We learned yesterday that parks are for white people. Today, Katherine DM Clover explains that travel is a privilege and that talking about travel is classist.

When the topic of travel comes up amongst friends or acquaintances, I either try to change the subject, or I try to convince everyone (myself included) that I don’t travel more because I’m just a homebody, OK?

I’m just more focused on trying to make this place the sanctuary of my dreams, rather than going other places.

Friends, if I have ever tried to sell you on that idea, hear me now: That is a lie.

I don’t travel much because I’m poor.

I’m more only “more focused on my home” in the sense that, well, my money has to be focused toward paying my rent so I don’t get evicted. My money also ends up getting focused toward buying groceries because I like eating food, and also, as a mammal, need it to survive.

Being able to travel great distances, just for the sheer joy of it, is actually an enormous privilege, one that has been out of most people’s reach, historically.

Air travel has made it somewhat more accessible, but the modern travel obsession still requires advanced technology, leisure time, and — critically — the expendable income to pay for it.

And while technology has certainly made it easier to get from place to place, in some ways things, haven’t changed much.

While the middle and upper classes may celebrate the many advantages of a life filled with travel (“It’s educational! It makes you a more well rounded person!”), on the other end of the spectrum, there are still plenty of low-income people who rarely have the chance to leave their neighborhood, let alone their city.

And what does that look like for the global poor? I don’t have the stats on this, but I have a hard time imagining people who live on $2 a day taking vacations.

Aside from money, being able to travel safely and easily is still often dependent on privilege. For people with disabilities, any form of travel can pose myriad potential problems. For folks who aren’t white or are visibly LGBTQIA, travel can mean opening oneself up to harassment and even the very real risk of violence.

I’m not saying travel can’t be lovely and educational; it certainly can be. I’m also not claiming there aren’t less expensive ways to get from place to place; there undoubtedly are.

What I am saying, though, is that travel is complicated and it is often dependent on a certain amount of privilege.

I don’t get out much — and it’s not because I’m boring or don’t have a sense of adventure or don’t care about learning about the larger world: It’s because I’m broke.

And when you hold travel up on some kind of pedestal, you sound classist as hell, and I wish you would stop that.

Whole thing.

In the final analysis, isn’t being currently alive and not a member of “the great majority” the biggest “privilege” of all? And, yet, we can rely upon perfect equality being achieved eventually for all of us.

The Vintage News:

Monte Testaccio or also known as Monte dei Cocci (literally meaning “Mount of Shards”) is an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of testae, fragments of broken amphorae dating from the time of the Roman Empire, some of which were labelled with tituli picti. It is one of the largest spoil heaps found anywhere in the ancient world, covering an area of 220,000 sq ft at its base and with a volume of approximately 760,000 cu yd, containing the remains of an estimated 53 million amphorae.

The huge numbers of broken amphorae at Monte Testaccio illustrate the enormous demand for oil of imperial Rome, which was at the time the world’s largest city with a population of at least one million people. It has been estimated that the hill contains the remains of as many as 53 million olive oil amphorae, in which some 61.3 billion imperial gallons/1.6 billion U.S. gallons of oil were imported. Studies of the hill’s composition suggest that Rome’s imports of olive oil reached a peak towards the end of the 2nd century AD, when as many as 130,000 amphorae were being deposited on the site each year. The vast majority of those vessels had a capacity of some 15 imp gal; 18 U.S. gal; from this it has been estimated that Rome was importing at least 1.6 million imperial gal/2 million U.S. gal of olive oil annually. As the vessels found at Monte Testaccio appear to represent mainly state-sponsored olive oil imports, it is very likely that considerable additional quantities of olive oil were imported privately.

Whole Story.

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Jim Geraghty (via email) asks: Considering the Circumstances, Why Shouldn’t We See a Revolt at the Convention? (UPDATE: Now on-line here):

Why is anyone surprised that talk of a delegate revolt at the convention in Cleveland is picking up? Donald Trump isn’t doing the basic tasks a presidential candidate is supposed to do.

He isn’t hiring staff; he has about 30 paid staff around the country while Hillary Clinton has something in the neighborhood of 700.

He’s refusing to spend any money on ads:

The Clinton campaign and its allies are airing just over $23 million in television ads in eight potential battleground states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and New Hampshire, according to data released by NBC News.

The Trump campaign? Zero.

Either Trump is illiquid, or he doesn’t have the money.

He’s either refusing to fundraise, or seriously slacking in this key component of a presidential campaign:

While Trump had promised Priebus that he would call two dozen top GOP donors, when RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh recently presented Trump with a list of more than 20 donors, he called only three before stopping, according to two sources familiar with the situation. It’s unclear whether he resumed the donor calls later.

