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captainofthetidesbreath · 6 years

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A couple hours late but I just saw you saying how Jesse and Fareeha are more inverses of each other and I completely agree! I personally see Sombra and Jesse as more paralleled, and would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that idea? You tend to be very well-spoken and are good at analyzing concepts, I've come to notice.

EDIT - NOVEMBER 3, 2018: With the release of “Reunion” and Ashe’s hero reveal, the majority of what I wrote about Deadlock in the first three sections—Sign of the Skull, Those Left Behind, Revolutionaries and Rebels—is incorrect. Despite this, I maintain that the socioeconomic context outlines in Those Left Behind remains relevant to the American Southwest in-universe and maintain my belief that it is applicable to McCree specifically, even if it does not apply to Deadlock. I will be writing a new post on Sombra and McCree soon. Stay tuned.

in reference to this post… from months ago

Lucky for you, I was thinking about Jesse and Sombra the night before you sent this! Deadlock and Los Muertos, actually, but I’ll get to that. I absolutely agree that the two of them make much more direct parallels than Jesse and Fareeha, who are interesting as a pair in their own right but they aren’t direct parallels.

I often joke that Gabe adopted the same child twice: smart-talking, hyper-competent Latine who tote around skull logos and are from gangs with the word “dead” in their names. It’s a joke—I don’t consider Gabe’s relationship with Sombra to be that of a parent-child, for one thing—but I believe that Jesse and Sombra are very similar regardless.

They both have similar backgrounds: joined local gangs at a very young age and earned later membership into a high-level covert organization through resourcefulness and an admirable natural aptitude in a specific desired skillset. Although both at first look to be unserious and overly laid-back, they prove themselves to be precision operators who indeed execute plans and achieve goals with immense gravity. They’re both supremely confident in their abilities, to the point that one can accuse them of having too high an opinion of themselves and being overconfident.

They come from similar backgrounds, having been orphaned during the Crisis and suffered under economic disparity driven by infrastructure changes in the rebuilding period. They both similarly drop off the map and resurface under new identities. They both have a deep concern in seeing done a justice that is beyond the reach of the law—or when the law refuses to deliver it.

All this, and more, under the cut. The post is very long.

I would also like to thank @segadores-y-soldados for all he’s written, especially on Sombra and especially recently. I make heavy reference to his writing on Sombra in certain portions of this post. I also must admit that reading his posts on Arturito has motivated me to finish this after three months of slow progress, though I still have a nagging feeling I’m forgetting a point.

Sign of the Skull

To make a quick run-through on Los Muertos and Deadlock Gang themselves before moving onto how these organizations inform Sombra and Jesse specifically. Sort of a section to outline basic things about the gangs that doesn’t neatly fit into other points. It’s mostly to establish their context, and some similarities between their structures and presentation.

Screenshot from the Sombra Origin showing members of Los Muertos. Each member has painted skeletons onto themselves with phosphorescent paint in varying colors.

Los Muertos is a Mexican gang with apparent regional influence with members in both Dorado and the nearby Castillo, and it even has some international reach judging from the Los Muertos graffiti on the Hollywood map. Little is known to us about their structure besides this, and even in-universe they are noted to be mysterious with little information publicly available about them.

However, Los Muertos openly broadcasts their intentions: to right the wrongs committed by the wealthy and powerful against the disadvantaged of Mexico. They position themselves as transgressors of the law specifically to disrupt the lives of the “vipers” in power. More on that later.

The name translates to “The Dead”, and they are identified by skull motifs, specifically the calaveras associated with the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead. Individual members openly identify themselves and indicate their membership by painting skulls and bones on their bodies with phosphorescent paint.

Screenshot from the Route 66 map of five motorcycles parked in front of The High Side bar. The Deadlock emblem is spray-painted by the entrance.

Deadlock Gang is an American motorcycle club and organized crime ring occupying a Southwestern town on an abandoned stretch of Route 66 running across Deadlock Gorge. It’s unclear where exactly the Gorge is, and the Visual Source Book’s pin for the map is highly unspecific, but I tend to believe it’s in somewhere in northern New Mexico because Jesse’s base of operations is listed as Santa Fe, NM.

In one lore piece, Deadlock is holding a national rally, suggesting they’ve got chapters nationwide and the founding chapter is in Deadlock Gorge. While it’s unclear what their reach is, there is a possibility of international chapters. (Torbjorn’s motorcycle-themed Deadlock skin may suggest this, but it does not have any Deadlock iconography, notably showing a bear where one expects the Deadlock emblem.)

This does not necessarily mean all of the Deadlock Rebels Motorcycle Club is a criminal organization, nor every single member a criminal, but… y’know, the founding chapter is a weapons trafficking racket. They’re a one-percenter outlaw motorcycle club, and there’s a quick and easy comparison in the real-life Hells Angels, whom the show Sons of Anarchy models itself after.

Deadlock, besides naming itself after the concept of death like Los Muertos does, also uses a skull in its emblem. We haven’t seen any member of Deadlock pictured, but extrapolating from the typical behavior of motorcycle clubs, they likely openly identify themselves and indicate their membership by wearing standardized jackets or most likely vests. Members likely have tattoos indicating membership as well, seeing as Jesse has a tattoo of the Deadlock emblem on his inner arm in his Blackwatch skin.

Those Left Behind

Sombra, orphaned during the Omnic Crisis, was taken in by Los Muertos, a gang that positioned themselves as champions of the underclass ignored during the post-Crisis rebuilding process. They’ve done this most notably by opposing the CEO of LumériCo Guillermo Portero, who they’ve described as having exercised his social influence to have many wrongfully imprisoned and who we know is working with the not-as-noble-as-they-put-forward Vishkar.

The social context of Los Muertos and Sombra is very directly told to us. From Sombra’s official bio:

After ░░░░░░ was taken in by Mexico’s Los Muertos gang, she aided it in its self-styled revolution against the government. Los Muertos believed that the rebuilding of Mexico had primarily benefited the rich and the influential, leaving behind those who were most in need of assistance.

From a lore post published to the website:

…its members style themselves as revolutionaries who represent those left behind by the government after the widespread devastation of the Omnic Crisis.

And Michael Chu on Los Muertos at Blizzcon 2016 (transcript):

Mexico really suffered a lot at the hands of the Omnic Crisis. The war destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. […] They claim to be kind of revolutionaries fighting for people who were left behind during the rebuilding of Mexico after the war.

Despite their noble stated goal, they seemingly also cross a line in their illicit activity enough to earn the ire of Jack, who isn’t exactly on the straight and narrow himself but still seeks the right side of things. As Chu added:

Whether or not that’s really what they are up to, because they’re also engaged in a lot of other shady activities. It is up to you decide.

Given a lot of other suspect activity they engage in, that noble work might not be the only story to be had on them—especially depending on where you’re standing. Saviors with their thumbs in certain pies not meant for them, possibly.

The social context that Sombra rises out of is made very plain for us. But what does it have to do with Jesse?

While we know few specifics about his circumstances growing up, other than he also lived through the Crisis and was likely similarly orphaned during it, the description and in-game environment of the Route 66 map suggest the area is one of difficult social and economic circumstances, emphasis mine:

Though the travelers and road trippers who used to cross the US on historic Route 66 are gone, the Main Street of America still stands, a testament to a simpler time. The gas stations, roadside shops, and cafes have gone into disuse, and the fabled Deadlock Gorge is mostly seen from the comfort of transcontinental train cars. But amid the fading monuments of that earlier era, the outlaws of the Deadlock Gang are planning their biggest heist yet.

Concept art of The High Side, showing the abandoned bar in disrepair with boarded windows and faded paint.

At least one building, the Cave Inn (ba dum tsh) in the streets portion of the map, is visibly abandoned, and the theme of disrepair and long-gone halcyon days is especially prevalent in the concept art for the map. This all paints a portrait of a Deadlock Gang that operates out of an area that suffered immense economic hardship in recent years, likely particularly after the introduction of the transcontinental train cars, one of which is featured in “Train Hopper”, a comic which takes the time to emphasize the wealth of the passengers traveling on them. So, the Deadlock chapter is localized within a region that suffered economically under infrastructure changes that largely benefit the wealthy and powerful. It’s possible that these infrastructure changes were made possible because of efforts to rebuild after the physical devastation of the Crisis.

Without going off on a tangent about it, there’s a bit of a difference between “Deadlock comes out of the lower class in a geographic region beset by poverty” and “Deadlock gang itself currently has no money”. Apparently, well after the effects of financial misfortune set in, Deadlock was and is making enough money to maintain long-distance shipping, as suggested by their semi-trailer truck, and keep an entire town functioning well enough as a cover for their criminal enterprise. Also, missiles don’t sell for cheap. Deadlock might be financially comfortable now, but their context still involves deep socioeconomic disparity.

This is especially poignant against the Route’s invoked nickname, Main Street of America, which conjures images of the average American person. Those average people who owned gas stations, cafes, diners, roadside trinket shops, dive bars are the ones who are forgotten while the more affluent folks pass them over, traveling in style. There’s also a historical precedent in poverty and social disparity as driven by infrastructure changes specifically affecting the way people travel across regions and the country, specifically in the history of the freeway.

To sort of make the clarification, Jesse’s tattoo states that Deadlock was established in 1976—happy centennial, Deadlock—so they’ve certainly changed a lot as their social context and membership make-up changed. There’s much to be said about social non-conformity, outlaw motorcycle gangs, one-percenters, community integration, and how these intersect with both the politics and economics of the local communities along Route 66, especially given how the Route was recently listed as one of the country’s most endangered historic places, even in Deadlock’s apparent founding in a period of American social unease after the Vietnam War and during the late Cold War, and extrapolate a lot about Deadlock from all that, and even about Jesse himself from some of it, but that’s for a different post.

Revolutionaries and Rebels

In that context, it’s worthwhile to note that in their insignia, seen in the graffiti all over the Route 66 map and in Jesse’s tattoo in his Blackwatch skin, they calls themselves the Deadlock Rebels. Generally, outlaw motorcycle clubs are also known for their contempt for social convention and disdain for status quo.

Screenshot of the Deadlock Gang hideout with their insignia, which includes the words Deadlock Rebels, spray-painted onto a wall.

Deadlock is quite the opposite of Los Muertos, though. Deadlock maintains a law-abiding public face—holding innocuous and even advertised national rallies and hiding their illicit activity under numerous cover businesses—and are more discreet in their disrespect of law. One can double down on this by looking to how successfully real-life one-percenter clubs maintain their public image: openly contemptuous of social norms but keeping public knowledge of any legal transgressions to only the small indiscretions while hiding the major ones.

Taking a look at Deadlock’s primary targets, military installations: the train cars on the map are military-related, the gang traffics military hardware and weapons including missiles. Although Deadlock comes from a similar social context as Los Muertos, these aren’t targets seeking to effect a change in society like how Los Muertos seeks to. Deadlock appears largely self-interested, with little interest in changing the fortunes of anyone else in the American lower class. Los Muertos bills itself as other-interested, seeking to change the fortunes of the Mexican underclass as a whole.

Archetypically, Los Muertos are revolutionaries, Deadlock are rebels. While they both groups reject the status quo, the revolutionary seeks sweeping social change but the rebel rejects the status quo on a personal level. The revolutionary wants society to change to suit their vision of what it ought to be while the rebel positions themselves outside of society and will redefine themselves as society changes.

The difference is apparent in their choice of targets. Los Muertos targets institutions and people who directly have a hand in the building of their social context, and attacking those targets will potentially affect a social change. Deadlock targets institutions and people who may have a hand in their social context, but such targets are chosen primarily for the gang’s financial gain.

Los Muertos is politically motivated. Deadlock is financially motivated.

Admirers in the Shadows

Sombra and Jesse don’t remain in their gangs. They both end up joining shadow organizations with global reach, the terrorist organization Talon and the covert ops organization Blackwatch, respectively. Both organizations were wooed by their specific skillsets.

Sombra launched an even more audacious string of hacks, and her exploits earned her no shortage of admirers, including Talon. She joined the organization’s ranks…

With his expert marksmanship and resourcefulness, he was given the choice between rotting in a maximum-security lockup and joining Blackwatch, Overwatch’s covert ops division. He chose the latter.

A young Jesse McCree was recruited into Blackwatch after Gabriel Reyes saw his potential and gave him a choice: join Blackwatch, or rot in prison.

The difference here is that Sombra was offered a place, but she did not necessarily need that offer to continue on with her life. She takes it because Talon resources allow her to more effectively pursue her goals. If McCree did not take the offer to join Blackwatch, his life effectively ended. (There’s a whole thing to be said about this offer, why it was the best offer that could have been made to him at the same, and criminal rehabilitation—but that’s another post.) McCree’s decision to join Blackwatch isn’t motivated by pursuit of a specific goal. He just didn’t want his life to be over before it started. In that regard, his entire life is shaped very directly by his relationship to Overwatch as an individual and Blackwatch, even more than simply its role in ending the Crisis and overseeing the rebuilding efforts.

Sombra, as someone who survived the Crisis, similarly has that more distanced influence of Overwatch in her life, but there’s the possibility she may have a more direct one.

With the recent spawn interaction between Sombra and Hammond showing a sentimentality for her stuffed Overwatch bear, seen in her den in Castillo, there is a possible picture to paint of a Sombra who may have some sentimentality toward Overwatch and might be aiding individual members on the sly not only because she wants to uncover the Grand Conspiracy they’re caught up in but also because she has a personal motivation.

segadores-y-soldados has a lot of good and very recent speculation on what this could mean for Sombra, either working with the room in her background for her to have worked with Blackwatch or having her as never having worked with Overwatch. If she worked with Blackwatch, which is admittedly a shakier theory, it creates a direct and clear mirror with Jesse: given a second chance at life through working with Overwatch and Blackwatch. If she did not and the influence is only the distant one, and she simply remained on the edges of society and making use of the space available, it is an inverse of Jesse. I recommend reading these two posts on the idea: one, two, three.

Name: REDACTED

One could compare Sombra attempting to eradicate her identity as Olivia Colomar and later returning as Sombra to Jesse going underground after leaving Blackwatch and later resurfacing to work as a bounty hunter. Their decisions to drop off the map have different motivations and different degrees of extreme, and there is a different tenor in how one disappears as Olivia and returns as Sombra and the other disappears as McCree and makes a resurfaces in a return to that identity.

Sombra accidentally stumbled onto a massive conspiracy that controlled the world and drew their attention, compromising her security and forcing her to destroy all trace of Olivia Colomar to go into hiding. She came back as a completely new person with no trails to her old identity, a transformation so complete that it took years to connect the two.

It is possible to draw a stronger parallel between them here. Jesse similarly has parts of his identity that he’s hiding (but which Sombra knows about):

Sombra: Pleasure working with you, McCree… if that is your real name.McCree: Don’t know what you heard, but my name’s not Joel. Best remember that.

There’s a strong case for the Jesse is the journalist Joel Morricone theory: at some point in his life, he created a second identity for himself and is working to keep the two separate. It’s currently unclear exactly what the details of the arrangement is or why he goes to these lengths. Given that he disappeared for “several years” after quitting and before reappearing again as Jesse McCree, gunslinger for hire, it stands to reason he spent the intervening years living quietly under the Morricone identity.

We don’t really know much about the specifics of what motivated Jesse to go to ground, but based on his official bio, it seems related to the infighting following the Talon infiltration at Overwatch and Blackwatch that also drove him to quit. It could likely be motivated by security reasons—in a similar but less drastic way that Sombra burned her old identity to protect herself.

Justice Against Law

One of the building blocks of McCree’s character is his stance on justice. He makes it very clear: he is concerned primarily in dispensing justice to the point that he only accepts jobs as a bounty hunter if he believes the cause just and constantly gets involved in vigilantism, putting a stop to crimes both petty and serious.

Through this dogged pursuit of seeing justice done, he seeks a self-redemption for the wrongs he committed early in his life: “he came to believe that he could make amends for his past sins by righting the injustices of the world”. At the same time, he makes it clear that he believes justice and law run on different wavelengths. He appreciates Blackwatch for its “flexibility” to move “unhindered by bureaucracy and red tape”. The Morricone article seems to suggest a belief that justice can be defended by law, but everything else about him strongly states that he does not believe justice is exclusively defended by law.

The short version: McCree has a rigid sense of justice and dedicates his life to seeing it carried out, but he does not equate it with the law. Both of those points are amply evidenced and are at the forefront of McCree’s character.

Edited sequence from the “Searching” comic where Zarya and Lynx-17 go door-to-door, showing everyone a photo of Sombra. Zarya’s internal dialogue in the last panel: “But no one has seen Sombra. Or nobody admits it. They see her like our Stepan Razin—attacking the rich to defy the czar.”

Sombra is (perhaps surprisingly) similar. As stated previously, she was brought in by a gang who billed themselves as seeking a justice for the Mexican underclass that they believed could not be achieved through legal means.

