Author: Robert Richardson

  • Interactive City Guide AI

    Interactive City Guide AI

    interactive city guide

    Interactive city guides can be incredibly helpful when planning a trip or exploring a new city! They offer features like searching for restaurants, hotels, historical sites, and activities with just a few clicks. Some popular options include:

    1. Toronto Interactive City Guide: Available in multiple languages, this guide offers preset searches for various categories like restaurants, hotels, and historical sites.
    2. Montreal Interactive City Guide: Similar to the Toronto guide, it provides preset searches and is also available in multiple languages.
    3. Visit A City: This platform allows you to create a personalised travel guide with itineraries, activities, and maps.

    Do you have a specific city in mind that you’re interested in exploring?

  • 1787 Continental Congress

    Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo October 19, 2024Congressional cocktails and a Whiskey Rebellion
    Card ImageBy Diana HubbellASSOCIATE EDITOR, PLACESAs we enter what feels like the 800th year of this American election season, I can’t help but find myself thinking back to the guys who started it all. We’ve spent a lot of energy and legislative manpower attempting to decipher and interpret the language the Founding Fathers used—and how they intended it to apply to technologies and concepts that didn’t exist in their era.And while there’s no denying that many of these men were ahead of their time in some ways, I question our tendency to put them on pedestals, be they literal marble ones or Tony Award–winning Broadway shows. Great thinkers they may have been, but they were also just people.What’s more, they may have been a little drunk.On September 14, 1787, just days before signing the Constitution, George Washington and his pals wracked up a bar tab at Philadelphia’s City Tavern worth the equivalent of $15,600 today. For 55 guests, the damage included 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 12 bottles of whiskey, seven large bowls of punch, eight bottles of cider, 22 bottles of porter, and 12 bottles of beer.A number of participants in the 1787 Continental Congress drank rather heavily. Photo: Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy Stock PhotoOne can only speculate that this must have been a larger than usual celebration, especially since the bar bill includes a number of broken glasses. But the total still stands at two bottles of wine per person, plus beer, whiskey, and several glasses of punch—enough to knock most people today flat.Brian Abrams, author of Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief From the Oval Office, says it’s important to remember that consumption habits were generally different during the late 18th century. It was still common at the time to start the day with a small beer (usually around 3 percent ABV). “John Adams would drink a tanker of his cider every morning with his breakfast,” Abrams says.Part of that was a coping mechanism for the physical and mental hardships of a rather difficult period in history. “As far as why all these old guys were drinking all the time, people’s bodies were riddled with all sorts of incurable diseases,” Abrams says. “Everyone’s walking around with whooping cough or typhoid, or they have splinters with tetanus in them, or bullets lodged in their bodies. These were not things that doctors could cure, so people just drank.”Some of the Founding Fathers drank and ate more extravagantly than others. “[Jefferson] allocated more than $16,500 to wine during his first two terms, and $50 a day for food,” Abrams says. According to an economist Abrams consulted at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that works out to the equivalent of $300,000 to $350,000 for wine.Although Jefferson’s Republican Party had a populist reputation in contrast to his Federalist counterparts, that didn’t stop him from drinking and dining like a French monarch. “[His cellar] was stocked with partridges, wild ducks, venison, squab, goose, pâté, rabbit, squirrel, crabs, and oysters,” Abrams says. Dinners were often eight courses, albeit with less stuffy table settings than was customary for the upper crust at the time.“It was a friendly atmosphere,” Abrams says. “It was about ideas and discussions. It gave off a vibe where he didn’t seem stiff like those Federalists. But the truth is, they were all…I guess today we would call them all one-percenters.”Appropriately, then, some of the Founding Fathers looked down upon the drinking habits of the lower classes. At the time, rum and whiskey distilling was on the rise.In a letter in 1790, then treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton described spirits as “pernicious luxuries” and wrote, “The consumption of ardent spirits particularly, no doubt very much on account of their cheapness, is carried to an extreme, which is truly to be regretted, as well in regard to the health and the morals, as to the [economy] of the community.”Both to make a dent in the fledgling nation’s lingering Revolutionary War debts and curb the drinking habits of its population, Hamilton suggested slapping a tax on domestically distilling spirits. It provoked immediate outrage in 1791 in western Pennsylvania, where many farmers straight-up refused to pay it.George Washington sent a militia to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. Photo: MET/BOT / Alamy Stock PhotoBy 1794, hundreds of “whiskey rebels” were starting violent protests, including burning down a house. The Whiskey Rebellion, as it became known, got so out of hand that George Washington himself had to take a militia of over 12,000 men down to Pennsylvania to quell it.Just three years later though, Washington himself got into the whiskey business. In 1799, his distillery at Mount Vernon produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey. And while it’s unlikely he was the biggest boozer at his now infamous pre-Constitutional bender, we know he liked a tipple.As Abrams writes in his book, “Washington and [French major-general François-Jean de] Chastellux bonded over booze,” helping to strengthen the alliance despite linguistic and cultural barriers. By the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington, who previously had mostly stuck to American beer and rum, had developed a taste for fine French wines.Certainly, no one would advise drinking the quantities of liquor that were socially acceptable to consume in Washington’s time. But if you’re curious, you could always try a version of their poison of choice. According to Abrams, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association said Washington’s home-distilled firewater had a “pretty sharp taste”—not encouraging.George Washington had his own whiskey distillery. Photo: B Christopher / Alamy Stock PhotoMore promising is the cocktail that he carried while wandering in the woods. “He kept a canteen of this brandy-flavored beverage while he surveyed the Allegheny Mountains in September of 1784,” Abrams says. Sweet, tart, and very strong, it would have kept our nation’s first president both fortified and a little buzzed as he traipsed through the wilderness.Given that the messy, conflict-riddled business of making this government in the first place drove the Continental Congress to drink, it feels appropriate to have a glass of something stiff on Election Day (just, you know, not so many that you trash a Philadelphia tavern).If you’re feeling a bit anxious and exhausted by our democratic process, here are two easy things you can do right now: First, go register to vote if you haven’t already. Second, go make Martha Washington’s spiced, spiked sour cherry “bounce.” It needs to mellow for a full two weeks, meaning you’ll have a jar of liquid courage in your refrigerator when November 5 comes.
  • Demolishing Chevron Deference: Republicans Push for a Billionaire-Run Banana Republic