He’s destroyed existing relationships between the Republican party and corporate America that previously had been beyond the realm of policy differences:

Apple has told Republican leaders it will not provide funding or other support for the party’s 2016 presidential convention, as it’s done in the past, citing Donald Trump’s controversial comments about women, immigrants and minorities.

Unlike Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which have all said they will provide some support to the GOP event in Cleveland next month, Apple decided against donating technology or cash to the effort, according to two sources familiar with the iPhone maker’s plans.

He’s getting less popular and he’s only creating more headaches for everyone else in the party. He’s trailing in Kansas, tied in Utah, and Arizona looks shaky.

Republican primary voters selected a candidate with very little appeal to the broader electorate. So which is worse? Alienating the 13.8 million voters who selected him in the primary? Or alienating a majority of the 120 million to 130 million who will vote in November? There’s no good option left; which one is less bad?

For those arguing the delegates have no business overruling primary voters . . . What are delegates for if not to avert a disaster like this? If they aren’t there to use their judgment and conscience, we might as well replace them with programmable robots.

Say this for a ticket out of any two other Republican lawmakers: that ticket will not destroy the party. It’s first act after a terror attack will not be to congratulate itself. It will not suddenly call the troops thieves. It will not call an Indiana-born judge “the Mexican.” An Anybody-Anybody ticket will stop creating problems for other Republicans and start solving them.

He’s right. Convention delegates are not robots, merely functioning to deliver the results of state caucuses and primaries. They are representatives, which role includes consulting their own consciences and using their own best judgement to choose a candidate who can be elected and who would represent effectively the principles of the Republican Party.

Donald Trump is not that candidate. He is too spoiled, narcissistic, and willful to run an effective and rational campaign. He is a divisive figure who cannot, in the final analysis, even attract the support of the entire Republican Party. He is not conservative. His positions consist either of unattractive and long-discredited negative impulses (Nativism and Protectionism) or mere opportunistic rhetorical poses which he is perfectly capable of reversing in an instant.

Trump is almost certain to lose to Hillary, and we cannot even be sure that his being elected would not be the worse result. Donald Trump as president is a frightening prospect. Trump is not really committed to any particular set of principles or theories of government. He is obviously not any kind of strict Constitutionalist. He is not at all a consistent adversary of Statism, Regulation, the Welfare State, Crony Capitalism, Gun Control, Abortion, Gay Rights, or the Progressive side in the Culture Wars. In fact, he is on the record, at one time or another, supporting each and every one of these issues.

The only sense in which Trump appears to be on the Political Right is as a sort of living, breathing embodiment of the crude, angry, and ill-mannered ignorance and vulgarity that the Left imagines in its own libelous imagination to be what being a conservative and a Republican is all about.

If Trump were to be elected, he’d would almost certainly prove incompetent in handling foreign policy and destructive in his economic policies. He would probably be at least as lawless a president as Barack Obama. And he’d leave office in disgrace, ruining the image and reputation of Conservatism and the GOP for a generation.

We still have time to prevent the catastrophe that the nomination to the presidency of Donald J. Trump would represent, and we should proceed to take all steps necessary to avoid that nomination occurring.

Secret Service memoir portrays a Hillary unknown to the public.

The New York Daily News served up some pretty juicy tidbits from the new Secret Service tell-all, Gary J. Byrne’s Crisis of Character.

Apparently, Hillary wasn’t the only woman publicly humiliated by Bill Clinton’s philanderings.

[Bill Clinton’s] relationship [with former Vice President Mondale’s daughter Eleanor] really set Lewinsky off, making her jealous and reckless, he writes.

On Dec. 6, 1997, the former intern arrived at the White House gate under the pretense of visiting with the president’s personal secretary. The Secret Service officers guarding the gate understood the special relationship the two had and that Lewinsky had arrived to see the president.

Only this time, Lewinsky was denied entry, according to Byrne, who was stationed elsewhere when she appeared but heard her arrival on his service radio.

“The president is still with another appointment,” Clinton secretary Betty Currie told the gate officer, who relayed the message to Lewinsky.

“Monica, however, still regarded herself quite favorably as the president’s singular mistress. So now she was pissed off. She pressed the officer about the delay and wanted to know why she was left standing in his security booth. He lashed back,” writes Byrne, who was later told of the exchange by a colleague.

“You have to wait. He’s with his other piece of a–. Wait till he’s finished,” the officer told her.

