China (Kinda) Invades Ecuador, Slave Labor Makeup, The Liberator on Netflix, Sunglasses for People Who Lose Sunglasses (The Five for 11/23/20)

Hey,

Welcome to Thanksgiving week! I’m in good spirits, as I start a new job today.

Here’s The Five.

[ONE]

Well, this is great. China is illegally fishing in the soverign waters of Ecuador. The Financial Times reports:

When the world was busy fighting the global pandemic of Coronavirus, in July-August 2020, a vast fleet of more than 300 Chinese fishing vessels was reported to be operating at the edge of the 200-mile EEZ off the Galapagos Islands on Ecuador’s western seaboard.

Chinese predation deeply threatens the ecosystems of Latin American countries with coasts mainly on the Pacific Ocean, although its incursions into the Atlantic have not been rare, as in the case of Argentina, which has had to dispose of several fishing boats that have illegally entered its territorial sea, sinking a couple of them in the process.

When the world was busy fighting the global pandemic of Coronavirus, in July-August 2020, a vast fleet of more than 300 Chinese fishing vessels was reported to be operating at the edge of the 200-mile EEZ off the Galapagos Islands on Ecuador’s western seaboard.

Elsewhere, China is blocking the India from a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, which might have something to do with the fact that China flirted with invading India this year.

I’m fairly doveish on foreign policy, but I see no other options than full scale war if China invades India or Taiwan, two of our strongest allies that have done China no harm.

[TWO]

The Associated Press has a pretty shocking report on the nearly slave labor conditions of Palm Oil worksers. The full report by the Associated Press is worth reading, but the following is taken from the condensed version in the New York Post:

With his hand clamped tightly over her mouth, she could not scream, the 16-year-old girl recalls – and no one was around to hear her anyway. She describes how her boss raped her amid the tall trees on an Indonesian palm oil plantation that feeds into some of the world’s best-known cosmetic brands. He then put an ax to her throat and warned her: Do not tell.

At another plantation, a woman named Ola complains of fevers, coughing and nose bleeds after years of spraying dangerous pesticides with no protective gear. Making just $2 a day, with no health benefits, she can’t afford to see a doctor.

Hundreds of miles away, Ita, a young wife, mourns the two babies she lost in the third trimester. She regularly lugged loads several times her weight throughout both pregnancies, fearing she would be fired if she did not.

I’m horrified, and I’m also not sure what to do about it. One of the things that enrages me most about cancel culture is that the Twitter mob will go crazy on the most minor of offenses, like getting this truck driver fired for making the “OK” symbol when he had no idea what he was doing…while not caring at all about people around the world.

I wish I had an answer here, except to encourage you to read the report and try to avoid the banks and brands who are looking the other way on these abuses.

The pic below is of a woman spraying hazerdous fertilizer in one of the Palm farms. These workers often resort to using collected rain water to attempt to get the dangerous substance off their skin, and will almost certainly have short lives from the work, even if they aren’t raped, tortured or murdered on the job.

If you were born in the U.S., even in the most impoverished of conditions, you still won the lottery by global standards.

[THREE]

Oh boy…The Holocaust Memorial Central Florida has added a George Floyd exhbit.

As the parent of a 1/4 Jewish daughter, I am horrified at how tone deaf this is.

I was just as moved as everyone else at the Facebook video showing Floyd’s final eight minutes of life, but that story has (and is being) told, and is not the same thing as six million people being shoved into cattle cars and carted off to gas chambers.

Here are things that compare to the Holocaust: The Pol Pot purge in Southeast Asia, which killed up to 1/4 of the nation of Cambodia. The genocide in Rwanda. Stalin murdering 100 million of his own people.

Here are things not like the Holocaust: literally every other human event from 1945 to now.

One death, no matter how public and how brutal, is not the same as this:

[FOUR]

In related news, I watched the first episode of The Liberator on Netflix this weekend, and it’s incredible. The aninmated miniseries follows a unit from Oklahoma through 500 days of combat, from landing in Siciliy to freeing the Concentration Camp and Dachau.

It’s animated because there wasn’t the budget to do a full blown Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan live production, so real actors were filmed on a green screen and then animated. If you’re worried about that, don’t be. The story sucks you in quickly and you forget about the medium it’s in.

The series does a great job of telling the story of how the Oklahoma Unit came together as a fighting force of “Mexican American, Native American and Dustbowl Cowboys” despite the fact that the former two groups faced segregation back home, including not being allowed into most public bars.

[FIVE]

And finally…one of my favorite sunglasses companies is having a huge sale. Shady Rays will replace two lost or damaged pairs for just shipping (and I always break/lose them) and donates 10 meals to those in need for every pair sold.

You should pick up a pair or two while they’re 55% off.

(As with everything I feature, these are not paid links…I just feature stuff I like).

Until the next one,

-sth