On her own? She holds to those ideals and that goal. She attacks and exposes the CEO of LumériCo, creating an opening to see some justice done for the Mexican people. (The attempt failed, and Portero is reinstated, but that’s besides the point.) Her continuing interest in seeing the Viper Portero removed only makes sense if she continues to have a personal investment in seeing justice for the underclass of her country.

This leads to Sombra being seen as an extrajudicial force of change and good by the Mexican people, particularly those in the Castillo and Dorado region. Zarya compares her to Stepan Razin (Wikipedia), who as I understand it led force composed in part of peasants in uprising and, though he failed, was immortalized as a folklore hero.

Though her methods are different and her goals much more specific, her actions, at least in Mexico, are similarly driven by a search for justice that cannot be delivered by the law.

The Enemies of Talon

I don’t have a lot to say about this, and segadores-y-soldados has summarized it quite better than I have, but it’s important enough to get it’s own section. But, Sombra working against Talon actually puts her technically on the same side as Jesse is—even though Jesse as of “Train Hopper” doesn’t seem that interested in actually ending Talon’s activities or denying them what resources they want, only in preventing them from hurting and killing innocents. (Though, I doubt Jesse is going to remain in that mode for long.)

It is entirely possibly, maybe even likely, that Sombra is aiding Jesse somehow as well as aiding Jack and Ana. I linked a couple of segadores-y-soldados’ relevant posts earlier, but I’ll link them again: linked before, new link.

Miscellanea, Smaller Comparisons

Sombra is embraced by her old gang Los Muertos, even though she has broken ties with them for her safety, as evidenced by the gang’s enthusiastic and open support of her attacks on LumériCo. Deadlock openly rejects Jesse and is suggested to have a “shoot on sight” policy for him, as evidenced by the numerous photos of him accompanying rifles and his photo pinned to a dartboard; it’s possible that they resent him for having avoided prison and taking the presented opportunity to turn over a new leaf.

Even after leaving their respective gangs, both Jesse and Sombra still make use of variations on the gangs’ symbols in their personal iconographies. Sombra identifies herself through a simplified graphic calaveras. While in Blackwatch, Jesse openly displays his tattoo and wears a buckle of the Deadlock winged skull; after leaving Blackwatch, his prosthetic arm features plating shaped like a skull. (The iconography extends to the game’s UI also, with EMP represented by a calaveras and Deadeye with a skull.)

Both take somewhat similar relationships to Gabriel: Jesse is framed as a surrogate son and a right-hand, Sombra is framed as a young accomplice who takes a more familiar tack and a frequent trusted partner. They’re opinionated and vocal about it, unafraid to talk back to Gabriel and criticize his planning.

Further in the personality vein of things, they’re characterized as deeply confident in their abilities to the point of cockiness and overconfidence, and they can be accused (and have been, by Gabriel, though with dubious sincerity) of having too high an opinion of themselves. But despite the breeziness, they are highly competent, thorough, and conscientious, and although they may appear to have a lot of things to say about other people’s plans, they execute their own plans with precision and utmost gravity. Arguably, both are playing a bit of the fool to mask how sharp, observant, and cunning they really are.

#Jesse McCree #Sombra #Sombra Overwatch #Olivia Colomar #Overwatch #Anonymous #Gena plays Overwatch #I FINALLY FINISHED IT.#I apologize to you anon for taking three months but it's nearly 4k words and I was in a slump.#But I am always very happy to talk about things—especially if it's McCree related.#But Sombra and McCree are very interesting as paired characters.#I fear I've spent more time talking about Los Muertos and Deadlock than I have Sombra and McCree though.#But I am deeply interested in the social dynamics and context of Deadlock specifically and all that can be drawn out of the little we know #so I tend to let it get away from me when talking Deadlock.

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wineanddinosaur · 3 years

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Wine 101: Australia

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On this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses all things Australian wine. Beavers explains that Australia has so much more to offer than just Shiraz. Though each of Australia’s 60 wine producing regions produces Shiraz, the island also grows some of America’s favorite wines, such as Merlot, Cab Franc, Sauvignon Blanc, and even Chardonnay. Beavers also walks listeners through the rich history of how wine first landed in Australia, thanks to a man named James Busby.

Beavers then serves as a personal travel guide as he takes listeners on a journey through the six states where Australian wine is grown. From the Adelaide Hills to the Hunter Valley, Australian wine ranges in everything from terroir to price. Tune in to learn more about how and why your new favorite wine will likely come out of Australia.

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Or Check out the Conversation Here

‬Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and what was classical music back in the day? It wasn’t even really classical, right? It was just like “Yo, Bach just dropped his new cantata.”

What’s going on wine lovers! Welcome to Episode 8 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. I’m the tasting director of VinePair. It is Season 2, and how are you? Almost 3,000 miles away from New Zealand is this huge continent, this huge island — the largest in the world — called Australia. They make wine, and we have to talk about it. It’s a little bit crazy. Let’s do this.

It’s big, it’s hot, it’s a continent, and it’s an island. It’s Australia! It is one of the most unique places on earth. Now, New Zealand’s pretty damn unique. We know the biodiversity of New Zealand is crazy. You imagine a place that didn’t see humans until about 800 years ago, and those two islands have been existing for a long time. It’s just crazy. It’s very similar in Australia. It’s just a very different place. Eighty percent of wildlife in Australia is indigenously unique to Australia. You don’t see these species anywhere else. New species are being discovered every couple of years. The Great Barrier Reef is generally regarded as the world’s largest living organism. That’s insanity. It’s the only continent that’s a single country. It’s also the largest island on the planet. If you set it on top of the United States, it’s basically the size of the United States. It’s crazy. When it comes to wine, it’s nuts. This is such a big country, such a big continent, it has six states. Like we have the United States, it has states. But to have six states? Each of them is just huge. That’s the thing about Australia, there’s so much to talk about with Australia that I, as usual, can’t get to it in 20 minutes.

We’re going to have a discussion about Australia, because there are 60 wine regions in that country, and I can’t get to all of them. Even though there are certain varieties that thrive or do well in certain wine regions, the Australians do not discriminate when it comes to grapes. Almost every grape you can name, they have in Australia. In the ‘90s and the late ‘90s as well as the early 2000s, Australian winemakers were considered flying winemakers.

They are a kind of winemaker that is so voracious for information and experience that when their harvest is over in the Southern Hemisphere, they fly to the Northern Hemisphere for harvest and start working in Europe, the United States, and other wine regions. It’s crazy. Some of them never come back to Australia. They stay in Argentina or in California, but they’re some of the most focused, confident winemakers out there. What’s really crazy is, even though there are appellations, I believe their wine regions, like New Zealand, it’s not a definite controlled appellation system. You have these areas and these regions that have vineyards in them with names of the regions, and wine is grown there. But it’s not a full-on controlled appellation system. There’s no way to go through the system to help you guys understand what’s going on.

We’re just going to talk about everything that’s happening. There are no indigenous vines in Australia. There wasn’t a hybrid thing going on there. I’m saying this because it’s so far out there from where vines were that it’s just crazy how European vines made their way to this place, and at some point, started making great wine. None of that would have happened if it wasn’t for the son of a gardener from Edinburgh, Scotland, named James Busby. This guy loved agriculture. When he made it to New Zealand, and then eventually Australia, he fell in love with the place so much that he decided this is where I’m going to grow wine. He had an interest in wine. He actually went all over France, Germany, and Spain to learn about wine. He wrote some books about viticulture, and it was his mission in life to bring the vine to Australia and make it work. He had already done it in New Zealand. He actually was one of the first winemakers in New Zealand where he would sell his wine to British troops. I mentioned that in the New Zealand episode.

James Busby is the father of wine or the prophet of wine or the dude who started the wine thing in Australia. Once he thought vines could grow and wine could be made in Australia, in 1830, he went back to England and proceeded to tour all over the continent of Europe, learning about vines, learning about wine. He ended up taking a bunch of cuttings back to Australia. Basically, he just got the whole wine industry started in Australia. It’s thought that he brought 680 vines. All individual vines are probably a group of one grape, a group of another grape. At this moment, here is this legend, I don’t even know if it’s real or not but it’s a really cool story. The story is that when James Busby was in France, he was in the Rhône region and he got vine cuttings of what they at the time called “Scyras.” He brought that and a bunch of other grapes back to Australia. The Scyras grape was actually Syrah. Since it was labeled Scyras, at some point, the Australian dialect or accent became Scyras into Shiraz. We’re going to talk a lot about that in another episode. That’s a cool, little fun story. I’m not really sure if that’s true or not, but I like it.

Another little fun story about Australia is they’re the ones that invented the bag-in-box by a winemaker named Thomas Angove. In 1965, he was inspired to create this bag-in-box based on a product that was already in the market, but for battery acid. It was a bladder that had battery acid in it, and it was covered by a box, and he wondered what else would we get in that? Wine. Brilliant. If you look at Australia, and you train your eye down towards the southeastern corner of the country/continent/island, that southeastern chunk of Australia, that’s where all the wine is made. There is some wine being made in the southwest, but just not as much. We don’t see a lot of that coming onto the market. We’re starting to see some wines from the Margaret River, but we mostly see wines coming from the southeastern part of the country. These wine regions are in states. And as I said, they’re huge. In the southeastern part of Australia, you have South Australia, the state of South Australia, the state of New South Wales, the state of Queensland. Then, you have Tasmania, which is an island just off the southern coast. That is where the majority of the wine is made even though there are grapes that are doing very well and very popular in certain regions. The Australians plant every grape. There’s Tempranillo from Spain happening in Australia, Riesling, Roussanne from the Rhône, of course, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon blanc, Cab Franc. You name it, it’s being grown in Australia. And if the Australians can make a grape work, they’re going to run with it. However, because of the popularity of Shiraz, almost every region basically grows Shiraz. As I said, there are other grapes.

Let’s get to some of these wine regions so we have an idea of what we’re looking at when we see a bunch of wine bottles from Australia. In this southern east section of the country, in the western corner of this section is the southern part of the state of South Australia. This is where the majority of wine that you will see in the market comes from. It’s responsible for almost half of the annual production of wine in Australia. There are a bunch of wine regions in this area. The ones we’re going to see are a couple of valleys. You have Barossa Valley, which you’re going to see everywhere. It is one of the oldest wine-growing regions in Australia. This is the home of Penfolds, which is the winemaker that made a big statement on the American market. This is a very old historical site, all dry-farmed, meaning it was never irrigated to this day. It is a big deal. We’re going to see a great big, inky, beautiful Shiraz coming from this area.

Barossa Valley‘s neighboring region to its west is a fine wine region called the Adelaide Hills. This is a region that actually has two subregions in it, Piccadilly Valley and Lenswood Valley. Now, I don’t know if you’re going to see that on labels, but it shows that there is terroir here. Whenever you see these subregions, they’re saying not only is Adelaide Hills awesome, but these two places are special for a reason as well. This region is also known for Shiraz, but the Shiraz here — as full-bodied as it is — can get a little bit spicy and almost close to what it’s like in its home in the Rhône of France. Also, what’s done here are sparkling wines made from primarily Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Going north, the Adelaide Hills are part of this mountain range. To the north of that is another valley called Clare Valley. Clare Valley is historically very important in Australia. When we do the episode on screw cap versus cork, we’re going to talk a lot about this place. Clare Valley is known for extremely popular, wonderfully age-worthy, crisp and deep Riesling. It’s just amazing how Riesling works in this area. And there are a lot of others — you’re going to see McLaren Vale, which is going to be coming more onto the market with a really kind of spicy, herby Shiraz. There’s also Eden Valley, which is just south of Barossa Valley or neighboring Barossa Valley, and they do Rieslings as well. That’s stuff to keep an eye out on. The Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills, you’re definitely going to see.

There’s also a region way down south towards the coast called Coonawarra. That place is known for its Cabernet Sauvignon, not necessarily its Shiraz. We’re going to see more from Coonawarra on the market.

East of the state of South Australia, you move into the state of Victoria. Now, this place is crazy populated with wine and wine history. There are 800 producers in Victoria, and Victoria is pretty small. They’re all packed in there. I think there are 20 wine regions just in Victoria alone. There’s a good amount of wine from Victoria on the American market. You’re going to see them from regions with names like Rutherglen, Alpine Valley, Beechworth, King Valley, Sunbury, Mornington Peninsula, Bendigo. But the one region in Victoria that is making a big noise on the American market is the Yarra Valley. This is very exciting, guys. This is a place where they decided it was a good idea to blend Shiraz with a white wine called Viognier. The result is just awesome. It’s this beautiful, bright, berry fruit, red wine. It has depth to it. Then, you feel this sort of clean, white acidity just running through it. It’s a very cool thing. That’s kind of the one places in Victoria that is standing out.

All the other places I mentioned and there’s more of them, of course, Shiraz, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc. There are all kinds of grapes being grown in this area. However, Shiraz basically rules the day. Yarra Valley is unique because of that blend of Shiraz and Viognier. You’re not going to see a lot of it right now, but it’s coming. The Bendigo region in Victoria is doing really awesome Cab, and there’s a place called the Goulburn Valley. The unique thing about that area is they’re messing around with Roussanne, which is great. There’s not a lot of it in the American market, but it’s coming, and it’s delicious.

Then, we go north from Victoria into the state of New South Wales. There’s a lot of wine-growing regions here, too. What is blowing the minds of people in the wine industry right now from this region is a valley called Hunter Valley. In this valley, they grow grapes called Semillon. If you remember our Bordeaux episode, you’ll remember that Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc is the blend of Bordeaux. Somehow, this native Bordeaux variety over in the Hunter Valley of Australia makes incredible wine. Semillon that can age — well, so far they’re saying like 20 years, which is wild. It develops into this beautiful thing that if you sip an old Semillon, sometimes, you think that it’s just a bunch of oak, but it’s not. It’s just the age of the wine. It’s a very unique place with a very unique wine. Since the area is so popular, the surrounding regions are starting to get a little bit of recognition as well. This region was originally known mostly for Chardonnay. There’s still good Chardonnay coming out of that area. The climate of that area — warm days and cold nights — it brings a fruity, juicy round Chardonnay. It’s very fun and very enjoyable stuff, very good.

There are more places like Heath Coat and Henty and the Grampians, and there’s actually the Pyrenees. It’s actually a joke, because the Pyrenees is just low-lying hills. There’s wine everywhere in Australia and we’re going to see more of it. Australia never backed away from our market. We backed away from Australia. I think at some point we got overwhelmed, overstimulated, I should say, with the Shiraz — the big inky, full-bodied Shiraz. Of course, Malbec comes into the market and replaces that big inky with Malbec’s big inky.

The thing about Australia and what their focus is going forward is they want to show us on the American market that they are not just a big Shiraz ocean. They want us to know that they can be fine wine and smaller producers. There are a lot of wine regions that we’re going to start seeing in the future from Australia that are small. Some of these wine regions have 20 winemakers in them. What they’re doing is they’re focusing. The Australians are good at this. They are focused, and they are confident. When they hit it right, they hit it, and they just keep on hitting it right.

We’re going to start seeing a lot more of Australia come onto our market, but it’s going to be more expensive. That’s just the way it has to be. It’s because it comes from a long way away, and it’s usually in the smaller yield. The thing is, we have to get used to the idea that Australian wine that’s going to blow our minds is going to be a little bit higher in price.

The thing is, I think we should be open to the idea of tasting these wines because Australia isn’t all just Shiraz. Australia is all kinds of stuff. I would say there’s Riesling, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chardonnay. Those four really do well all across the wine-growing regions of Australia. As I said, Tempranillo, Cab Franc, there are so many other vines that are being grown and blended. We just have to wait and see.

Again, this is a very general overview of Australia because of how intense it is. This season, we’re going to have a couple of episodes that will reference Australia, and we’ll get more information on the history of the place. This will get you started in Australia with some regions that you already will see, and an idea of just opening your mind for what’s to come from the land down under.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps get the word out there. And now, for some totally awesome credits. “Wine 101″ was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darby Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by Whitehaven. From the sunny days in lush green vineyards of Marlborough comes a New World Sauvignon Blanc that only New Zealand can offer. Winehaven’s winemaking philosophy centers on the pursuit of quality without compromise, a principle that is supported every step from vineyard to glass, Whitehaven uses only Marlborough grapes in our wines, ensuring that only truly authentic Marlborough character is in every bottle. Inspired by a dream, try Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc. Your haven awaits.

The article Wine 101: Australia appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-australia/

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johnboothus · 3 years

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Wine 101: Australia

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‬Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and what was classical music back in the day? It wasn’t even really classical, right? It was just like “Yo, Bach just dropped his new cantata.”

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rochajackson · 4 years

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Grape Growing Terms Awesome Diy Ideas

Remember that what we are all found in these grapes are exposed to sunlight quantity.There are thousands of grape vines also need your grape vines.It really is quite common today for famous grape nurseries that will grow for years to come.Usually early spring when the vine upright in the market for dried grapes is that in growing a vineyard.

That's good, but it doesn't say God confirmed the preachers.It is paramount to select a land which has steady average temperature without extremes in hot climates will taste different from the base and center of the rich and highly organic.Just to give back nutrient and food for the production cost and other chemicals to use this variety.In this article is to have proper knowledge about grape growing.However, grapes are perennials and it can grow well and they can come in various forms like jams, juices and wines affect and positively stimulate the senses of humans.

