https://nuclear-news.net/author/christinamacpherson/
Please go to the above page and find out what can and must be done towards a Nuclear Ban Treaty! I absolutely agree that indeed human survival is at stake. Do we want that humans can survive or do we not care? That is the question.
Published on Dec 17, 2015
Published on Feb 28, 2017
Dr. Axel Munz was today a guest in the Deutswche Welle. This is why I googled the following about dirndl and lederhosen and copied it. It says that
CNN’s global series i-List takes you to a different country each month. In February, we visit Germany and look at changes shaping the country’s economy, culture and social fabric.
(CNN) — To an outsider, lederhosen and dirndl — the traditional costumes of Bavaria — may seem like an outdated symbol of a bygone age, last seen in “The Sound of Music.”
But the outfits — short leather dungarees for men and wide skirts with corsets for women — have become must-haves for the young and fashion-conscious of Munich in south Germany.
They are particularly popular at Oktoberfest, Munich’s annual beer festival attracting 6.4 million visitors, and increasingly at fashionable parties and weddings.
The German edition of Vogue magazine regularly features Bavarian costumes in its September issue, according to Simone Egger, a researcher in cultural studies, and shops open around the city every August specifically to sell Oktoberfest costumes.
Lola Paltinger, a designer who sells couture dirndls for 2,500 euros, or about $3,440, said: “When I first went to Oktoberfest everyone was in jeans. The only traditional costumes were dark, sad and unfashionable.
“Now they come in bright colors, modern designs and are more comfortable. It still has a wide skirt and a corset, but it’s one you can breathe, eat and drink in.”
Paltinger began designing dirndls as a project at her fashion college, and after an apprenticeship with Vivienne Westwood, began her own business.
She said: “I was sitting outside at the Oktoberfest with my friends talking about what we were going to do for our diplomas. The atmosphere of the Oktoberfest got to me and I just thought of doing traditional costumes.”
When she started her business 11 years ago, Paltinger sold about 20 dirndls a year. She now sells 1,000 a year, both custom-made and off-the-rack, and supplies 20 to 30 weddings.
She said: “When you see someone in dirndl or lederhosen they look wonderful, and you are really disappointed later when you see them in normal clothes. The dirndls in particular are very sexy and feminine.
“For women there are bright colors and modern styles, but for men you can’t really do lederhosen in a modern way. In my opinion, there’s nothing nicer than a real, traditional lederhosen.”
Of course, most people can’t afford to buy their outfits from designers like Paltinger. You can pick up a new dirndl for 50 to 60 euros or lederhosen for 120 euros, according to Karoline Graf of the Munich Tourist Office, and there is a thriving second-hand market.
Paltinger said: “Many, many shops sell dirndl and lederhosen in the run up to the Oktoberfest. Some of them just open up especially and sell them very cheaply, made in India. It’s a big business.
“Some people say it’s not good to sell cheap ones, but I think it’s really nice that so many young people want to wear them and pay homage to Bavarian tradition.”
Angermaier, a traditional clothes business with two stores in Munich and other temporary stores in high season, has seen lederhosen sales double over the past 10 years. Sales of dirndls have risen 500% over the same period.
Axel Munz, director of the company, said: “The customers have become younger and more trendy. Fashion has found its way into tracht (traditional costumes).
“People wear traditional costumes at weddings, special events or folk festivals, but mainly they wear it at the Oktoberfest.”
Egger, a researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, wrote a diploma thesis on the popularity of traditional Bavarian costumes.
She said: “About 10 years ago I noticed all the young people wearing dirndl and lederhosen and thought ‘what’s going on?’ I’m a cultural scientist so I wanted to find out why.
“At the beginning, it was just for the Oktoberfest, but now it is for parties and sometimes weddings. Nowadays pretty much everybody in Munich and the surrounding region has at least one traditional outfit.”
She added: “The choice to wear traditional costumes appears to be more than just a fashion trend.
