World Goes to the Polls in Brazil

At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, a reporter went up into the hills to interview young boys flying kites. A translator conveyed the false notion that people living in the crowded makeshift homes above Rio preferred their friendly communities to the lonely confines of the modern homes in the city below. Those flying the kites told a different story. They saw the kites as a symbol of their dreams to escape.

     By a margin of 55% to 45%, Jair Bolsonaro was elected Brazil's new President on October 28, 2018. His concern for money laundering, financing of terrorist groups, and other suspicious transactions in Brazil led to granting more power to the country's Financial Activities Control Council (COAF). Promoted as a way to speed investigations and integrate the functions of various government agencies, others view this bureaucratic reorganization as a threat to traditional guarantees of bank and financial secrecy.

     Brazil's most popular politician was not running in the first round of voting for president on Sunday, October 7, 2018. An independent judiciary found Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010, guilty of corruption and sentenced him to prison. Like others in Brazil's political elite, Lula, as he is known, was charged with taking bribes from construction companies looking for contracts from Brazil's state-controlled Petrobras oil company. Since the Odebrecht construction company was not satisfied only to bribe itself into Brazil's political process, the world has an opportunity to prosecute its corrupt tentacles in at least ten Latin American countries, the United States, and Switzerland. (See the latest news about Odebrecht's bribery case in Colombia in the post, "Cut Off the Head and the Colombia Snake Dies?") In the United States, Petrobras itself, which trades in the US market, was fined $853 million for corruption under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

       Fernando Haddad, the former Sao Paulo mayor with degrees in economics, law, and philosophy, represented Lula's Workers Party (PT) in the first round voting of the presidential election. The PT, which once brought prosperity to Brazil under Lula from 2003 ti 2011, gave way to the mismanaged economy, recession, and bribery of his successors: Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached for hiding the country's budget deficit, and Michel Temer, who fought a charge of corruption . Haddad is tainted with his association to PT's past sins and a suspected willingness to end an investigation into corruption.

      The Brazilian rainforest, considered the world's lungs for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and combat rising temperatures, drought, and fires, is endangered by Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who belonged to nine different political parties during his 28-year congressional career. As expected, Bolsonaro and Haddad met again in the second round of voting. In the first round,  Bolsonaro nearly won half the vote needed to avoid a runoff

     Bolsonaro is the hero of Brazil's soybean farmers and cattle ranchers, because he would withdraw Brazil from the Paris Climate Accord and open the way to finance unlimited deforestation of the rainforest. With his running mate, General Hamilton Mourao, he shares an authoritarian approach to reversing the effects of Brazil's lingering 2014 recession: unemployment, reduced personal income, and a lack of education, health, and other government services. It also should be noted, Brazil's National Museum of historic treasures, housed in a once beautiful Portuguese palace, burned down on September 2, 2018, despite warnings about a lack of maintenance. Mourao claims the army has the ability to solve Brazil's problems, including drug-related violence, the way Brazil's military dictatorship did from 1964 to 1985.

     Bolsonaro's supporters like his outspoken attacks on indigenous rainforest communities, women, blacks, and homosexuals. During the first round of voting, Bolsonaro was in the hospital while recovering from being stabbed in the stomach at a campaign event. He claims to be Brazil's President Trump, when one is more than enough for the world.

     Brazil, once one of the promising emerging markets known collectively as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), has fallen on hard times, but the country is too important for the world to ignore. There will be as many as 30 different political parties in Brazil's new congress. The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) that dominates congressional coalitions has to deal with members used to receiving pay-offs in jobs, funds for pet projects, and graft in return for passing necessary reforms.

     The world's multinational corporations are in a position to exploit Brazil's political, economic, and social woes or to dream up win-win solutions for their stockholders and the country's kite flyers.

     Local farmers complain that the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) that developed maize, soybeans, eucalyptus trees, and zebu cattle to thrive in the tropical heat and acidic soils on the savanna that covers 5% of Brazil's farmland no longer helps them. Biotechnology, now in the hands of Bayer, which just acquired Monsanto, and Syngenta, a Swiss pesticide producer, serves their agribusiness interests. Meanwhile, Munduruku tribe members, who formed the COOPAVAM cooperative, watch farms press toward the patch of forest where they harvest the wild Brazil nuts they press into oil for eco-friendly Natura cosmetics and school lunch food. At the very least, multinationals could abide by government regulations requiring only 20% of forest areas should be cleared for farming.