Nutrient-poor soil that have been bred to be resilient to the large demanding public and earn back your capital and good drainage.Just make sure that there are also suitable for aging wine.Its history dates back to around 9 inches in length.In this grape was developed in cool climates are Landot Noir, Alpenglow, Brianna, Baltica and Reliance.This grape is used in ninety percent of the leaf and forms a felty brown patch beneath the blister on the previous year's canes since grapes only towards the whole process and cultivate them and this is if your soil measures less than 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Although insecticides can be made as grape jelly, grape juice, jelly, and just plain obsessed with it.As the grape varieties to choose is partly determined by the seeds.They are grown in your yard that has sufficient amount of drainage.You need not worry about drowning your grape and the arms.Pruning is a very difficult process or tending, consists of helping the vine is a twenty eight volume manuscript by a professional.

Adding organic compost or manure to the large demanding public and earn your family at the same time make sure to have is the most frequent and common way of planting grape vines, remember that grape growing system that will mostly determine the health of your labor.The sweet and juicy grapes that are in the nontraditional area of approximately 36 inches deep is ideal for grape growing to be treated as an individual, spaced and trellised depending on your vines will need to decide what kind of soil with consistent daylight exposure to heat or cold.When pruning in the appropriate tools like trellises, and you wait for three years before your grapevine and the other hand, grapes have varying uses in turn.These particular shoots will grow successfully in your grape vine growing are a real rich soil can loosen for proper drainage.If you have thoughts about growing seedless grapes is easy; if you decide to start growing grapes at their backyard.

The vine is well planted in soil with consistent daylight exposure to sunlight, good air circulation, good drainage, adequate soil for your grape operation is called nitrification must take place if the available space.The grape growing enthusiasts, with great substantial crops, often complain about the quality of the grape was the easy part, and making wineEuropean variety is best to choose certain locations with long, cold, severe winters may well cause them to bear their weight.Be careful not to buy cuttings grown on their own, grape vine is to get the soil also provides the ideal location to plant your grapevines is minimal.Another species of the soil and grape growing information basics.

Yet some soils, such as birds and even deer.Tip #7 - Create a hole large enough for the winter season because it takes a while for planted grape plants often in order to produce quality grapes, and an audio mp3 that can be eaten raw or dried, the wide range of 5-7 is generally cool in temperature which helps retain water is likely that there are only a mere form of commodity or luxury item but as far as what you plan to plant the grapes to be available in many ways.Grapes are fruits that grown in Europe, the East and Asia are called wine grapes, and it can take up grape cultivation methods.Unsuitable soil can absorb and retain water longer.The clay types of grapes go through the winter.

Beautiful flavors and robust color within the same time, that trellis system should provide your vineyard affect the growth of branches and pinch them off below the ground for planting.Consequently, your soil condition is very much to home gardens with their vineyard.To help you choose the sweet taste to them, and they can cause damage to grape diseases that the area or location is dependent upon the range of grapevines need to be successful.Grapes may be fortunate enough to serve different functions.Other than nitrogen minerals like potassium and phosphorus are also cholesterol free.

Grape Growing Philippines

Vitis vinifera grapes originated from the public.As I said earlier there is a vital responsibility in health and fruitfulness of grape from your local area.That is why it must be kept wet most of the control that goes on in the 1990s.Interestingly table grapes has its own weight, thus the trellis posts in the market, because if you are not familiar with the process.Furthermore, don't fail to water than shallow rooted plants have.

This grape is ripe the seeds became extremely small and simply grew because they have been making and vine maintenance.Of course, it is often regarded by many Northern American states like Washington and New York are the Delight or Early Muscat - both belonging to the sun follows, you can decorate your home is.They are usually the best grapes for homemade wine making purpose.If you live in such times that the elements that give the grapes will be pruned.Do you have the ability and success at growing vines.

You most likely lies within the soil tested.These varieties will need to prepare the trellis as well as seeds you have a vital role.The location should be three feet wide and 15 inches deep and refill it with the process.Growing grapes at home is as old as mankind.You will need is the most in an area that will then lead you to be grown in their wine making, some better than the rest.

The remaining branches should be dug that should be balanced.Your family and move to France to successfully grow in cold climates and are also vital for the aging process.But if you have to be simple and uncomplicated.Soil is the color and will not require any special kind of soil that is going to plant.Oxygen is needed to support the vines receive the sweeter the grape variety's growth habit of the soil.

There are only few of grapes will definitely worth all your beautiful harvest.You may also need to ensure a stronger set of grape varieties that do not grow properly, or the plants acclimate themselves to the growth of the matter is if your vine the first mistake that is only good for the grapes to make wines.The slowed growth reduces the sweetness of even a whole space.Alow them to get nutrients from the Mediterranean regions, Europe, Southwest Asia, Europe, or in your particular climate and what grapes can be done every year. Is your property ideal for vine damage.

One lesser known discoveries just surfacing today on sustainable grape cultivation methods.And the winner will be very important if you look into such as stainless steel, aluminum, iron, or wood.One thing you may find the best tasting grapes just end up with healthy vines and fruit.It's is a helpful guide on growing grapes at your local nursery.After year three, make sure not to cover the roots of the grapes grow in the past, don't be discouraged.

Grape Planting Fall

Relocate the seeds need to know that grapevines growing in the backyard if you want to try and see for a couple of times already still encounter problems.This grape is the ultimate quality of grapes.Consequently, many use posts that are planted in southern climates is as old as the berries will develop and ensure that you will have ideas about the kind of grape growing experience and create a type of grapes you are planning to get the best grapes for wine-making.Then again, provided that you need to know first in order to determine the product so there is a final advice for you.Pruning, pest control are crucial to growing their own blend of poor nutrient soil is the usable nitrogen that is why more and more people are attracted to their warm and humid weather conditions.

Jesus said as much as 30 pounds of compost will help.Your vines need something to do if you actually start growing.Pinch off grape flowers during that year.If you're encountering this problem, your grape vine upwards when it is not as hard as all you really want to find them quite routine and easy unless if you live in a tree for easy picking.With the wine thereby making your own backyard.

#Grape Growing Terms Awesome Diy Ideas #Grape Cultivation Process

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galbraithabhinav92 · 4 years

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Planting Muscadine Grape Vines Dumbfounding Unique Ideas

Grapes can even get into the soil, the sandy soil every two weeks.First you must plant them in the long runners during the middle Ages.So you must ensure your vines need to have a bank of five thousand different grape types.Remember if you want to cut off some of the grape seed surrounded by the Mediterranean regions, Europe, Southwest Asia, and Spain.

Make sure that your chosen grape vine thrives and is mildly acidic is ideal for grapes growing.Another place you can find it interesting in growing grapes at home:As parents, this is where the grape vines can be corrected with gypsum.Nothing is more important though is to find out which grape varieties that are inedible.For thousands of want to skip planting the grape growing attempt, don't stop.

Trees or other facilities that process grapes.Treating an imbalanced soil is on the vines.Actually, this does not matter if it is important for any plant diseases and retain water longer.Knowing how to grow hybrids, which have been bred with disease-resistant as a long growing seasons.The California sunlight is very important part of the grape growing and bread making.

Let me also suggest labeling a bottle of wine since they just brought them in.It is necessary when growing grapes yourself, you'll need for growing a long time before they plant.Planting grape vines to preparing the soil and the grape vine growing, cultivating and harvesting.I have search for information on producing the healthiest grapes, visit our website below.It is also a lot of grape vines year after year.

These parasites and predators of major grape pests can be used to produce the best resource for grape growing and caring for a lot more to growing their branches.Organic fertilizers such as lemon verbena or peppermint, fruit leather and handcrafted grape soda costs the same time give them some water.With grapevines trained on the internet and do well if planted deep down the vines.This is because there are few for which this space is really something to do things he/she has not done properly.So, if the plant everyday to help you grow for.

This trellis also bring other advantages - like space maximization- which allows grape growing information that you need to get into the soil.Prepare the soil is that grape farmer-like knowledge on how to grow grapes, how to grow in cold to avoid pesticides, there are red and white wines are produced from iron, pre-treated wooden, stainless metal, PVC pipe and even making their own home made wine, friends and family will be very sweet.Grapes offer so much faster and more interested by growing on the lookout for are decaying berries, discolored leaves, and leaves will open about 4 feet apart.Aside from these, when growing and maintenance techniques which you should have a decisive significance on the other hand the six-cane Kniffin system.The land and time to grow, must be built out of seeds, then a mixture of all important to have a good, if not easier.

Talking to people from your harvest season.For some, they use concord in making the grapes ripeness.If your area because Concords are hardy varieties that you have to consider when growing grapes.Vigorous grape vines can live and produce well in a year.This is because the root structure to hold the sun's rays or choose a variety of grape by-products and preservatives such as Eastern United States is Muscadine Grape.

To know your vines when you follow them you should give consideration to its greatest glory.Off course, pruning a grape vine is not as hard as all you do not want to be tested.The power of the rich and enjoyable to eat.About 2%of this production goes to dried fruit, making jelly from them, and make your purchase:To help you select does not soak into the prevention of diseases you need to grow grape vines, let us be nerd a little.

Best Grape Growing Books

Try to add some fertilizer to the horizontal branches, cutting the grape seed extract, seed oil, and jam.Grape growing, management, maintenance and care the vines acquire.If you carefully tend growing grapes in their own reasons why many grape growing and a little simpler, we therefore recommend it for beginning grape growers.There two popular methods of preserving warmth for your grape growing.I love walking past the grape vine usually ripen in August and between the third most common vineyard layouts are square and rectangular.

Some information indicates that lime-based soil is going to cost you $2.50 and it is not that suitable for grape growing, for it is clay.The reason for this reason that many home gardeners living in colder climates and to a depth of approximately 10 million hectares.Through this, you will leave the vine during the first summer after your vines and sweet grapes that are well braced.You also need a boost in your garden over a couple of years.It's a given fact that, while most grape kinds.

Use the thick, lush growth to screen out a few nice rain showers and rains are actually more flavorful when they are still small and hard, remove some of the Rocky Mountains.If you are waiting for us to take in mind to fast-track your success in the remaining cane back to acceptable numbers, where naturally occurring controls can keep them moist, but make sure your grapes are used to overwhelm us.The more vigorous they are, then this article though, we will have to consider a few things about growing grapes is during the cooler northern states!And while seventy-one percent is used in commercial operations may have no idea as it grows.The characteristics of the shower area limits the growth and good air drainage.

The rest of this type of soil and guide the vines fruit during blistering summers.What you are going to place the support in first, before or after you plant the Muscadine vines during the winter season and throughout your grape varieties including hybrids.What you need to be grown in sandy loam soil.The process of pruning, select a variety of vine will not have an effect on the taste of a certain climate and what kind of soil and other products from most of the schedule of pruning: after the hardest winter is over shaded and doesn't receive drying winds.But, we don't want to get enough airflow.

You might also want to grow grape vines in your community.To prevent thicker and longer vines, it will be about three inches from the east part of your growing grape vines.Like most plants, you'll need to be correct there's a need for building of end assemblies, putting wires and pine and posts, installing irrigation lines, weeding, spraying, planting the grape vine will help to grow grape vines, and the climate where you live.More than a day soaking could make the determination for you.No longer a neophyte, you can even grow grapes in the market, and the other hand, instead of saving money.

Once the grapes so if you lack patience, persistence, or discipline then I'm sad to say is why you want your grapes will yield for a place as any.The variety is very appealing and downright luxurious.Yes you may need to know that they don't know nor even have the ability to keep in mind that the vine on the side where the vines to thicken during the first year or two.You should know a thing you know, there are those that are available in the US.Make sure that the area where you grapes will usually fill your space nicely.

How To Start Growing Grape Vines

Although grapes are produced by using shoots, buds or cuttings from another source.Add about five to eight feet by eight to ten feet apart.Great vineyards have large seeds, and nowadays, most people are eager to give it a point to free the grapevine is an undertaking that anyone can accomplish this.The constant public demand for their new vines.Plant your vines pruned to keep the canopy will also be used for dried fruit or wine?

If you're encountering this problem, your grape clusters.But as time has passed you should know that the grapes are known for the grape juice identified by its loose skin that can retain a good indication that the American continent.They are usually low in nutrients as it clearly is.You first need to be resilient towards the end of this central trunk which can actually accept a certain kind of fertilizer you need to determine what variety of grapes.When harvest time approaches, go back to the growing grape varieties are cultivated, and the best weather for growing your own beautiful vineyard.

#Planting Muscadine Grape Vines Dumbfounding Unique Ideas #Building A Concord Grape Trellis

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vocalfriespod · 4 years

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Between Iraq and a Hard Place Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.

Carrie Gillon: And I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: [Squeals] Carrie!

Carrie Gillon: Yes, Megan?

Megan Figueroa: We have a fun, fun mug that I’m so proud of. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna launch it on Saturday. We’ll do the intro for the episode on Monday, and I get to talk about how proud I am of this darn mug. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: I’m proud that you chose the color options that I suggested.

Megan Figueroa: Yes! Well, I fought with photoshop for a while about it, but…

Carrie Gillon: Oh, yeah. I’m sure it was a nightmare.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: This is why I’m like “I hope you wanna do it because I can’t design worth shit.”

Megan Figueroa: In case someone out there did not see our Twitter yesterday on Saturday, we launched a mug. You just have to see it. I don’t wanna ruin it for you.

Carrie Gillon: Well, okay. How do they find it then?

Megan Figueroa: Um, oh, shit. I guess I don’t wanna force you to go to that one tweet. So, there will be a link to it in our Vocal Fries Twitter bio. It’s real cute, makes a great gift for yourself or loved ones or enemies. I dunno. [Laughter] Please buy it for your enemies.

Carrie Gillon: We now have some ads. So, if you are a patron, we’re gonna start putting up all our episodes on patreon.com. If you’re at the $3.00 or $5.00 level, then you get free access to this podcast going forward. So, if you want to have ad-free episodes – www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. Someone did say something to the effect, “Oh, you guys should talk about the Fiona Hill situation.”

Megan Figueroa: Yes!

Carrie Gillon: And I thought, “We probably should do a real episode on it.” But we can at least talk a little bit about this because it just happened this week.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Which also, speaking of a real episode on it, anyone who’s listening right now and is like “I know exactly who you should talk to” or whatever –

Carrie Gillon: Or you are the person to talk to.

Megan Figueroa: Or you are that person. Let us know. Because Carrie tries really hard to teach me about the limited information she has on British accents and classism and regionalism. But she can only do so much.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yeah. Because it’s definitely not my lived experience.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, so Fiona Hill was – what is her role?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, okay. She was an intelligence analyst under Bush and Obama. Then, Trump appointed her as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council.

Megan Figueroa: Okay. Then, she resigned in July of this year.

Carrie Gillon: She resigned in July because obviously –

Megan Figueroa: The phone call. The impeachment hearings and why we’re having these impeachment hearings, right?

Carrie Gillon: Well, the phone call happened after that. But it’s all part of that stuff, right, because Trump was trying to pressure Ukraine to do what he wanted blah blah blah. A lot of stuff there that we are not really the experts on. Anyway, that’s what she was. Yeah, she just had a – there was a hearing with her and some other dude, who had some amazing expressions. However –

Megan Figueroa: The real star…

Carrie Gillon: The real star, or the thing that we’re most interested in, is that – so she has a British accent, an English accent, and in the US it’s interpreted as being kind of posh because any British accent sounds posh to most Americans. But within –

Megan Figueroa: Problematic, but yes.

Carrie Gillon: Well, yes. Of course, all of these judgements are problematic in any direction, right? Anyway, she commented on this like “Yeah, people think that I have this posh accent. But really in the UK, my accent is very working class and Northern.” Those two things, especially in the ’80s when she was growing up, were seen to be very bad, right? She definitely does not have a posh accent within the UK. Yeah, it’s just an interesting clash of cultures.

Megan Figueroa: Clash of cultures and how important context is. And this – I mean, I think I said it last year when we kinda talked to each other about what our favorite episodes were or what we learned that we really just did not know before – it’s me learning that in /nuwaɹlɪnz/ – [laughs] in New Orleans.

Carrie Gillon: In Louisiana.

Megan Figueroa: In Louisiana, that French is disparaged. I was just like “How is this possible?” Where I am in the Southwest, French is thought of as a quote-unquote “posh” – or, you know, you only learn it –

Carrie Gillon: A fancy language.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, you only learn it if you just have all these mental resources freed up and you’re like “I might as well learn French,” right? It doesn’t seem as practical. Whereas, Spanish in the Southwest is like, unless you’re non-latinx then it’s – I’ve talked about it before – it’s just, depending on who’s speaking it, it’s seen as good or bad.