“Possibly, a mobile society wishes to demonstrate affiliation. In times of international networking, local and regional references become even more important.”
She added that the first to take up the fashion were 16 to 18-year-olds who felt free to wear traditional costume precisely because there was no pressure from their parents to do so.
Gabriele Hammerschick, chief buyer of traditional clothes for the clothes store Lodenfrey, said customers had become younger in recent years and bought dirndl and lederhosen all year round for weddings, parties, christenings, Christmas and of course, Oktoberfest.
She said people had rediscovered tradition for its permanence in a fast-paced world.
Graf said: “Twenty years ago, no young men or women would go out in traditional costume because it wasn’t fashionable.
“Now teenagers, students, people of all ages wear them.”
http://www.eur.army.mil/AtlanticResolve/
https://auntyuta.com/2017/06/26/nato-exercises-in-romania/
Nearly two months ago I mentioned the ‘Nato Exercises in Romania’ in a post. Today I had another look at some of the YouTube videos. It is hard to describe what I feel when I watch these videos. After World War Two I grew up thinking that it was possible that mankind should live in peace. That World Wars could be prevented because people did not like these wars. People wanted to live in peace, didn’t they? What do people want now, really?
“The BuJazzO, Germany’s Youth Jazz Orchestra, sponsors qualified and talented young jazz musicians in Germany. The current concert repertoire is rehearsed with changing line-ups in working modules that take the form of an intensive musical training in a professional master course atmosphere. The artistic directorship of rehearsals and stage work alternates and is performed by renowned artists. The working modules are followed by guest performances at home and abroad, where the results are presented to an international audience.
To encourage high qualified young female musicians BuJazzO has put a focus on women as conductors and instructors, starting with pianist Maria Baptist, composer/arranger and professor at the Berlin Music Conservatory ‘Hanns Eisler’. She has been conducting the 47th working phase of BuJazzO in March 2011.
Maria Baptist is fascinated by big cities. Together with BuJazzO she presents the programme City Grooves. It reflects the different moods and the mutability of a big city. Powerful energetic music alternates with concertante moments.”
“Her music is a gift, infused with all the creativity, power, . . . ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Baptist
“Maria Baptist was born in 1971 in East Berlin in a very musical family. Her grandfather was an orchestra musician and composer, her father himself is a pianist. Maria discovered very early her fascination for music and at the age of six she began playing the piano. At the age of eleven she composed her first pieces. Maria developed her desire to become a classical concert pianist. At the age of fifteen Maria listened to recordings of Dave Brubeck and Keith Jarrett and discovered for the first time the world of jazz and improvisation. Impressed by the musical expression, Maria felt that she had to continue on this path. She began studying piano at the music university in Berlin and won her first international piano competitions on improvisation. During this period, the Berlin Wall fell, which meant a great personal change in Maria’s life. She took the opportunity to move to New York. Here Maria experienced the freedom, space and magic, which opened up whole new musical worlds to her. Maria’s artistic work was significantly influenced and inspired by the tremendous creativity, energy, living will, the strength and melancholy of the metropolis. . . . . ”
. . . . ”
A few weeks ago Peter and I enrolled for a six week Tai Chi course. Today we had our fourth lesson on the terrace of Wollongong Hospital. We started with 16 participants, in week two only 11 people came, then in week three and four only 7 of us were left!
Peter found the following YouTube video about Taoist Tai Chi. These exercises look very much like the ones we are being taught, only we are of course still very much at the beginning.
Master Moy Lin Shin, founder of the Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism, demonstrates the Taoist Tai Chi® arts.
In 1970, Master Moy immigrated to Canada, where he devoted the rest of his life to fulfilling the the aim to help people restore and maintain their physical, mental and spiritual well being through the practice of the Taoist Tai Chi® arts.
