Washington State Route 129 points you in the right direction, driving the nearly 12 miles along Cloverland Road to arrive at the Cloverland Garage in Asotin County can make you feel like you're, well, chasing ghosts…

A map of downtown Spokane's east end, circa 1910, would be barely recognizable to most locals today…

It doesn't take long for a really old building to fall apart…

On the face of it, the legacy of Jerry Quinn Sr. is simple…

Of all the proposed solutions to Spokane County's emergency shortage of houses, one is glaringly obvious: build more houses…

The number of people requesting food from Partners INW, previously called Spokane Valley Partners, has increased by about 370% in the last five years, says Calvin Coblentz, CEO of the nonprofit organization…

The estimates vary — 32 million adults?…

Each year, hundreds of organizations throughout the Inland Northwest work hard to ensure that everyone in our community is healthy, happy and whole…

There are only three rules in improv: Be mentally present in the scene, always make your scene partner look good, and approach every scene with a "yes and..." mentality…

Cast a quick glance into the front windows of Francaise and you might wonder if it's a florist shop…

Maybe it's the spirits of past prostitutes or the guardianship of saintly nuns, but walking into 315 Cuisine in Coeur d'Alene feels, well, different…

With 100 artists performing over two nights, planning your Volume experience may feel daunting…

marusin posted a photo:

via Instagram ift.tt/2hm6c3F

Released earlier this year in Europe, Alegranza is the debut from El Guincho (Spaniard Pablo Diaz-Reixa). The nine song, forty-minute release mixes afro-beat, calypso, world music, tropicalia, and freak folk into a delirious blast of music that sounds something like Manu Chao crossed up with Animal Collective. It's very loop-based, with repetitive song-structures that rely on clever transitions and some great vocals.

As part of Mental Health Awareness Month, the Fifth Harmony alum releases a new song called 'Temporary' while the 'Finally Famous' MC teams up with his mother for a video series.

'Perfect' will chronicle the Olympic gymnast's heroic performance at the 1996 Olympics where she completed a final, gold medal-winning vault in the team competition on a badly injured ankle.

The Texas senator becomes the subject of mockery after commenting on the agency's ad by claiming that CIA agents have 'come a long way from' Matt Damon's fictional character.

According to one of his friends, the 'Lucid Dreams' hitmaker was ready to check into rehab to seek professional help for his addiction before his tragic passing.

In his legal papers, Paul Phillips claims that the doctors' lack of care during his initial admission at Baptist Medical Center of the Beaches led to him suffering brain damage.

The 'Justice League' director plans to host a viewing party for 'Man of Steel', 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice', and 'Justice League' to raise money for good cause.

The Ethan Hunt depicter was reportedly so frustrated by the branches knocking on the roof of his trailer on the set of his new movie that he got the trees chopped off.

'Perfect' will chronicle the Olympic gymnast's heroic performance at the 1996 Olympics where she completed a final, gold medal-winning vault in the team competition on a badly injured ankle.

The Texas senator becomes the subject of mockery after commenting on the agency's ad by claiming that CIA agents have 'come a long way from' Matt Damon's fictional character.

In this episode, Tunmi13 walks us through how to activate iOS and iPadOS beta updates.

To do this, first sign in with your Apple ID at either developer.apple.com, to access the developer beta, or beta.apple.com, to access the public beta. Then, once signed up for either program, go to Settings > General > Software update > Beta updates, and select the beta you signed up for. You can then go back one level in Settings, and the beta should appear like any other update that you can download and install.

Important: Beta versions of iOS and iPadOS may contain serious bugs, which is why it's generally advised, if possible, to install them on another device specifically designated for beta testing, or have a full and complete backup of your data in case a downgrade from the beta, which involves a full restore of your device, becomes necessary. For more information, check out this introduction to iOS and iPadOS beta testing.

In this episode, Thomas Domville gives us short looks at some of what's new and notable with Accessibility features in iOS 17.