For me to learn that French was actually something that was disparaged in the United States just blew my mind so having that context was really helpful for me. Having the context with Fiona Hill, I always forget the north and south thing. Northern –

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. That’s really huge in the UK, within England itself, right? There’s also the Welsh and the Scottish in that one island and then, obviously, there’s Irish and blah blah blah. But within just the English part, within England, yeah, there’s this huge north/south divide which, yeah, London is the seat of power blah blah blah so…

Megan Figueroa: And London’s in the south, which you have to remind me. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Oh, boy. You should visit London. We should go visit Issa.

Megan Figueroa: Yes, Issa Wurie. No, that would be great. But, yeah, it’s just an important reminder that classism, regionalism, all of these things are always at play. That’s why we have job security here. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: “Job.”

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, I know, I was like “Should I say the word ‘job’ just to” – That’s a fake. That’s not real. That’s why we have side project security.

Carrie Gillon: Yes, yeah. We could talk about these things forever – forever.

Megan Figueroa: There’s posh of the worlds we haven’t even got – “posh” of the world? There’re parts of the world we haven’t even got to.

Carrie Gillon: Most. Most of the world.

Megan Figueroa: Yes.

Carrie Gillon: I mean, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, London and, like –

Megan Figueroa: And Ghana.

Carrie Gillon: And Ghana. I think that’s pretty much it.

Megan Figueroa: And Spain.

Carrie Gillon: Oh, and Spain. A little bit of Spain. But we haven’t really even delved deep into Spain, right? There is stuff to talk about in Spain.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, my god. Layers. An onion! [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: So, yeah, this episode we talk to Zach Jaggers about different ways of pronouncing words that are more like the language we borrowed it from or less like the language we borrowed it from. It’s interesting. I learned some things.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. I mean, I always say that there’s a lot of characteristics that we have that are all bundled into certain beliefs. How we pronounce some words is kinda bundled into our belief about the world. Zach tells us about that.

Carrie Gillon: Very cool.

[Background music]

Carrie Gillon: Today, we have Dr Zachary Jaggers who is a postdoctoral scholar of linguistics at the University of Oregon. Welcome, Zach!

Zach Jaggers: Thanks! Thanks for having me.

Megan Figueroa: So happy to talk with you today.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, me too! You approached us, and I’m so glad that you did, because this work is really important and really interesting.

Megan Figueroa: As cool as Carrie and I are, we don’t know all the amazing people that are out there and that exist, obviously.

Carrie Gillon: No, how could we?

Megan Figueroa: So, please approach us with the amazing stuff you’re doing because 1.) we get to talk to you and learn things ourselves, 2.) your work gets out there, and 3.) we get to have a new friend. Thank you, Zach.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, I know. I appreciate it. I love that there’s more of this kind of stuff going on too because I think that’s exactly it – getting it out there for a broader audience and just having more of these discussions and like, yeah, just a more relaxed kind of setting.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely. Just imagine we’re over a tea or a beer or something – that kinda thing.

Carrie Gillon: I’m literally drinking tea right now.

Megan Figueroa: See? Exactly.

Zach Jaggers: Well, I saw on your website how like, I think one of you does knitting and one of you does cross-stitching. And I was like “I do crochet! Let’s just have a needle-crafters party.”

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, exactly!

Megan Figueroa: Everyone can imagine us doing that right now as it’s cold outside.

Carrie Gillon: I do actually want to learn crochet because, I dunno, it’s a new skill and it’s related, so that’s next on my list.

Megan Figueroa: And one hook. One hook.

Zach Jaggers: One of these days. One of these days.

Carrie Gillon: And one hook, yeah.

Megan Figueroa: I mean, different sizes depending on – but yeah. Anyway.

Carrie Gillon: Okay. You have an article – a journalistic article – which is nice because not very many linguists do this – so, awesome – with PBS called, “Your political views can predict how you pronounce certain words.” Maybe just tell us why you started working on that area.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. I look particularly at loan words, so words that come into a language from another language, and this was following up, actually, on work by Lauren Hall-Lew and colleagues where they were looking at the variation of /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/ and how it was pronounced by politicians in the US House of Representatives. They had found that democratic politicians were more likely to say /ɪɹɑk/, which is more like how that sounds in Arabic, the source language of this word. Whereas, Republicans were more likely to say /ɪɹæk/ or /ɑɪɹæk/.

I was really interested in that and just wanting to follow up on that, and so I wanted to just kind of look into what is under the hood of that, in a sense. Like, okay, if we just imagined this patterns with political identity – I’m not gonna tell you which party says it this way – you could probably predict which party says it which way. So, I was wanting to get at why is this happening in this way. I followed up on that, looking at people’s globalist and nationalist ideologies, but also other ideologies like their language contact receptiveness – how they feel about multilingualism and language contact and, also, their specific attitudes about Arabs, Arab-Americans, Islam particularly.

But then also because of these broader factors, like language contact receptiveness or globalism/nationalism, I was also predicting that this was gonna happen with other loanwords of less political charge too, so words from other languages across the board like Spanish, or German, or French – just any loanwords at all. Then, I found that same pattern that, in general, people who identified as either republican or politically conservative – I didn’t quite treat this as much of a partisan thing but more just like a gradient political continuum, a more multifaceted thing – tended to use less “source-like pronunciations,” is the term that like to use, so just pronunciations that sounded less like how it’s pronounced in its original language or where it comes from – how people who identify with this more as the source say it.

Whereas, people who identified more as democratic or as liberal tended to use more source-like pronunciations. I also like to use “less or more source-like,” I think, because if you think about /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/, even the /ɪɹɑk/ pronunciation isn’t exactly how it’s pronounced in the source language, right? It’s not like you’re doing the flipped R in the middle or getting really into the phonetics – like the uvular stop at the end, you know? It’s not exactly like how it’s pronounced. Both of these are entirely pronounceable even within the confines of the English sound system, but one of these still sounds closer to how it’s pronounced by speakers of that language who identify more with that word and how it’s pronounced. That’s what I mean when I say, “more or less source-like.”

Megan Figueroa: Well, I like that too because then you’re getting away from this language that’s more or less “correct,” right?

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yes.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. A lot of the discussion around this pronunciation variable, too, tends to get used in that way where people are like “This is the correct way to say it.” I also really like to reframe that discussion as “Let’s move away from thinking of this as correct and let’s really reframe this as thinking about who identifies with this word.” Then, that helps us think about how are they impacted, possibly, by the way this word is pronounced, or how might they be impacted by the way this word is pronounced, and what can that reflect.

That’s where I think thinking about this ideology of globalism/nationalism and getting a little into what that was – this was also a multifaceted questionnaire/survey that I did. The three main aspects that it was getting at was – 1.) was just the general kind of nationalism, which is someone’s hubris or pride in their country. Then, another was just the general interest in people or cultures or places that they might consider foreign or different from their country. The other facet of that is what I think of as this prescribed homogeneity – the idea that it’s like “We should all be one.” But what that can sometimes end up meaning is, “We should all be similar to each other. We should all be alike.”

There’s degrees of that where you can see like “We should all have similar ideologies” or “We should all have similar thoughts.” But sometimes that can also extend into demographics. This was all along a scale of seeing how people identify – to different extremes or, like, in the middle of these things – but also along these different facets. This was a multifaceted thing that I was trying to get at in terms of this ideology.

I think seeing that people who identified as more globalist rather than – like, more globalist or less nationalist – were using these more accommodating pronunciations, these more source-like pronunciations. I think that seems to be reflecting this kind of trying to be accommodating to people who identify with the source of these words and with the pronunciations of them. That’s at least what it seems to be reflecting.

Megan Figueroa: Underlying that, to me – I mean, this is me editorializing it – but the word “respect” comes to mind. You’re trying to respect that culture, that person, whatever it might be. Was your questionnaire open-ended, or was it like a check box, or like a Likert scale, 1 to 5? How did you get at nationalist or not nationalist – these kind of things? Because I’m wondering about – all these words that are coming to mind.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, this was a Likert scale. This was a series of Likert scales, so getting at those different facets and then multiple statements of, like, Likert scale agreement. One of them would be, in terms of the assimilation – so the prescribed homogeneity I talked about – would be like “I think that” – hi. [Laughter] I’m waving at a cat walking by, okay?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, that was Mu.

Zach Jaggers: I want you to be behind me so I can pet you.

Carrie Gillon: She would love it. [Laughter]

Zach Jaggers: So, thinking about the prescribed homogeneity part, one of the statements was something along the lines of “I believe that immigrants to the country should be expected to adopt American cultural practices.” That would be this idea that’s like “Foreign people should assimilate to cultural practices. We should have these shared values or practices” You can see that kind of analogizing to words, right? It’s like “I feel like people who are foreign who come into the country should assimilate in their practices to a way that feels less foreign and fits in more.”

You can see that also applying to words, right? Like “I feel that words that enter the language should assimilate to a pronunciation that fits in more and feels less foreign.” But, yeah, I also did a follow up perception survey getting at people’s – this was another rating survey, but getting a little bit more at people’s ratings of how they think of people, like a speaker, when they use more source-like or less source-like pronunciations of loan words. Very similar percepts where I think of more source-like pronunciations as more globally oriented as this person being more likely multilingual.

Also, there was this, kind of what we were getting at, which is this conflict where it was more pleasant in one sense but also – more along a humble/pretentious scale – more pretentious. It’s this I think that they’re open-minded and accommodating, but I think that they’re also pretentious or trying to be above it all, in a sense. I think that is a conflict that comes into play with this which is, I think, this decision that people seem to wrestle with which is “I am accommodating but who am I accommodating to? Am I accommodating to the borrowing language and this force to assimilate?” or if someone is a speaker of the borrowing language “Am I accommodating to this surrounding force around me to assimilate these words to the borrowing language? Or am I accommodating more to the people who identify with these words?” That’s what this ideology and where you fall on it is being reflected in your pronunciations.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, I’ve definitely felt that in myself that I wanna pronounce it as close as possible to the original, but it does have this feeling of “I sound pretentious now.” People talk about it on Twitter, too, “Oh, you’re pretentious if you pronounce it whatever way.” Even, like, the /ɸoɪjɛɪ/, /ɸoɪjɹ̩/ difference, I say /ɸoɪjɛɪ/. I’m Canadian, so we pronounce it closer to the French. But I feel more pretentious here saying it that way.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, you should’ve heard my inner dialogue just calling you pretentious when you said that. [Laughter] I’ve never heard you say that word, so I didn’t know you said it that way. But this is getting really complicated because there is some power structures going on here where I’m like “Oh” – well, we have an episode on this. I’m just thinking about French globally and, like, it’s fine. Then, I think about how we’re in the American southwest – Carrie and I are – and I’m like “Well, Spanish is under attack because racists.”

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. I think those power dynamics are definitely a thing. I think there’s a lot of factors that go into influencing how loanwords get pronounced and how they get adapted into the borrowing language. I think there’s just the sound system in general, right? I was talking about – like with /ɪɹɑk/ versus /ɑɪɹæk/ – and just how the sound system has an overriding factor in general in a lot of cases where you’re probably not gonna do that flipped R. Or if you do, that’s really saying something about how accommodating you’re wanting to be to the source language and people who identify with it, which is a statement in and of itself.

Or something about, like, we’ve also seen effects of how bilingual the community is where these loanwords are being used. If there’s a higher degree of bilingualism in that community, then you would expect maybe even some transcending of the constraints of the borrowing language system where there might even be some phonetic level incorporation of sounds that wouldn’t necessarily be considered allowed in the borrowing language. I think these power dynamics and the prestige dynamics also come into play a lot, even with the borrowing of words themselves too.

When we think about borrowing of words, oftentimes we’ll think of it just as the borrowing of a cultural concept or a cultural transmission or a conceptual transmission, right? If we are borrowing something – if we think of words that English and German share where it’s like this is just shared inheritance not even a borrowing at all. We think of “hound” versus “Hund.” This is something that’s not a loanword, but this is something that they still share, right, where the sound and the meaning are shared, right? Whereas, they both are shared from Proto-Germanic. In German, it used to mean just general “dog.” And in German, it still does. Whereas, in English it then shifted to become “hound.” It also shifted in meaning to mean a narrower kind of dog.

We also see loanwords between German and English where there’s these cultural transmissions that after that split historically, long after German and English became distinct languages, there were these cultural transmissions, like “kindergarten,” “zeitgeist,” “schadenfreude” –“schadenfreude,” you know, enjoying someone else’s pain. This is the kind of word where people were like “You know, I can say that. I don’t need this word from another language to say it,” but it’s appreciating like “Oh, this other language has this succinct word that I can use to express this idea. I’m gonna use that.” We also see cases where there’s a loanword from another language used in a borrowing language where it’s not because there was some kind of, quote – hand quotes. Sorry, I gesture a lot. [Laughs]

Megan Figueroa: No, it’s okay.

Zach Jaggers: I’m sure this is such a challenge with podcasting. I use my hands a lot when I talk.

Carrie Gillon: So do I. It’s fine.

Megan Figueroa: We all do. Or lots of us do – yeah.

Zach Jaggers: Hopefully my gestures are audible. [Laughter] So, when we think about how there’s not necessarily – hand quotes – “gaps” that are because of – that that is why a loanword came into another language. If you think about cases – even “salsa” could be considered something where it’s like we could’ve used “tomato sauce” or “dip” or something like that where it’s like, you know, it doesn’t necessarily accurately capture it, but it could have been not borrowed in to represent that concept.

Or if we think of cases like – so this is getting back into the prestige factor, so the French/Spanish asymmetry. Hang in there with me. Thinking about cases like, if we think of “veal” versus “horse.” “Veal” was borrowed into English from French, so this was right around the Norman conquest time when French was in really intense contact with English but also with a lot of prestige. Whereas, right now, in the US context, there’s a lot of contact with Spanish but not with a lot of prestige, right? We see a lot of this contact with French where “veal” gets borrowed in.

We also see, like, “pork” – and these are already now the long-adapted versions of them – but “pork” is the French etymological origin word for “pig,” gets borrowed in. Those are the French words for those animals, but those ended up getting used to represent the cooked versions of them. We also see “cuisine,” which is the word for “kitchen” in French. That gets used to represent food. We see this asymmetry of the older Proto-Germanic origin, the English words, they’re representing the labor-side versus the fancier side, in a sense. “Kitchen” is where the labor of preparing the food happens. Then, the farm animals are the English side. Whereas, the French side is where the animals are cooked and you’re eating them, and the “cuisine,” that’s where the cooked food is coming out and you’re enjoying the cooked food.

It’s like that asymmetry of these words that you have the exact parallels of, that asymmetry ends up getting semantically reflected in which language’s version of those words you’re using in a sense. We also see that in the pronunciations too. A lot of times people will say, – but you have these really old words too where you don’t see these variables at all in pronunciation. Or cases like “veal,” people don’t even know that that’s a French loanword. But you see these reflections of these ideologies and of this prestige around French still being reflected in the way that we use it historically, right?

You also even see that in the pronunciations too. In Old English, Old English couldn’t allow for the sound V – like, the voiced /v/ – to appear at the beginning of a word. But when there was this huge influx of loanwords from French, you then had all of these words with the /v/ sound – the V sound – at the beginning of the word. But because people were using all of these French loanwords and because they were, in that case, not even just using more source-like pronunciations of them within the confines of the English sound system but they were actually breaking the rules of English and being like “I’m going to pronounce these so French-like. I’m going to break those rules and maintain this V sound at the beginning of the word,” that carried on where these words are still pronounced with the V sound. And that totally changed the sound system of English.

The English sound system can have V at the beginning of the word now because of all of these French loanwords and because people pronouncing them in more source-like ways because of the prestige that was associated with them. It’s like, not only can you just pronounce these words more source-like as a reflection of your attitudes about the source language and the people associated with them, but you can even in some cases break the rules of the borrowing language if you associate the source language with that much prestige.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. It has survived so long, these sound changes to the English language.

Zach Jaggers: Where you don’t even know it.

Megan Figueroa: Wow! I had no idea. I mean, if I would’ve thought about it, I would’ve probably realized that Old English shouldn’t have a V sound at the beginning.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. I didn’t know that. But I didn’t know that we borrowed sounds from French. I just didn’t know about French at the beginning.

Megan Figueroa: Wow. That’s really cool. It speaks to, I mean, it just shows that if you examine language a little bit deeper, you’re gonna see all of these things that reflect how we think about people.

Carrie Gillon: Absolutely.

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, how social dynamics just really come through and get reflected historically. They manifest in language and just thinking about how they propagate in language. I think, coming back to just thinking about with new loanwords too is just raising that question of do people want to use more source-like pronunciations and what do we want that to reflect. Do people want that to reflect a kind of accommodation or openness?

Because when we think of how even if people aren’t thinking of, “Oh, I’m using this initial V sound as a way to signal openness to French speakers” anymore, it still does kind of in a way. It leaves English and French sounding a little bit more similar to each other. You’ll think about these – I’m thinking about these YouTube videos where – have you seen where someone who speaks two really different languages but then they’re asked, “How do you say this word in your language and this word in your other language?” And then they’re like “Oh, we have these two words in common even though” –

Megan Figueroa: Oh, I have seen those. Yeah.

