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Coca-Cola is introducing to the US an blended unsweetened tea called Sokenbicha. This tea was originally developed for health conscious young Japanese women. Sales of tea drinks are up 15.6%, while soft drinks are down 5.6%, for the first 10 months of 2010. Soft drinks still make up 47% of ready to drink beverages in the US, according to Beverage Digest, even with the increasing emphasis on the dangers of obesity in the US.

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More than half the calories Americans eat is from ultra processed foods- it makes RFK Jr. admonition "Eat Real Food" a Big Deal. It is all about eating whole foods and avoiding packaged foods and sweetened foods. It says NO to more than 10% of daily calories from added sugars. It says whole milk and yogurt is good for you.

“My message is clear,” Kennedy told a White House press briefing. “Eat real food.” The new Dietary Guidelines take out the pyramid used for 30 years and make the message clear and outright plain- avoid artificial foods, packaged foods, added sugars, ultra processed foods altogether. A plate now replaces the pyramid and shows a carton of whole milk at the top, a block of cheese, a steak., fruits and vegetables, whole grains.

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Surcharges from Covid era coming back in 2026.

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A mid-July 2011 CBS poll on where Tea party supporters stand on raising the debt ceiling and on a balanced deficit reduction approach combining tax increases and spending cuts. This poll shows 66% of Tea Party supporters saying Republicans in Congress should compromise on their positions to reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. Only 31% said they should stick to their positions even if this meant not reaching an agreement. On a balanced approach 53% said it should be the path taken including tax increases and spending cuts for a solution to deficits, and 45% said only spending cuts was the right way. This shows a more flexible Tea Party than is presented in the media reports and strident statements of politicians.

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The Dutch had their tulip bubbble, the Chinese have their Pu-er tea bubble which has just burst. It was a pure speculative bubble with speculators cornering the market and bidding up the price of tea in Yunnan province on the Burmese border. From 1997 to 2007 the price of these green tea leaves from Yunnan- that make a fermented brew called Pu-er- wentup from $15 to $150 a pound. Actually a group of manipulative buyers drove prices up. Production doubled from 2006 to 2007 to 100,000 tons. Unlike other teas this tea is said to grow better with age and is packed into compressed cakes for transport. Now prices of this tea have collapsed to $3 a pound. Russia had its own experiment with unbridled capitalism, now China is struggling with the effects of the aftermath of its own unbridled capitalism.

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WSJ investigations of Facebook and Instagram showed how these social media companies business activity was damaging to young women's health in the US, Europe and other countries. Because of the reach of social media companies into the lives of millions of young people the damage was serious and extensive. This report in the WSJ describes the activities of management at Facebook and the resignation of one of the key executives from burnout herself. This WSJ report says that during the WSJ series on the investigations this and other key executives remained silent on the issues facing young women for mental health in the use of Facebook products.  One WSJ report in 2021 said that company documents showed Facebook knew that the company's products were toxic for teenage girls. Other issues emerged in the WSJ investigations such as the Outrage Algorithm which the WSJ says was made by tweaking some aspects of the company's algorithm as a way to counter dropping user engagement. This led to much angrier discourse on Facebook according to WSJ and other reports. The experiences at Facebook reflect the general experience of this period in 2000-2015 when business management shifted to an entirely different conception of business that ignored the importance of human values in the blind pursuit of rapid growth, profits to make acquisitions of smaller companies for further growth creating monopolistic firms. This extended to disruptions of democratic process with the Cambridge Analytica access to records of data of 87 million Facebook users as reported in WSJ, that were used to target social media users in the period leading to the 2018 election. With such activities the risks could be seen to the democratic process itself in addition to mental health by the emergence of social media in the short period of a dangerous decade 2010-2020, when there was little or no regulation of this medium.   ...

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Biden calls ending the war in Afghnistan a "wise decision" for the American people. He says in his foreign policy speech that "it is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries." A Pew Research poll shows 54% of American adults support the decision.  In a sense the decision had already been made. Biden cited the Doha agreement president Trump signed a year ago with Taliban that called for the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners which included most of the top commanders, and no agreement on the future of Afghanistan. The decision had come much earlier than that when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the period of George Bush were rejected by the American people for the cost and lack of purpose during the presidential election of 2016. That period marked the rejection of policies set under Reagan, Bush and Obama for starting American involvement in the Iraq-Iran conflict first on one side and then on the other side. All the time precious resources that were needed for infrastructure and services in education and healthcare were diverted to these wars, impoverishing America and also Europe. Looking beyond the words thrown around for political advantage both Trump and Biden and the American people, had decided to put these wars behind them 5-10 years earlier. Biden said assertively that America had made a tragic wrong turn, that was all he could say about Reagan, Bush, Obama policy. In the meantime he stated something else was happening- the US was losing its position in the world by wasting its resources in these wars that do not serve the interests of America. "There is nothing China and Russia would want more in this competition than the US to be bogged down for another ten years in these wars."  Biden was saying that he had the courage and tenacity to make a decision that was the right one and a wise one for America against all the transient opinion of people who lacked a grasp of what was happening to the American people- the increasing impoverishing of America in both rural and urban areas. And a similar situation in Europe. It was time to take a new turn, close this chapter, and write a new one in American history, brighter and with new sense of hope. ...

