Add Fashion to Protest Passions

When protests blocked roads and polluted life with gas-filled burning tires in 2012 Lebanon, the Bokja (pronounced "bubjeh") textile house countered by rolling out a photographic display of tires covered with its elaborately embroidered fabrics.

     President Trump's red cap was followed by women donning knitted pink "Pussyhats" when they marched to protest his claim about where he could grab any woman.

     Black gowns worn at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards announced women were finished playing amateur sex object roles for Hollywood's powerful moguls.

     To demonstrate their increasing numbers and rightful place in Congress, women lawmakers joined males at the 2019 State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. wearing white outfits like those suffragettes used to call attention to their cause.

     What fashions might help call attention to the need to address climate change and other problems?

     To concoct the bugs intense heat could spawn and other dramatic protest examples, look to the Mummers who parade in Philadelphia on New Year's Day, "Miss Universe" costumes, and the beaded creations strutting in New Orleans' Mardi Gras parades.

February's International Film Festival

One of the most pleasant ways to learn about a country is to go to a movie made in or about somewhere you don't live. When Oscar nominations for short and feature films are announced, it's time to start looking for theatres that show them, because many of these potential Academy Award winners have an international connection.

     This year, in the animated shorts category, South Africa presents Revolting Rhymes based on Ronald Dahl's dark spin on fairy tales. One French short, Negative Space, shows a sad relationship between father and son can exist in any culture, and, in another French short, two amphibians explore a deserted mansion. These shorts are shown together with two U.S. films: the Pixar short, Lou, that ran before Cars and Kobe Bryant's retirement letter, Dear Basketball.

     Since the live action shorts nominated for Oscars often portray news events, they can be a pleasant way to see both uplifting and unpleasant aspects of a country. Watu Wote (All of Us) shows how Muslims risked their lives to protect the Christians riding on a bus with them, when Islamic terrorists attacked in Kenya. The British short, The Silent Child, introduces the social worker who taught a deaf 4-year-old girl the sign language that enabled her to come out of the shadows and be included in family conversations. Two U.S. entries cover a school shooting in Atlanta titled DeKalb Elementary and My Nephew Emmett based on the 1955 racist murder of Emmett Till. Australian humor is on display in The Eleven O'Clock, a short about an appointment between a psychiatrist and patient that try to treat each other.

     Families already may have seen the animated feature, Coco, which has a Mexican theme depicting how a death in the family shouldn't end memories of a relative. Loving Vincent probably won't have wide distribution, but if young people have a chance to see this Polish-British feature, it might be their only time to see a movie where each frame about Vincent Van Gogh is made by an oil painting. Since Angelina Jolie produced The Breadwinner, this animated feature likely has wider distribution. It shows how an 11-year-old girl disguised herself as a boy to grow up with more opportunities under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

     Although too advanced to be appropriate or understood by young people, the live action foreign language films nominated for Academy Awards provide adults with points of view from Chile (A Fantastic Woman), Lebanon (The Insult), Russia (Loveless), Hungary (On Body and Soul), and Sweden (The Square).

     Oscar winners will be announced on Sunday, March 4, 2018.

     

   

Plain Talk about Nuclear North Korea

If you haven't seen the current TIME magazine article (Feb. 12, 2018), it sheds light on how North Korea's so-called hermit kingdom became a nuclear power while no one was looking. Pakistan helped North Korea understand how to enrich uranium for a nuclear warhead, but TIME didn't say where North Korea obtained its uranium. Pyongyang recruited unemployed missile experts (as well as chemical and biological weapons' experts) from Russia and Ukraine in 1991 after the USSR collapsed and later from Iran and Pakistan. A missile engine stolen from the Yuzhmash factory in Ukraine also could have ended up in North Korea.

Russia is happy to keep the U.S. distracted, the TIME issue reported. No wonder Moscow stands idly by as sanctions on North Korea make selling its nuclear technology to Syria and other would-be nuclear powers an attractive income producing option. Yet, Russia has shown concern about the nuclear fallout that a US nuclear attack on North Korea could send its way. Moscow strategists state the purpose of their nuclear missiles is to inflict enough devastation on enemies to bring them to the negotiating table. Of course, it makes more sense to avoid all devastation by negotiating before inflicting harm. Hope that is what Kim Jong Un and President Trump are about to do.

At nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap, which was mentioned in the earlier post, "Nuclear Straight Talk," it is possible to predict the extent of fallout from a nuclear detonation in any city.