Topics include:

• New Haptic sensation
• Open Per Voice Settings
• Text Detection
• Point and Speak
• Sound Curtain
• Fast long-press speed option
• Siri (Voices sound natural and expressive)
• Listen to Page
• React with your Hands in FaceTime
• Level Tool for Camera
• Audio Transcription in Messages

In this episode, Thomas Domville introduces us to the new “per voice settings” introduced with iOS 17.

These can be found by navigating to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Speech, and then selecting the language and desired TTS voice. After selecting the voice, flick up or down with one finger, or press space with dot 3 or dot 6 on a Braille display, to access the per voice settings.

The configurable parameters available vary by voice. For example, Vocalizer voices can tweak sentence pause and timbre, while for Alex you can adjust pitch range and words per minute.

In this episode, Thomas Domville demonstrates how to enable the Fast long-press speed option on iOS 17. This new feature allows for quicker access to context menus and other Haptic Touch actions, enhancing your workflow and making your iPhone feel more responsive.

Here’s how you can activate the Fast Long-Press Speed Option:

1. Launch the Settings app.
2. Navigate to Accessibility.
3. Select Touch.
4. Choose Haptic Touch.

5. Under Touch Duration, opt for Fast.

   You can gauge the new response time by long-pressing on the flower image displayed on the same screen. This simple adjustment can significantly boost your iPhone’s responsiveness.

In this episode, Thomas Domville takes us on a journey through the world of FruitPot 2, a fun-filled slot machine game for iOS. FruitPot 2 is a game that will take you back to the 80s with its retro graphics and sounds. The game features an ever-changing fruit machine slot, as well as more than 15 mini-games that appear as you progress through the game. With the Bucks you earn, you can purchase items from stores at the mall. FruitPot 2 is a great game to play when you're looking for something to relax and have fun with.

FruitPot 2 is available for free on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fruitpot-2/id6444378324?l=en

In this episode, Ida Grace introduces the Connected Breath iOS app. Designed to promote mindfulness and relaxation, Connected Breath offers guided breathing exercises to help you pause, reset, and find serenity. The app boasts a simple and tranquil interface adorned with a night sky background. As you inhale and exhale, stars gently appear and fade, symbolizing other users across the globe who are also engaging with the app simultaneously. This shared experience fosters a sense of connection and support during your practice.

Download Connected Breath on the App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/connected-breath/id1166443182

transcription:
Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello AppleVis, good evening from Ida and tonight I'm going to be doing a podcast app demonstration of an app called Connected Breath.

This is a meditation app that connects people from all around the world to do a meditation together.

So this app works just similar to apps that are social media apps where you can connect in real time with people but you can't communicate with them.

It simply shows you how many people are using the app at a time.

So if I open the app, open Connected Breath, this app is used in portrait mode and the first thing we get is to select breathing duration.

You can do one, three, or five minutes.

I'm going to select three minutes and then I will show you what happens.

For anybody who's curious, I'm using an iPad.

I'm using Daniel as my voice over voice, the compact version of Daniel because I like him better than the enhanced and I'm using an Apple keyboard that doubles as an iPad case.

So you can choose to breathe for one, three, or five minutes in this app.

I'm going to double tap on three minutes and you're going to hear a bell.

And then go to the bottom of the screen, okay that message is going to change throughout the meditation.

I will show you, okay so that's the starting sound and then breathe in, breathe out.

This message is changing with the music.

Breathe in, breathe out, and now it's going to change.

You are breathing in and then it's going to tell you how many.

Seven other people are currently connected right now.

The stars in the distance are the people breathing, that's the visual representation.

We are all breathing together, we are all connected, I guess I don't need to repeat.

Now close your eyes and focus on your breath.

Now the rest of the time it's going to say breathe in and breathe out over and over again.

And for those of you with perfect pitch, you will notice that it's saying breathe in on the C chord and breathe out on this like A minor type chord.