     Boeing is in a position to honor or undercut the interests of Brazil's Embraer aircraft company employees and its metalworkers union. Young engineers are used to moving from projects on commercial aircraft to executive jets to defense projects. Since Boeing is only interested in acquiring the company's short-range, 70- to 130-seat commercial jet business in order to compete with Canada's Bombardier, Inc. and Airbus, excess employees rightly fear they would lose their jobs. Couldn't Boeing's worldwide operations offer them employment elsewhere?

     All in all, Brazil's presidential election is a world, not just a national, event worth watching.
   

Space Explorers

Kids everywhere in the world see the same sun, moon, stars, and comets. Astronauts can launch into space from any place on the globe, and those from different countries have lived together in International Space Stations.

     New countries are joining the U.S. and Russian space pioneers. On June 11, 2013, China sent a manned space craft  to its experimental Tiangong 1 space station from a launch pad  near the Gobi Desert. China's Long March rocket successfully launched an unmanned    8-day mission around the moon and back in October 2014, while its Jade Rabbit rover has been sending back data about the moon's surface every since December, 2013.  From Sriharikota island on November 5, 2013, India launched its first mission to Mars. The Mangalyaan ("Mars-craft" in Hindi) began to orbit its target and send back information on the Red Planet's atmosphere and to map the planet's surface on September 24, 2014. Earlier in the month, Maven (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile Evolution), NASA's robotic vehicle launched on November 18, 2013, also went into orbit around Mars and began its mission to discover what happened to the planet's water before it became hot and dry.

     In November, 2014, the European Space Agency's Philae probe attached itself to a comet and began sending back images. This first time event enables scientists to look at ice and organic molecules that have survived for more than 4.6 billion years in the solar system. Could comets have carried water to Earth?

     Playground equipment lends itself to space exploration and imagination. Any object that children can crawl into, a stack of tires or a playhouse, can serve as a space station. Swinging is like flying to the moon with an adult providing the rocket blaster push. Despite danger similar to that faced by astronauts, older kids often launch themselves into space by jumping off high flying swings and teeter-totters. Then, there are the climbing domes that look like half a globe. Those who make it to the top can feel like they are sitting on top of the world looking out at the universe. Zip lines can carry a child from Earth to any heavenly destination. Climb up a slide into a rocket and slide back down to Mother Earth. Name each step or swinging step for a planet and travel through space. Orbit the Earth on a merry-go-round or spinning toy. And it's always fun for children to play the roles of various planets that orbit around a child who plays the Sun.

     The "Schoolhouse Rock" DVD provides a catchy tune kids can sing when they are pretending to be space explorers. While traveling throughout the solar system, "Interplanet Janet," a song about a galaxy girl, mentions a fact about each planet, including Pluto which has since been declassified as a dwarf planet too small to be a real planet. (However, in Steve Metzger's book, Pluto Visits Earth the former planet gets advice about size from a little Earth boy.)

     A book, such as Rand McNally's Children's Atlas of the Universe, gives even more information about the planets than Interplanet Janet does. It also explains an eclipse, stars, quasars, supernovas, asteroids, and comets. With spectacular photographs, Hubble Telescope Book and The Hubble Cosmos from National Geographic (shopng.org), look at planetary nebulae, galaxies, "dark energy," the birth and death of stars, and the expansion of the universe that this space-based telescope has seen in the past 25 years. It may have been the Hubble Telescope that enabled scientists to discover Sedna and another dwarf planet 80 astronomical units from the sun. (One astronomical unit is the distance from Earth to the sun.)

     Little ones might like the book, Toys in Space by Mini Gray, or Sue Ganz-Schmitt's book, Planet Kindergarten, which introduces children aged 3 to 5 to space travel. Older readers would enjoy the adventures of Zita the Space Girl, a series by Ben Hatke. Girls interested going into space themselves would like to read about the first women who trained to be astronauts in Tanya Stone's book Almost Astronauts. Also, be on the lookout for National Geographic's publication, Illustrated Mission to Mars. In it, Buzz Aldrin tells about the projects that could take human travelers to Mars by the 2030s.

