Russian Sanctions on Turkish Fabric Imports Halt Production of Anti-Turkish T-Shirts

by Nomad

With relations between Turkey and Russia at an all-time low, T-shirt designers in Russia are learning about the peculiar twists of globalization.

In need of a good irony fix? Well, Nomad does house calls!

You may have heard about the falling out between Russia and Turkey after the downing of a Russian bomber which had likely violated Turkish airspace for all of 17 seconds. One pilot was killed by rebels conducting target practice on parachuting Russians. 

Both sides had their own versions of what happened and things got meaner and nastier. A "stab in the back" was how the clearly-flustered Putin put it. Erdogan claimed to right to defend his national airspace.

Tit for tat snipes quickly were followed by the imposition of trade sanctions.
That's no small matter either.

In 2014, trade between the two countries amounted to $31 billion, and in the first nine months of 2015, to $18.1 billion. Turkey Russia’s eighth largest trading partner, while Russia is Turkey’s second largest trading partner, after the European Union. For different reasons, both economically-troubled nations do not need this hiccup.

The Re-Greening of the African Continent: How African Leaders Came Together to Save the Planet

by Nomad

African leaders recently announced a new regional initiative to tackle one of the world's more important environmental threats.

During the recent Climate Summit 2015 in Paris, leaders from ten African nations came together to launch an initiative aimed at restoring 100 million hectares or about 400 thousand square miles of degraded or deforested land.

Countries that have agreed to join the AFR100 initiative include:

• Democratic Republic of Congo | 8 million hectares
• Ethiopia | 15 million hectares
• Kenya | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Liberia | 1 million hectares
• Madagascar | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Malawi | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Niger | 3.2 million hectares
• Rwanda | 2 million hectares
• Togo | Committed, but finalizing hectare target
• Uganda | 2.5 million hectares

The project, AFR100 (African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative) has been endorsed by the African Union and its promoters hope to reach this goal by 2030.  

One billion dollars in development finance and more than $540 million in private sector impact investment has been earmarked to support the restoration.

The announcement was made during the Global Landscapes Forum at the Conference of Parties (COP21) in Paris, where forest landscape restoration is a key ingredient of the global movement to adapt to and mitigate climate change. Commitments made through AFR100 build on significant climate pledges made by many African countries to support a binding global climate agreement.

The threat is immense, endangering not merely people and wildlife in the region, but the entire planet.

History and Texas Anti-Abortion Laws Show How Futile and Dangerous Conservative Efforts Are

by Nomad

A new study in Texas about self-induced abortions underscores that truth that conservatives have long denied. Making something illegal won't make it go away and could have unintended consequences.

Republican leaders in Texas are jubilant about their attempts to close down Planned Parenthood clinics  in their state. When deciding to cut off Medicaid funding for the organization, Governor Greg Abbott led the charge even to the point of breaking federal law. The rush is on now to close down to remaining abortion clinics in operation. 

Planned Parenthood, as most people know, is not solely an abortion provider. It also provides valuable reproductive health care services for women. Inevitably, there will sooner or later be consequences for half-baked policy.

But then this is Texas where, when it comes to conservative bombast, there are no holds barred.Conservative crazy comes at a two-for-one price there. Republican president candidate Canadian-cum-Texan Ted Cruz called Planned Parenthood "an ongoing criminal enterprise."

JEB! couldn't understand why it was necessary to spend half a billion dollars for women's health issues at all. Apparently nobody has explained to JEB (the "smart" Bush) that women make up 50.8% of the population and 43.5 million of those women have children. These mothers gave birth to 95.8 million children. Somebody forgot to inform JEB that the health of women naturally has an impact of the children they have.)

Rep. Steve Stockman not long ago contributed his excuse for cleverness with a bumper sticker campaign which linked two seemingly unrelated issues close to the hearts of Texas right-wingers: Guns and fetuses.

The stickers read: 

If babies had guns, they wouldn't be aborted. 

This was matched with pro-choice signs that read: 

If my vagina could fire bullets, you wouldn't regulate it.

Who could possibly argue with logic like that?

With One United Voice: The First Stirrings of the Women's Rights Movement in 1850

by Nomad

When the Founding Fathers declared that a government earns its true legitimacy from the consent of the governed, they hadn't counted on women taking it to the next logical step.

The 1850 Women's Rights Convention

Recently I uncovered this interesting quote by an early American reformer/activist named Francis Dana Gage.  The name isn't as familiar to the general public as it should be. Even by modern feminists, she is largely forgotten. 

That's a pity.

The Year Emma Morano was Born

by Nomad

When Emma Morano was born, Queen Victoria, now weary with age, was still on the throne and William McKinley was president. 

The other players were rehearsing in the wings.
The youthful Albert Einstein had just entered university and, Morano's fellow countryman, Guillermo Marconi was still working out the details of his wireless communication device. The Wright brothers were flying kites in Dayton, Ohio.
Mohandas Gandhi was a just young lawyer in South Africa. Adolf Hilter and Benito Mussolini were just a pair angry teenagers and Franklin Roosevelt was a sheltered young man of Hyde Park privilege, preparing to go to Harvard.

In the year of her Morano's birth, Henry Ford had a falling out with Thomas Edison and started his own enterprise. He called it "The Detroit Automobile Company." The term, "automobile," had only been coined earlier that year in an editorial in The New York Times. A year later, after only twenty vehicles had been built, the company went bust.

In 1899, visionary inventor Nikola Tesla in his laboratory in Colorado Springs told an interviewer:

Life is a rhythm that must be comprehended....Everything that lives is related to a deep and wonderful relationship: man and the stars, amoebas’ and the sun, the heart and the circulation of an infinite number of worlds. These ties are unbreakable, but they can be tamed ..to propitiate and begin to create new and different relationships in the world, and that does not violate the old.

Telsa looked deep into the future and saw a fantastic era in human history about to begin. It was a time of profound optimism. It was impossible not to feel that every problem could be solved and things from here on out would steadily improve. 

Nevertheless, when Morano entered into this world, there were no televisions, no radios, and the motion picture industry was in its infancy. There were no airplanes in the sky and no highways crisscrossing the land and lassoing cities. 

The average life expectancy in Italy- Emma's home- was only 44 years. For an Italian woman today, that figure has nearly doubled to 85.2.