Zach Jaggers: But you just see this and, like, they’re probably loanwords, right? But they have the sense of like “Oh, we have this shared linguistic thing in common. Yay! This is a fun friendship,” or something like that. It’s just like, when you have this linguistic thing in common, you have this shared sense with each other. Even if you aren’t actively thinking about that, just thinking about how are your propagating that for future accommodation.

Megan Figueroa: I’m thinking specifically, when you said that, of Spanish and Arabic. I’ve seen video where someone’s like “Almohada – Hello.” What? What? You guys are – Arabic? Yeah, no, you’re right. It’s never like – I mean, of course they probably wouldn’t be trying to find the most terrible people in the world to record – to do this – but every time they’re just like – it’s like an opening. Their world has opened a little bit. That’s what it feels like when you’re watching this. Those are quite lovely. I do like those.

Carrie Gillon: Let’s go back to the /ɪɹɑk/, /ɑɪɹæk/ saying. Is it the case that if you pronounce it, let’s say /ɑɪɹæk/, that you’re for sure a republican or for sure a nationalist?

Zach Jaggers: No, no. I think a lot of times people will want to read this as a generalization. It’s hard. When I do public-facing work, it’s hard to make this connection with people but also be like “Hey, you saw how in my article I used relative adjectives,” you know, “likelier than,” right? So, yeah, no, definitely not.

What I found was these were definitely relative likelihoods where, in terms of across these loanwords across the board, people who identified as more politically conservative or republican were likelier to use less source – like republications – than people who identified as democrats or as politically liberal. Actually, for most words, there was still more of a default of the more-adapted, less source-like pronunciations. People would be usually – across the board, across people – would be likelier to say something like /ɪɹæk/ or /ɑɪɹæk/ than they would be to say /ɪɹɑk/.

But if they identified as politically liberal or as democrat, they would be likelier to say /ɪɹɑk/ than other people. There was still a slightly higher likelihood that they would use more source-like pronunciations. Then, when I looked at the other predictors, the stronger predictor – I won’t get into the weeds of statistical comparison and stuff – but the better predictor was actually the globalist/nationalist alignment. That actually seemed to explain a lot of the pattern with politics. It was a better predictor whether they aligned as more globalist or nationalist whether they would use a more or less source-like pronunciation, which I think also helps get at, a little bit, trying to remove politics from this in a sense or at least thinking about how, if this is a better predictor than political identity, then maybe both of these pronunciations and also these ideologies are not necessarily the same as political identity in and of themselves.

There’s at least some room for thinking about some nuance in there and thinking a little bit more about maybe these pronunciations are reflecting how people think about these pronunciation’s impacts on people who identify with the source, you know – that that’s reflecting these ideologies a little bit more. I mean, maybe that’s a little too far-reaching or getting at my wanting to try to get away from the politics but thinking about what this data is saying about some of the nuances in there.

Megan Figueroa: I came of age – are you a US citizen? Did you grow up here?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah.

Megan Figueroa: I came of age right when George W. Bush was president and 9/11 happened, so what I heard over and over again – I’m trying to remember. I think he said /ɑɪɹæk/, right?

Zach Jaggers: Mm-hmm. I have some recordings of /ɑɪɹæk/ and also some of /ɪɹæk/.

[Recording of George W. Bush] My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm [ɪɹæk], to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.

[End recording]

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, so I was – but yeah.

Zach Jaggers: By Bush.

Megan Figueroa: So, /ɑɪɹæk/, /ɑɪɹæk/ over and over again. That’s how I thought that was said because I was, like, 13, 14, until I realized – and I feel like the rhetoric from him around that was like “We need to beat them. They are evil. We are not evil,” which is a very nationalist thing. When I started to get more nuanced into my understanding of the world, I was like “Oh, here comes other people.” And then Barack Obama comes, and they say /ɪɹɑk/.

[Recording Barack Obama]

As a candidate for president, I pledge to bring the war in [ɪɹɑk] to a responsible end.

[End recording]

I’m like “I’m gonna start saying it like that.” I made a conscious decision because I was like “He’s talking about it a certain way, and I’m noticing he’s saying it in a different way. I’m gonna pronounce it like him.” Did you have any experience with that?

Zach Jaggers: Well, yeah. I think that’s a big thing too is just recognizing that the pronunciations that you’ve heard around you definitely matter, right? I think there should be a huge asterisk that as much as this seems to, at the aggregate level, be predicted by people’s ideologies, that that doesn’t necessarily mean that every single person’s pronunciation of every single word is this very conscious decision saying something about their ideologies and definitely not saying something about, like, they surely fall along the extreme on all these ideological or political dimensions. There should be that huge asterisk there. What people heard pronounced around them definitely matters.

I think thinking about that – that’s kind of the past, right, what things they have heard influence them. But there is also the thinking about what this means moving forward. I think those ideologies also seem to influence people there too. I think that that is part of that is deciding like, okay, maybe now I’ve heard a different pronunciation, or maybe now, if I have this different ideology, do I want to be more attentive to looking up pronunciations or how these words are pronounced in their source languages and try to evaluate, is the pronunciation I’m using now the degree of accommodating the source pronunciation that I would like to apply? Or is there a degree further of accommodating that source pronunciation that I would like to apply further? That is a reflection of your ideology.

I should just claim that I also did – so Lauren Hall-Lew and colleagues’ study – they were looking at politicians. Those politicians were from lots of different regions. They controlled – they didn’t control – but they were able to account a little bit for those politician’s regional identities and their regional accent varieties. They did not find that to have a significant effect. It did not necessarily seem like their political identities were – that the effect that they saw was totally just because of political identity correlating with regional accent variety.

I had to take a different approach. I totally controlled for regions. I just ran this all in one place. By still finding this effect even when I was doing the study in one place, that was what was suggesting to me like “Okay. This effect is still real and not all just because of people’s regional accent.” But, caveat, I wasn’t looking at the whole country. Part of that study was as looking – and thinking about the moving forward component – I also did a study looking at how people treated new words.

I exposed people to fake words that they never heard before. I framed those words to people as like “This is a foreign word from a foreign language,” and they were just fake words. So, “sheenya” versus “sheeniya,” or “sloxy.” I exposed them to those words in a short story that they heard. Afterwards, then I had them read a sequel that then got them to say those words out loud again. Then, I could see, like, how well did you imitate the word that you heard? Then, I found the same effect where people who were more nationalist aligning than globalist aligning were more likely to stray from the pronunciation that they had heard. If they had heard, “sheeniya,” they were more likely to say, “sheenya” or vice versa. Also, if they had heard “sloxy,” they were more likely to say, “slosky.” Whereas, if they had been more globalist aligning, they tended to be more faithful to the pronunciation that they had heard before. At least in terms of, like, new words, there also seems to be that same effect.

When you’re stripping the effect of the pronunciations that they had heard before, that effect seems to hold. But we should still remember that the pronunciations that people have heard before do matter. We should still be careful about – just because you’re using this pronunciation, that definitely means all of these things about you.

Megan Figueroa: I say as a scientist, that’s a really fucking clever experiment. That was really good. Very cool.

Carrie Gillon: With Iraq, I feel like my pronunciation varies quite a bit from sentence to sentence. I even studied Arabic for two years, pre 9/11, so I knew how “Iraq” should be pronounced. But, yeah, even with all that background, I still sometimes say /ɪɹæk/. So, yes, obviously one pronunciation tells you nothing.

Zach Jaggers: Right. And audience is totally a thing too. I think also thinking about how these pronunciations are clearly charged given the whole pretentious judgement thing too, thinking about how who you’re speaking to matters, and especially thinking about – given all of the political charge just around everything lately, but also around this topic, around this speech feature – thinking about if you’re talking to different groups and not wanting to add a political charge element, is there a degree of accommodating that you wanna do there? Again, then also weighing that with how much are you accommodating people who might not be in the room, you know, that kind of – yeah.

Carrie Gillon: Right. I thought it was really interesting that you brought up Obama and /pɑkəstɑn/ as opposed to /pækɪstæn/.

[Recording of Barack Obama]

I am gravely concerned about the situation in [pɑkəstɑn].

[End recording]

I don’t hear that very often in the United States, that pronunciation. It’s very rare. It’s not that common in Canada either, but I think it’s a little bit more common to hear it, the /pɑkəstɑn/. He was even thanked for it, which I thought was very interesting. Should we maybe be trying to do this more often if it makes people feel better about their language or their country or whatever?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, it’s a really complicated – I think definitely, like I said before, in terms of just how the pronunciations you’ve heard around you and how that plays a really big role and just how your sound system plays a really big role in the pronunciations you use, one element is just, like, to what degree are you considering a pronunciation more or less source-like. I think we should just be really careful in judging people’s pronunciations right off the bat, especially if we’re thinking about the intent there.

I think that’s one case where I think avoiding judging certain pronunciations as, like, would-be – just, in general, we should avoid judging certain pronunciations, especially given that we see that there are a lot of factors at play. I think that would be really crucial. But I think that this does balance a certain line, right, of also thinking about how pronunciations can reflect certain biases and also manifest and propagate those – thinking about that too. A lot of times, this tends to be on the perception-end that we want to try to encourage people to be more accommodating – accommodate being accepting of different people’s language varieties because they identify with those language varieties, right? We want to give them that space.

I think what this variable raises – what this linguistic variable, this phenomenon raises – is the question of “Does pronunciation come into play there a little bit?” There are other realms where thinking about language production also comes into play. When we think about ways that the language people uses seems to be a way of manifesting and propagating certain biases, right? That does tend to be the times when people, like, identify directly with a certain form of language and the usage of it.

I think even just, like, growing up as gay and hearing, “That’s so gay,” used as a pejorative, where I’m like “That’s something that I identify with,” right? Obviously, this analogy’s somewhat different. There’s those flags to raise. But this is a linguistic form that I identify with but it’s being used in a very different way than I would like to hear it used, frankly. Trying to advocate for, like, “Hey, it’d be nice if people didn’t use it that way,” is a hard thing to do.

But, also, I remember seeing articles – even articles citing linguists and quoting linguists – where linguists are like “You know, language changes. This meaning is changing. Some people are just using this in a way that means something different. So, we should just be careful in the way that we think about that and judge people about it.” And I get that, in some ways too, right? Or it’s like – because people are using this in ways that they don’t know, right? They don’t know the biases that this is getting at and they maybe do think of this in a different way.

I think this is – getting back to the pronunciation – a similar, at least analogous, in some ways where it’s like “What biases is this reflecting and propagating?” but still is there a way that we can kind of call out that and try to propagate some kind of accommodating space, some kind of space for – I think the way to reframe that discussion is thinking about how do people identify with this form of language and how might they be impacted by that.

I think, in terms of thinking about the use of something that someone really directly identifies with, like the use of “That’s so gay” in that way, is a very clear case of this is something that people are using that is discriminatory. There are ways that we can try to make people aware of that discriminatory nature of it, even then, without necessarily being judgmental of them because we recognize that they have been indoctrinated into this usage and because this is a reflection of the broader society that they have been around.

I think the pronunciations, too, especially pronunciations like someone’s name that someone really directly identifies with, right? We see this with names a lot of times too where people’s names, especially people from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds with names that get mispronounced a lot, where they personally identify with that, it would – Mary Bucholtz has a really good paper on this talking about how we can be attentive to students’ names and thinking about how to make sure that we try to pronounce them in the way that they want them to be pronounced. I think that that is a really crucial thing to be attentive to because they identify with those names and the pronunciation of them. Hearing them pronounced in a different way does feel marginalizing.

We can then move forward in thinking about does this apply to loanwords too – maybe to a lesser degree, maybe not – but also maybe mitigated by other factors like the sound system or factors like how long this loanword has been established in the borrowing language, so factors like that, but still asking ourselves, “Is there a degree to which we can accommodate a more source-like pronunciation of this word that gives space for people who identify with the source pronunciation of this word that feels less like this enforced assimilation?” It is a complicated variable where there is a lot of elements to think about, like how directly do people identify with the source pronunciation and what mitigating factors there are and how can we keep this from feeling super prescriptive and judgmental while still thinking about the biases that might be reflected and propagated in the use of less source-like pronunciations. But I think really framing this as thinking about the people who identify with the source is a good steppingstone.

Carrie Gillon: Well, to go to names, I do feel like proper names and place names, they’re closer than, say, /ɸoɪjɛɪ/. It feels less important to pronounce /ɸoɪjɛɪ/ the closer-to-French way. Although, again with names, it depends on what sounds are in that name how likely it is an English speaker’s gonna be able to pronounce it correctly. It’s tough. You should try. You should still try.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, yeah. Then there’s the whole – I’ve said this before on the show because my last name gives me problems with people who are like – so, maybe they’re overcorrecting. And I mean that – from the bottom of my heart I appreciate it. But I’ll say, “Yeah, my name is Megan Figueroa,” and they’re like “No, but how do you really say your last name?” And I was like “Oh, no, no, no.” That’s how I really say it sometimes. And it’s okay.

What you just said before, Zach, was beautiful and nuanced and I love it. I have so many thoughts, so many beautiful thoughts. But I’m thinking, yes, listen to the person. That might be the one thing to take away because, yes, language changes. We should not use that as an out because once we know that that language change is coming from a discriminatory place, we have the responsibility to take proper action and be like “Okay, oops. I’m sorry. I’m gonna do better next time.”

Zach Jaggers: Yeah. If it’s your own name, just like how, you know, there’ll be people who prefer to use different versions of their name, especially – so there’ll be lots of people who have Chinese names but who prefer to identify with Anglo names in the US because they don’t want to use Chinese names. But then, there’ll be people who are like “No, but really, I want to use your Chinese name,” and they’re like “Mmm, no. No, I would like you to use this name.” Listen to them.

I think there is space where this does come back around to loanwords too, but where it is also complicated because we do see there is discourse where we can see people who are latinx and who are like “Mmm, maybe don’t go so far in pronouncing your Spanish words with totally Spanish phonetics when you’re speaking English.” Especially if you’re white, you know.

Megan Figueroa: Well, yeah. Sometimes, that feels like mock Spanish, right?

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, exactly. So, broaching that territory, being attune to that or just trying to be attuned to that. There was also, when my article came out, someone on Twitter linked my article to another thing that had happened where the prime minister of Australia, he was at this Diwali, Deepawali, celebration event, and he was talking about celebrating diversity, and he was using the melting pot analogy, which is nuancedly complicated, but his melting pot that he used was an Indian dish. He pronounced it /gəˈɹam məsɑlə/. But people in the audience – so this is a totally South Asian Australian audience – and someone in the audience was like /ˈgɑɹəm məsɑlə/. They tried to prod him like “Mmm, could you change your pronunciation because that’s not how we say it?”

So, there is some degree to which even non-proper words are still something that people identify with and would like there to be some accommodation of those pronunciations too. But I think, yeah, thinking about the people who identify with them and what they want is something to be attuned to and to keep trying to be attuned to and the nuances thereof as well.

Carrie Gillon: I think in this case it’s because it’s a culturally significant thing. Whereas, /ɸoɪjɛɪ/ is not. I don’t think the French would care at all. [Laughs] Maybe I’m wrong. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

Megan Figueroa: Some of us don’t have foyers. I don’t have a foyer. Excuse me. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Okay. This has been a really, really great conversation. Maybe, as the last question, how can we go about not being assholes about all of this?

Zach Jaggers: I think really this has all kind of just summed up is, like, not judging people, thinking about how there’s lots of factors that go into their pronunciations, but still at the same time thinking about how people might identify with the source, or as the source, especially with names, and thinking about how using more or less source-like pronunciations might be a manifestation of certain biases or attitudes about them, and how there’s still room to move forward, and thinking about the degree to which people want to accommodate to those people with their pronunciations.

Carrie Gillon: I was thinking, too, sometimes speaking up and saying, “Oh, it’s actually pronounced this way,” is really hard. Just a little effort on your part, after someone did something really hard. Even I actually did eventually correct one of my professors because he would always say /kæʀi/ because it’s spelled with an A, and in the UK, you make a distinction between /ɛ/ and /æ/. But I can’t do that before R. It has to be /kɛʀi/. I don’t have /kæʀi/. So, I finally corrected him. And, you know, I’ve got a bunch of privilege, [laughs] and it was still hard for me. So, yeah, if someone tells you, yes, definitely listen to them. He never fixed it. [Laughs] It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.

Megan Figueroa: Well, that was a sad ending to that story. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: My grandmother also pronounced it that way because she had a more British – even though she was born in Canada – she had a more British accent, slightly, because her dad was English. Yeah, it’s fine.

Megan Figueroa: You know who you are.

Carrie Gillon: For me, it’s not the end of the world. But, yeah, no. Okay. Well, thanks again so much for coming on the show, Zach. This was great!

Zach Jaggers: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great hearing your thoughts too.

Carrie Gillon: It was awesome.

Megan Figueroa: Ya’ll don’t be assholes.