It was clear to all, including Lewinsky, that the president was “screwing with Eleanor in the Oval Office.”

Irate, Lewinsky responded with an unseemly gesture, toward her body, “What’s he want with her when he has this?”

Meanwhile, as Hillary campaigns for the presidency with an emphasis on Gun Control, Byrne’s new Secret Service memoir reveals what no one would ever had guessed: Hillary likes shooting guns and can handle a Thompson sub-machine gun. (!)

What if [the first lady] ran into the president with Monica or with another mistress? Would I have to protect the president from his irate wife — or even from a mistress?” Byrne writes.

And dealing with the first lady’s anger was no small matter, according to Byrne, who describes her as a self-centered, tantrum-throwing, physical abuser.

She also knew how to handle a gun. Byrne found Hillary Clinton took a “surprising liking to firearms, especially a Thompson submachine gun, an original and an American classic, Al Capone’s legendary ‘Chicago typewriter.’”

Sometime after Bill’s 1998 impeachment, and long after Byrne left the White House, the Clintons came by a Secret Service training center and Byrne saw “Mrs. Clinton let loose a spray of man-stopping .45 -caliber rounds into the paper, dirt, and berms of our outdoor one-way range.” Smiling, she fired her next shots “right into the target’s crotch.”

Byrne says the Secret Service discussed the potential for “domestic violence” between the Clintons and worried frequently about how to protect the president from his volcanic — and occasionally violent — wife.

Lucien Freud, drawing of Pauline Tennant, 1945

Christie’s Sale 13100, Defining British Art, 30 June 2016, King Street, London, Estimate: £2,000,000 – £3,000,000 ($2,844,000 – $4,266,000).

Unwelcome guest in Luchegorsk

Last year, dozens of hungry bears besieged Luchegorsk, a city of 21,000 in Eastern Siberia. A shortage of nuts and berries in the Primorsky region apparently caused hungry bears to enter the town opportunistically looking for food.

Outside:

Dubitsky had gone only two steps when he felt that something was amiss. He turned and saw the bear in midleap. Dubitsky was knocked to the ground. The bear swiped at his throat. Dubitsky put his arm in front of his face. The bear bit into him. He heard people shouting and felt a claw rip into his groin. He passed out. A taxi driver pulled up to the building and honked, startling the bear. It jumped off Dubitsky and ran. Passersby rushed to his aid. Neighbors threw first aid from their balconies, bottles of rubbing alcohol and bundles of gauze that ribboned to the bloody ground. Nikolai and his neighbor came back outside, surveyed the scene, and decided that they needed a drink.

John Hinderaker reports on the latest crusade for racial equity in the Twin Cities:

The Metropolitan Council never saw any human behavior it didn’t want to change. It wants to change the way we get from one place to another, where we live, and where we work. It also isn’t happy with the way we use Twin Cities parks. The Star Tribune headlines: “Racially equitable use of parks is the goal, with big dollars at stake.”

What, exactly, is “racially equitable use of parks”? Are members of some races barred from the region’s parks? Of course not.

A politically charged push is taking shape, with millions of dollars at stake, to break down barriers that are making Twin Cities parks and trails feel to some like white people’s preserves.

Barriers? What barriers? There are no barriers, actually. The “problem” is that a higher percentage of whites than minorities make use of metro area parks and trails.

The main evidence of park disparities in the Twin Cities metro area remains a 2008 survey of the racial and ethnic makeup of visitors to major regional parks and trails, such as the Chain of Lakes in Minneapolis or St. Paul’s Como Park.

The “Chain of Lakes” is simply a set of walking and bicycle paths that go around, and connect, Minneapolis’s major lakes: Calhoun, Harriet, Isles and Cedar. Anyone who wants to walk, or run, or bicycle or rollerblade around any of these lakes is welcome to do so. There is nothing stopping him or her.

While blacks make up nearly 7 percent of the metro area’s population, they account for less than 3 percent of regional park and trail users. Percentages for Hispanics look much the same.

Whether a person spends time in parks or on walking or bicycle trails is entirely a matter of choice. No one makes you throw a frisbee or have a picnic in a park, and no one stops you if you choose to do so. Has the Metropolitan Council noticed that there are racial “disparities” with regard to nearly everything? Whether it is going to the opera, attending a soccer game, fishing, or sitting outside to watch a fireworks display, there is no activity that people engage in in equal racial proportions. Are these all problems that need to be fixed by an ever more intrusive government?