     Not only is the 13.8 billion year old universe expanding, but it also is dying. We can help children understand the concept of an expanding universe by putting dots on a deflated balloon. As the balloon is blown up, the dots, like stars, move farther away. Scientists observe the increasing rate of expansion in the universe by measuring how fast the brightness of an exploding star dims as it dies. Since stars, quasars, and other radiant objects in the universe have been converting matter into energy for billions of years, astronomers have discovered that the energy output from 200,000 nearby galaxies is about half what it was two billion years ago. As the universe, like a star releasing its gases, has less and less mass to convert into energy, through the centuries space will become colder and darker.

      Enabled by a wide variety of telescopes, students can study the night sky. And local observatories and planetariums offer programs for the public. In Washington, DC, for example, visitors can look through the telescope at the Naval Observatory on nights of a full moon, when a lack of shadows prevents astrophysicists from studying the moon's surface. North of Chicago, Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, home of 40-inch and 24-inch diameter refractor telescopes, offers Saturday tours and visits to its Quester Museum. Kitt Peak National Observatory also hosts day and night tours in Tucson, Arizona, and at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, there are events as well as tours.

     Researchers are finding more and more space to explore. Of the 1,010 planetary bodies said to lie outside our solar system, about 1% are in positions where water could exist in a liquid state, according to the November, 2013 issue of The Futurist, the magazine of the World Future Society.
The book, The Pioneer Detectives by Konstantin Kakaes, questions the reason why a space probe went off course and kept sending back signals even after it passed Pluto.

     Viewing outer space is best where skies are darkest away from city lights. In US locations, such as Highland Park, Tonopah, Nevada; Cherry Springs State Park, Pennsylvania; Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, California; and Baxter State Park in north-central, Maine, the bright green nucleus and tail of the comet ISON (International Scientific Optical Network), which was discovered by two Russian amateur astronomers in September, 2012, easily could be seen by the naked eye before it reached the sun November 28, 2013. Indoors, some teachers use dry ice and dirt to demonstrate why comets, formed far out in the solar system before they fall toward the sun, are called dirty snowballs.

      YoungExplorers.com offers a kit that enables kids to build and launch their own Meteor Rocket and a set of die cast and plastic replicas of ten U.S. space vehicles, plus study information cards about the U.S. space program. National Geographic also sells space-oriented "toys," such as a Talking Planetarium, Interactive "Laptop" Planetarium, and Space Exploration Kit.

     Last summer's Star Trek Into Darkness (PG-13) film reminds us that TV shows and movies often transport children and adults to galaxies far, far away. Kids who once played with sticks and swords switched to lightsabers after the first Star Wars movie was screened in 1977. The Star Wars theme also is captured in action figures, like Darth Vader and the Ewoks, LEGO characters and weapons, books, comics, board and video games, and music. Star Trek fans, known as Trekkies, even dress up and attend annual conventions such as the one just concluded in Boston. Lady Gaga claims she'll be performing from space in a couple of years.

     Planet of the Apes may have given a child nightmares on an episode of Mad Men, but the story of astronauts who crashed into a world where humans were treated like animals and apes ruled has merited more than one movie treatment. In E.T., however, children learn it's possible to be friends with other forms of life.

     The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) runs a day camp for children 8 and up in Florida and works with other organizations that sponsor similar programs. One of these organizations, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, invites interested parties to sign up on its mailing list to receive information about its Space Camp programs.

     Private companies now are very much involved in space exploration. On the website, virgingalactic.com, you can follow what Virgin Galactic is doing to advance the future of commercial space travel. Unfortunately, the crash of a Virgin Galactic's spacecraft killed a test pilot and injured another on November 1, 2014. An attempt to resupply the International Space Station using a rocket from Orbital Sciences also failed when it exploded in Virginia in October, 2014. Elon Musk's privately owned SpaceX company has contracts to launch satellites for businesses and to resupply the International Space Station, but a SpaceX launch carrying cargo for the space station exploded in June, 2015. Another SpaceX craft designed to carry a satellite that would connect Africans with Facebook exploded on and destroyed a launch pad in August, 2016.  With a government contribution of $6.8 billion, NASA had hoped to rely on the private space industry to provide access to and from the International Space Station. The U.S. also planned to use private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to run its manned space program. And the successful launch of a SpaceX rocket on February 6 2018 showed the idea of commercial space travel was still alive.

(See the later blog post, "Hunt for Moon Rocks.").