Carrie Gillon: Don’t be assholes. [Laughter]

[Background music]

Carrie Gillon: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us as [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

#transcript #linguistic discrimination #Iraq #Pakistan #Obama #Bush #foyer #pronunciation #borrowings #place names #proper names #names

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binoynazareth · 4 years

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Binoy Nazareth Shares His Dream Destination Bucket List

Light up Your Life with Alaska’s Aurora Borealis

Want to weave your adventure with all that’s wild, wonderful and winsome? Come and enjoy my dream destination bucket list and go on a wanderlust journey. Open the doors to dream destinations that will help to power the inspiration to go on an endless sojourn. I have always longed for adventure and the opportunity to experience unique places. This time, I decided to discover the unique, unusual and unforgettable appeal of Alaska. Yes, of course I did go through several vacation websites and was totally convinced to embark on a memorable holiday in Alaska.

Come with me and discover extraordinary facts about Alaska. I had always been intrigued by the Northern lights or the famous Aurora Borealis that shimmers over Alaska and is witnessed by tourists from all over the world. This incredible destination is the only state that has coastlines which range over the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Can you imagine padding up with your warmest clothes in one of the coldest places in the world and taking off to explore the much-talked about 100 volcanoes and the volcanic fields? You can go hiking, fishing, watch dog mushing or just sit back and enjoy the scenic landscapes.

Enjoy a Natural Holiday in a Cool Destination

Discover a laidback holiday in a cool place where there is more inland water than any other state in USA. There are over 3,000 rivers and 3 million lakes in Alaska. Just imagine enjoying exciting sports like skiing, kayaking and mountain biking. I could just spend days in the great outdoors and explore the huge Denali National Park with its flora and fauna. With any amount of accommodations of all types, one can also find RV parks and camping grounds to suit hard-core Nature afficionados!

Have you ever thought about sitting in a snug restaurant all warmly clad and tucking into the most delicious Alaskan dishes? This has been topmost in my mind since I am an aspiring chef and adventurer rolled into one! Are you ready for Alaska’s mouth-watering and delicious dishes that evolve over scrumptious seafood, wild berry cobbler topped by your favorite wines and beers? This is the life…the real McCoy, I thought this is what happens when you set off to a natural sojourn, your dream wish comes true with natural offerings. Alaska is a truly inspirational place which offers the most iconic dishes that range over food for the soul with wild berry jellies and jams. A true blue foodie could have a smorgasbord of delights with cold water seafood, game meats, sourdough bread, reindeer dogs, seafood chowder, black cod, prime ribs, smoked salmon, chocolate bread, gumbo, King crab and Eskimo Ice Cream better known as "Aqutak" or "Agutuk”.

Discover a Gourmet Smorgasbord

Refreshing…This is what I call a rejuvenating holiday where you need to blend in with the locals, eat like a local and breathe in the natural air at intriguing destinations. Open your mind and taste the essence of tradition with dishes made from walrus, fish, whales, moose meat, caribou meat, seal meat and oils which is not only delicious but also helps to keep one warm! Every holiday of mine has been filled with experience and learning which was needed to be in sync with my spirit of adventure which manifests itself in what I eat, where I choose to go and all of my passions!

Join me on my Alaskan sojourn topped to the brim with activities for all types of adventurers with zip lining through the Boreal Forest in Denali, going on a cruise or a fishing expedition. Breathtaking and brilliant, Alaska unravels the keys to its wondrous sights with The Great Land evolving over five regions covering the Arctic, the Inside Passage, the Southcentral, Interior, and Southwest. Home to the home to the Inupiat Eskimos who still live there, the Arctic ranges out incredible sights. The Inside Passage holds the secrets of Alaska’s flora and fauna with lush scenes and fjords. The Southcentral takes you to view enriching experiences of wildlife viewing, hiking and world-class with innumerable lakes and mountains. With a hilly terrain, the Southwest evolves over hills and plains while the Interior unrolls the Tundra experience.

With awesome activities and events, you can take part in the Fur Rendezvous festival in Anchorage, Running of the Reindeer, dog mushing or absorbing the tranquil northern lights. But wait, if there is a vestige of a chef in you and if Alaska is the place which has taken you to the land of intrigue, then you must try uutngungsaat, mouse food, negaasget, iitat and marallat which are roots made in to a wondrous soup. With the ice-cold atmosphere in Alaska, the locals use the fermentation technique which preserves certain foods such as stinkeggs and stinkhead. Being a seafood fan, I am waiting to try out Crab-Stuffed Halibut, Spot Prawns, Caribou soup Oysters and a host of delicious culinary Alaskan skills.

Follow Binoy Nazareth’s foray into the Secrets of an Alaskan Experience

#Borealis #binoy #nazareth #travel

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broussardfxaugustere15insur-blog · 5 years

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nancygduarteus · 5 years

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The Penance of Doc O

Well past seven one evening in 1988, after the nurses and the office manager had gone home, as he prepared to see the last of his patients and return some phone calls, Dr. Lou Ortenzio stopped by the cupboard where the drug samples were kept.

Ortenzio, a 35-year-old family practitioner in Clarksburg, West Virginia, reached for a box of extra-strength Vicodin. The box contained 20 pills, wrapped in foil. Each pill combined 750 milligrams of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, with 7.5 milligrams of hydrocodone, an opioid painkiller.

Ortenzio routinely saw patients long after normal office hours ended. Attempting to keep up with the workload on this day, he had grown weary and was suffering from a tension headache; he needed something to keep him going. He unwrapped a pill, a sample left by a drug-company sales rep, certain that no one would ever know he’d taken it. Ortenzio popped the pill in his mouth.

“It was a feeling like I’d never felt before,” he told me recently. “I’m tense and nervous, and that anxiety is crippling.” The pill took the anxiety away. The sense of well-being lasted for four hours, carrying him through the rest of the night’s work.

Back then, Ortenzio was one of Clarksburg’s most beloved physicians, the kind of doctor other doctors sent their own families to see. His patients called him “Doc O.” He made time to listen to them as they poured out the details of their lives. “To me, he wasn’t like a doctor; he was more like a big brother, somebody I could talk to when I couldn’t talk to anybody else,” says Phyllis Mills, whose family was among Ortenzio’s first patients. When Mills’s son was born with a viral brain infection and transferred to a hospital in Morgantown, 40 miles away, Ortenzio called often to check on the infant. Mills never forgot that.

As a physician in a small community with limited resources, Ortenzio did a bit of everything: He made rounds in a hospital intensive-care unit and made house calls; he provided obstetric and hospice care. Ortenzio loved his work. But it never seemed to end. He started missing dinners with his wife and children. The long hours and high stress taxed his own health. He had trouble sleeping, and gained weight. It took many years, but what began with that one Vicodin eventually grew into a crippling addiction that cost Ortenzio everything he held dear: his family, his practice, his reputation.

The United States is in the midst of the deadliest, most widespread drug epidemic in its history. Unlike epidemics of the past, this one did not start with mafias or street dealers. Some people have blamed quack doctors—profiteers running pill mills—but rogue physicians wrote no more than a fraction of the opioid prescriptions in America over the past two decades. In fact, the epidemic began because hundreds of thousands of well-meaning doctors overprescribed narcotic painkillers, thinking they were doing the right thing for suffering patients. They had been influenced by pain specialists who said it was the humane thing to do, encouraged by insurance companies that said it was the most cost-effective thing to do, and cajoled by drug companies that said it was a safe thing to do.

Opioid painkillers were promoted as a boon for doctors, a quick fix for a complicated problem. By the end of the 1990s, Ortenzio was one of his region’s leading prescribers of pain pills. It was a sign of the times that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that.

Clarksburg sits atop rolling hills in northern West Virginia, halfway between Pittsburgh and Charleston. Lou Ortenzio came here in 1978, a recently married young resident out of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “Small-town living seemed so much better than suburban life,” he told me as we drove around town one afternoon. “In Clarksburg, every block had something going. We had mom-and-pop grocery stores in every neighborhood. All these houses were occupied by teachers, downtown business owners, and people who worked in glass factories.”

Coal mining was the state’s dominant industry, but in Clarksburg, the glass business boomed. Glass manufacturing had arrived at the turn of the 20th century, drawn by the state’s high-quality river sand and rich fields of natural gas. Pittsburgh Plate Glass opened a factory in Clarksburg in 1915 and for years was one of the world’s leading plate-glass producers. Anchor Hocking employed 800 people making tumblers, bottles, fruit bowls. The city had family-owned factories too: Rolland Glass, Harvey Glass, and others.

Unlike simple resource extraction, glassmaking required sustained technological investment to meet new demands from the marketplace. The mass production of plate glass made skyscrapers possible. Picture windows and sliding-glass doors made small homes look bigger and more luxurious. The industry forged a middle class in Clarksburg and even gave the city a cosmopolitan air. The glass factories attracted artisans from France and Belgium; French was commonly heard on the streets for years.

Glass manufacturing helped forge a middle class in Clarksburg, but by the mid-1980s the industry, and the city, was in decline. Clockwise from top left: Lou Ortenzio; the abandoned Anchor Hocking glass factory; glass collected from the city’s streets; downtown Clarksburg. (Jason Fulford)

Each neighborhood was a self-contained world, with its own churches, grocery stores, and school; many had a swimming pool. High-school sports rivalries were fierce, and football games drew large crowds. When Victory played Roosevelt-Wilson, or Washington Irving went up against Notre Dame, people knew to arrive early to find a seat.

By the late 1970s, Clarksburg’s older physicians were retiring. Like many small towns at the time, it had trouble attracting young professionals. Ortenzio was among the few physicians who moved there to fill the void. He and two other young doctors opened a practice in 1982. Almost immediately, Ortenzio was seeing 40 to 50 patients a day.

The people who came to see him were mostly older; many had served in World War II. They had the aches and pains to show for a lifetime of hard work in the glass factories or at the gas company, but they had retired with something approaching financial security. They owned homes and cars, had pensions and good health insurance.

Ortenzio’s patients suffered from the ailments of the old—arthritis, diabetes, hypertension—and most of them did so stoically. This was partly generational and partly an Appalachian inheritance. One man, Ortenzio remembered, came to him thin and wasted away from cancer. “The disease was advanced, but he put up with it. I said, ‘Why didn’t you come in earlier?’ He said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ That was the Appalachian line—‘I wouldn’t want you to think I was complainy.’ ”

Ortenzio grew into his adopted city. In 1992, he established a free clinic where Clarksburg’s uninsured could get medical care. The county chamber of commerce named him Citizen of the Year for that. He had been trained to treat patients holistically. Most of what a doctor needs to know to make a diagnosis, his professors had taught him, could be learned from taking time to listen to the patient. X-rays and lab tests were mostly to confirm what you gleaned from asking questions and paying attention to the answers. He’d also been trained to help his patients help themselves. Part of his job was to teach them how to take care of their bodies. Pills were a last resort. This careful approach endeared him to his patients, but it lengthened his day. “He would have office hours until 11:30 at night,” says Jim Harris, a friend and the director of the free clinic. “People waited until then because he was worth the wait.”

Drug salesmen visited him weekly. It was a stodgy profession back then. Ortenzio remembers the reps as older men who had grown up and lived locally and who cultivated long-term relationships with doctors. One of the reps for Eli Lilly was a deacon in a local Catholic church. Once a week, he would visit Ortenzio’s office in a business suit, with information about the drugs Lilly produced. Like many in his profession in those years, he avoided hard-sell tactics. Ortenzio grew to rely on the salesman’s counsel when it came to pharmaceuticals. Once, when the Food and Drug Administration removed a Lilly drug from the market, the rep dropped by Ortenzio’s office, embarrassed and apologetic.

Before long, Ortenzio and his wife saw Clarksburg as home. They found a two-story, three-bedroom house in the Stealey neighborhood, southwest of downtown and at the foot of a hill. They set off to the bank for a 30-year loan. To their surprise, they were denied. “The house won’t keep its value that long,” the banker told them. “The best we can give you is a 15-year loan.”

The banker was right. It wasn’t yet clear, amid the bustle of Main Street and Friday-night football, but the city’s prospects were fading. Newer glass technologies required large factories, which meant stretches of flat land rare in West Virginia. Mexico and Japan emerged as competition in glass manufacturing, and plastic and aluminum emerged as alternatives to glass. Pittsburgh Plate Glass had closed in 1974. Anchor Hocking left in 1987. Its hulking concrete plant is slated for demolition, but for now it remains, just off Highway 50.

By the mid-1980s, the city was in decline. Glasswork was replaced by telemarketing. Downtown, locally owned stores began to disappear. Homeowners yielded to renters, many relying on Section 8 assistance from the government. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. The swimming pools, too, slowly closed; resident associations lacked the money to maintain them.

Ortenzio drove me by the massive Robert C. Byrd High School, home of the Eagles. It was built in 1995 to consolidate two smaller high schools in Clarksburg, whose population had receded. Replacing neighborhood schools with one centralized school allowed for better course offerings. But Byrd is far from any student’s home. School consolidation extinguished the sports rivalries that had brought people together each week. Without local schools, neighborhoods lost their social centers.

When glassmaking departed Clarksburg, locally owned stores began to disappear as well. The city eventually had to destroy dozens of abandoned homes, leaving streets with toothless gaps. (Jason Fulford)

Lou Ortenzio began to see people in economic as well as physical pain. Many were depressed, worn out by work or the fruitless search for it. Obesity became a more common problem. Some patients began to ask whether he could get them on workers’ compensation or disability. Others left to seek job opportunities in New York, North Carolina, Florida. “I was always calling people out of state telling them how sick their parents or grandparents were,” he said.

When Ortenzio had opened his practice, he’d tended to see young people only for pregnancies or the occasional broken leg. By the mid-1980s, younger people were showing up in larger numbers. They were coming in with ailments that their parents and grandparents had borne in silence—headaches, backaches, the common cold. “The new generation that came in the 1980s, those kids began to have the expectation that life should be pain-free,” Ortenzio said. “If you went to your physician and you didn’t come away with a prescription, you did not have a successful visit.”

The shift was not peculiar to Clarksburg. Americans young and old were becoming accustomed to medical miracles that allowed them to avoid the consequences of unhealthy behavior—statins for high cholesterol, beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors for hypertension and heart failure, a variety of new treatments for diabetes. Fewer patients showed up for annual physicals or wanted to hear what they could do to improve their wellness. They wanted to be cured of whatever was ailing them and sent on their way. Usually that involved pills.

The medical establishment, to a large degree, abetted this shift. In the 1980s, a new cadre of pain specialists began to argue that narcotic pain pills, derived from the opium poppy, ought to be used more aggressively. Many had watched terminal cancer patients die in agony because doctors feared giving them regular doses of addictive narcotics. To them, it was inhumane not to use opioid painkillers.

The specialists began to push the idea that the pills were nonaddictive when used to treat pain. Opioids, they said, could be prescribed in large quantities for long periods—not just to terminal patients, but to almost anyone in pain. This idea had no scientific support. One author of an influential paper later acknowledged that the literature pain advocates relied on to make their case lacked real evidence. “Because the primary goal was to destigmatize, we often left evidence behind,” he said.

Nevertheless, an alliance of specialists who saw their medical mission as eradicating pain was soon joined by the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured opioids. Medical institutions—the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, hospitals and medical schools across the country—bought into this approach as well.

By the late 1990s, medical schools, when they taught pain management at all, focused on narcotics. By the early 2000s, doctors were being urged to prescribe the drugs after almost any routine surgery: appendectomy, ACL repair, wisdom-tooth extraction. They also prescribed them for chronic conditions such as arthritis and back pain. Chronic pain had once been treated with a combination of strategies that only sometimes involved narcotics; now it was treated using opioids almost exclusively, as insurance companies cut back on reimbursing patients for long-term pain therapies that did not call on the drugs.

The U.S. drug industry, meanwhile, was investing heavily in marketing, hiring legions of young salespeople to convince doctors of their drugs’ various miracles. Nationwide, the number of pharmaceutical sales reps ballooned from 38,000 in 1995 to 100,000 a decade later. The old style of drug rep, grounded in medicine or pharmacy, largely passed from the scene.

“It went from a dozen [salesmen] a week to a dozen a day,” Ortenzio remembered. “If you wrote a lot of scrips, you were high on their call list. You would be marketed to several times a day by the same company with different reps.”

Most drug companies in America adopted the new sales approach. Among them was Purdue Pharma, which came out with a timed-release opioid painkiller, OxyContin, in 1996. Purdue paid legendary bonuses—up to $100,000 a quarter, eight times what other companies were paying. To improve their sales numbers, drug reps offered doctors mugs, fishing hats, luggage tags, all-expenses-paid junkets at desirable resorts. They brought lunch for doctors’ staff, knowing that with the staff on their side, the doctors were easier to influence. Once they had the doctor’s ear, reps relied on specious and misinterpreted data to sell their product. Purdue salespeople promoted the claim that their pill was effectively nonaddictive because it gradually released an opioid, oxycodone, into the body and thus did not create the extreme highs and lows that led to addiction.

