This article, The New Economics of Hunger, is both fascinating and sobering, showing just how interconnected the world’s economy has become and how good environmentalist intentions and arcane investments are translating into actual human beings starving to death. Killer quote: “food was becoming the new gold.”
Here is how the current food crisis happened: The wheat harvest worldwide was mediocre, making for tight though sufficient supplies. But Argentina and Russia decided to ban exports so they could keep their crops for themselves. That meant less wheat on the world market, sending prices up.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., our farmers–who account for half of the world’s grain exports!–had shifted a significant amount of their production from wheat to corn to take advantage of the federally-subsidized ethanol market , which consumes nearly 25% of the current corn supply. So less American wheat meant still higher prices. Foreign buyers, facing the prospect of hunger at home, bid it still higher. Because of the falling value of the dollar, foreigners bought more and more, stockpiling supplies. In the meantime, the collapse of the mortgage markets sent investors into grain markets! Bidding prices even higher!
Now, food shortages and high prices are destabilizing governments in Haiti, Bangladesh, and a dozen other countries. And, after years of progress in fighting hunger in these countries, starvation is back.
Remember J. R. Ewing? Southfork? Miss Ellie? We are at the 30th anniversary of “Dallas.” According to this article, How ‘Dallas’ Won the Cold War, the show with its evil oil tycoons and cutthroat capitalism, helped win the hearts and minds of the proletariat in communist countries. It happened along the lines of this priceless anecdote:
Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie “The Grapes of Wrath” in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies’ westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies — and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. “Dallas” functioned similarly.
Communist officials reasoned that the depradations of J. R. would teach their people the evils of capitalism. But, instead, Iron Curtain viewers saw the swimming pools, Cadillacs, and blockbuster business deals and lusted after them and the economic system that, for better and worse, made them possible.
As evident in last week’s blog about cricket, India makes for a good case study about the effect of pop culture on a traditionalist society. In this article about the struggles of India’s “untouchable” caste to break into the country’s “Bollywood” film industry–Bollywood No Longer A Dream Too Far for India’s Lower Castes - washingtonpost.com–we learn just how much the poor people are taken with the fantasies they see on screen:
Going to the air-conditioned cinema is a popular national pastime without parallel in this country, especially for low-caste laborers who work under India’s unforgiving sun — in construction, in farming, as cow herders and as fruit vendors. For Indians, most of whom subsist on less than $2 a day, the masala mixes of drama and dance are the ultimate escape.
So beloved are Hindi film stars that there are Hindu temples named after matinee idols. Political rallies always include a Bollywood starlet. Some political leaders are former actors. And in small-town theaters, audiences are so personally involved in the melodramas — often four hours long — that they whistle, clap, imitate dance moves and sing along with the songs.
“India is really a special place for film. It’s second only to religion in the way it occupies people’s minds and dreams,” said Barry John, a longtime drama teacher.
(1) Do you think the state should approve this as an optional design, if people want to pay for it?
(2) Why do Christians today, when they finally DO get interested in expressing their faith through an artistic medium, have such a fondness for not the sublime or the beautiful but the tacky or banal?
(3) But wouldn’t this license plate be a witness tool, so that someone seeing the message as your car tears past them might get converted? (Hint: The answer is no. Explain why.)
The movie version of “The Hobbit” is getting under way. Here are some details:
Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was named on Thursday to direct two movies based on the J.R.R. Tolkien book “The Hobbit” to build on the blockbuster success of “The Lord of the Rings” series.
Plans to make a two-part precursor to “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, based on Tolkien’s three-volume follow-up to his “Hobbit” story, were announced in December after settlement of a bitter legal dispute cleared the way for the project.
Del Toro, whose credits include “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Blade II,” will move to New Zealand for the next four years to work on both “Hobbit” films with executive producer Peter Jackson, who directed all three “The Lord of the Rings” movies, according to New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
The studios have said that filming will begin in 2009, with tentative release dates set of 2010 for the first film and 2011 for the sequel.
The plans call for del Toro to work back-to-back on “The Hobbit” and its sequel, which will deal with the 60-year period between that story and “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the studios said.
Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was a pretty remarkable fantasy movie, however creepy and depressing, so he should be OK. Jackson, who did such a good job with the trilogy, will be in charge. That this two-movie arrangement will include not just “The Hobbit” but will cover the 60 years before “The Fellowship of the Ring” is interesting, indeed. I guess that means that filmmakers will be taking on at least part of “The Silmarilion.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been taking every opportunity to share her favorite Bible passage:
“The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us.’ On this Earth Day, and every day, let us honor the earth and our future generations with a commitment to fight climate change.”
Apparently, it’s a favorite verse of hers. She has used it in official statements on global warming, the budget, Martin Luther King Day, Christmas, and why she’s a Democrat.
Padre Pio was an Italian monk who apparently bore the stigmata, the bleeding wounds of Christ in his hands and feet. Forty years ago, he died and was soon proclaimed a saint by the Roman Catholic church. Now his body has been exhumed and put on display for veneration. His body, of course, had decayed–which was doubtless a disappointment to those looking for that miraculous sign of sanctity, a body that did not decompose–but a lifelike silicon mask and other reconstruction has made the body presentable. See Thousands flock to exhumed body of saint Padre Pio , which includes this sad sentence:
“A poll in 2006 by Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana found that more Italian Catholics prayed to Padre Pio than to any other figure, including the Virgin Mary or Jesus.”