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This report in WSJ shows a generational problem that is creating a shortage of workers in Vietnam and China, that will require factory owners to increase wages significantly. US and European government policy supports these higher wages so that some of the manufacturing can be returned to bring jobs back home.   Younger workers do not want to spend much of their lives behind factory walls, and prefer less strenuous jobs shorter working hours in the services sector. They are having fewer children and at later ages than parents, resulting in less pressure to work in their 20's for a steady income. Factories in Vietnam are offering glass walls, yoga classes, improving cafeteria food, and offering kindergarden for worker children to attract workers.  In China there is 21% urban youth unemployment at a time of factory shortages. South Asian countries such as Bangladesh have infrastructure problems, and in India factories are finding it difficult to sign up workers. In the next 2 years this will result in costlier goods in US and EU, over 3-5 years this will bring many jobs back to the home countries. ...

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German chancellor Merz says the old order is unraveling. He says -

"We have entered an era of great power politics," Merz said. "The new world of the great powers is founded upon power, strength and when necessary, force. It is not a cozy place."    

The German chancellor says Russia's invasion on Ukraine is the beginning of a "new era, but change runs much deeper."

"China, with strategic foresight, has worked its way into the ranks of the great powers," Merz says. He said Washington is reacting to these challenges from these other "great powers" by radically reshaping its foreign and security policy."

"Europe [and its] like-minded partners must stand closer together. European countries must do more to make their economies competitive and to invest massively in our ability to defend ourselves."

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Professor Yann LeCunn of the Sorbonne University, France, is a pioneer in the field of AI.  He is now focusing his work on Advanced Artificial Intelligence AAI, saying that the large language models which are being developed in a surge of data center spending of $400 billion in 2025 alone are not the way AI will develop in the future. AAI is based on visual learning similar to how an infant learns, and not by consuming large amounts of data as under large language models.

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Coca Cola's minority stake in Honest Tea, and the issue of the words "no high fructose corn syrup" on the label for the Honest Kids product. The insistence of Honest Tea founders to keep the label in negotiations with Coke.

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Lisa Jackson, who worked for EPA for 15 years and headed New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection, told the senate committe at a confirmation hearing, that contrary to what happened at EPA under the Bush administration she will listen to scientists. And political appointees and will not compromise the integrity of EPA's technical experts to advance certain outcomes. She said that she will adminster with science as her guide. This was a point of particular frustration for Senator Barbara Boxer, who now heads the Environment and Public Works Committee, during the Bush years. Jackson said the administration's priorities were to curb global warming, reduce air pollution, cleanup hazardous waste sites, regulate toxic chemicals, and protect water quality.

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Jhulan Goswami's remarkable career in women's cricket as a fast bowler for India is the subject of this report in BBC Sports. Her last game was at Lord's against England on September 24.  With Mithali Raj she represents the best of Indian women's cricket.

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A Trump-Vance nomination with its huge tariffs inside a Republican shell with its preference for tax cuts is with a large degree of certainty likely to put America further behind China, slipping even further by a decade. And slipping in renewable energy and in meeting the aspirations of ordinary Americans. Most of the public does not realize that Trump-Vance 60% tariffs and Republican preference for tax cuts over infrastructure spending would create inflation and lack of growth in a Trump-Vance second term. Things would get worse because of the contradictions existing in the choice of tariff preferring Trump in a Republican party that sees tax cuts not infrastructure spending -even when desperately needed- as the answer to every economic problem. Without a clear policy of making the trillion dollar investments in the US economy, in manufacturing, in renewable energy, in chips and science, as it has under Biden the US under Trump-Vance policies would have two serious problems- first it would revive inflation. 60% tariffs on Chinese imports and 10% tariffs on other nations proposed by Trump-Vance would increase inflation. In the absence of the infrastructure investment that Biden has put in place it would create both a lack of growth for the jobs missing that come from infrastructure that is badly needed in a aging dilapidated infrastructure economy, and the inflation that the high tariffs would engineer. The benefits would not be great if China chooses to find other ways to conduct business and continues to keep its currency at levels that promote its exports. Even today Chinese products enter the US through other countries or when China builds factories in the US as Japan has done. The Republican aversion to tackling Chinese industrial challenges in the same way that China does by actively supporting American manufacturers would give China another decade of advantage as America slips even further behind in chips, science and manufacturing. This is the real problem in mixing Trump-Vance to the Republican philosophies on the economy which are not right for this point in time whatever their merits may have been in the 1980's when America was the industrial leader in the world.   ...