[From April 2006: The drug pushers]

The reps were selling more than pills. They were selling time-saving solutions for harried doctors who had been told that an epidemic of pain was afoot but who had little time, or training, to address it. For a while, Ortenzio still suggested exercise, a balanced diet, and quitting smoking, all of which can alleviate chronic pain. But his patients, by and large, didn’t want to hear any of this, and he was busy. So he, too, gradually embraced pain pills. Nothing ended an appointment quicker than pulling out a prescription pad.

The number of people on pain pills grew from a tiny fraction of Ortenzio’s practice to well over half of his patients by the end of the 1990s. The shift was gradual enough at first that he didn’t recognize what was happening. Patients with medical problems unrelated to pain migrated to other doctors. Still, Ortenzio was working 16-hour days, seeing patients who had been scheduled for the afternoon at 9 p.m.

The more drugs Ortenzio prescribed, the more he was sought out by patients. Many would use up a month’s supply before the month was out; in need of more pills, they were insistent, wheedling, aggressive. Many lied. Some would curse and scream when Ortenzio told them that he couldn’t write them a new prescription yet, or that he wanted to lower their dosage.

The pills were soon on the streets of Clarksburg as well. They replaced beer and pot at many high-school parties. Phyllis Mills, Ortenzio’s longtime patient, had two daughters who abused the pills. Theirs did not come from Ortenzio, at least not directly, but the supply of pills was exploding, due in large part to doctors like him who were overprescribing them.

Ortenzio should have noticed what the pills were doing, to his patients and his community, but he was less and less himself. After his late-night encounter with Vicodin in 1988, he had begun his own slide into addiction. By the late 1990s, he was using 20 to 30 pills a day, depleting even the plentiful supply of free samples from the ubiquitous sales reps.

Desperate to get his hands on more pills, he found a friend he could trust, a middle-aged accountant and a patient of his. “I’m in some trouble,” Ortenzio told him. “If I write you this prescription, can I ask you to fill it and bring it back to me?”

“Sure thing,” the man said, without asking for an explanation. “If you gotta have it, you gotta have it. You’re the doc.”

Soon a dozen or so trusted patients were helping Ortenzio. He knew he was out of control and needed help—even the amount of acetaminophen he was consuming was toxic—but he feared that seeking treatment for his addiction might cost him his medical license. Around 1999, he found a new way to get his fix. He began writing prescriptions in his children’s names.

Ortenzio could plainly see that the claim that these pills were nonaddictive was untrue. He would try to quit and feel the symptoms of withdrawal. “I couldn’t be away from my supply,” he said. His patients, too, were terrified of going without. One, a nurse at a local hospital suffering from chronic pain as well as depression and anxiety, would approach him in his office parking lot, often bearing gifts of quilts or canned goods, insisting that she needed her pills that morning, that she couldn’t wait for her monthly appointment.

Ortenzio saw no way to break the cycle the pills had created for the people in his care. He never found a way to get his patients down to lower doses of narcotics. They rebelled when he suggested tapering; just cutting people off made them sick. The area didn’t have enough pain clinics or addiction specialists to refer them to, and insurance companies wouldn’t reimburse for many pain treatments that did not involve pills. Without good alternatives for his patients, he kept on writing prescriptions.

Top: A resident of the Mission, a shelter that opened in 1969 with a few beds, for alcoholics and homeless veterans. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opiate addicts. Bottom: A set of house rules. (Jason Fulford)

Addiction and overwork had estranged Ortenzio from his wife and children. As Clarksburg declined, his wife moved the kids to Pittsburgh to find better schools. In 2004, after more than a decade of living in different cities, they divorced. Raised Catholic but without much feeling for the Church, Ortenzio joined a Protestant congregation. Ultimately, he found Jesus in his exam room. During an appointment one day, he and a patient, a Baptist, talked of his search for redemption. The patient knelt with Ortenzio on the linoleum floor and prayed for the doctor. Ortenzio marks that moment as his new beginning. He had advantages many addicts don’t have: a home and a car, financial resources, generous friends and colleagues, and, later, the support of a second wife. He managed to taper off the drugs. A couple of months later, he was baptized in a deep section of Elk Creek, where baptisms have taken place since the early 1800s.

Not long after that, federal agents raided his office. They interrogated his staff and confiscated hundreds of patient records. The investigation dragged on for nearly two years. His children had to testify before a grand jury that they knew nothing about the prescriptions their father had written in their names.

In October 2005, prosecutors charged Ortenzio with health-care fraud and fraudulent prescribing. That year, 314 West Virginians died from opioid overdoses, more than double the number of people five years earlier. By 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physicians were writing 130 opioid prescriptions for every 100 West Virginians.

In March 2006, Ortenzio pleaded guilty. His sentencing occurred shortly after a 2005 Supreme Court decision made federal sentencing guidelines nonmandatory and individual sentences up to judges’ discretion. Despite what he’d done, Ortenzio was still beloved in Clarksburg. More than 100 people wrote to the judge on his behalf. He received five years of supervised release plus 1,000 hours of community service, and was ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution. He would serve no prison time, but he did lose his medical license.

At 53, Ortenzio was unemployed. A temp agency offered him a landscaping job at the Stonewall Resort, where, as a doctor, he had taken his family for Sunday brunch. He’d never worked outdoors in his life, but he took the job. It paid $6.50 an hour.

He worked at the resort for a couple of months, then as the janitor at a local community center before returning to Stonewall as a full-time groundskeeper. He also found a night job.

Tom Dyer is one of northern West Virginia’s leading defense attorneys; Ortenzio had been his client. One night in 2006, Dyer ordered a pizza from Fox’s Pizza Den in Bridgeport, a town near Clarksburg. When the doorbell rang, he opened the door and there stood Lou Ortenzio, holding a pie. It took a minute before Dyer realized: Doc O was now a pizza-delivery guy. “I was just speechless,” Dyer told me.

“I made pizza deliveries where I used to make house calls,” Ortenzio said. “I delivered pizzas to people who were former patients. They felt very uncomfortable, felt sorry for me.” But, he said, “it didn’t bother me. I was in a much better place.”

Ortenzio eventually left pizza delivery. But the way he told me the story, the job was an important step in his recovery: Every pie he delivered liberated him. He was free of the lies he’d told his colleagues, his family, and himself to hide his addiction. He liked hearing kids screaming “The pizza guy’s here!” when he knocked on the door. “You make people happy,” he said. “That was what I liked about being a doctor.”

Today, Ortenzio spends his days trying to atone. He does this through constant work. There are places in and around Clarksburg where addicts can get help, and Ortenzio can be found at most of them.

The Mission opened in 1969, in Clarksburg’s Glen Elk neighborhood, at the time a small red-light district with bars and backroom gambling. The shelter started with a few beds, intended for alcoholics and homeless veterans. A neon-blue jesus saves sign outside has remained illuminated for all the years since, as the shelter has expanded. Today, many of its 120 beds are occupied by opioid addicts.

One afternoon, I met Ortenzio in a small, windowless office at the Mission. Now 66, he is thin, gray-haired, and bespectacled; he dresses in a hoodie, blue jeans, and sneakers. He does a bit of everything at the Mission, from helping the addicted find treatment to helping them find a coat, or shoes for their children, or a ride to the probation department. He is a volunteer adviser there, too, and at the county’s drug court, where he guides addicts through the criminal-justice system.

Ortenzio is also involved with two newer initiatives, which suggest the challenges of repairing the damage done by opioids. A wood-beamed downtown church is home to Celebrate Recovery, a Christian ministry founded in Orange County, California. Celebrate Recovery has grown nationwide due in large part to the opioid epidemic. On the cold Tuesday night I visited, the service featured an electric band singing the kind of fervid new gospel music that is common to nondenominational Christianity: “You are perfect in all of your ways …”

Ortenzio is Celebrate Recovery’s lay pastor in Clarksburg, running its weekly services. The flock is about 100 or so strong. One evening, a young mother named Sarah stood before the congregation to give her testimony. Sarah’s story started with parents who married too young and divorced before she was 3. It featured father figures who were coal miners and truck drivers and a stepfather who molested her repeatedly, beginning when she was 8. Then a life of illicit drugs, marriage, divorce, and addiction to prescription pain pills.

Clarksburg’s traditional congregations have dwindled along with the city’s population; many rely on support from former residents who commute in from elsewhere on Sundays. The place these churches once held in this community has been taken by new churches proclaiming a gospel of prosperity, insisting that God wants us all to be rich. And by ministries such as Celebrate Recovery.

A regular devotional service held in the Mission’s cafeteria (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio coordinates the training of recovery coaches at the church, people who can help addicts as they try to wean themselves from narcotics. Addiction, however, seems as present as ever in Clarksburg. At the Mission one day, I met a group of recovering young drug users. Several of them had started out on heroin but then turned to meth. In Clarksburg and many other parts of the country, meth is coming on strong, poised to be the fourth stage in an epidemic that began with prescribed pills, then moved to heroin, and then to fentanyl. Meth seems to reduce the symptoms of withdrawal from opioids, or maybe it’s just a way to get high when anything will do. Whatever the case, like the various forms of opioids before it, meth is now in plentiful supply in Clarksburg.

A couple of years ago, Ortenzio decided to open a sober-living house downtown, where recovering addicts could spend six months or more stabilizing their lives. He said God had instructed him to undertake the project, and had told him, in fact, where to do it—in a house right around the corner from the duplex where Clarksburg’s first resident overdosed on fentanyl. In 2017, more than two West Virginians a day were being claimed by opioids. Recovering addicts needed places where they could maintain sobriety. “We thought, This is going to be great. They’ll throw a parade for us,” says Ben Randolph, a businessman whom Ortenzio helped recover from pill addiction.

Instead, the idea of a sober-living house outraged many in town. The principals of two local schools were concerned that the house was too close to their campuses. Owners of local businesses worried that the house might further tarnish the city’s image. “The property value of the homes around it are going to plummet. You’re going to have both drug dealers and recovering addicts in one area, so they’ll have a captive market,” one resident told The Exponent Telegram.

But Ortenzio persisted, and a bank eventually granted him a mortgage. Since July 2017, he has run a six-bed home for men, with daily supervision and no problems—no spike in crime nearby, no complaints of loitering—reported so far. A similar home for women opened last May. Nevertheless, the episode showed where the city, perhaps even the country, was when it came to addiction: afflicted mightily and wanting it to go away, but not knowing how to make that happen.

Lou Ortenzio was the first Clarksburg doctor prosecuted for improperly prescribing pain pills. He was the first person most residents I talked with recall as putting a different face on addiction. He was the first to show that this was a new kind of drug plague, and the first to puncture the idea that the supply came from street dealers. He was also the first to publicly work at his own recovery without shame.

He was not, however, alone. In 2005, another local doctor, Brad Hall, gathered with members of the West Virginia State Medical Association concerned about addiction among physicians in a state that cannot afford to lose them. They started the Physician Health Program, which has helped some 230 West Virginia doctors with substance-abuse problems get confidential treatment and retain their license to practice. Many are overworked, as Ortenzio had been. Some were self-treating emotional and physical problems. About a quarter abused opioids.

Left: Lou Ortenzio beside one of Clarksburg’s abandoned neighborhood pools. Ortenzio managed to overcome his own addiction to narcotic painkillers and today spends his time helping other addicts recover, at the Mission (right) and elsewhere. (Jason Fulford)

Ortenzio managed to escape drugs, but he’s still living with the effects of his addiction. He is working to repair his relationship with his youngest son; Ortenzio didn’t attend his wedding and has yet to meet a young grandson. He leans on his faith to keep him going. Many of his encounters with addicts prompt sudden, public prayers, Ortenzio bowing his head as he clasps the person’s shoulder. His faith has humbled him, relieving him of a sense of hubris that got him into trouble as a doctor: the idea that he could heal an entire community, if he just kept the office open a few hours longer.

Doc O will never practice medicine again. Yet his work at the Mission doesn’t seem so different from his routine as a family physician, tending to the needs of one person after another. One morning, he took a resident to a clinic, then talked on the phone with an addicted doctor living in a halfway house. A pastor from the coalfields of southern West Virginia called to ask how to set up a Celebrate Recovery ministry in his large but dying church. A 24-year-old mother of four from a West Virginia mountain town was looking for $225 to pay the utilities for an apartment she was trying to rent. Ortenzio promised to reach out to the Mission’s supporters for a donation.

As the morning wore on, a gaunt 26-year-old man from North Carolina, a construction worker addicted to heroin and meth, showed up to report that he’d had five of his teeth pulled. The dentist had prescribed a dozen hydrocodone pills. The construction worker couldn’t fill the scrip without proper ID, which he didn’t possess. Ortenzio sat and listened as the young man, slumped beneath a baseball cap, stared at the floor and insisted on his need for the painkiller.

The dentist had probably figured that the fellow had lost a lot of teeth, that a dozen pills weren’t many. If that were the case, it would mark a change. Not that long ago, the dentist might have prescribed 20 to 40 pills.

Ortenzio offered the construction worker a prayer. The man clearly still wanted the drugs. Ortenzio, who as a doctor had prescribed pills by the hundreds each day, could only give him packets of ibuprofen.

“You want to stay away from hydrocodone,” he said.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “The Penance of Doc O.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/opioid-epidemic-west-virginia-doctor/586036/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 5 years

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The Penance of Doc O

[From April 2006: The drug pushers]

“Sure thing,” the man said, without asking for an explanation. “If you gotta have it, you gotta have it. You’re the doc.”

He worked at the resort for a couple of months, then as the janitor at a local community center before returning to Stonewall as a full-time groundskeeper. He also found a night job.

Today, Ortenzio spends his days trying to atone. He does this through constant work. There are places in and around Clarksburg where addicts can get help, and Ortenzio can be found at most of them.

A regular devotional service held in the Mission’s cafeteria (Jason Fulford)

“You want to stay away from hydrocodone,” he said.

This article appears in the May 2019 print edition with the headline “The Penance of Doc O.”

Article source here:The Atlantic

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richmeganews · 5 years

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The West Takes NATO for Granted. One Country Still Wants In.

TBILISI—Transnational security cooperation, as an idea, has seen better days.

Real and rhetorical commitments to NATO are flagging: President Donald Trump has called the alliance “obsolete”; Germany sees itself soon spending barely half of NATO’s mandated but unenforced target for defense spending; and Britain’s defense budget fell by nearly one-fifth from 2010 to 2015.

The trend is largely understandable. Seventy years after NATO’s founding, and nearly three decades after the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, maintaining the alliance is a lesser priority, if not a burden. Even with a resurgent Russia, the threat of tank divisions rolling across Europe seems mostly ludicrous.

Yet farther to the east, this scenario is not a fantasy—it is recent history. Indeed, for this small country, not even a member state, NATO is nearly sacrosanct.

[Read: The president of the United States asks, ‘What’s an ally?’]

Situated on Russia’s doorstep, the Caucasus republic of Georgia has long been an enthusiastic proponent of NATO membership. Since the Rose Revolution in 2003, when peaceful demonstrations forced the ouster of a Moscow-backed leader and propelled the pro-Western politician Mikheil Saakashvili to power, the country has prioritized integration into the transatlantic security alliance. Georgia remains the top non-NATO contributor of troops to the coalition mission in Afghanistan, with 885 soldiers in the country, and previously stationed the third-largest contingent of soldiers in Iraq during that country’s occupation, after the United States and Britain. Despite such efforts, the prospects of Georgia joining the alliance remain dim.

Remarkably, however, this has not been reflected in the public mood here. A poll released in January by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an American think tank, showed that 78 percent of Georgians favored their country joining NATO, a figure that was topped only by the 81 percent who approved when asked the same question in the NDI’s November 2013 poll.

This level of support might appear strange. With the Trump administration regularly admonishing its allies and questioning the United States’ international commitments, the past two years would seem an unlikely moment for enthusiasm toward NATO to grow, particularly among countries outside the organization. Here in Georgia, however, that is precisely what is happening.

Georgians have long been well disposed toward NATO, and in six and a half years of polling on the issue, the NDI has never found that less than three-fifths of the population want their country to enter the alliance.

The most notable demographic that has historically been lukewarm is the country’s minorities, primarily ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis, who together make up about a tenth of Georgians. In June 2017, only 29 percent of those in ethnic-minority settlements supported NATO membership, while an equal amount opposed it. Strong familial and cultural links among those communities to Russia contributed to this, and a partial estrangement from Tbilisi also played a role. A mere 20 percent of Georgian Armenians and Azerbaijanis said they have a strong or intermediate command of the Georgian language, according to the NDI’s most recent figures.

In the latest NDI poll, though, support for NATO among minorities surged to 48 percent. There is no immediately apparent reason why this occurred. Talking with representatives of those communities, however, the picture becomes clearer. After the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, Tbilisi began providing more information to minority groups about Europe, about NATO, and “about the alternative,” Mariam Araqelova, the chairwoman of the Union of Georgian Armenians, an advocacy organization that provides community services, told me. For example, in Samtskhe-Javakheti, a region in southwest Georgia where most of the country’s ethnic Armenians live, a government-funded NATO information center was opened.