The word-hoard of the English language keeps growing, as new words come into existence and into our vocabulary. This article–Harold Meyerson - Back to The ’60s - washingtonpost.com–gives us “Sixtiesism,” which could be defined as a reversion to the issues and mindset that characterized the 1960’s. The article also coins a related word: Sixties-ization. Meaning imposing the issues and mindset of the 1960’s on contemporary times or on an individual.
The author is using those terms to analyze the current Democratic presidential race, as all of those elderly Sixties survivors–Rev. Wright, those Weather Underground terrorists–and the Sixties issues of Civil Rights and Peace are being injected, for better or worse, into today’s campaigns.
Still, the words are the best part of the argument. So what are some other examples of Sixtiesism? Of Sixtiesization?
America. . .what is the matter with you? On “American Idol,” the two best performances of the previous night, Syesha’s and Carly’s, landed up when the votes were tallied as the bottom two! And Carly, the tatooed Irish lass who certainly belonged in the top three of the whole bunch, got voted off.
(In saying these two performances were the best, I’m not applying my own personal arcane tastes in classical music or alt country. The two did rock numbers–as much as Andrew Lloyd Weber can compose rock numbers–but they did them very, very well.)
Whereas the two worst performances, an awful performance of an awful song, “Memories,” by the dreadlocked Jason and an effort by Brooke in which she actually forgot the lyrics and had to start all over, made their perpetrators “safe.”
This is a terrible injustice. So was voting off the Australian, Michael Johns, but this conjunction of awarding the two worst and punishing the two best is just wrong.
This comes from letting little children have cell phones. The contest is in danger of being taken over by young girls enthralled by “cute” boys. (True, two of these–the two Davids–are worthy of winning. David Cook, I think, is the best, rocker though he is. David Archeleta, though, I predict, will win.)
The government needs to intervene. Congress should investigate. American Idol should be regulated. Those who vote more responsibly should get tax cuts. President Bush should send in the troops.
America, what are you going to do when making a more important decision, like picking a president?
This article surveys our energy problems and the global food and starvation crisis caused to a major extent by the biofuel fiasco. The solution the article lifts up is nuclear energy! It does not pollute the air like other fuels. It is pretty much inexhaustible. And yet, people fear it irrationally. A nuclear power plant does NOT set off an atom bomb. It’s not like on the Simpsons, generating three eyed fish and irradiating the community. The radiation can be managed pretty easily.
Do you buy that argument, that environmentalists, in blocking the building of new nuclear energy plants, are harming the environment?
Or can another case be made against nuclear energy, that it violates the basic building block of matter in a profoundly unnatural and so immoral way?
At any rate, when the left ridicules President Bush, pro-lifers, creationists, and social conservatives in general for being “anti-science”–whether their stances are valid or not– can we include anti-nuclear activists in that group?
The young girl, named Sarah Barlow, who called authorities from that Texas polygamist compound claiming that she being abused, leading to a raid and the taking of 400 children away from their mothers? Evidence has come in that indicates she was a 33-year-old African-American woman from Colorado with a history of phoning in false accusations of sex abuse. But Texas authorities still vow to “press on.” FromTexas 911 Calls Linked To 33-Year-Old in Colo. - washingtonpost.com:
SAN ANGELO, Tex., April 23 — The phone calls that triggered a massive raid on a polygamist compound in west Texas — in which a quavering girl’s voice described being forcibly married at 15 — have been linked to a Colorado woman with a history of making false claims of sexual abuse, according to an affidavit filed in Colorado Springs.
The affidavit says calls that allegedly came from “Sarah Barlow” — a teenage girl at the Yearning for Zion Ranch outside Eldorado, Tex. — actually came from numbers connected to Rozita Swinton, 33, of Colorado Springs. The affidavit also notes Swinton’s possible involvement in a series of separate but similar reports in which the young caller described being abused by a pastor, an uncle or her father.
Texas authorities yesterday said they have not determined whether the calls about the Yearning for Zion Ranch were a hoax and that they plan to press on with their investigation of possible sexual abuse there. More than 400 children are now in state custody, as authorities try to sort out what happened at the ranch run by a polygamist group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Strange lights flew in formation over Phoenix, Arizona, and St. Augustine, Florida. (Something similar happened in Phoenix in 1997.) These were widely seen and photographed. Here is a story about the Arizona sightings: Unexplained lights spotted above Valley; what were they? Here is a story on the Florida sightings. (The anchors say the lights may be wedding lights, I guess something like balloons.)
Here is a video of what people were seeing in Arizona, so you can see them for yourself:
What do you make of these? (I welcome opinions both serious and humorous.)
Lucas Cranach was the great artist of the Reformation. He was a close friend of Martin Luther. He was a businessman, who first printed Luther's translation of the Bible; a politician, who served on the Wittenberg town council and served the city as its mayor; a chemist, who operated a pharmacy; a teacher, who trained a host of apprentice artists; a family-man, who helped arrange Luther's marriage with the two men serving as the godfathers of each other's children; and an active layman in his church, who gave his pastors important personal and material support.
As a Christian who lived out his faith in his many different callings, Cranach thus embodies the Reformation doctrine of vocation, using the gifts God had given him in service to Christ and his neighbor in the church, the family, the workplace, and the culture.
In the spirit of Lucas Cranach, this blog will discuss wide-ranging issues of Christianity and culture with a Lutheran twist.