Master Moy was always careful to point out that these teachings were more than just a mere set of movements, they encompassed practical wisdom for living, drawing upon the richness of Chinese culture and Taoist tradition.
Read more on http://www.taoist.org/about-us/our-fo…
Last night Peter and I started listening to what Noam Chomsky had to say on one of his July 2017 YouTube videos. The theme was THE EMERGING WORLD ORDER. Here I published this video just as we started listening to it last night:
https://auntyuta.com/2017/07/28/noam-chomsky-july-2017-the-emerging-world-order/
We knew it would be running for one hour, and we were rather tired already. It was nearly past our bedtime. But I agreed, we should start watching it. Peter meant we could always stop it half way through and finish listening to it the next day.
Well, what Chomsky had to say sounded only all too scarily true to me. At some point I said I wish to stop it now, otherwise I might not be able to go to sleep. Peter thought he would not have any trouble going to sleep. True enough within a short time we were both fast asleep. We had really been very tired. It had been a long day again.
There are many, many more videos on YouTube about what Chomsky has to say about the state of the world. It is very interesting to listen to someone who has this amazing grasp of reality, a reality that most politicians do not seem to grasp at all. Could someone like Chomsky be a politician? Maybe not. Somehow it is remarkable that he can deliver his voice on the internet. Anybody who is able to access the internet really has a chance to listen to him. And voices very similar to Chomsky’s can also be accessed on the internet. I wonder whether in the long run these voices are going to change anything for the better as far as the actions of our politicians and other powerful people are concerned?
I just noticed a blog about our first Sunday in Berlin in June 2016:
https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/24843910/posts/11404
There is a video that was taken in the Volkspark am Weinberg.
I did write the following:
We had arrived on Saturday, the 4th of June. Ilse’s sons had come to Tegel-Airport to pick us up and drive us with all our luggage to our apartment in Rubensstrasse. It was so good to have the two cars waiting for us. Klaudia as well as Ilse and Finn had also come along and we took off on the Autobahn that took us from the airport to our apartment in just a few minutes! Once we were settled in our apartment, we were given huge amounts of food, especially Ilse and Finn had brought a lot of food along. So all of us stayed together for quite a while, talking about lots of things and having a nice meal.
Strangely enough we did not feel too tired to go out to the Brandenburg Gate after our Berlin family had left us. So it was the five of us from Australia, namely Martin, Caroline, Matthew, Peter and me, exploring Berlin on our own on our first day in Berlin after we had only just arrived after our very long trip all the way from Australia.
The following morning we went out for breakfast. Die “Wolke” was just around the corner. They were doing pretty good business on a Sunday morning. We noticed a constant stream of customers. So we had a good breakfast sitting down in the Wolke Cafe.
Steak tartare is a meat dish made from finely chopped or minced rawbeef
I seem not to have taken any pictures from that afternoon we spent near Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor) and where we had gone to by public transport.
But on Sunday the five of us did – also by public transport – go to Alexander Platz and from there on the U-Bahn to Rosenthaler Platz to meet my niece Corinna and her son Carlos for lunch.
After lunch and coffee at the place that had been a cindema in the past, we were heading for Volkspark am Weinberg. where – as Corinna promised – there would be some dancing on display together with great swing music from the 1940s. Carlos had made his good-buys in the meantime. (After all, it is only a certain amount of time a fifteen year old is willing to spend with the ‘oldies’!)
Peter and I found the music quite electrifying. It reminded us of old times and the swing music that we used to like. During the 1950s, when we would often go dancing, swing was still quite popular.On that Sunday afternoon in the park inspired by the music Peter and I actually tried a little bit of dancing of our own. To our amusement, somebody videoed us while we were doing this! (See video at the beginning of page) We found this absolutely hilarious. Later on we watched for quite some time the dancing of the very young people. They seemed quite familiar with this type of dance music and danced very well indeed. A lot of these young people had dressed up in the 1940s style. There was even one young guy who had dressed in something that reminded us of the post WWII period when the young Americans of our occupation forces looked in their uniforms a bit like this guy did. Quite amazing!