What exactly does the Met Council intend to do to encourage or compel more minority residents (or, I guess, fewer whites) to use the region’s parks and trails? The Strib never answers that obvious question. …

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This alleged disparity of usage problem is not confined to Minneapolis-St.Paul. Last year, the New York Times was demanding special initiatives to get minorities visiting National Parks.

The national parks attracted a record 292.8 million visitors in 2014, but a vast majority were white and aging. The most recent survey commissioned by the park service on visitation, released in 2011, found that 22 percent of visitors were minorities, though they make up some 37 percent of the population.

This suggests an alarming disconnect. The Census Bureau projects that the country will have a majority nonwhite population by 2044. If that new majority has little or no relationship with the outdoors, then the future of the nation’s parks, and the retail and nonprofit ecosystem that surrounds them, will be in trouble.

Jeff Cheatham grew up in southeast Seattle, and still lives in Mount Rainier’s shadow. Yet, he said of Mount Rainier and other national parks, “I’ve never been, and never thought about going.” A 29-year-old African-American writer, Mr. Cheatham said he didn’t even know what a national park was, or what he would be likely to find at one. “As far as I know, it’s a big field of grass,” he said.

A neighbor, Carla DeRise, has been to Mount Rainier and other parks, and is game to go again. She just can’t get any of her friends to come along. They are worried about unfriendly white people, hungry critters and insects, and unforgiving landscapes, said Ms. DeRise, 51, an African-American. So she mainly hikes alone, albeit with some anxiety. “I don’t have a weapon,” she quipped. “Yet.”

I also live in one of the Rainier neighborhoods, close to where I grew up, the son of a Japanese mother. I met my oldest friend in the Boy Scouts, an African-American from a family that, like mine, frequented the parks. In college, he and I led outings for minority student groups.

There was always nervous banter as we cruised through small rural towns on our way to a park. And there were jokes about finding a “Whites Only” sign at the entrance to our destination or the perils of being lynched or attacked while collecting firewood after the sun went down. Our cultural history taught us what to expect. …

We need to demolish the notion that the national parks and the rest of nature are an exclusive club where minorities are unwelcome.

Coercive egalitarianism inevitable finds “problems,” i.e. targets of opportunity for coercive intervention essentially everywhere.

Politico reports on rumors that Trump would take some very large amount of money to simply walk away from the GOP nomination.

How much would it cost to get Donald Trump to give up his presidential run and walk away?

“I bet if someone offered him $150 million to drop out, he would,” one former Trump adviser told POLITICO, unprompted, during an interview Friday.

Asked about whether Trump would drop, another former Trump adviser, Jim Dornan said he believes the presumptive GOP nominee would cut a deal. “Yeah, probably,” Dornan, a veteran Republican operative who worked for Trump last spring on an abortive effort to set up a super PAC, replied via text message — adding there would be plenty of interest in buying him out. “The Kochs would be the first in line.”

Trump himself says it’s a ridiculous proposition and that he’s not a fan of the question.

Whole thing.

General G. Moxley Sorrel, C.S.A.

At the Right Hand of Longstreet: Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer:

An incident on the river may bear telling. It was after the battle [Fredericksburg], when the pickets had resumed their posts and had become friendly; more given to trading than shooting each other at less than one hundred yards. … A fine Federal band came down to the river bank one afternoon and began playing pretty airs, among them the Northern patriotic chants and war songs. “Now give us some of ours!” shouted our pickets, and at once the music swelled into Dixie, My Maryland, and the Bonnie Blue Flag. Then, after a mighty cheer, a slight pause, the band again began, all listening; this time it was the tender, melting bars of Home, Sweet Home, and on both sides of the river there were joyous shouts, and many wet eyes could be found among those hardy warriors under the flags. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Thrillist:

California
King Tommen Baratheon
Blond and easily duped, powerful but clumsy with said power, impressed by girls’ boobs and wacky religions.

Colorado
Jorah Mormont
Athletic, secretly wealthy, with a sun-tanned, weathered face. Incessantly trying to sleep with a younger woman.

Connecticut
Joffrey Baratheon
Rich, bratty, emotionally unnerving. Definitely PG’d at Taft.

Delaware
That guy Ned Stark executes in the pilot
No one remembers that Delaware is the first state either.

Florida
“Mad” King Aerys II Targaryen
Senile, wealthy, paranoid, prone to random outbursts of insanity. Pretty confident that he will eventually turn into a dragon.

Georgia
Janos Slynt
Does not do well in cold weather.

Hawaii
Sansa Stark
Unspoiled and beautiful, until evil outside forces wreak havoc on her. Understandably angry.

Idaho
Mance Rayder
An anti-big government Libertarian with his own militia.

Whole story.