Muslim Perspective: Conclusion of a 3-Part Series

What was the Muslim perspective after World War II? At first, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen agreed with Britain's suggestion to form an Arab League to protect their independence from outside threats, especially from the Soviet Union. But a common opposition to the new Israeli state proved to be a stronger unifying force. Muslim countries that had no part in murdering Jewish prisoners in the Holocaust were unwilling to recognize Israeli independence. They responded with a declaration of war, when a UN resolution ended Britain's Palestinian Mandate and created the new state of Israel on May 15, 1948. The United States, with the largest concentration of Jewish people outside of Israel, went to the aid of Israel.

     After Mohammed's death, Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims took different directions and became bitter enemies (For an explanation of the rift, see the section, Mohammed's Legacy, in the earlier post, "This We Believe."). Both Muslim sects had splinter groups determined to annihilate Israel, and, by extension, Israel's ally, the United States. The new fundamentalist Shi'ite regime that took over in Iran in 1979 permitted militants to hold 62 Americans in the U.S. embassy for over a year. Israel viewed exiled Palestinian Sunnis and Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shia in Lebanon as terrorists. To rid its northern border of the threat posed by both groups, Israel supported the 1982 raid by Maronite Christian militias that resulted in a refugee camp massacre.

     Seen as an ally of the Israeli forces behind the 1982 raid, the United States became an Hezbollah target. After a suicide bomber drove a truck full of explosives into the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in April, 1983, Iran directed another suicide operation that killed 241 at the U.S.Marine barracks there in October. Tel Aviv, which had destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, pressured Washington to see that Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb would not succeed.

     Only because of a blatant invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 was President George H.W.Bush, with UN backing, able to assemble the international force that took just four days to defeat Iraq and liberate Kuwait. In other circumstances, the U.S. was a target in 1993 for Muslim terrorists who set off a bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center in New York and for the terrorists, trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, who bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. With a successful "business plan" in hand, the Muslim mastermind behind these attacks traveled to Sudan in 1995 to remind Osama bin Laden how effective suicide bombers could be against Americans. (For additional information about the Muslim perspective, see the earlier post, "Why Do They Hate Us?")



   

All I Want for Christmas Is Seeds

Who knew elves occasionally take a break from making toys to store seeds in Santa's warehouse. Although many put Syria on their naughty lists, in October, 2015 the Svalbard global seed vault half way between the north pole and Norway responded to an urgent request from the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (Icarda) and sent the 128 crates of wheat, barley lentil, chickpea, fava bean, pea, and legume seeds Syria needed.

     After seeds for another 70,000 crops were added to the Global Seed Vault in 2018, Svalbard now stores 1,059,646 seeds. 

     Svalbard, known as the "Noah's Ark of seeds," is just one of the storehouses for the diversity of seeds needed to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains; the collections of plants, like apples and grapes, that are not cultivated from seeds; and even the genetic material essential to maintain the bees that pollinate many crops.

     Individual farmers also are essential in the process of ensuring a lasting food supply. On one of his "Parts Unknown" TV programs, David Bourdain found restaurant owners in the US South have been searching for the seeds that grew foods popular before the US Civil War. They located seeds that had come down through the families of former slaves, when war wiped out the seeds held by plantation owners. When kids start collecting and drying seeds for diverse crops, they also will be getting involved in the vital task of protecting the world's food supply.

 Why is the world's food supply in danger? There are many reasons:

• Wars destroy farms. Research stations in Lebanon and Morocco are working to produce seeds and saplings to resupply Syria's farmers.
• Globalization of agriculture has concentrated seed production in companies that abandon many plant varieties in order to produce uniform, high-yield varieties. (See the earlier post, "World (Food) Expo. Hybrid Crops & New Farming Practices.")
• Pests and diseases can wipe out crops. (See the earlier post, "The Bees and the Birds.")
• Global warming has reduced the area suitable for farming. (See the earlier post, "Coffee Prices Going Up; Allowances Going Down?")
• Farmers have moved to urban areas to find work.
• Without a market, farmers have stopped growing foods that have gone out of favor when diets shifted to wheat, rice, potatoes, maize, soybeans, and palm oil.
• Deforestation has removed forests where plants thrive and evolve.

Kids used to get oranges and apples in their Christmas stockings. To be sure these fruits continue to exist, the world is counting on Santa to bring these goodies along with toys and candy.