The above is taken form my post from Jul 26, 2016 with this URL:
https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/24843910/posts/11404
First thing when you go to this URL there is this video that was taken in the Volkspark am Weinberg. I think Matthew was the one who made this video of us and titled it “Adorable Dancing Couple”
How the US Uses War to Protect the Dollar
Dr Stuart Bramhall says that the videos are are lot better than the post – She says: “All I’m trying to do is inspire people to watch them.”
This is what I am doing right now.
I found the following in YouTube:
“The Gods of Money” F. William Engdahl is an American German freelance journalist, historian and economic researcher. “The Gods of Money” lecture is based on Engdahls book “Gods of Money”. The dollar financial system of Wall Street was born not at a conference in Bretton Woods New Hampshire in 1944. It was born in the first days of August, 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After that point the world was in no doubt who was the power to reckon with. This lecture traces the history of money as an instrument of power; it traces the evolution of that power in the hands of a tiny elite that regards themselves as, quite literally, gods-The Gods of Money. How these gods abused their power and how they systematically set out to control the entire world is the subject.
http://www.openmindconference.com
https://thischangeseverything.org/book/
I copied the following for I think it makes for very interesting reading
HIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: THE BOOK
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
Observer Book of the Year
New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate. We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.
We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.
Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world—before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink.
Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. This Changes Everything is about to upend the debate about the stormy era already upon us.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“A book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable … the most momentous and contentious environmental book since “Silent Spring.”
— New York Times Book Review
“Written with an elegant blend of science, statistics, field reports and personal insight, it does not paralyze but buoys the reader. The book’s exploration of climate change from the perspective of how capitalism functions produces fresh insights and its examination of the interconnectedness between our relationship with nature and the creation of better, fairer societies presents a radical proposal. Klein’s urgency and outrage is balanced by meticulous documentation and passionate argument. Heart and mind go hand in hand in this magisterial response to a present crisis.”
— Jury citation: Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction
“Few journalists today take on the big issues as comprehensively and fearlessly as Naomi Klein. She combines rigorous reporting, analysis, history and global scope into a package that not only identifies problems, but also illuminates successful activism and solutions. That goes for her groundbreaking book on climate change and for columns that brilliantly connect the dots – such as the intersection of climate justice and racial justice.”
— Jury citation: The Izzy Award
“This is the best book about climate change in a very long time— reminding us just how much the powers-that-be depend on the power of coal, gas and oil. And that in turn should give us hope, because it means the fight for a just world is the same as the fight for a liveable one.”
— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and co-founder of 350.org
“An enormous, complex, compelling and, by turns, distressing and rallying analysis of the dysfunctional symbiotic relationships between free-market capitalism, the fossil fuel industry and global warming”
— Booklist Review
“Naomi Klein applies her fine, fierce, and meticulous mind to the greatest, most urgent questions of our times. Her work has changed the terms of the debate. I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today.”
— Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and Capitalism: A Ghost Story
“Without a doubt one of the most important books of the decade.”
— Amitav Ghosh, author of The Hungry Tide: A Novel
“A work of startling force, exhaustive reporting, and telling anecdote … makes a muscular case for global warming as the defining, cross-sectional issue of our era.”
— Globe & Mail Review
“Naomi Klein has done for politics what Jared Diamond did for the study of human history. She skillfully blends politics, economics and history and distills out simple and powerful truths with universal applicability.”
— Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Naomi Klein’s “words and knowledge run deep, inspiring change and the need for immediate action.”
— Charlize Theron
“This Changes Everything gets the science right, but it’s about much more than facts and figures. This is a deeply insightful exploration of the ideology and interests that have systematically blocked climate action and have undercut even good faith efforts. Klein gives no one a free pass. A rousing must-read!”
— Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
AuntyUta 