    Demolishing Chevron Deference: Republicans Push for a Billionaire-Run Banana Republic

    In 1904, O. Henry coined the phrase “banana republic” to describe a country where the government supports big business for the exclusive benefit of the morbidly rich. A government of, by, and for what that generation called the “fatcats” or the “robber barons.”The banana republic-ication of America just kicked into high gear, and, curiously, there’s been a virtual mainstream media blackout about it.Here’s how it’s happening.When Steve Bannon was in the Trump White House, he declared one of their goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” That same type of language also appears in Project 2025.Now, fewer than two weeks ago, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court began that process by kneecapping the ability of regulatory agencies to protect the American people from out-of-control polluters, rip-off banks and insurance companies, Big Pharma, and hundreds of other industries and massive corporations that put profits above humans.They did it by blowing up the Chevron Deference. It’s part of their long-term commitment to turning America into a billionaire- and corporate-run banana republic with an autocrat as president.The case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ends the power of most regulatory agencies that are so hated by America’s most exploitative industries and the rightwing billionaires they’ve made.

    Source: Demolishing Chevron Deference: Republicans Push for a Billionaire-Run Banana Republic

  • Noblesse oblige is dead: Today’s wealthy elite just don’t give a damn

    Opinion by Thom Hartmann

    Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:

    “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

    “To hell with democracy,” they essentially said. “There’s money to be made!”

    What ever happened to the sense of obligation that wealthy Americans used to feel to help out their country and her people in need?

    Maybe it’s all the new money. Maybe it’s just good old-fashioned greed. Maybe it’s the nearly psychopathic drive to crush everything and everyone in your way to make that first billion dollars that twists people’s perspectives and their view of their fellow citizens.

    Whatever it is, the concept of noblesse oblige — the obligation to give back to the society that helped make you rich — seems dead for today’s “conservatives” among the morbidly rich.

    It wasn’t always this way.