So if you don't want to constantly listen to the messages, just listen to the music and follow the music.

You hear the peaceful nature sounds in the background?

You kind of hear a breathing noise too, it's kind of creepy honestly.

Breathe in and breathe out.

See it's still changing from breathe in to breathe out.

And it will…

In this AppleVis Extra, Dave Nason and Thomas Domville engage in a discussion with Bryan Bashin and Hans Jørgen Wiberg from Be My Eyes about the acquisition of AppleVis. They tackle the tough questions, explore how Be My Eyes came to acquire AppleVis, and share insights into the experiences of the AppleVis Editorial Team before and after the acquisition.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is generated by AIKO, an automated transcription service. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Hello there and welcome to the AppleVis Extra podcast, the first AppleBiz Extra podcast of the new era.

We wondered if we would have another one and we do.

We are so excited.

My name is Dave Nason and I'm joined as so often by Thomas Domville , also known as Anonymous Thomas.

How are you my friends?

Oh boy, that's a loaded question to come in.

How am I doing?

Well, you know, I'm ecstatic, I'm excited.

Gosh, what a whirlwind of emotion and whiplash that we have all gone through, right?

It's been a roller coaster, I think it's fair to say over the last, it hasn't only been a month because it feels like about three years.

Right.

It does feel like it's been going on for years, that's how much impact this has had on us, hasn't it?

It really has.

So I suppose for those who kind of maybe aren't sure, what happens?

And you know, we don't need to go into the absolute weeds, but kind of what happened on a high level in terms of, you know, getting to a point where Appleviz appears to be shutting down.

You know, yeah, let's start from the beginning.

So everybody will be on the same level as we are because we have had a lot of questions, a lot of critiques and I understand because I completely understand, we were in the same boat with you guys.

So what happened, guys?

Let's back up all the way to July.

This is when it all came down, was July 3rd.

I remember that specifically, it's right the day before America's Independence Day.

And we woke up with a bombshell of a news from David and, you know, David mentioned in there, he has talked about the first or thought about it for several months and a lot of people have asked us, we had several months, how come you haven't done anything during that time and to be quite fair to the editorial team is that no, we had zero idea, we had no idea.

It was just like we woke up and this bombshell was set.

And I think I can say it was so dramatic.

I will say that first two days just was a blur because I was still trying to digest and process like what in God's name is that mean for all of us in the community and everything.

But of course, the most important thing out of this whole thing was that David has reached a limit that he spent so much of his personal life into.

And so it was so understandable.

I completely understand where he was coming from.

I completely understand why he made that decision and why we're trying to process all this.

We were trying to figure out as a team what to do.

We had a meeting that weekend that we talked about the team and the steps that we wanted to take.

And during that meeting, David Goodwin was with us and he was very ill at that time.

We had no idea…

Making sure the new addition arrives without tears.

JS Wright to sponsor Stourbridge Lions rugby team.

Teenagers turn urban designers with St. Modwen Homes.

Labour’s West Midlands Mayor candidate pledges to build 3,000 new affordable homes per year.

The newly formed ‘Birmingham St Mary’s Hospice Kings Norton Fundraising Group’ are urging all quiz enthusiasts to join them for their debut fundraising event

Dave Woodhall on Villa's annual defeat at home to Manchester United.

Lord Tony Blair of Bollocksville, former king of Inger-lund, talks exclusively to Sir Howard Elston about his totally blameless role in the Iraq and Afghani wars.

New guide celebrates city’s independent retail scene.

From deep down in the Coventry canal basin, Martin Longley enjoys an intimate recital by Brooklyn guitarist David Grubbs...

Construction is now underway on the latest phase of homes to be built on the former MG Rover factory in Longbridge, near Birmingham.

Pupils from St Columba’s Catholic Primary School received a lesson in site safety from local housebuilder St. Modwen Homes;

Jessica Harris is enchanted by a half-term family performance at the MAC.