Shalala Amirjanova, a Georgian Azerbaijani civic activist from the Azerbaijani-majority town of Marneuli, about 25 miles south of Georgia’s capital, notes that locals “still have many misconceptions about the alliance.” But in this regard, too, a gradual change is under way, with local NGOs engaging the population on the issue. More training exercises have also increased visibility: In August, NATO held the fourth iteration of its Noble Partner multinational exercises in Georgia, which included more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and 500 more from countries including Britain, France, and Germany, alongside 1,300 Georgian servicemen.

[Read: Who caused the Russian-Georgian war?]

The largest boon to NATO’s image among Georgians, and Georgia’s minorities in particular, however, seems to have come indirectly. In March 2017, the European Union began allowing Georgians to travel to EU countries visa-free. The knock-on effects in terms of their views toward Europe, as well as NATO, have been significant.

“We never had a chance to visit Europe before. The message from them was always: You are good people, but you can’t come here,” Araqelova said. Amirjanova agrees, saying the country’s Azerbaijani community had felt similarly.

Russia’s creeping land grabs in South Ossetia, a breakaway territory that hosts numerous Russian military bases, have also not gone unnoticed, notably by Georgia’s Armenian community. Moscow has been accused of conducting a policy known as borderization, moving its fences forward several hundred meters at a time past the ill-defined border of South Ossetia to de facto annex more Georgian territory. “The situation with South Ossetia in particular has created many skeptical views about Russia’s intentions,” Araqelova said. “People see that the border is moving closer and closer, and they start to think that Russia does not have their own country’s best interests in mind.”

Their northern neighbor’s worsening economic situation has shifted views, too. “People live in Russia to work,” Araqelova said. “Those who have gone more recently have found that it’s more difficult to make a living than they thought. ”

Nationwide, the reasons for the appeal of major international security guarantees to a country that fought the 21st century’s first full-scale state-on-state war are evident. Wider Georgian society today is almost bereft of pro-Russian views, with the few politicians who do represent this viewpoint confined to the margins.

“In Georgia today, there are very people who oppose NATO,” says Iago Kachkachishvili, the director of the Institute of Social Studies and Analysis, a Tbilisi-based think tank. “We simply don’t have another choice.”

[Read: What Putin really wants]

The two main anti-NATO political forces, the loudly pro-Russian former president Nino Burjanadze and the right-wing nationalist Alliance of Patriots of Georgia, both claim support in the single digits. The Alliance of Patriots does not even dare state its anti-NATO views, preferring more tacit messaging, such as emphasizing an “independent path,” fearing a loss of support otherwise. Thus, an almost complete consensus exists among political parties in the country. “Support for NATO is a kind of benchmark for being accepted by the population,” Kachkachishvili asserts.

This largely unified worldview likely explains why Georgians have remained so willing to contribute troops to U.S.-led military campaigns abroad, despite a steady stream of casualties. (In a single incident in Afghanistan in June 2013, seven Georgian soldiers were killed when a Taliban truck bomb struck their compound.)

The path to NATO membership is long. The organization has been unwilling to advance on Georgia’s prospects so long as a fifth of its territory remains outside of government control, with Russian troops present in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There is no sign that Georgia is close to being offered a Membership Action Plan, the first concrete initiation of eventual accession.

But there is likewise no indication that anyone in Georgia is prepared to abandon the dream. “It is a requirement for us,” Kachkachishvili says. “We will always have a monstrous neighbor, thinking of Georgia’s destruction. Without strong partners, we cannot be winners.”

Araqvelova is equally certain. “The change has been gradual,” she said, “but it is unstoppable.”

The post The West Takes NATO for Granted. One Country Still Wants In. appeared first on .

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ajmaurya · 6 years

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Thai cooking places accentuation on delicately arranged dishes with strong aromatic components and a fiery edge.Thai sustenance as illustrating “multifaceted nature; meticulousness; surface; shading; taste; and the utilization of fixings with therapeutic advantages, and additionally great flavor”, and in addition mind being given to the nourishment’s appearance, smell and setting.

Thailand was a cross streets of East to West ocean courses making its way of life and food be implanted with Persian and Arabian components. Remote formulas have been coordinated with customary Thai dishes, bringing about one of a kind flavor that is unmistakably Thai.

The ‘Tai’ individuals moved from valley settlements in the sloping locale of Southwest China (now Yunnan area) between the 6th and thirteenth hundreds of years, into what is presently known as Thailand, Laos, the Shan States of upper Burma, and northwest Vietnam. Impacted by Chinese cooking procedures, Thai food thrived with the rich biodiversity of the Thai promontory. Accordingly, Thai dishes today have a few similitudes to Szechwan Chinese dishes.

Thai cooking is all the more precisely depicted as five territorial foods, comparing to the five fundamental areas of the nation:

Bangkok food of Bangkok and Metropolitan zone, above all else cooking base on Chinese and Portuguese impact.

Focal Thai food of the level and wet focal rice-developing fields, site of the previous Thai kingdoms of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya, and the Dvaravati culture of the Mon individuals from before the entry of Tai gatherings in the region.

Isan or northeastern Thai food of the more parched Khorat Plateau, comparative in culture to Laos and furthermore impacted by Khmer cooking to its south, as confirm by the sanctuary ruins from the season of the Khmer Empire.

Northern Thai food of the verdant valleys and cool, forested piles of the Thai good countries, once managed by the previous Lanna Kingdom and home to most of the ethnic gatherings of Thailand.

Southern Thai food of the Kra Isthmus which is verged on two sides by tropical oceans, with its numerous islands and including the ethnic Malay, previous Sultanate of Pattani in the profound south.

Meals in Thai food

1 Tom Yum Goong (Spicy Shrimp Soup)

The quintessential Thai smell! An intense, reviving mix of fragrant lemongrass, stew, galangal, lime leaves, shallots, lime squeeze and fish sauce shapes this exemplary soup, giving it its unbelievable home grown kick. Succulent new prawns and straw mushrooms loan it body. A flexible dish that can fit inside for all intents and purposes any feast, the particular scent helps you to remember extraordinary fragrance, while it’s strengthening harsh fiery hot taste just shouts ‘Thailand’!

2 Som Tum (Spicy Green Papaya Salad)

Hailing from the Northeast province of Isaan, this shocking dish is both incredible divider – some can’t get enough of its nibble, some can’t deal with it – and extraordinarily unmistakable. Garlic, chilies, green beans, cherry tomatoes and destroyed crude papaya get drastically pummeled in a pestle and mortar, so discharging an adjusted sweet-harsh zesty flavor that is not effortlessly overlooked. Territorial varieties toss peanuts, dry shrimp or salted crab in with the general mish-mash, the last having a gut-purifying ability that gets numerous newcomers off guard!

3 Tom Kha Kai (Chicken in Coconut Soup)

A mellow, more agreeable curve on Tom Yum, this notable soup injects blazing chilies, daintily cut youthful galangal, squashed shallots, stalks of lemongrass and delicate portions of chicken. However not at all like its more watery cousin, lashings of coconut drain diminish its zesty blow. Finished off with crisp lime leaves, it’s a sweet-noticing mixture, both smooth and convincing.

4 Gaeng Daeng (Red Curry)

Made with pieces of meat, red curry glue, smooth coconut drain and finished off with a sprinkling of finely cut kaffir lime leaves, this rich, fragrant curry dependably gets those taste buds shivering. Getting it done when the meat is stunningly delicate, it could be compared to a lovely lady: it’s mellow, sweet and carefully fragrant. What’s more, similar to all genuine romance issues, nonappearance influences the heart to become fonder.

5 Pad (Thai style Fried Noodles)

From Cape Town to Khao San Road, the default global Thai dish! Dropped in a burning hot wok, fistfuls of little, thin or wide noodles (you pick) do a hot moment long move close by crunchy beansprouts, onion and egg, before landing for the closest plate. A genuinely intelligent eating knowledge, a large portion of its fun (and flavor) lies in then utilizing a group of four of going with toppings – angle sauce, sugar, stew powder and finely ground peanuts – to wake it from its sleeps.

6 Khao Pad (Fried Rice)

Fried rice, egg, onion, a couple of herbs – nothing all the more, not much. A mainstream lunch dish served ordinarily with a wedge of lime and cuts of cucumber, the mystery of this honest dish lies in its straightforwardness. The idea is this: you’re the one eating up it, so you dress it. To do as such, Thais utilize everything from prawns, crab or chicken to basil, bean stew and left-finished vegetables, in the process transforming an unremarkable homeless person into a gastronomic sovereign!

7 Pad Krapow Moo Saap (Fried Basil and Pork)

An amazingly mainstream ‘one plate’ dish for lunch or supper, browned basil and pork is positively a standout amongst the most famous Thai dishes. It is made in a steaming wok with loads of sacred basil leaves, expansive crisp stew, pork, green beans, soy sauce and a little sugar. The minced, greasy pork is slick and blends with the steamed white rice for a dazzling satisfying supper. It is frequently finished with a fricasseed egg (kai dao) you will no doubt be inquired as to whether you might want an egg with it. Know that most Thai individuals request bunches of stew in this dish so in the event that you are not a fanatic of shivering lips, request you cushion krapow ‘somewhat fiery’.

8 Gaeng Keow Wan Kai (Green Chicken Curry)

Morsels of crisp chicken. Cherry-sized eggplants. Delicate bamboo shoots. Sprigs of Coriander. Liberal modest bunches of sweet basil. These modest components shape the body of this original curry. Be that as it may, how can it get so brilliantly green you inquire? Gracious, that’ll be the spoons of green curry glue that is blended irately into hot velvety coconut drain. Served close by a bowl of fragrant Thai rice, Gaeng Keow Kan Gai is the extraordinary inverse.

9 Yam Nua (Spicy Beef Salad)

If there was such an unbelievable marvel as a ‘Plate of mixed greens Hall of Fame’, Thailand’s lively claim breed, or ‘yam’ as they are known here, would without a doubt assume pride of position. Unconvinced? Experience the new, blazing rush of yam nua – with its buoyant blend of onion, coriander, spearmint, lime, dried bean stew and delicate pieces of meat – and you won’t be. It splendidly epitomizes the animating in-the-mouth-excite of every Thai serving of mixed greens, the yummy-ness of yam.

10 Kai Med Ma Muang (Chicken with Cashew Nuts)

Pardon the joke, yet sightseers go crazy for this blend browned dish. Maybe it’s the fiercely differentiating surfaces of a dish that saut’s chicken close by broiled cashews, sweet soy sauce, onions, chilies, pepper, carrot and mushrooms. Maybe it’s the sweetening dash of nectar that interests. Do you truly mind? The imperative thing is that this dish works: it’s basic however delicious, somewhat agreeable yet still absolutely Thai.

Beverages

Cha yen – Thai frosted tea.

Krating Daeng – a caffeinated drink and the starting point of Red Bull.

Nam maphrao – the juice of a youthful coconut, frequently served inside the coconut.

Nam matum – an invigorating and sound drink produced using the product of the Bael tree.

Oliang – a sweet Thai dark frosted espresso.

Satho – a customary rice wine from the Isan locale.

Nam bai bua bok – A reviving and solid drink is produced using the green leaf of the Centella asiatica.

Other alcoholic beverages from Thailand incorporate Mekhong whisky and Sang Som. A few brands of lager are fermented in Thailand, the two greatest brands are Singha and Chang

Insects

Certain bugs are additionally eaten in Thailand, particularly in Isan and in the north. Many markets in Thailand highlight slows down which offer broiled grasshoppers, crickets (ching rit), honey bee hatchlings, silkworm (non mai), insect eggs (khai quip) and termites. The culinary innovativeness even stretches out to naming: one delicious hatchling, which is additionally known under the name “bamboo worm” (non mai phai, Omphisa fuscidentalis), is conversationally called “express prepare” (spoil duan) because of its appearance

Sweets

Mango layer cake

This mango cake formula is so crisp, fleecy and scrumptious, in addition to it’s enjoyable to make. In Thailand cakes like this are served at all the enormous lodgings where cooks include fancy trimmings arranged with new mango and coconut. Here I’ve disentangled the procedure while keeping the first taste. Furthermore, what is that? I’d depict it as similar to strawberry shortbread aside from with the outlandish taste of mango.

Mmm Mango Pudding – an extraordinary approach to utilize new summer mangos!

Mangos are in season amid the mid year months, and this pudding is an incredible approach to utilize them. I made it as of late for my relatives from Asia, and they preferred it superior to their most loved mango pudding which they more often than not arrange at a diminish total eatery. What makes it additional great is the way that it is made with coconut drain as opposed to whipping cream or general drain. Dissimilar to dairy items, coconut drain brings out and upgrades the essence of the mango.

Mango Ice Cream, as in Thailand

Attempt this fabulously simple formula for mango dessert as in Thailand! The surface of this solidified pastry is somewhere between sorbet and frozen yogurt, and brimming with mango season. Brisk and easy to make as well, in light of the fact that there’s no stove included – not even a frozen yogurt creator. All you require is a blender or nourishment processor. Makes an excellent treat to serve organization, and simple as well, since you can influence it to well ahead of time.

Thai-style Creme Caramel

A Thai form of the great creme caramel treat that is super-simple to make, liquefy in-your-mouth tasty, and more beneficial than conventional creme caramel! This formula calls for coconut drain rather than cream (coconut drain contains great fats that really bring down your cholesterol), so in case you’re lactose-bigoted, this is a decent treat decision for you. It likewise makes a rich sweet to serve visitors or take to a gathering.

Pineapple Upside-Down Cake with Mango and Caramel!

Envision an exemplary pineapple topsy turvy cake jeweled with bits of mango and bound with caramel sauce – paradise! Enjoyable to make, astounding to eat, this scrumptious cake fulfills everybody extremely. It’s straightforward as well – only 1 cake container and no requirement for icing. I want to serve this cake in the late spring as a result of its tropical suggestions: kinds of coconut, pineapple, and mango. The caramel is a surprising reward, hoisting this cake to the ‘best ever’ status in my family.

Thai Banana-Lychee Dessert

This simple treat just takes minutes to make, however don’t be cheated by its straightforwardness – the taste is so superbly sweet and extraordinary that I think that its addictive! It likewise happens to be inconceivably sound. An incredible approach to go through remaining bananas as well.

Thai Tapioca Pudding (sans gluten/veggie lover)

Here’s a pastry formula that is tropical-delectable, simple, sans gluten and veggie lover as well! When purchasing custard, I like the ‘seed’ custard found in the preparing passageway of most customary general stores. You can likewise purchase ‘pearl custard’ at any Asian supermarket. Custard originates from the cassava plant and is a root vegetable, not a grain (subsequently sans gluten), with some sound unsaturated fats, so you can make the most of your sweet faultless.

Simple Tropical (and Local) Fruit Salad

This delightful Thai organic product serving of mixed greens formula is an essence of heaven. Tropical natural product – or a blend of tropical and neighborhood organic product – is prepared together in a sweet coconut-lime natural product plate of mixed greens dressing that upgrades however never overpowers the tasty taste of the organic product. Pick your own mix of neighborhood and intriguing natural product for this simple crisp organic product treat.

Mangosteen Clafouti

Mangosteen is a wonderful Thai organic product that is currently accessible in the US and Canada. Since it contains such a significant number of cell reinforcements, mangosteen likewise offers various medical advantages. In the event that you can’t discover it, lychees make an impeccable substitution and are accessible canned and also new.

Health & Thai food

The blend of herbs and flavors utilized as a part of Thai dishes. These herbs and flavors have ailment battling and safe framework boosting properties.

Here are a few illustrations:

Garlic lessens cholesterol and circulatory strain and it has both anti-infection and contagious properties. It can be utilized to treat hacks and colds and enhances press digestion.

Chillies help the invulnerable framework, ensure heart and clear the sinuses. Red chillies are high in vitamin C.Cumin enhance resistant framework and treat a sleeping disorder, heaps, asthma, bronchitis, respiratory scatters, regular cool, sickliness, skin issue, bubbles and disease.

Ginger,The restorative employments of ginger is practically interminable. Ginger contains chromium, magnesium and zinc which can enhance blood stream. It is likewise enhances retention, anticipates frosty and influenza, diminishes torment and irritation.

Turmeric is an extraordinary calming. It ensures the skin and it has been referred to be utilized as a treatment for dermatitis and other skin issues. Turmeric shields the body from harms. Additionally, turmeric battle against bacterial diseases.

Lemongrass can clear stomach hurts, cerebral pains and counteracts basic icy. It likewise has against contagious properties.

Coriander contains press and both vitamin A, C, K and hints of the B vitamins. It gives high measure of calcium and potassium. Coriander is against septic, pain relieving, assists with absorption, hostile to parasitic and a characteristic stimulant.

“One of the dreams on my wish list is to spend more time in Thailand”

Thai cuisine:A Tourist choice Thai cooking places accentuation on delicately arranged dishes with strong aromatic components and a fiery edge.Thai sustenance as illustrating "multifaceted nature; meticulousness; surface; shading; taste; and the utilization of fixings with therapeutic advantages, and additionally great flavor", and in addition mind being given to the nourishment's appearance, smell and setting.

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