    — At 13, Andrew Carnegie came to this country from Scotland with his parents, his younger brother, and two dollars in their collective pocket; he became, within four decades, the richest man in the world. And he funded 2,509 libraries, ultimately giving away his entire fortune before the end of his life. “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” he wrote in his book The Gospel of Weal. Continues here

  • ‘A Soldier’s Journey

    ‘A Soldier’s Journey

    ‘A Soldier’s Journey’
    The long-awaited centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial was unveiled Friday, a 25-ton, nearly 60-foot-long relief capturing the human toll of the war. Located just east of the White House in Pershing Park, the relief panel is the largest freestanding bronze sculpture in the Western Hemisphere.  The piece depicts more than three dozen figures used to tell the story of a single soldier, or “doughboy”—from leaving America for the war, witnessing death and destruction, and returning home. The sculptor, Sabin Howard, described the piece as emphasizing the process of being human as seen through the lens of war. Watch an interview with Howard and others discussing its creation here. Roughly 118,000 Americans died in the war, with more than 200,000 soldiers wounded (the global death toll is estimated to be as high as 22 million). Read about the decadelong effort to make the larger National World War I Memorial a reality. 

  • Emirates Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup

    Emirates Team New Zealand Wins America's CupAmerica’s Cup

    On Saturday, Emirates Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup for the third time in a row, beating the INEOS Britannia challengers 7-2 in the final race series. Two days earlier, the British dream of a “Miracle on the Med,” which would’ve brought the Cup back to England for the first time since 1851, seemed like a real underdog possibility, given the U.K. team won two successive races to bring the series to 4-2.

    But it was not to be. The Kiwis won two more races on Friday and clinched a tight race for an historic three-peat on Saturday, arriving across the finish line 37 seconds ahead of INEOS. The black-clad team aboard New Zealand’s foiling raceboat sprayed each other with Moet and later doused the America’s Cup itself in bubbly while thousands of Kiwi fans, who had traveled around the world to watch the finals, cheered in celebration.

  • Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution” Has Been Appointed: Who is On His List?

    Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution” Has Been Appointed: Who is On His List?

    Get ready: Trump and his neofascist MAGA movement may soon be coming for you.They’re already explicitly gunning for journalists like me who write for Raw Story (which, along with The New Republic, Daily Kos, Alternet, Common Dreams and others, regularly publish my articles), CNN, The Washington Post, and Reuters, according to an astonishing new investigative report published yesterday at Raw Story.Trump’s self-described “Secretary of Retribution,” Ivan Raiklin, already reportedly has a hit list of 350 “deep state” individuals he says they intend to try to assassinate by tricking police into attacking their homes with SWAT teams.Raiklin posted a video to X, which has now gotten more than 10 million views, saying:“Expect to see live-streamed swatting raids of every single individual on that Deep State target list, because the precedence has already been set.”He added:“Look at my entire Deep State target list. That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?”The list, according to Raw Story investigative reporters Jordan Green and Mark Alesia:“[I]ncludes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.”

    Source: Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution” Has Been Appointed: Who is On His List?

  • Quebec new flood maps

    Quebec new flood maps

    The Quebec government is introducing a new generation of flood maps aimed at better protecting residents from climate risk, while Montreal presents a compelling—but not yet funded—vision of an urban paradise that will be affordable, leafy, and mostly car-free by 2050.

    The nascent flood management plan announced by the François Legault government last week contains some difficult truths. The long overdue updating of flood maps will triple the number of Quebec households designated to be at risk of inundation, reports the Montreal Gazette.

  • The oil lobby’s pipeline to the CAQ, part 1 – Ricochet

    The oil lobby’s pipeline to the CAQ, part 1 – Ricochet

    Nicolas Hulot, France’s environment minister, resigned publicly on Aug. 28, denouncing the influence of lobbyists on his government. The most powerful lobby is that of the oil industry, which is mobilizing around the world to dissuade states from adopting effective measures against greenhouse gases, while global warming threatens the survival of humanity.In Quebec, this lobby includes the MEI, where Youri Chassin, now a candidate for the CAQ, was an economist and then director of research from 2010 to 2017. It is worth looking into his actions there, because he could very well have an important position if elected with the CAQ. This means examining the hidden face of the MEI and its relationship with U.S. think tanks backed by oil magnates, including the brothers Charles and David Koch.According to the Vancouver Observer, the Koch brothers financed the MEI through their foundations. The MEI is formally associated with the Heritage Foundation, one of the many foundations that is supported by the Koch brothers and promotes oil, according to the Foundation’s latest annual report.

    Source: The oil lobby’s pipeline to the CAQ, part 1 – Ricochet

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